The Investigator again felt feverish, nervous, uneasy. He threw the last magazine on the floor and pulled the Psychologist’s envelope out from under his thigh.
TO THE FOUNDER. He reread the address three times. If he was reading it, that meant he had the ability to read it, and that it could be read. It followed, therefore, that those three words existed, written on the envelope. And it further followed that he was indeed able to read them and had not all at once — because of the shock of his collision with the wall, or because he’d abused his medications — become incapable of perceiving handwritten or printed characters. Wishing to be delivered from his doubts, without stopping to think, he ripped open the envelope and took out the sheet of paper the Psychologist had written on.
The paper was creamy white and folded in quarters, quite carefully; the Investigator could still see the traces of the Psychologist’s fingernails where he’d conscientiously pressed the edges of the folds. The Investigator unfolded the sheet of paper, looked at it, turned it over, turned it over again, and then started flipping it back and forth more and more violently, with trembling fingers. The sheet of paper was blank, dramatically blank, irremediably blank.
It bore no trace of ink, not a single word.
Nothing.
It was immaculate.
XXXVIII
MANY WARS AND MANY OTHER, less extreme circumstances have tested man’s faculty of resistance, subjecting him to physical and mental trials whose ongoing refinement, from century to century, serves to demonstrate the human being’s capacity for surpassing himself in the imagination and execution of horror.
From simple drops of water falling one after another on a prisoner’s forehead to the Pear of Anguish, from torture with the boot, on the wheel, by drawing and quartering, by the inoculation of gangrene into healthy bodies, by the insertion of living rats into the vagina of a female victim, by the peremptory amputation of all four limbs, by the sun, to which one leaves the task of baking the skull of a naked creature buried up to the neck in desert sand, by slowly removing a hundred strips of flesh from a living body with a knife, by plunging a child into a tub of icy water so that the duration of its death agony may be accurately timed, by shocks of electricity, by inflicting upon a man the spectacle of his wife, his daughter, his son executed with a bullet in the back of the head, by the traditional and constant use of rape, by disemboweling, by prolonged detention in precarious conditions, by forced nudity intended as humiliation, by the blade, deliberately chosen for rust and dullness, that gradually slices through a victim’s throat, and by endless solitude, to the conviction planted in the victim’s mind that he himself is solely responsible for the situation he’s in and for the tortures being inflicted upon him, man has revealed himself to be not a wolf to man, despite the ancient saying — an old saw unfair to wolves, which are genuinely civilized and socialized creatures — but, more accurately, the anti-man, as physicists speak of antimatter.
Who wanted to destroy the Investigator, then? Who was it who was so determined to grind him down like a common grain of wheat and scatter the poor flour to the wind, never to return? Who, and why? For this was the conclusion he’d come to in the soundless privacy of the white room, a conclusion in the form of a double question. Well beyond his hunger and his thirst, well beyond time, whose passage he couldn’t — or could no longer — quantify, having had his nose rubbed in its irrefutable relativity, well beyond pure questions of identity — who was he, really? — the Investigator was gradually apprehending the void in which he floated and out of which he was made. Had he not himself become a portion of matter confronted with antimatter in expansion? Was he not progressing, swiftly or slowly, it made little difference, toward the black hole that was going to ingest him? Did someone — but who? who? — want to bring him face-to-face with a radical, definitive, metaphorical insight into his life, into human life in general?
The Investigator doubted his thoughts as well as his faculty of thinking. In the absence of any reference point — how could one cling to whiteness, to magazines composed of vanished texts, to a green plant that wasn’t even green? — he persuaded himself that perhaps he wasn’t completely living, and therefore not completely thinking. I don’t think, he thought. Someone’s thinking through me, or, rather, someone’s thinking me. No initiative is within my possibilities. I’m made to believe that I have an Investigation to conduct. In reality, doubtless, I have no such thing. I’m tossed back and forth, bashed around, bruised and then petted, knocked over and then stood upright again. I’m placed and displaced. I’m forbidden to cross a street and then I’m led across it. I’m smiled upon, I’m embraced, I’m cheered, only to be dashed the next minute against a wall. My brain is washed with floods of rain and avalanches of snow, with waves of cold and heat, I’m starved, I’m dehydrated, I’m stuffed with food, I’m made to vomit, I’m humiliated by the ridiculous clothes I’m compelled to wear, I’m prevented from washing myself, I’m walled up in a room, I’m listened to patiently in order to be all the more quickly abandoned to my fate. What justification can I seek for all that?
The Investigator would have paid dearly to be able to go backward, to be a reel of film that could be rewound, to make a long march in reverse, gradually returning to the train and its steps, thin rectangles of open-worked metal he should never have gone down, to the train compartment, which he scarcely remembered, then to his apartment on the morning of his departure — but he was too tired to visualize his apartment, and he would have been incapable of describing it or even of giving its exact address, to say nothing of the furnishings or the floor covering (carpet? tiles? parquet?) or the walls (painted? wallpapered?) — and then, finally, back to the Head of Section’s office at the moment when he’d spoken to him of his mission. The Investigator wondered what exact terms had been employed; they were difficult to recall.
At that very moment, which could still have been dated, even if dating it was no longer of any use, he had another thought without any logical basis, a dazzling illumination destined to die at once, like big fireworks in the dark skies of summer nights: He felt that all the places he’d passed through, all the streets he’d gone down, the walls he’d walked past, the buildings he’d seen, the first night’s bar, the Hotel and the Guardhouse, the glass cone where the Manager’s office was, and maybe even the Psychologist’s office, no longer existed — from a certain point of view, he was right — and that in fact they had existed only for the brief moment of his passage, and that no doubt the same went for the people he’d encountered, who had likewise disappeared, annihilated along with their settings, plunged into the endless torpor for which the Guide’s Level 6 Impediment was a metaphor, and that this universal, complete, irreversible disappearance perhaps signaled the failure of his memory and the exhaustion of his intellectual and physical faculties, which no longer allowed him to retain anything, and that he was now getting ready to become a person who, quite simply, would soon cease to be a person at all, would meet the fate of all other people, who wind up dying one day even if, throughout the course of their existence, they have never stopped denying the implacable evidence.