At the same time, the thought of the destruction of his thoughts, the awareness that the whiteness that surrounded him and had contaminated everything in sight, both walls and furniture, surely prefigured the greater, limitless whiteness toward which he was moving — this very thought proved that he was, in spite of everything, still thinking! And that the hope of remaining, of lasting a while longer, even if it was only a very little while, existed. All his misadventures, his crash into the wall, his obsession with seeing the Founder’s portrait everywhere, and his isolation in whiteness had as yet failed to destroy him completely. The Investigator turned out to be quite solid, unshaken even in his awareness of impending disappearance. But how sorrowful all that was! He couldn’t take it anymore, the mad race going on inside the walls of his skull. And he was starting to get cold. Very cold.
He grabbed the bottom of his light, too light, hospital gown and tried in vain to stretch it, to lengthen it, to pull it over a little more of his body; but by twisting the fabric he succeeded only in tearing it at the left shoulder, and it was at that moment, at the precise moment when he was performing the very human action of clothing himself, of covering his naked skin with an article of clothing, that the walls and floor of the Waiting Room started moving, as if the movement had been synchronized with the ripping of the gown, which made a delicate sound like opening a zipper, and a few fractions of a second later, in proportion as the trembling of the floor and the walls increased, a metallic racket broke out and gathered force, a concerted din of axles set in motion, wheels, squeals, clangs, and bangs that caused an image to spring up in the Investigator’s brain, a very distinct image of the train that had brought him to the City and whose dilapidated condition had surprised him a little, even though he hadn’t really dwelled on it, yes, that train sprang up in his memory, along with many others, dozens, hundreds, thousands of trains, their engines united and their cars filled with resigned travelers, all of whom had features more or less in common with those of the Investigator, all of them tossed about, powerless, surprised, and together making up, in spite of themselves, the interminable and stupefied procession of human History.
The pitching increased, and so did the racket. While both grew in magnitude, the sounds of whistles, of hammer blows, and perhaps of voices, too, though he wasn’t sure about that, seemed to transpire through the padded surfaces around him, literally to transpire, the clamor changing into drops of sweat, of oily, sticky liquid, a kind of resin seeping in from outside and suffusing the white walls, penetrating them, passing through them, and saturating the room.
The Investigator would have liked to puncture his ears so he wouldn’t hear anymore, pierce his eyes so he wouldn’t see anymore, burst his soul so he’d stop suffering this nightmare, but he couldn’t do any of that. The room was flinging him in every direction, contradictory forces were crushing him, spinning him, sending him flying to the ceiling, the ceiling that changed into the floor, then into a side wall, and then again into the ceiling, just before it violently became the floor again. Despite all this nonstop banging around, the Investigator felt no physical pain. Everything was soft. The shocks were cushioned, and whenever an object — low table, chair, magazine, green plant that was white — struck him, he had no sensation at all, just the impression that the object was going through him without causing any pain or damage. He thought about the men whom the Species, for the past several decades, had regularly been sending into space in order to explore its confines or ridiculously, and quite briefly, to take possession of it. He remembered seeing some of those men floating in the air of their cabin, pirouetting, sucking up liquids that remained in suspension in the form of little drops of different sizes and various colors, playing with wrenches that had assumed the weight of feathers and steel balls no heavier than soap bubbles. He remembered their slow voices, muddled and staticky from the hundreds of thousands of miles they’d had to travel to reach Earth, and the slow-motion smile on their faces, and how they were shut up in a narrow space, far from the world, zipping through the universe at astronomical speeds, alone, with no real possibility of return nor desire to return. Yes, he remembered their smile, an eternal smile that no longer had anything terrestrial or human about it, loosed as they were from the original blue globe, which took on for them the proportions of a child’s ball, small and far away.
Then he too began to smile, and he let himself go.
XXXIX
A RAY OF WHITE INCANDESCENT LIGHT had been striking the Investigator’s left eyelid for the past several minutes. Eventually, feeling the heat, he opened the eye but closed it at once; the light was impossibly dazzling. He tried to open his other eye, but with no more success. The light was simply too fierce. He shifted his head and body a little and half opened his eyelids again. Sparing his eyes, the light now fell hard on his neck. The lock on the door had given way, and the light was streaming in through the narrow opening.
The Investigator came completely awake and looked around him. The Waiting Room had been turned upside down, the chairs and table were broken, the livid plant lay sprawled in the ruins of its pot. The magazines looked like shavings from enormous, chlorotic tubers. He stood up and touched his body, expecting it to fall into a thousand pieces, but he was all right. The rip in his gown, however, was worse than before and now left two-thirds of his torso uncovered.
A little fearful, he pushed open the door, slowly, and then, since nothing frightening happened, he flung it open with some force, so that it thudded against the outside wall. The sun rushed in like water through a suddenly lifted sluice gate. The light, he realized, was coming from the sun, only the sun, which beat down on him ferociously. It was a pale-yellow ball of fire, a circle with a shimmering circumference suspended above the horizon. He couldn’t tell whether the ball was moving away from the horizon or preparing to dissolve in it. The Investigator made a visor of his hands. Thus protected, he was gradually able to take stock of the place where he found himself.
It was a sort of immense vacant lot, dusty and perfectly flat. Scattered here and there, according to some incomprehensible arrangement, were stacks of containers. They resembled big trailers without wheels, some of them sheathed in steel or aluminum, armored parallelepipeds incandescently reflecting the sunlight, whereas others were wrecked and looked like giant, battered cardboard cartons. There were also many site sheds, with plasterboard or pressed wood or sheet-metal walls. Sometimes a group of them were in perfect alignment; others were shoved together in clumps, lopsided, tipped up, overturned, resting on their sides. A few containers stood in isolation; although there was no sign on the ground of a border or an enclosure or a boundary, a prudent distance was apparently maintained around them. In certain groups, hierarchies of size, shape, material, or condition, whether good or bad, seemed to hold sway. Some containers were brand-new, as if they’d just come off an assembly line; others, by contrast, showed evidence of decay in the corrosion of their component parts, the dirty stains covering their original surfaces, the fanciful geometry of their wall assemblies.
The Investigator moved forward a few paces. The heat was stifling, and the sun didn’t move. There was no indication that it was going to set, just as there was none that it would rise higher. The day was suspended, scorching; it had neither evening nor morning and was distinguished not by its place in a classic temporal sequence but by the immobility of its light and its heat. The whiteness of the ground, which was covered with soil that resembled plaster, prevented the Investigator from really being able to take in his surroundings. He could make out things in the foreground fairly clearly, could discern the dozens and dozens of containers located not far from him, but beyond that, and despite all his efforts, he couldn’t see at all, because everything disappeared in the wobbly fluctuations of the air, which dilated the atmosphere into moving, translucent fumaroles, and behind them the landscape collapsed in an unfathomable void.