The Enterprise couldn’t be far off, or the City, either. His journey in the container hadn’t lasted very long, or at least that was his impression. But, then again, what did he know?
He was almost naked, and even though he’d left the Waiting Room only a short time before, twenty seconds at the most, his head and body were covered with sweat. (No doubt to convince himself that everything was going to return to normal, he continued to think of the burst prefabricated structure lying ten feet away from him with its door open as the Waiting Room.) He felt extremely light. Walking — he took a few steps — was easy. The only problem was the heat. He’d never known such heat. It was thoroughly upsetting, because, aside from cooking him, it extracted from his body a great deal of perspiration, which slicked his legs, dripped between his thighs, ran down his back, his chest, the nape of his neck, his sides, his forehead, flowed uninterruptedly and especially into his eyes, drowning them, adding liquid blinding to light blinding, with the result that the Investigator not only couldn’t see much, he was also steadily seeing less and less.
With his arms and hands stretched out toward emptiness, hoping in vain to block a sun that was slipping in everywhere, as if his limbs had become transparent, the Investigator looked for shade. He walked in all directions, and in particular he circled the Waiting Room, but it did no good, he couldn’t find the least shadow, which defied all logic and all laws of physics, for if the sun was shining on one wall, it couldn’t be shining on the opposite wall, too, and, what was more, the great star was far from its zenith, contenting itself with hovering lethargically just over the horizon; but the Investigator had reached the point where nothing surprised him anymore.
Out of breath, he stopped, sat — or, rather, knelt — on the ground, folded his body at the waist, drew his chin down to his breastbone, curled his head under himself as far as he could, and put one hand on each temple, getting smaller and smaller, a shape deposited on the ground, nothing but a shape, hardly different from a large stone or a package; had there been anyone to see it, he might have wondered what it could possibly contain. And what did he contain, in fact, aside from several score pounds of burning, ill-used flesh, inhabited by a buffeted, uncertain, and broken soul?
The Investigator had no more tears. Even if he’d wanted to cry, he wouldn’t have been able to. All the water in him was leaving his body in the form of sweat. He groaned and groaned again, trying to get more of his head between his arms and under his torso in order to escape the sun. His groaning became a cry. At first it was low and comparatively muffled, but then it grew, throbbed, rumbled, conveying the last shudders of an energy that sensed its own imminent decline, and culminating in a final explosion of animal howling, extended and powerful, which might have caused chills in a hearer had it not been so hot.
In zoos, it sometimes happens that the cries of the great apes or the peacocks awaken the other animals, and then, in the middle of the night or during the peaceful afternoon hours, when everything’s asleep and there’s no hint of unrest, a sonorous protest breaks out, a sort of living tempest consisting of hundreds of sounds and voices fused together into a thunder of low notes and high notes, of whistling spasms and guttural bursts, of yelping, hooting, growling, stamping, of banged bars and shaken wire fences, of barking and trumpeting, which electrifies the passerby and plunges him into a nightmare all the more frightening because he’s unable to discern the exact source of each of the sounds that scamper around him, bind him tightly, and suffocate him, preventing his escape from the cacophony as it turns into torture.
The Investigator hadn’t completely finished howling when, from most of the containers, gigantic boxes, prefabricated buildings, mobile homes, and storage units scattered around him, there arose a clamor, partly muffled and partly clear, of cries, rattles, rumblings, of voices, yes, no doubt about it, voices, whose supplicant tones he could grasp without understanding the words, the voices of ghosts or of persons condemned to death, the voices of the dying, of outcasts, age-old, ancestral, and at the same time atrociously present, voices that surrounded the Investigator and drowned out his own.
XL
AFTER A WHILE, THE VOICES fell silent. Gradually. One by one. It was a progressive disappearance, as if a knowing finger, in the name of a higher intention, had turned down a dial that regulated their intensity. The Investigator couldn’t get over it. He spun around and around, making himself dizzy, and finally came to a staggering halt.
“Is anyone there?” he ventured to ask after a few seconds.
“Here!”
“Over here!”
“Me!”
“Please!”
“I’m here!”
“Me! Me!”
At different volumes, depending on their distance but also on the reserves of energy quickening them, the voices made themselves heard again, at first isolated but then mingled, confused, blending into one another, creating an intolerable commotion that seemed to saturate the air, filling it like fog or heavy rain.
The Investigator ran over to the nearest container and knocked on its wall. At once, blows struck from the inside responded to him.
“Who are you?” the Investigator asked, pressing one ear against the wall.
“Open the door, for pity’s sake, let me out.… I can’t take anymore …” replied the muffled voice from inside the container.
“But who are you?” the Investigator repeated.
“I’m … I’m …”
The voice hesitated and broke off. The Investigator thought he could hear sobbing. “Tell me who you are!” he said.
“I was … I was … the Investigator.”
The Investigator jumped back as if he’d just burned himself. His heart was racing.
“Don’t go away, please, don’t leave me … please.…”
The Investigator’s chest contracted under violent pressure. The beating of his heart was uncontrollable and totally random, now slowing down, now most unexpectedly accelerating. He placed a hand over it, trying to calm and reassure it, as though it were an animal with one leg caught in a snare and striving to free itself, against all logic, by gnawing off the leg rather than biting through the cord. The pause did him good. With the back of his hand, he wiped away the sweat that continued to stream down his forehead, giving him the impression that he was dissolving.
He examined the container. It was one of those that appeared to be the most recent, the newest. The film of dust that covered it was thin and translucent. Careful to make as little noise as possible, he started walking around the container, looking for the door.
“I can hear you, you know. You’re moving.…”
The Investigator kept walking. He made an effort not to worry about the voice, which had spoken those last words in the most desperate manner possible. He stepped along on tiptoe, making himself light. Rounding one corner of the container, he looked at the wall on that end, saw no door, and tiptoed on.
“Why don’t you answer me …?”
The Investigator continued his inspection. He turned the next corner and studied the second of the container’s two long sides. Still nothing. No door in sight.