All was silent again. He still had his eyes closed. He’d dropped his hands long ago, and now they lay along his sides. The voices had stopped. Only the moaning of the wind as it played among the containers reached his ears. All of a sudden, he had the impression that he was a little less hot, and at the same time, the blackness behind his eyelids became still blacker.
A shadow.
It must be a shadow, he thought, a thick cloud hiding the sun, unless the sun itself has finally decided to go down.
He opened his eyes. A man stood before him, a figure he could see only in silhouette. The tall, stout body cast a large shadow over the Investigator. The man looked enormous. He was no cloud. In his right hand, he was holding what appeared to be a broom handle.
“Where did you come from?” asked the Shadow. His was an old man’s voice, heavy, deep, a little hoarse, but it projected, despite that roughness, a lively, fresh, lightly ironic tone. The other voices, the ones that came from inside the containers, rose in lamentation again.
“Be quiet!” the Shadow bellowed, and immediately there was silence. The Investigator couldn’t believe it. Who could this shadow be, that he had such rough, incontestable authority over all those captives?
“I asked you a question,” the Shadow said, addressing the Investigator again.
“The Waiting Room. I was in the Waiting Room, over there …” the Investigator slowly replied, leaning on the wall of the container as he rose, with great difficulty, to his feet. The Shadow moved, turning his head in the direction the Investigator had indicated, and then remained still for a few moments, gazing at the gutted prefab structure with the open door from which the Investigator had emerged. The latter had the sun in his eyes again, the bloody, blinding sun. It hadn’t moved an inch.
“You can’t see a thing,” said the Shadow. “Wait, I’ll fix that for you.”
The Investigator felt a hand on his person, tearing away what was left of his hospital gown. He quickly tried to cover his groin, but the cavernous voice forestalled him: “You’re not going to start with that old nonsense again, are you? What’s the point? Nobody can see you, except for me, and I’m in the same state as you.”
The Investigator heard the Shadow tearing his hospital gown into many strips. Then his hands, his old hands with their long, misshapen fingers, grazed the Investigator’s face as they tied the strips around his eyes in several layers, gently pulling the cloth taut and knotting each strip behind his head, but not too tightly, so that his eyelids would retain their freedom of movement.
“There you are. It’s done. You can open your eyes now.”
When he did so, the Investigator perceived the world through the orangey gauze that up until then had served him as a garment. The sun was now only a yellow ball the color of straw, and the ground had lost its blinding whiteness. Here and there, he could make out darker masses: the unequal hulks of the different containers. They covered the plain, which was perfectly flat, without elevation or eminence, as far as the eye could see. There weren’t dozens or hundreds of them, as he’d at first thought, but thousands, dozens of thousands! And the vision of that infinity sent sweetish bile surging up into his dry mouth. He felt on the point of vomiting. But what could he possibly have to vomit?
In each of those boxes, he told himself, there was a man, a man like him, a man who’d been knocked about, mistreated, allowed to hope, who’d been made to believe that he had a mission to accomplish, a role to play, a place in life, who’d been driven crazy, humiliated, brought low, who’d seen the fragility of his condition, his memory, and his certainties repeatedly demonstrated, an Investigator, perhaps, or someone claiming to be an Investigator, a man who was now howling and pounding the walls, and whom nobody could ever help. A man who could have been him if his box, less solid or more abused than the others, hadn’t opened.
For such a long time, he’d thought himself unique; now he was able to measure the magnitude of his error, and it terrified him.
“That’s better, isn’t it?”
The Investigator started. He’d almost forgotten the Shadow.
“Here, it’s by blindfolding yourself that you’re able to see.”
The Shadow was becoming more distinct, as a mirage sometimes does. The Investigator could make out his features and the details of his body. He was decidedly an old man, with a distended paunch that fell in several folds and hid his sex. The skin of his thighs put the Investigator in mind of very ancient animals, members of species that vanished ages ago, and his sunken pectoral muscles resembled the withered breasts of an elderly wet-nurse. His shoulders sagged, too, presenting soft, round, receding contours attached to obese arms on which the skin hung like tattered spiderwebs. But when the Investigator raised his eyes to the Shadow’s face, his shock was so great that he felt the earth vanishing under his feet and would have fallen had the other not held him up with his right hand, while his left retained its grasp on the broom handle, which apparently served him as both cane and scepter. The broad forehead, on which a network of wrinkles etched deltas and streamlets; the drooping jowls; the dimpled chin; the ears, behind which his silvery hair cascaded in gray waves; the heavy mustache, whose thick points descended on either side of his mouth, with its cracked lips — those were features the Investigator had contemplated many times, and even though he couldn’t make out the eyes, which disappeared almost completely behind the blindfold, he nevertheless had to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence: “The Founder!” he managed to blurt out, feeling waves of electricity surging through his body. “You’re the Founder!”
“The Founder?” the Shadow repeated. He seemed to reflect for a while, and then he shrugged. “If it makes you happy … I’m not in the habit of being contrary. On the other hand, if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that you’re the first man.”
“The First Man …?”
“Yes, the first to come out of one of those boxes. No one was ever so lucky before. But don’t kid yourself, you’re only getting a brief reprieve. You’ll wind up like the others. Whether you’re inside or outside doesn’t change anything. That’s the distinctive characteristic of this ship; everyone’s aboard, one way or another.”
The Shadow dealt the container a heavy blow, which provoked no reaction on the inside. “You see? It’s all over for him. He must have breathed his last. These boxes are so well designed and so well sealed that any attempt to open them is useless. I often tried my hand on one or another of them, for philanthropic reasons, no doubt, or to relieve my boredom. I gave up after breaking three fingernails and spraining my wrist.”
Joining the deed to the word, the Shadow massaged his forearm, as if his evocation of the incident had reawakened the pain. “What’s curious,” he went on, “is to discover that the weight of misfortune becomes fairly light in proportion as it intensifies or proliferates. Seeing a man die before your eyes is quite unpleasant. Almost unbearable. To see or hear millions die dilutes both atrociousness and compassion. Rather quickly, you find you no longer feel very much about what happened. Number is the enemy of emotion. Who has ever felt bad while trampling an anthill, can you tell me that? Nobody, that’s who. I talk to them sometimes, to keep them company when I’ve got nothing better to do, but they’re tiresome.… They want me to put myself in their place, but it never occurs to a single one of them to put himself in mine. I’d like to make them feel better, but all they know how to do is complain. Some of them still have telephones. They try to reach their loved ones or some emergency-services number, but they exhaust their credit or their battery in the mazes of the automatic switchboards, which never manage to put them in touch with the person they want to reach. Besides, even if they made contact, what could the person on the other end do for them? What could we do? Nothing, as I already told you. After all, I’m not responsible for putting them where they are. And if I did have some responsibility at some point, it was so long ago that the statute of limitations has run out by now.”