THE PHOTOGRAPH OF CONSTANCE was taken just after she was injected with propofol, in the back of the repair van, after it had been parked in an underground parking garage on Avenue Foch. The lowering of the left eyelid before the subject loses consciousness is a well-known side effect of this common, short-acting anesthetic, another effect being said subject’s rapid recovery of consciousness. So, conscious again, and cautiously opening that left eyelid—closely followed by the right eyelid—Constance was able to see the place where she was being kept: namely, a long, narrow space, maybe one hundred square feet in total.
The furniture in the room consisted of the bed where she lay, a chest of drawers, and a chair pushed in front of a corner shelf fixed to the wall, all of it made of high-gloss MDF boards. It looked like a cheap hotel room, except that there was no letterhead notepaper in the drawer and no list of rules stuck to the inside of the door. And that door—Constance checked as soon as she got up—was locked from the outside. The floor was marbled linoleum, the walls covered with beige woodchip wallpaper. Pinned to the wall was a violently colored poster of a horse on a beach at dusk, rearing up in the spurting foam, and near that was a metal support for a television, of the kind you also see in hospital rooms, but without a television. There was a shower cubicle in one corner. The absence of a toilet might have made Constance hope for a brief stay, but her capacities for anticipatory reasoning were still too slow to make that leap. The room had no distinguishing features, no detail that might have enabled her to identify the nature of the building, the name of the city, or even on which continent it was located.
She was able to see all of this thanks to a spindle-shaped wall lamp near the bed, which constituted the only light source. The room did contain a window, but it was hidden by a shut blind, its slats so tightly wedged together that not even the faintest hint of light, artificial or otherwise, filtered through. The long crank handle that would have enabled her to open this blind had been removed.
Approaching the window anyway, Constance had no idea what she was doing here, nor why nor how, nor even the idea of wondering about any of this. The weight of the situation was enough to squash any curiosity she might have had about its motives, its terms and conditions, or any fears she might have had regarding the future. The same was true for the past: her memories ended with her visit to Philippe Dieulangard’s real estate agency. After that, nothing; even the walk in Passy Cemetery had been expelled from her memory. When, by chance, her gaze alighted on a red dot fringed with pink about one-third of the way up her left forearm, she remembered the injection she’d been given, but only as an isolated event, purely physical and without any context. Then the present slipped away from her like the past when, her gaze sliding down her forearm, Constance noted that her wrist was bare: they had taken her watch.
At the foot of the bed, she saw her handbag and quickly checked its contents. At first sight, nothing was missing: passport, wallet with money inside, house keys, cell phone. The latter, however, with its battery and SIM card removed, was no use to her whatsoever, not that she’d even thought of calling anyone, but at least she would have known what time it was. She had to think about doing her makeup before she realized that her cosmetics bag—containing nail varnish, lipstick, powder, compact mirror—wasn’t there either: confiscated, apparently.
So there was no way of figuring out where or when she was, nor how long her artificial sleep had lasted: not long, perhaps, as the imprint of her watch strap was still visible, its side seams embedded in her skin. Then a sudden desire to go back to sleep took hold of her, illogically since she had just woken up, but as this setting offered no entertainment or any alternative to sleep, she didn’t see what else she could do. And it was as she lay down that she finally noticed an important phenomenon that, fully occupied as she had been with what she was experiencing in the moment, she hadn’t perceived when she opened her eyes: the noise. The huge noise. The massive, constant background noise.
Despite the shut window and the lowered blind, a ceaseless and close-sounding engine roar filled the room, making all the furniture vibrate. To judge from the volume and tone of that engine noise, it had to be produced by heavy-goods vehicles, probably a very large quantity of eighteen-wheelers in fact, the nuances of the sounds indicating an incessant succession of vehicles crossing, passing, changing speed, and double-clutching, on a highway situated just below the window and which, given the volume of the noise, must be at least four lanes wide, if not six. This phenomenon did constitute a clue, at least: wherever she might be in the world, Constance had not been removed from all civilization.
It may seem surprising that it took her so long to become aware of such a din, and indeed she was surprised by it. But perhaps it was because the sheer immensity of the volume had become, in a way, the perfect inverse of silence, to the point where the two were exactly equivalent. Perhaps. In any case, while the roar of heavy traffic on that truck-filled highway hadn’t troubled her chemical lethargy, it was going to be an entirely different matter to fall asleep normally with it in the background. After switching off the lamp, after tossing and turning fruitlessly on the bed, after trying to block her ears with the edges of the pillow, she turned the lamp back on and the poster of the horse on the beach suddenly brought back a memory.
A childhood memory: a vacation house by the ocean, very close to the beach, nighttime, rocked peacefully to sleep by the sound of waves, their regular ebb and flow, waves being born and growing louder as others wear themselves out, collapse, and stretch out over the sand with a hiss, reduced to foam. When the ocean was rough, it roared and howled just as loudly as a highway full of trucks, but not only did the backwash not prevent Constance from falling asleep; it acted like a narcotic on her. There was nothing to stop her, now, from imagining those eighteen-wheelers as equally hypnotic waves, just as long as she could filter out their squealing brakes, their screaming revs, and above all the fact that the sea does not honk its horn.
It was amid this racket that Constance distinctly heard a fine metallic sound from the other side of the door: the sound of a key turning in a lock.