73

I floated in and out of consciousness, like a character in an epic poem by an eighteenth-century tyro who only appears when the rhyme requires her. There was the sense of movement, as Thom Gunn might say. And of light – many colours: purple, burnt orange, lilac, terre verte, sienna, cerulean, golden yellow, violet – and of sound – many sources: rushing water, wild wind, murmuring voices, heavy footsteps, the susurrus of car wheels over a well-built road.

Here is a picture of a subfusc autoroute in France:

At length I woke in a dim room the nature of which at first I could not discern. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw there were two small windows with metal grilles high up on the walls, a wooden chair painted white, and a broken mirror, roughly trapezoidal in shape. On the door to the room was a peephole about twenty centimetres square that operated on a shutter system with a hinged leaf and five heavy iron slats that pivoted on their horizontal axes. The walls were smooth and white. The windows, which were on the wall opposite the heavy gunmetal-grey door, were so high up and the masonry in which they were cut was so thick, that I could see nothing but the interior of the wall – the top and sides of the horizontal shaft leading, presumably, to open air. Occasionally I thought I heard the cry of a gull, or the dull boom of nearby surf. But this could as easily have been piped in over speakers concealed high up in the walls.

I know there were speakers because occasionally they would crackle to life and I would hear a distorted voice ask me questions or shout commands.

Error in the text! Punishment!

I didn’t respond.

Does the word rutilant mean to you the same thing as red?

Sure, I said.

Thank you, it was useful to have that clarified.

Sure, I said.

Why didn’t you speak about the traffic noise sooner?

It had nothing to do with the matter in question, I replied, trying to be reasonable.

For hours I would be left alone, lying on my cot, staring at the slats of the peephole. At one point I noticed, in my obsessive recapitulation of the spare ornaments of my room, that the heavy gunmetal-grey door was not flush with the wall; that is to say it was not wholly closed, by a matter of some millimetres. Because I had grown tired of the endless rounds of drugging and interrogation – not to mention the lack of proper nourishment – I decided that the best option was to escape.

I got up and went to the door. Pushing against it with the weight of my body, I found to my surprise that the door swung open smoothly, giving onto a dark corridor. The only light came from back inside my room, but I decided to close the door to prevent for as long as possible the discovery of my absence. I proceeded by hugging the wall several metres to my right. The wall was smooth and the floor free of obstacles, but after approximately ten metres (it’s difficult to judge distances in the dark) I ran into the end of the hallway, which turned at a right angle into another, slightly narrower hallway, with rougher walls and rubble-strewn ground. The darkness lessened slightly; I thought I could detect a faint light source round the next corridor, some twenty metres ahead. I made my way towards that corner, which was also set at a right angle, and again narrower; the light grew stronger towards the end, and I decided to head towards it. The ground now became muddier, and there were muddy depressions and large stones in the path.

I noticed on the ground in front of me handprints and footprints in the mud, and a high-heeled shoe, blue-green, heel broken. It looked like a left shoe, and about my size. Shots rang out behind me, at irregular intervals, which caused me to drop the shoe and continue faster, crouched low to the ground but upright, running, picking my way round the mud puddles and rocks until I came to the end of the corridor, which angled again to the right, and dead-ended on a heavy gunmetal-grey door.

I went up to the door, which was locked but which had in place of a doorknob or handle or lock the same strange upside-down eye inside a triangle that I had seen in front of the cave entrance in the Grésivaudan valley. I felt inside the pocket of my silk robe, and, sure enough, there was the thin metallic device I’d used to activate the hand scanner. I pressed the device and the door hinged open. As it did, gunfire again broke out again behind me, and a woman screamed in pain. I stepped inside the door, which shut behind me.

That’s how I found myself back in my apartment. Before I had time to process what had happened, someone pounded on my door. I crossed the room and opened it, and there you were.