a hammer.
At the other end, the corridor opens onto a huge similarly deserted area, an enormous underground hall with no apparent function, in which nothing can be made out that suggests—neither architectural detail nor signboard—any particular direction to follow; unless placards are mounted on certain surfaces but these are so remote, given the considerable dimensions of the place, and its dim illumination, that nothing identifiable is apparent in any direction, the very limits of this useless and vacant interval being lost in the uncertainty of the zones of shadow.
The very low ceiling is supported by countless hollow metal beams, whose four sides are perforated with floral patterns dating from an earlier period. These pillars are quite close together, only about five or six feet apart, set regularly in parallel lines, which divides the entire area into equal and contiguous squares. The checkerboard is moreover materialized on the ceiling by identical rafters jointing the capitals in pairs.
Suddenly the asphalt floor is interrupted, for a considerable length, by a series of stairways with alternating railings, ascending and descending, each of whose first step occupies the entire distance between two ironwork pillars. The whole seems conceived for the flow of a huge crowd which obviously no longer exists in any case at this hour. In two opposing flights, a lower area is reached, resembling the upper one in every particular. On a still lower level, I finally reached the shopping gallery, brilliantly illuminated this time by many-colored harsh bulbs, the more painful to the eyes in that the upper areas were only dimly lit.
And with a similar lack of transition, there is also a crowd now: a rather scattered crowd, but one of regular density, consisting of isolated figures or those grouped by two or, exceptionally, three, occupying the whole of the surface accessible between the stalls as well as that inside them. Here there are only young people, mostly boys, although a close examination reveals among some of these, under the short hair, tight blue jeans, and turtle-neck sweaters or leather jackets, probable or even incontestable girls’ bodies. All are dressed alike, but their beardless pink and blond faces also look alike, with that bright and uninflected coloration which suggests not so much good health as the paint used on store-window mannequins, or the embalmed faces of corpses in glass coffins in the cemeteries of the dear departed. The impression of artificiality is further enhanced by the awkward postures of these young people, doubtless intended to express self-confidence, controlled strength, scorn, arrogance, whereas their stiff attitudes and the ostentation with which every gesture is made actually suggest the constraint of poor actors.
Among them, on the contrary, like tired guards in a wax museum, linger here and there occasional adults of indeterminate age, discreet and inconspicuous as if they were trying not to be seen; and as a matter of fact, it takes a certain amount of time to become aware of their presence. They reveal in their gray faces, their drawn features, their uncertain movements, the quite visible signs of the night hour, already very late. The livid glare of the neon tubes completes the illusion of invalids or addicts; the various races have here become almost the same metallic tinge. The huge greenish mirror of a store window reflects my own quite comparable image.
Nonetheless, old and young possess one characteristic in common, which is the excessive slackening of every movement, whose affected deliberation among some, whose extreme lethargy among others, threaten at any moment a total and definitive breakdown. And all this is, moreover, remarkably silent: neither shouts nor words spoken too loud, nor racket of any kind manages to disturb the muffled, padded atmosphere, broken only by the clicking of slot-machine levers and the dry crackling or clatter of scores automatically registered.
For this underground area seems entirely devoted to amusements: on each side of the huge central mall open out huge bays filled with long rows of the gleaming garish-painted devices: slot machines whose enigmatic apertures, which respectively devour and spit forth change, are embellished so as to make more obvious their resemblance to the female organ, games of chance allowing the player to lose in ten seconds some hundreds of thousands of imaginary dollars, automatic distributors of educational photographs showing scenes of war or copulation, pinball machines whose scoreboards include a series of villas and limousines, in which fires break out as a result of the movements made by the steel balls, shooting galleries with tracer bullets trained on the pedestrians in an avenue set up as the target, dartboards representing the naked body of a pretty girl crucified against a stake, racing cars driven by remote control, electric baseball, stereopticons of horror films, etc.
There are also, alongside, huge souvenir shops in which are set out, arranged in parallel rows of identical objects, plastic reproductions of world capitals and famous structures, ranging, from top to bottom of the display, from the Statue of Liberty, the Chicago stockyards, to the giant Buddha of Kamakura, the Blue Villa in Hong Kong, the lighthouse at Alexandria, Christopher Columbus’ egg, the Venus of Milo, Greuze’s Broken Pitcher, the Eye of God carved in marble, Niagara Falls with its wreaths of mist made out of iridescent nylon. Lastly there are the pornographic bookshops, which are merely the extension in depth of those of Forty-Second Street, a few yards, or dozen of yards, or hundreds of yards up above.
I discover without difficulty the shop window I want, easily found because it displays nothing: it is a wide plain ground-glass sheet with the simple inscription in moderate-sized enamel letters: “Dr. Morgan, Psychotherapist.” I turn the nearly invisible handle of a door made of the same ground glass, and I step into a very small bare cubicle, all six surfaces painted white (in other words, the floor as well), in which are only a tubular-steel chair, a matching table with an artificial marble top on which is lying a closed engagement book whose black imitation-leather cover shows the date “1969” stamped in gold letters, and behind this table, sitting very stiffly on a chair identical with the first, a blond young woman—quite pretty perhaps, impersonal and sophisticated in any case, wearing a dazzlingly white nurse’s uniform, her eyes concealed by sunglasses which doubtless help her endure the intense lighting, white like everything else and reflected on all sides by the immaculate walls.
She looks at me without speaking. The lenses of her sunglasses are so dark that it is impossible to guess even the shape of her eyes. I bring myself to pronounce the sentence, carefully separating the words as if each of them contained an isolated meaning: “I’ve come for a narco-analysis.”
After a few seconds thought, she gives me the anticipated reply, but in an oddly natural voice, gay and spontaneous, suddenly bursting out: “Yes … It’s quite late … What’s the weather like outside right now?” And her face immediately freezes again, while her body has regained its mannequin stiffness at the same time. But I answer right back, still in the same neutral tone, insisting on each syllable: “It’s raining outside. People are walking with their heads bent under the rain.”
“All right,” she says (and suddenly there is a kind of weariness in her voice), “are you a regular patient or is this your first visit?”
“This is my first visit here.”
Then after having looked at me again for a moment—at least so it seems to me—through her dark glasses, the young woman stands up, walks around the table and, though the narrowness of the room does not at all require her to do so, brushes against me so insistently that her perfume clings to my clothes; in passing she points to the empty chair, continues to the far wall, turns around and says to me: “Sit down.”
And she has immediately vanished, through a door so well concealed in the white partition that I had not even noticed its glass knob. The continuity of the surface is re-established, moreover, so quickly that I could now suspect I never saw it broken. I have just sat down when, through the opposite door opening onto the shopping mall, walks one of the men with iron-gray faces I glimpsed a few minutes earlier standing in front of a bookshop window: his body was turned toward the row of specialized magazines and papers on display, but he kept glancing right and left, as if he was afraid of being watched, though at times his eyes rested with some deliberation on an expensive magazine of which an entire row of identical copies were
