The Statement — Summary

Luc has nothing wrong with his life and knows it exactly. Every month a statement tells him to the centime what he has received and under which article of which act; he reads it and turns it face down on an otherwise bare table. He is thirty-one, in Fribourg, in a country that decided to do provision properly and did. He has never had a job.

Where the other Humans have noise around the question, Luc has the statement, and in his pocket a paper railway timetable from the last year they printed one, the last object he owns made for someone who needed to know something.

The question came on the gorge path in March without a cause: what is this, this being kept, this life that costs nothing and asks nothing and lasts. Taking away everything that could distract from it does not make it louder. It makes it exact, like a single object on an empty table. To his friend Anouk it is a note held under everything; she thought that was just Switzerland. Nothing mitigates it: no work, no dependent, no worry, no faith. Provision answers every question a life can pose except the one it creates. He is fine, and suspects fine is the sound the note makes when nothing is played over it.

At the lake in June a swan reconsiders him and leaves. Whether the pure case is the one that can produce an answer or the one that cannot, because the question needs something to press against, is left standing. He goes home. The statement is face down, accurate in every line, and it never said it was the answer to anything.