The number of the house is printed so large that at first I take it for something else. It’s on a red plaque hanging on the iron gate: 323. Under the plaque is an orange sign attached by bits of wire that says FOR SALE. It dawns on me that there are seventeen numbers missing, so I turn and make my way around a traffic circle. I have no idea which way to go. A street with three cold, modern skyscrapers leads from Anatole-France; none of them look like they might be the location of the Social and Administrative Center. But I’m not ready to give up.

It begins to rain. I work out that the skyscrapers aren’t in fact on the street, but up a ramp that veers off to the left. The street continues on to a freeway. The neighborhoods of the northern periphery stretch out into the distance; they are depressing watered-down replicas of Carrefour Pleyel, yet during the brief instant while I’m gazing at them I have a vaguely pleasurable sense of unease. I think I might need to cross the freeway to reach the stretch of avenue I want, but for the moment I opt for the ramp. I advance. There are no street signs; I’m certain that I’m heading nowhere. I continue to advance. When I get to the skyscrapers, I discover that they are surrounded by a parking lot full of trucks.

Option two: cross the freeway. I take the street; it comes to an abrupt end at an embankment. I stand there observing the maelstrom of traffic passing at exhausting speed under the rain. My shoes are soaked. When I get back to my tiny room at the residency I phone Michel and get his voicemail message in French. In my diary I write: “Even if I return every day, I’ll never find the place.” That’s not enough to get the whole thing off my chest. I go to my bookshelves and find a collection of articles by Marguerite Duras called Outside. I know that one of those articles is about the Paris suburbs. I read that there are no maps of the periphery. That it’s impossible to draw them up. That they only exist for the old neighborhoods like Saint-Denis, before the construction of the banlieues. Banlieues: the exact opposite of empty Paris boulevards from which the Arabs, treated like rats by their white neighbors, have fled.

By the next day I’ve forgotten my misgivings and set off along the odd numbers, determined to ask. I approach an elderly woman who tells me that I don’t have to leave the underpass because the center is at the end of a passage that branches off from the exit to the even numbers. I can’t miss it.