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her mother did indeed break her back after falling down a flight of stairs, for a reason no one has ever been able to explain.

    He found among his late father’s things a roll of undeveloped film. Curious, he sent it to a lab and received back twelve prints – each of a young woman he recognized as having disappeared twenty years before “under mysterious circumstances.”

    Some there were who claimed that the camera steals the souls of those it photographs. Were their detractors able to see the ghosts that flee the rolls of exposed negatives, they would not have jeered. But spirits are invisible in the darkroom, even under a red light; and the shriek they habitually utter is beyond human audition.

    The man loved to look at old photographs, especially of people he did know, taken long before in places he had never visited. While looking at a picture of the 1914 graduates of a small business college, he was stunned to see himself there on the marble staircase, under a swag of patriotic bunting, his finger touching the knot of his tie. Too late he dropped the picture onto the flea-market table. Already, he was adjusting the knot of his tie, nervously, while the owner of the Groningen Tractor Manufacturing Company, who had hired him yesterday, began to climb the staircase toward him.

    There was one photograph among those he received from the lab that he had not taken: of a woman of unearthly beauty. Seeing it, he was lost to her – her eyes, the intensity of their gaze. He spent the next five years in search of her. It was as if she had been able to enthrall him with a single look. Because he could not forget her, he forgot everything else that had mattered to him: wife, child, house, job. Forgetting them, he lost them all. In the fifth year of his search, he found her. She was not what he had expected. She was five years older. But more than this, she had not the photograph’s power to possess him. Her eyes – in it so entrancing – would, after a moment, slide off his in embarrassment. He was broken. But he married her in spite of his disenchantment in order to “justify himself.” It was a marriage he bitterly regretted.

    For a rope to become a snake, a snake a rope – there is nothing marvelous in these. But for a man to become a rope or snake – it is truly a marvel. There was a man with this gift. While a rope, he strangled his friend. While a snake, he poisoned his wife. The two were lovers and happy to die together in one another’s arms. Did they not tell him they could not live a moment longer without each other?

    Her completely innocent remark to her husband at breakfast, that he was not himself today, severed the slender attachment he had not only to her but also to himself – his identity. If not himself, then who? He left the house that same morning, never to return. It was only natural that, in a barroom close by the docks, he should take the first identity that came to hand and kill the sailor who had given him offense. After having assumed in the most casual way this new and homicidal self, it was inevitable that he became, for a time, the most hunted criminal in the city in which once he had lived so peaceably. He was sentenced to death in the presence of witnesses able to verify without the slightest doubt his identity as a murderer.

    To lose one’s mind is tragic; but to find it again inside someone else – this was the catastrophe that sent him, raving, to his death.

    He no longer knew how to live. In what way, so as to be happy and good. But of this he was certain: to remain in the city would be his doom. So he determined to leave it – leave everything by which he was known. His wife, his children, his dog, his job of courtroom usher, his clothes, the pipes and tobacco enjoyed by him each evening in the small garden he had made for himself behind the house – everything. I must begin again, he whispered. It’s the only way to