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not only afraid, not only angry, but exhausted as well.
    The moment he shuts his eyes, he sees the shadow-beings marching through his head. It is a long, dimly-lit procession composed of scores if not hundreds of figures, and among them are included both men and women, both children and old people, and while some are short, others are tall, and while some are round, others are lean, and as Mr. Blank strains to listen in on them, he hears not only the sound of their footsteps but something he would liken to a groan, a barely audible collective groan rising from their midst. Where they are and where they are going he cannot say, but they seem to be tramping through a forgotten pasture somewhere, a no man’s land of scrawny weeds and barren earth, and because it is so dark, and because each figure is moving forward with his or her head down, Mr. Blank cannot distinguish anyone’s face. All he knows is that the mere sight of these figments fills him with dread, and once again he is overwhelmed by an implacable sense of guilt. He speculates that these people are the ones he sent off on various missions over the years, and, as was the case with Anna, perhaps some of them, or many of them, or all of them did not fare so terribly well, even to the point of being subjected to unbearable suffering and/or death.
    Mr. Blank can’t be sure of anything, but it strikes him as possible that there is a connection between these shadow-beings and the photographs on the desk. What if the pictures represent the same people whose faces he is unable to identify in the scene that is playing itself out in his head? If that is so, then the phantoms he is observing are not figments so much as memories, memories of actual people – for when was the last time anyone took a photograph of a person who did not exist? Mr. Blank knows there is nothing to support his theory, that it is only the wildest of wild conjectures, but there has to be some reason, he tells himself, some cause, some principle to explain what is happening to him, to account for the fact that he is in this room with these photographs and these four piles of manuscripts, and why not investigate a little further to see if there is any truth to this blind stab in the dark?
    Forgetting about the two nails hammered into the window, forgetting about the door and whether it is locked from the outside or not, Mr. Blank wheels himself over to the desk, picks up the photographs, and then puts them down directly in front of him. Anna is on top, of course, and he spends a few moments looking at her again, studying her unhappy but beautiful young face, gazing deep into the gaze of her dark, burning eyes. No, he says to himself, we were never married. Her husband was a man named David Zimmer, and now Zimmer is dead.
    He puts the photograph of Anna aside and looks at the next one. It is another woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, with light brown hair and steady, watchful eyes. The bottom half of her body is obscured, since she is standing in the doorway of what looks like a New York apartment with the door only partially open, as if in fact she has just opened it to welcome a visitor, and in spite of the cautious look in her eyes, a small smile is creasing the corners of her mouth. Mr. Blank feels a momentary twinge of recognition, but as he struggles to recall her name, nothing comes to him – not after twenty seconds, not after forty seconds, not after a minute. Given that he found Anna’s name so quickly, he assumed he would be able to do it with the others as well. But such, apparently, is not the case.
    He looks at another ten pictures with the same disappointing results. An old man in a wheelchair, as thin and delicate as a sparrow, wearing the dark glasses of the blind. A grinning woman with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, wearing a 1920s flapper dress and a cloche hat. A frighteningly obese man with an immense hairless head and a cigar jutting from his mouth. Another