Claustrophobia overwhelmed me in my bathysphere. I wanted to feel people around me. Even if it were just through a warmly lit windowpane or through the brittle wall of artificial non-acknowledgement that diners in a restaurant raise against other diners. And so I turned off toward Reims, toward the halo over the city where the city’s heart seemed to glow white as in a crucible.

But it was a cold heart. Obliquely illuminated by spotlights fixed on the surrounding houses, the cathedral stood cadaverously mute in the deserted square, wanly scattering the reflection of its charnel-house yellow into the darkness behind the shivers of rain, which had now become misty and fine. I knew a hotel somewhere close by—the one where I had once spent the night with Schwab—but I also wanted to stretch my legs after several hours of hard driving. So I parked the car, took out the essentials for overnight, locked up, and walked across the square—

and above me floated a great angel, smiling blindly into the night.

The city was dead, except for a group of three men and two women about to climb into a car at the end of a line parked along the curb. One of the men was unlocking the car door; one of the women wore a hat that recalled the style of the 1920s; its narrow brim cast a shadow over her eyes; the nose and lips underneath were well shaped. Walking past, I tried to drill my gaze into her eyes, but they were undiscernible beneath the shadow, which lay upon them like a domino mask. She turned away, saying, “. . . et si tu penses qu’ils te font payer trente mille balles pour une nuit, tandis que dans le Midi tu as une très belle chambre pour quinze mille maximum . . .” (Beloved! And together we could’ve counted up the stars! . . .)

In the hotel, which reeked of wine, like an old barrel, from basement to roof (the restaurant was already closed), I took a room, fell into bed, and dropped off instantly.

•

I awoke from my dream at dawn. As usual when it had taunted me, I lay paralyzed for a while until its images drifted away, one after the other. Having sucked their fill of my marrow, they slipped back into the unwatched world whence they had crept up. What lay here now was like a negative of myself: it bared black teeth at me from between white lips. I had devoured the ashes of my confidence in life. For a fragment of the instant that shattered on the threshold between dreaming and awakening (when I realized with holy terror that I had dreamed the truth and had indeed truly killed someone), I was—without illusion or delusion, without guile or ruse—myself. I was, in an innocent, childlike way, ME. But with the next splinter of this instant, my certainty (and ME with it) was already dissolving, and what was left of my dream was merely an echo and eventually merely the memory of an echo, like the empty after-feeling of pleasure following a night of love. And I was again what I usually am: an echo of the SELF that I had been at some time or other (a time untraceably lost in oblivion, and perhaps even then only an instant).