They returned to me again in a dream that night. When I awoke, it seemed as though I’d been dreaming that dream throughout the night, nine hours of it. They were there, by the window, and the glare of the day fell on them like the heat of the noonday sun, so that it seemed to consume them without reducing them, as if something is cruelly replenishing that incessant loss. I can feel them shrinking from the light, but they are statues, and they cannot move. I’m afraid to move them myself. I imagine breaking one of their arms in a clumsy attempt to drag the statue out of the light, and the figure wailing in helpless agony. After what might have been hours, it occurs to me at last to cover the window, since, now that I think about it, the sun has not budged in the sky all this time. I waste time in a fruitless search for a curtain, a sheet, a piece of cardboard, and in the silence, I can imagine their weak voices raised in pain. I feel it in my own throat. I feel the light like acid on my skin. I turn my head, and I am face to face with one of them, staring directly into eyes that seem about to vanish in sheer suffering, my own lips just inches from the gaping, stinking mouth, and I realize that I can’t see the other one because I am the other one, and I cannot move, cannot move, not even to pull myself aside into the shade and out of the searing light of the pitilessly motionless sun.

I returned to the area I had scouted the previous day and continued searching; a region bounded on one side by the street I had first taken, and on the other by an enormous public park. There were plenty of hiding places in there, I was sure, but, as there were no roads leading into the park, but only surrounding it, anyone with a large object to conceal would have had to carry it in plain sight over broad lawns, or past fountained plazas and circles that are never entirely empty of people. Not possible, of course. Toward the end of a nerve-wracking day of wasted effort, I suddenly remembered—with a palpable shock that, for a moment, I feared might be the beginning of some sort of seizure—that the domain of converted industrial buildings and warehouses I had been searching did not quite end when it reached the park: there was a little more on the far side, between the park and the river.