That night, I was at the outskirts of the city, consulting with various of my colleagues about some matters of importance involving water, irrigation. Our formal conversation at an end, one of my colleagues starts to press me about something; we are both avidly interested, even obsessed, with art of all kinds, and especially pictorial and sculptural arts. We are men of high rank in the city, so we are sure to be invited when a new statue is presented or when a carved wall or pillar is unveiled, and in our own modest ways we both collect what we can. Now he has something remarkable to show me, he says, and conducts me to the home of a mutual acquaintance, one of the wealthiest and most powerful officials in all Memphis, and a noted patron of the arts. As we meet with him, exchanging ceremonious words and gestures, I am becoming short of breath, all the blood pooling in my center, leaving my arms and legs weak and cold, and my heart bristles and shakes, because this man is gesturing to the tomblike door of his home, and I know what’s inside, what he is going to show me. It’s them. Freshly made, fully intact and new, and there is no doubt that I am going to read the words scrawled on them, to be able now to read them and understand what they mean. I’m being waved through the door. My friend has my arm, I can’t stop walking forward. Any moment I am going to see them in their entirety—

I wake up with a strangled cry, shivering as waves of cold revulsion and misery wash over me, nearly crazy with the desire to rip the life out of myself and get out of the world.

If I find them, the dreams won’t stop, will they? Will they become permanent?

The block was just as empty by day as by night, and nearly as silent. I found I could move in and out of the buildings easily. Most of them had no doors to lock, nothing was boarded up or marked, and being there was like visiting the world after it had ended.

I had scaled one building and then a second. I was looking out into a shaft way from the rear windows when I saw the crowns of two misshapen white heads just above the sill of a window opposite.

I fly down the stairs, out into the street, which wheels and skates along with me, carrying me to the doorway, propelling me up the stairs and through an open doorway into a vast apartment, the entire floor open, the partitions torn away, all plaster and drywall—and them, by the window.