I remain a hermit locked in my room. I see its objects gather around me, keeping my silence company for hours without getting bored or complaining. It’s in my power to remain like this forever, not moving, not thinking, not feeling. Or else I could leave and go elsewhere, without any particular reason behind the change. I do it all with a remarkable ease and flexibility. It’s only my bouts of trembling, which have intensified recently and shift between my different limbs, that make me lose control of myself. That, and also the absence of my body, which I do not see, and which no longer comes along when I move or try to do something. It just stands there, stubborn and headstrong as a mule.

After he went through the window, my father exited his body because it was no longer residing in this world. When the body is no longer a resident, the world erases itself. My father erased the world. Then he left his body, and his soul remained suspended, without anyone to pull it down. Who is it that plucks the souls of the fathers from the tree of life if not their sons? Neither Sa’id nor I did it, so my father’s poor soul remains hanging in the air.

I stand in front of the square mirror, and I do not see a face. I move my hands, and I do not see my hands. Where could this person be, standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror above the sink, where no reflection is to be seen? And if the person standing there isn’t me, where might I be? I reach my hand to the tap and turn it on. The water flows out and goes down the drain in the middle of the white basin. It is water flowing from a faucet that I turned on, but I see it as if through a pane of glass, as though everything were flashing by on a screen and not before my very eyes. I can’t feel things no matter how much I touch them, turn them over, handle them. There is some diaphanous film separating me from everything, a fine coating of rubber that sticks to everything—rubber and intangible, so I do not see it covering my soul and my limbs, separating them from everything around me.