I parted from the stranger warmly, as though we had always known each other, and was left alone in front of the hospital. The fresh November air startled me. I was impatient to leave the hospital in which they had followed the behavior of my body for twenty-four hours on monitors and watched over my health. And, now that I was deprived of all that, on the street, waiting for my taxi, I felt a mild uncertainty, and fear.

Not every return home is the same.

When you come back from a journey, you find things just as you left them at the moment of departure. After all the days of being away, you are now back in your own room, perhaps there’s an ashtray on the desk with a cigarette butt in it, perhaps a half-finished glass of wine, or a book you were reading on the day you left, open. Everything that retains a living trace of your presence in these objects becomes an image of the time that has passed and cannot ever be replaced.

I came back from the hospital and the first thing I saw from the doorway was the nice bedspread on the bed, the one with the floral design à la Paul Gauguin, which had come home before me. Washed, it lay over the bed, and it was unchanged, its textile essence was unchanged, there was no trace on it of the hospital, or of my illness.

Sanja had carefully removed from all the rooms most traces I had left of the rituals of my daily life, my previous life. She had taken particular care to eliminate the traces of those rituals that, according to the doctors’ instructions, I ought to give up. There were no ashtrays, the smell of tobacco smoke had altogether vanished from the air.

I went into the sunroom, my covered balcony, my office.

I wasn’t there either.

Erased from my rooms, now I could start over.

And then, reluctantly, I went into the bathroom, where it all began.

In our human habitations the bathroom is, apart from anything else, a place of fear, it is where we are naked and unprotected. That is why American films choose the bathroom as an emblematic theme of horror.

I undressed and stood in front of the mirror. I looked at the swelling on my right side, beside my genitals. It was no longer a swelling, but a bruise that was growing pale, with reddish edges, almost the color of rust.

I shaved.

Then I stepped cautiously into the shower, listening to the behavior of my body. The water was too hot. There was no pain in my neck, no pressure in my chest. Nothing hurt. The bathroom filled with warm steam. Water poured over me; was there anything simpler than this? A naked body with water pouring over it.

And I remembered a short film called The Room.