As though I’d ever have a chance to find LIBERATION BOOKS! But books have a certain power over us nevertheless. If this weren’t the case, during my dramatic ride to the hospital, I wouldn’t have noticed the inscription LIBERATION BOOKS. Or was my mind turning to anything else, just to forget the pain in my chest? The young man sitting by my feet kept shifting the heavy metal canister that was lying on my legs. He shifted it so that the cold metal lay uncomfortably against the bone of my knee, and for a while that became the dominant pain in my body. This made me silently furious with the young man, who was, perhaps, scraping the oxygen canister against my knees on purpose, intending to deflect my mind away from my heart to a different problem.

Then I turned my attention to the tops of the trees lining the street, the leaves were reddish brown, before they fell. In the autumn, the leaves here take on such dazzling, sunny colors that even on a cloudy day one has the impression of a surplus of light. Was it a sunny morning? Or did the colors in the treetops give me an illusion of sun? I had always been disturbed by the thought of dying in a landscape where deciduous trees grew. There was something unconvincing, something obvious about it.

It was somehow indecent to die in the autumn.

It was kitsch to die in the autumn, along with everything else. With the leaves.

The ambulance stopped in front of the hospital. In the parking lot, the first image I saw from my horizontal position was this: walking between the cars toward the hospital building was a girl in the red hockey shirt of the Washington Capitals. She was looking upward, toward a window, or at a cloud.

I had only ever been in this parking lot once before, when the wife of the poet F. was giving birth to their little daughter. I remember that he had bought a new Toyota Camry that day, and asked me: “Would you like to drive it?” “Sure.” And I drove once around the parking lot. That was ten years ago. I can still remember the smell of the new car.

My oxygen mask began to mist up in the icy November air.

In the hospital entrance, I was met by a choir of smiling medical personnel. On my right, a nurse struggled to find a vein in my arm to take blood. On my left, two girls in green coats were gazing and marveling at the design of the bedspread I was wrapped in. At the same time, I caught sight of Sanja at the end of the corridor, a man (a doctor?) had just come up to her with some papers in his hand, she listened carefully to what he said and then began to cry.