Her father’s insouciance made things worse. She checked the date and time on Apep Otein’s page over and over again, and within a week that act had become an obsession. She clicked on the image every five minutes, anxious to find a mistake, as if her life depended on it. She was playing Russian roulette. This ended with a panic attack so severe that she had to be hospitalized and injected with a tranquilizer. Her short chubby father looked on in despair, as though after losing his wife he now had to witness his daughter’s death. She couldn’t tell him that her collapse had been caused by the Facebook page. Nor did she mention it to the psychiatrist who visited her, nor to the psychologist. She felt a mixture of rage and shame whenever she spoke to them.

She was prescribed a drug that had effects similar to those of ecstasy. It wasn’t the best means of halting her fixation with Apep Otein’s profile. In a state of euphoria she became convinced that her daily pilgrimage had nothing to do with checking the date and time of the photograph, but was a way of demonstrating to herself that she was capable of bearing what she saw.

She sought a new explanation. A few rather convoluted but not wholly improbable ideas occurred to her, in all of which chance played a role. For instance, she imagined an identity thief breaking into the house and scanning that snapshot to fatten the list of people whose lives he could impersonate on social media platforms. That atypical burglar selected the best, most beautiful, and happiest photos, the objects of greatest sentimental value in order to lay his trail in virtual space. To be effective, these clues had to be directed only at the people closest to the victim. Another possibility was some family friend who had been in love with her mother and who, when he heard that she was dying in the hospital, had opened that account in a fit of pain, anger, confusion, or simple fear of death, with the sinister coincidence that the post was made at the moment his beloved passed away. She told herself that the person must have been asking for her friendship but then, when the period of mourning had passed, felt embarrassed about it or had forgotten his rash act. She also told herself that, under the effects of her medication, those suppositions functioned in the same way as the narcotics, and that she fabricated them as part of the process of reestablishing a form of normalcy that requires an answer to everything.