I don’t feel safe. I feel as if I were buried up to my mouth in asphalt at the end of an empty street.

Dr. Saul walks away.

I try to listen out for any sounds in the world beyond the glass barrier and penetrate it with my sensory antennae. There’s someone else there. I can feel a presence, calm and majestic and attentive, but it’s out of reach. Is it Dr. Saul? Or Nurse Marion with her cool, soothing fingers?

What is watching me?

I continue to search for the girl and find her very close, directly by my side. She’s in a frightful state, but she no longer wants to die. She’s fighting. She seems to be desperately dragging herself toward life, yet something is holding her back with an iron grip.

The darkness approaches tantalizingly from all sides with a peaceful, soft blanket, trying to carry me away, and I anticipate the sweet slumbers that it brings. I put up a fight. No! I want to open my eyes wide, squeeze and crush Dr. Saul’s hand. I want to tell him not to leave me and that I’ve been here, close to the glass, many times before, always too briefly, and now I want to wake up. I want to tell him to help the child, because the little girl is never going to make it alone. But it’s as if someone has turned off the light and . . .

DAY FORTY-THREE

Night

Henri

The next time I drift up to the glass barrier, the air is different, cooler, as cold as groundwater, and a lush, black veil is lying on it. I can feel the depths of night have settled over the room; it has a different weight from the day.

At my side is the rock called Dr. Saul. He whispers, “It’s two o’clock.” He’s searching for me, but he can’t find me. He explains that they tested me in my “absence” for Guillain-Barré syndrome, a form of rapid-onset paralysis, and for polyneuropathy, a different disorder of the nervous system that makes it impossible for the sufferer to move. However, it isn’t my body that’s resisting—it’s my brain.

“Your son once said that the brain was a church built of thoughts. I like Samuel. He has an inner dignity most people will never attain, even if they live to be a hundred.”

My son! He’s here? What does he look like? What’s he doing? How is he?

Dr. Saul doesn’t tell me. I suspect that this doctor never leaves the hospital and has set up his camp bed in a room on a forgotten corridor somewhere.