A light would snap on. The doors would swing quietly open and, while whispering orderlies tramped up and down the steps with stretchers, I would steal up to the cloth panels of those summer ambulance trams and listen to the muffled, almost soundless squirms and moans of dying human flesh. By the time the cars had been cleaned out, a new load would be creeping up from behind.

I found it hard only to look. Being here but drawn there, I could no longer do that. One night, I seized the moment when several orderlies, while unloading carcasses, converged in the doorway creating a jam: I walked up to a stretcher abandoned on its short folding legs in the middle of the pavement. (The carriers, given a free minute, had gone off to get a light from someone’s cigarette.) The carcass, entirely covered by a greatcoat, was unguarded. I quickly bent down and pulled back the broadcloth. I could barely see anything. Before my suddenly fogged lenses was a blurry smudge, writhing and twitching. A smell of sanies and sweat singed my nostrils. I bent down lower still, to the ear of what was lying under the broadcloth.

“For us? For me? But I may not exist. That’s just it, I don’t. So it turns out that . . .”

My tugging at his greatcoat must have hurt him, because suddenly from there, from the twitching smudge, came a soft and strained eeeee. I unclenched my fingers; the broadcloth sank down—and covered the smudge.

I hurried home, in a rush to get somewhere. Yet when I got to my door, I hung back, loath to cross the threshold. I knew that there, in that dark box, patiently waiting among the symbols and numbers, was my figment: 0.6 person.

All that night it tormented me with the relentless emptiness of its eye sockets.

Meanwhile, the white and pink squares pasted to the walls of buildings had been replaced by dark blue rectangles. The years listed, rising up the scale of time, were coming closer and closer to my “call-up year.” The distant there, glowing blue from the paper leaves, was calling to me ever more loudly and tenderly: Come.

It seemed to me that I heard it, that short simple syllable.

But then one day, at a crossroad, I met a doctor I knew. As we were saying goodbye, I retained his hand in mine.

“Tell me . . .”

“What?”

“With six diopters, do they take you?”

“Y-yes. Although . . .”

“What about seven?”

“No.”

We unlinked palms. When he had gone a dozen paces, the doctor glanced back at me and made to turn round. But then he went on. At the time my vision was 7.5. My glass adjunct was stubbornly clinging to here. Still standing where the doctor had left me, I unclasped its tight metal legs, held it up to my face, and peered at its enormous oval-squinting biconcave eyes. I don’t know if it was a simple solar reflex or something else, but in the eyes of my adjunct there glittered a joyful brilliance.

It was then that my excruciating insomnias began. I gave up my late-night strolls about the streets. They no longer helped. I never could and cannot drink. People’s society to me is worse than insomnia. But I had to fill my long, empty vigils with something.