He left the room to allow me to compose myself, and I went a little mad. It was intolerable—inconceivable—to hear that, for no better reason than an unimaginative taxonomy, I would lose my life. I became obsessed with the knowledge that I would die, and day by day I played a game of it to prepare, as if by endless repetition I could somehow change sides and be not the corpse but the death, and thus survive myself. I lay upon my bed and imagined that I was breathing my last, that I was in mortal agony on a torture table or coughing as my broken ribs gouged my lungs. I was starving and could not go on, or dying of thirst, or shot and feeling the red hot rounds unmake my heart. I died and wept and died again, over and over, until I could not stand it and wished the day would come sooner. Finally one morning something in me shattered and could not be pulled back together, and the illusion that complicity in my own demise might undo the fact of it was blown away. I knew then, with only a fortnight to go, that I must at all costs escape, and since Alem Bekagn was in the normal way of things escape-proof, the only remedy for its walls being bribery or favour—and I had no means to effect either—I must take an extraordinary route for my departure. I must, I determined with a feverish certainty, learn to walk through walls, and to do that I must make the walls my own. I must cover them in the outpouring of myself, complete the image that had insistently been midwifing itself through me, and in that action I would gain control of matter and time and be made free. I gathered up the stubs and fragments they had left me and began to work, and when they came I extended my hand almost absently so that they could perform the vandalism upon it, only to find that in this the committee had relented, and in place of the vise they had brought me a parcel of brushes and tubes of oils taken from my own supply.