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and pondered. The lamp gave a sickly, dim yellow light, and Harotian asked himself angrily why he had to see the light exactly as others saw it. This, too, was unbearably humiliating. He touched the crushed paper flower in his pocket, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He fixed his eyes on the lamp and stared at it till he grew dizzy. His eyes were puffy and brimming with tears. A German patrol marched down the next street, and Harotian retreated into a darkened hallway out of which he continued to stare at the lamp. For four hours he stood there motionless. At some point during this strange night his legs gave out and he collapsed on his back, still staring at the lamp. Toward dawn the lamp surrendered. It poured out myriad grains of pollen that gave off the scent of oranges. He sniffed with pleasure. The street was filled with the pungent smell he remembered from his childhood in Armenia. His old head ached, he felt the pounding of heavy hammers but was too elated to notice. The amazing thing was, said Wasserman, that the moment Harotian crossed the frontier of the incredible, everything seemed possible and simple, even logical in its way: he had all five senses at his command, and he felt he was exercising a natural right denied to the rest of mankind. Wasserman likened him to a prisoner who starts to make inspired statues out of the bars of his cell. When Harotian ran his hand over a fence made of wood and steel, he could hear, through his cars (or through his fingers?), strange sounds melodiously weaving in and out. Soon he could “hear” the rough and smooth texture of things without even touching them, and—eventually—their density.The world suddenly held vast kaleidoscopic treasures. He could imbue different smells with flavors; he could stop the sounds of a girl singing as they floated by, paint them purple with a look, twirl them around like a swarm of fireflies, and let them ring again and fade away. Life teemed with his new gifts. He stopped scavenging for food, and his face grew sharp as a fox’s. His clothes were so worn his arms and legs showed through the holes. Passersby nodded at him with COMPASSION [q.v.], but he had no need of their compassion. He was happy.

And then one night he suddenly woke up on the pile of rags he used as a bed in the vacant lot, and dragged himself with his remaining strength to the street corner, where he had seen the lamp. A terrifying thought struck him. He stopped by the wall and looked: the lamp was still shining murkily in a small circle. Harotian could not see the light: he could only smell the orange pollen wafting through space. He steadied his wobbly legs and straightened his shoulders, as he always did before the difficult part of a performance. This was the big test: he tried to see the lamplight once more. There was no point to all his work unless he could bring back the old reality of his five senses. For a long time nothing happened, and Harotian broke out in a cold sweat. And then very slowly he saw the murky lamp again, like the searchlight on a rescue ship cutting through the fog. Now he knew that his war had ended in victory: he could “choose” the world he lived in the way one leafed through a giant catalogue. He had almost completely freed himself from the bonds of sensory perception. The color red was his by right, like the smell of soil or the texture of bark, or the sound of a harmonica coming from a window, or the taste of raindrops. He was, as Aaron Marcus said of him, “the resurrector of the obvious. The autodidact of the senses.” And he could have been happy, if only things had not gone amiss. “What went amiss?” roared Neigel, who for the last few minutes had been listening with some interest. “The war,” Wasserman elucidated. “The war shuffled the deck. Listen and judge for yourself.” Harotian’s first difficulties began when the old reality he remembered became more and more garbled and contradictory. It, too, seemed to overflow into the realm of imagination. When he walked, the streets seemed emptier than usual. He heard strange talk of people disappearing from the ghetto to a place of no return. Harotian could not believe his cars. He feared that his new talent was deceiving him: human voices were saying outlandish things, altogether inconsistentwith the old world he knew: things about sealed chambers with ceilings that emitted a strange ether that killed everyone inside; one man who had escaped from such a place stood on an old fish barrel on a street corner and told passersby about what happens “there.” He described the crematoria where hundreds of people were burned by the minute; about doctors conducting experiments and infecting healthy people with cancer; he swore he’d seen people flayed alive so their skin could be used to make lamp shades. He said they had found a way there to make soap out of people. Harotian thought there was something wrong with his hearing, that his mind was mistranslating the sounds people made. But his sense of sight began to worry him too: when the man raised his hand to swear that every word was true, Harotian saw that numbers had been tattooed on his forearm like a greenish numerical rash. Harotian fled, but he couldn’t stop seeing what he had failed to see for so long, and the sights were overwhelming: people who had remained behind in the ghetto and starved like him took on strange forms: their skin turned bluish, their nails thickened till they resembled claws. Their bodies swelled and their faces hardened into masks. Harotian saw and could not believe his eyes: women grew thick hair on their faces and bodies. Hair sprouted on people’s eyelids,