Yellow—A two-dimensional shadow—An incurable soul.
I have not written for several days, for I don’t know how many. All my days are alike. All are of one color—yellow like dry, overheated sand. Not a patch of shade, not a drop of water, only an infinity of yellow sand. I cannot live without her, but she, since she disappeared that day so mysteriously in the Ancient House. …
Since that time I have seen her only once, during the hour for the Walk, two, three, four days ago, I do not remember exactly. All my days are alike. She only passed swiftly by and for a second filled up the yellow, empty world. With her, arm in arm, reaching not higher than her shoulder, were the double-curved S- and the thin papery doctor, and a fourth person whose fingers only I remember well; they streamed out, those fingers, from the sleeve of the unif like a bundle of rays, uncommonly thin, white, long. I-330 raised her hand and waved to me, then she bent toward the one with the ray-like fingers, over the head of S- . I overheard the word Integral . All four turned around to look at me—and then they disappeared in the bluish-gray sea and my road was once more dry and yellow.
That same evening she had a pink check on me. I stood before the switchboard and with hatred and tenderness I implored it to click and soon to show the number I-330 . I would jump out into the hall at every sound of the elevator. The door of the latter would open heavily. Pale, tall, blonde and dark they would come out of the elevator, and here and there curtains were falling. … But she was not there. She did not come. And it is quite possible that now, at this minute, as I write these lines, at twenty-two o’clock exactly, with her eyes closed, she is pressing her