as if she hadn't seen me, maybe she genuinely didn't see me, maybe back there in that corner I was invisible, hidden who knows how from the rest of the world? You're crazy, said Marko, though I understand the urge to become the invisible man. Better the invisible man than Batman, I replied, and slipped out the door to avoid Marko's tirade about comic book characters and their symbolic meaning. The chill darkness awaited me outside, or I would have gone straight to the courtyard at Zmaj Jovina. Early the next morning, it may have been before six, the phone rang, and continued to ring so insistently that I had to get up and stumble over to the side table in the living room, but when I finally lifted the receiver, there was no one there, and a few seconds later I heard the click of the connection being broken. I went back to bed but couldn't sleep. I tried to read; alas, that magical formula for falling asleep works only in the wee hours, not in the early morning. Actually, the book I had picked up to read, which described the system of German concentration camps during World War II, made me even more awake. I finally got up at seven with a grinding headache, dressed, put water on for coffee, went down to buy my paper. Hardly anyone bought the newspapers anymore because the news they carried and the accompanying commentary were so predictable, but the morning reading of the paper with a cup of black coffee was a ritual I could not relinquish. It was better than watching television, which never ceased to be a source of official propaganda, a parade of bizarre creatures often of stunted intellectual capacity. The newspapers were different: you could always skip the first pages and focus on the sections about life in the city, practical advice, and sports; on the other hand, even in the first section, there was the chance that a journalist might slip in a subversive twist, a tiny signal that reality was not what the government claimed it to be, and the search for those twists provided an appealing intellectual game, as long, of course, as the reader didn't have a headache. So I gave myself over to the pages with the obituaries, neutral enough for the pain assaulting my forehead and temples. Death, judging by the obits, was busy those days, as usual discriminating in no way among gender, age, or place of residence. The faces, old and young, male and female, even children, looked me straight in the eyes, as if it were my fault that they were there, offered briefly to a world that had never cared about them. I sipped my coffee and turned to the section with the personals and classifieds. The small number of readers meant a small number of ads, and under the heading Miscellaneous there were only two. The first offered a universal product for the cleaning and repair of scratched autobodies, which, it said, was not the only way this product could be used. The second ad read: Sometimes a slap can change the entire cosmos — Code Palm. I stared at the words, unable to believe my eyes, though I was certain they were written for me alone. Again I saw the woman stagger and the man say something savage, which, I sensed, had startled her. Something had been set in advance, had not gone according to plan, and at that moment the cosmos had begun to collapse for all of us, to shed the skin containing it. One question, however, still begged to be answered: Why was all this being played out before me? What could I possibly mean to the people who had devised the game? I was not caught up in any political shenanigans, I had no friends in high places in the government or cultural institutions, I had no ties to international humanitarian organizations, at times I didn't even know my own name. Perhaps this was all a mistake, it suddenly hit me, as I was still poring over the ads page, maybe they had confused me with someone else, an important writer or professor, someone they needed to communicate with or draw into a tangled game from which, in fact, it would be best to flee, and fast. I poured more coffee, sipped the cold liquid, and sat back in the chair. Even if it's a mistake, to whom should I report it? If I don't know who made the mistake, how can I tell that person to stop bothering me? I looked at the ad. My headache had meanwhile receded, leaving only a small knot on the right temple. I pressed my index finger to it, and the dull throb made me suck in my breath. Then I stood up and went over to the computer to write a message using the code word