It’s quiet. The streets are deserted. The traffic lights are signaling in vain. The silhouette on the corner has abandoned its vigil and the girl is no longer peering through the curtains. The screenwriter’s still begging her to stay with him, still promising he’ll protect her. She doesn’t see how this paradise of his could benefit her writing. He can’t conceive of any paradise without her. But this could be fleeting. He may not feel the same way later on. He lowers his head and his eyes flit to the keys of the typewriter. Then the girl starts talking again, and seems like her old self. Why would a mind build an imaginary world around itself? she asks, referring to her idea of a whole world inhabited by beings who aren’t aware they’re from another planet. What role does such a mind play in the lives of these characters? What gives it the impression it’s created a world at all? These are the questions that constantly run through her mind, the answers to which, like indefinite shapes, are always vague, although becoming more distinct with every passing day. Perhaps her work should deal only with this. The girl asks the screenwriter for another cigarette and lights it by the window. Let’s imagine that nothing around us truly exists — that however much we believe what we see and touch is real, it’s all in fact the creation of a single mind; that that mind is but a thoughtlet in one small corner of another, greater mind — the one that conceives the universe; and that the universe is but a thoughtlet in an even greater mind, and so on, ad infinitum. Is it physically possible, or even logically feasible, to have more than one universe? The screenwriter doesn’t know. The girl expels a mouthful of smoke and asks: Does this cigarette exist? The smoke? “2.063 The sum-total of reality is the No World.” A slight alteration of W’s pronouncement. She goes back to her initial inquiry. She thinks the answer must be simple, because a thoughtlet is like a fundamental particle, and these constitute everything else in existence, everything a mind learns, and everything it imagines, are composed of these. And if it bodies forth a whole world, it must do so because it doesn’t want to be alone. It’s the only possible answer to the question. It’s the only answer the girl can think of. Listening to her, the screenwriter starts thinking he should imagine his script not as a series of concentric layers like an onion, but of a series of parallel planes, each successive one subsumed in the next. So where should he situate the girl’s watcher in the shadows? Should he exist in the same world in which she moves, or should he exist in the world she imagines? The plane she calls real, or the one she’s created? He parodies an old controversy, but instead of mathematics, he asks himself whether it was the No World that was discovered or invented. Perhaps he should avoid philosophical polemics and stick to thinking about the story’s subplots and themes, something better suited to a man of his trade. Nothing exists outside our minds — there is only intellectual curiosity, delusion, love. And aren’t these the very things the movies try to capture?