IT HAPPENED WITHOUT WARNING, ALMOST FROM ONE day to the next. I was walking along an empty street, an unsettling question going around and around in my head, a question that had wormed its way into my mind several days earlier that I couldn’t shake off: What proof did I have of my existence? Was I even real? In an attempt to figure this out once and for all, I had stopped eating. What was the point of nourishing myself? My body was made of paper, ink flowed through my veins, my organs didn’t exist. I was a fiction. After a few days of fasting, I began to feel the first flutter of a kind of euphoria replacing my hunger. A lightness I had never felt before. I was no longer walking; now I was gliding along the ground, and if I’d flapped my arms, I would surely have flown away. I felt no emptiness, not the slightest stomachache, not even a vague tug of hunger at the sight of an apple or a piece of cheese. I was no longer part of the material world.

And because my body could cope with the absence of food, why would it need to sleep? From dusk to dawn I kept my eyes open. There was nothing to break the continuity between day and night. Until one evening when I went to check in the bathroom mirror that my reflection was still there. Curiously, it was still there, but what was new, and fascinating, was that now I could see right through it.

I was disappearing, evaporating, slipping away. A dreadful sensation, like being ripped from the realm of the living, but in slow motion. As though my soul was leaking through the pores of my skin. I began wandering the streets all through the night, searching for a sign. Some proof of life. Around me, the city, misty and otherworldly, was taking on the sepia hues of an old film. If I raised my eyes, the railings of the public garden in front of which I was standing seemed to be moving on their own, turning like a magic lantern, three or four images a second, like eyelids blinking, slowly and regularly. Something inside me was still in revolt. I wanted to scream: Is anybody there?

Two people emerged from the door of an apartment building. They were carrying heavy wreaths of funeral flowers. Their lips were moving, I could hear the sound of their voices addressing me, yet I couldn’t make out any intelligible meaning in their words. Just a few seconds earlier I had been thinking that the sight of living beings would help me grasp hold of reality, but this was worse than the immobile landscape of the sleeping city. In the space of a moment, so elusive that I might have dreamed it, I said to them, as if to reassure myself,

“Excuse me, do you have the time?”

“There is no time for the weak,” one of them replied, his back bowed by the weight of the wreath, whose luminous colors cast a glow up his arm. But perhaps what he’d actually said was, “There is no time for weeping.”

A feeling of overwhelming grief broke over me.

I looked at my hands and I could see right through to the bones, nerves, tendons, flesh, and even cells teeming beneath my skin. Anyone could have seen through my body. I was nothing but a powdery cluster of photons. Everything around me was fake and I was no exception.

A police van appeared around the corner. Two men in uniform got out. One of them came toward me.

“What are you doing here? You’ve been walking around this garden for the last hour. Are you lost?”

Because I was crying, and because I backed away, frightened, the man turned to his colleague, who rummaged around the front seat of the vehicle and returned with a sandwich in his hand.

“Are you hungry? Here, have this.”

I didn’t dare move. He opened the back door of the van and said,

“Why don’t you get in and warm up?”

He was trying to sound unthreatening, but when he pointed to the two parallel benches in the back, I saw an electric chair, waiting just for me.

How long had it been since I lost all trace of myself? Why did I accumulate so much guilt, to the point of believing that I merited a death sentence? I had no idea. At least that’s how it seemed to me when, in the early hours of the morning, I found myself in a gloomy hospital where a bearded professor, who was clearly revered by the junior doctors who were listening to him as if he were the Messiah, was interrogating me about the experience that had led me to this sad shelter for mad, crazed, anorexic, suicidal, desperate people. There was a video camera set up at the back of the room.

“Mademoiselle, you have just experienced a psychotic episode, with a phase of depersonalization,” said the bearded man. “Please ignore the camera. I want you to tell me what happened.”

“You mean all this is true? I’m not . . . fiction?”