I must stop thinking. I’ll pretend that everything’s all right and then everything will be.

She tried to act naturally, and for a few seconds the sense of oddness diminished. The two minutes that elapsed between first feeling the palpitations and reaching the exit with her husband were the most terrifying two minutes of her life.

When they reached the brightly lighted foyer, everything seemed to start up again. The colors were so garish, the noises from the street seemed to rush in on her from all sides, and everything seemed utterly unreal. She started to notice certain details for the first time; for example, the clarity of vision that covers only the small area on which we fix our gaze, while the rest remains completely unfocused.

There was more. She knew that everything she could see around her was just a scene created by electrical impulses inside her brain, using light impulses that passed through a gelatinous organ called the eye.

No. she must stop thinking. That’s how she could be brought to sanity.

By then her fear of an aneurism had passed; she had managed to get out of the theater and was still alive. The friend who had died, on the other hand, never even had time to leave her seat.

“I’ll call an ambulance,” said her husband, when he saw his wife’s ashen face and bloodless lips.

“Call a taxi,” she said, hearing the sounds leaving her mouth, conscious of the vibration of each vocal cord.

Going to a hospital would mean accepting that she really was seriously ill, and Mari was determined to do her utmost to restore everything to normality.

They left the foyer, and the icy cold air seemed to have a positive effect; Mari recovered some control over herself, although the inexplicable feelings of panic and terror persisted. While her husband was desperately trying to find a taxi, which were scarce at that time of day, she sat down on the curb and tried not to look at her surroundings: the children playing, the buses passing, the music coming from a nearby street fair—all seemed absolutely surreal, frightening, alien.

Finally a taxi appeared.

“To the hospital,” said her husband, helping his wife in.

“Please, let’s just go home,” she said. She didn’t want to be in any more strange places; she was desperately in need of familiar, ordinary things that might diminish the fear she was feeling.

While the taxi was driving them home, her heart rate gradually slowed, and her temperature began to return to normal.

“I’m beginning to feel better,” she said to her husband. “It must have been something I ate.”

When they reached their house, the world again seemed exactly as it had been since her childhood. When she saw her husband go over to the phone, she asked him what he was doing.

“I’m going to call a doctor.”

“There’s no need. Look at me—I’m fine.”

The color had returned to her cheeks, her heart was beating normally, and the uncontrollable fear had vanished.

Mari slept heavily that night and awoke convinced that someone must have put some drug in the coffee they had drunk before they went into the theater. It was a dangerous prank, and she was fully prepared, at the end of the afternoon, to call the prosecutor and go to the bar to try and find the person responsible.

She went to work, read through several pending lawsuits, and tried to occupy herself with various other tasks, for the experience of the previous day had left a residue of fear, and she wanted to prove to herself that it would never happen again.

She discussed the film on El Salvador with one of her colleagues and mentioned in passing that she was fed up with doing the same thing every day: “Perhaps it’s time I retired.”

“You’re one of the best lawyers we’ve got,” said the colleague. “Besides, law is one of the few professions where age is in your favor. Why not take a long vacation instead? I’m sure you’d come back to work with renewed energy.”

“I want to do something completely different with my life. I want to have an adventure, help other people, do something I’ve never done before.”

The conversation ended there. She went down to the square, had lunch in a more expensive restaurant than the one she normally went to, and returned to the office early. That moment marked the beginning of her withdrawal.

The rest of the employees had still not come back, and Mari took the opportunity to look over the work still on her desk. She opened the drawer to take out the pencil she always kept in the same place, and she couldn’t find it. For a fraction of a second, it occurred to her that her failure to put the pencil back in its proper place was an indication that she was perhaps behaving oddly.

That was enough to make her heart start pounding again, and the terror of the previous night returned in full force.

Mari was frozen to the spot. The sun was coming in through the shutters, lending a brighter, more aggressive tone to everything around her, but she again had the feeling that she was about to die at any minute. It was all so strange; what was she doing in that office?