By monitoring himself internally, he was able to distinguish his own faint heartbeat. Soon the discomfort passed; even the itching abated. Albert had installed the metal tubes so adeptly that he could hardly feel their presence. For that matter, he was slowly being divested of any feeling: a vacuum, the more alarming for being so painless. He was losing all sense of spatial relationship, of the position of his arms and legs; only his memory told him where they were. He tried to calculate how long he had been underwater with his face imprisoned in white paraffin. To his surprise, he discovered he hadn’t the faintest idea of how much time had elapsed since his submersion in the “loony dip”—and he’d always been able to guess the time to within a few minutes’ accuracy.

He hadn’t got over his surprise when he discovered that his body, his face—everything—was gone. Not what one would call a pleasant feeling; on the contrary, it was terrifying. Slowly but surely, he was dissolving into this water, whose presence was as unreal to him as his own body. Even his heartbeat had faded. He listened intently. Nothing. Silence engulfed him, was transformed into a low murmur, a monotonous white drone, against which he was defenseless—he couldn’t plug his ears. After a while, when he was sure enough time had elapsed so that he could risk a few minus points, he decided to move his arms.

There was nothing to move, which was more a cause for amazement than alarm. Okay, the textbooks had said something about “total sensory deprivation”—but who would have believed it could be this total?

A normal reaction, he assured himself. The thing is not to move. Whoever toughs it out the longest will get the highest grade. For a while he sustained himself on this maxim, though for how long he didn’t know.

The situation went from bad to worse.

The darkness in which he was submerged—which he embodied—began teeming, flickering with dimly incandescent circles swirling about on the periphery. He swiveled his eyeballs and was consoled, though it wasn’t long before this feeling eluded him as well.