I got up from the chair and went over to the sofa to try that out. It was wonderful, both to sit on and to lie on. I settled down and picked up the remote from the coffee table, pointed it at the TV, pressed a button at random and the picture quickly appeared. It was a German channel broadcasting a talk show. I flipped here and there, established that there appeared to be lots and lots of channels, and that at least the world came here, even if I couldn’t reach the outside from now on, not by mail, e-mail, text messages or telephone calls. From now on the telephone existed for me only in the form of a fixed internal line, and as for the Internet, I was allowed to surf only under supervision, which meant an orderly or another member of staff sitting beside me, and I was not allowed to join chat forums, contribute to blogs, create or respond to advertisements, or vote in opinion polls.

After flipping at top speed through fifty or so channels, I switched off the television, got up from the sofa, stretched, then looked around the room. What should I do now? A glance at the clock on the DVD player under the TV told me there was still quite a while before the meeting at two o’clock. This was not good. I’d begun to get the creeps. Whether it was from anxiety or anger, I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know. If there had been a window I would have gone and stood by it to look out. That usually had a calming effect on me, standing by a window and looking out. But-I only realized it now-there were no windows, not anywhere. I had probably registered it subconsciously as soon as I was shown into the apartment, but it was only now that it struck me.