An old man sits alone in a room. He does not know how long he has been there, or how he got there in the first place; he does not know whether he is a prisoner or a guest; he doesn’t even know his own name (he is only Mr Blank); but when he closes his eyes he sees the shadows of men and women he has sent to some gruesome fate, his ‘operatives’. More frightening still, it seems likely that, as he is given more and more of the drugs brought to him throughout the day chronicled in this novella, he will soon forget the names of the most basic objects around him, for there are labels on the wall (‘WALL’), desk (‘DESK’) and bed (‘BED’) to identify these things to him.

However, while the various doctors and nurses who visit Mr Blank work to obliterate his memory, Mr Blank himself goes about attempting to reconstruct it. He does this with the help of some of his mysterious former operatives, and four manuscripts and one pile of photographs he finds upon his