Saturday, February 18
[fragment]

On November 29, 2005, my friend Dr. Hiroji Matsui walked out of Montreal’s Brain Research Centre at 7:29 in the evening. On the security video, his expression gives nothing away. For a brief moment, the camera captures him in passing: greying hair, neatly combed. Silver-framed eyeglasses, intense brows, a stubborn chin, the softness of an old man’s face. He wears no coat, despite the freezing temperatures, and he carries nothing, not even the briefcase with which he had arrived that morning. He exits through a side door, down a flight of metal steps. And then Hiroji walked into the city and disappeared into air. The officer assigned to Hiroji’s case told me that, without evidence of foul play, there was very little the police could do. In this world of constant surveillance and high security, it is still remarkably easy to vanish. People go to great lengths to abandon their identities, holding no credit cards or bank cards, no insurance papers, pension plans, or driver’s licences. I wanted to tell the officer what I believed, that Hiroji’s disappearance was only temporary, but the words didn’t come. Just as before, they didn’t come to me in time. Many of the missing, the officer went on, no longer wish to be themselves, to be associated with their abandoned identity. They go to these great lengths in the hope that they will never be found.

[end]