Affected by Louise Brooks' departure from screens, Bioy Casares writes of a man who discovers her substitute, but as a projection of total cinema (Morin), involving a Faustian bargain making possible a kind of technical immortality but at the cost of the withdrawal of existence into this retentional doubled unworld. The man inserts himself into her recording, her unlife, "so that they can respond to each other like an allusion to what a spectator would think was their happy intimacy" (Blanchot).