Plate 7 of 11, from the illustrated book, He Disappeared into Complete Silence, second edition

Bourgeois' entire text for this volume appears below.

Plate 1:

Once there was a girl and she loved a man. They had a date next to the eighth street station of the sixth avenue subway. She had put on her good clothes and a new hat. Somehow he could not come. So the purpose of this picture is to show how beautiful she was. I really mean that she was beautiful.

Plate 2:

The solitary death of the Wool- worth building.

Plate 3:

Once a man was telling a story, it was a very good story too, and it made him very happy, but he told it so fast that nobody under- stood it.

Plate 4:

In the mountains of Central France forty years ago, sugar was a rare product. Children got one piece of it at Christmas time. A little girl that I knew when she was my mother used to be very fond and very jealous of it. She made a hole in the ground and hid her sugar in, and she al- ways forgot that the earth is damp.

Plate 5:

Once a man was waving to his friend from the elevator. He was laughing so much that he stuck his head out and the ceil- ing cut it off.

Plate 6:

Leprosarium, Louisiana.

Plate 7:

Once a man was angry at his wife, he cut her in small pieces, made a stew of her. Then he telephoned to his friends and asked them for a cocktail-and-stew party. They all came and had a good time.

Plate 8:

Once an American man who had been in the army for three years became sick in one car. His middle ear became almost hard. Through the bone of the skull back of the said ear a passage was bored. From then on he heard the voice of his friend twice, first in a high pitch and then in a low pitch. Later on the middle ear grew completely hard and he became cut off from part of the world.

Plate 9:

Once there was the mother of a son. She loved him with a com- plete devotion. And she protected him because she knew how sad and wicked this world is. He was of a quiet nature and rather intelligent but he was not interested in being loved or pro- tected because he was interested in something else. Consequently at an early age he slammed the door and never came back. Later on she died but he did not know it.

Credit: Gift of the artist