The first impression of Gerhardt Richter’s cycle of paintings, October 18, 1977, is one of darkness and confusion. The series of paintings are based on real images; they are black-and-white, smudged distortions, as though they have been left in the rain. “So shadowy. No color,” is how one of the characters in Don DeLillo’s story, Baader-Meinhof, describes the paintings. But clarity and lightness in the images would oppose the subject of the paintings: the arrest and deaths of the leaders of the Rote Armee Faktion, a 1970s West German terrorist group. Urban guerillas? Revolutionaries? Terrorists? The uncertainty of how to classify the young, dead radicals in the paintings pervades the mind of viewer and is reflected in DeLillo’s story. The characters are never named, hardly described, and their objectives are hard to identify. There is a woman and a man. There meet in a museum, viewing Richter’s October 18, 1977. They are both alone, perhaps lonely? The woman seems to connect with the paintings, or she desires to connect with them. It’s her third day viewing them and the subjects are familiar to her; she comes to know them intimately through the portraits of their death. “At first I was confused,” she says, “[I] still am, a little. But I know I love the paintings now.” The man is at the museum to pass the time; at least that’s what he claims. He is interested in the woman as she is in the paintings. They both want to know and understand subjects that will not let them pass certain boundaries. No matter how much the woman studies the paintings, there will always be spots that she can’t figure out—is it a tree or a cross? She will still wonder, how did they die? Baader, Ulrike, and Gudrun? Even if the man can engage a conversation with the woman; he can even accompany her home and proposition her. She will still lock a bathroom door between them, and show him that his curiosity is inappropriate, too much, too fast. But the man and woman cannot break their desire; the need to understand is almost addicting, and it draws them back. They return to the museum, to the haunting obscurity of the paintings. But did they return only for the art, or did they find another object that they must figure out? Despite the bleakness and the distortion, one continues to study Richter’s images because they hold a promise of something deeper. DeLillo’s story shows how the same dynamic can be found between people.