Chapter 1
PART I
Chapter One
“Dogs aren’t mad, are they?”
“They growl when they’re angry and wag their tails when they’re happy. I growl when I’m happy and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore, I’m mad.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland(Author’s translation from the original English.)
I sat in a chair across from the man whose eye I had imagined driving a pencil through for ten years straight.
My right leg shook on its own, beating out a jagged, broken rhythm against the metal leg of the chair. Unevenly—like a heart that couldn’t decide whether it still wanted to keep beating.
I stared at the scarred tabletop, its surface carved with old grooves left behind by nervous fingers belonging to people just like me, while absentmindedly tearing at the ragged skin around my fingernails with my teeth. The familiar salty taste of blood filled my mouth. My jaw ached from the tension, and my fingers trembled.
I was afraid to raise my eyes, even though I had imagined this day thousands of times.
Every single night.
Every goddamn day.
Ten years behind locked doors, buried under pills, padded walls, white coats, voices behind doors, screams in the middle of the night, and my own mind—a mind that kept shattering into pieces only to stitch itself back together, just so it could fall apart again a week later. A place where time ceases to exist. Where yesterday is no different from the day before, and the people around you either scream or remain so silent it feels as though they died without ever bothering to lie down in a coffin.
Yet even in the middle of all that madness, her face was always there before my eyes. The only thing that never disappeared. The only thing that stayed with me.
I remembered her as a child.
I remembered the little girl with her messy hair and ridiculous pajamas covered in yellow ducklings, pointing a finger at me and demanding that her parents throw me out of her room.
“He’s disgusting! Make him leave!”
She would throw tantrums, cry, scream, and then, half an hour later, she would be sitting beside me, showing me her drawings as if nothing had happened. She always gave in, and I always stayed. I remembered how, during our school years, she would nervously twist a silver ring around her finger whenever she was anxious before presenting a project.
No.
The ring came much later.
Or did it?
But there was one thing I knew for certain. Her gray eyes. Large. Clear. Carrying the cold shade of an autumn sky. Those eyes saved me whenever the walls of my room began to breathe. Whenever I heard voices in the darkness. Whenever I couldn’t tell where the dream ended and reality began. I closed my eyes and saw her. Again. And again. It became easier. I talked to her. I imagined her sitting beside me and smiling, laughing, telling me that everything would be okay.
By the fifth year of my stay in the hospital, I began to forget the sound of her voice, and that was when true terror consumed me. It wasn’t fear in the ordinary sense—it was the panic of someone who suddenly realizes they’re losing the only thing that had kept them afloat all those years. For hours, I sat by the barred window of my room, watching the clouds drift slowly beyond the iron grating, trying to reconstruct her voice from memory. How exactly did she say my name? Did she laugh loudly, or did she always cover her mouth with her hand? Sometimes, it felt as though I was remembering someone else entirely. But the moment I tried to picture her face, everything blended together into a single image once again.
At times, I wondered if I had invented half of those memories myself. Perhaps her smile had never been that warm, and perhaps her eyes had never looked at me with the tenderness I had spent years placing in them. I didn’t know how she’d changed. Whether her hair had grown longer. Whether she still refused to eat oranges and wrinkled her nose every time she caught their scent. Whether she still cut her steak into tiny pieces before taking the first bite. After all, ten years had passed. In reality, I had been surrounded by pills, sleepless nights, episodes, and endless conversations with myself. In that time, memory could turn anyone into a saint... and a childhood attachment into a religion.
But I didn’t care.
Even if some of those memories were lies, I would rather live with that lie than wake up one day and discover that her image had vanished completely. Because then I would vanish too. All those years, I clung to her. One guy from the room next to mine dreamed of seeing his son. He used to show me photographs of him. I never understood him. Why? The child looked exactly the same in every picture. How could anyone miss someone if it wasn’t her? I was certain that one day I would see her face again, hear her voice, and realize that those years had not been wasted.
Sometimes thoughts crept into my head that made it hard to breathe. They came suddenly, disgusting and sticky. That someone might have been beside her. That someone else might have seen her smile, heard her laugh, known what she looked like in the morning. I pushed those thoughts away immediately, as if they were something filthy, something wrong, something that had no right to exist.
No.
No, damn it.
That was impossible.
It comforted me to think that, after all those years, she probably hadn’t been able to forget me either. Long ago, I stopped understanding whether it was love or something else. While I was learning again to distinguish reality from my own nightmares, while I swallowed pills, while I counted the cracks in the ceiling, her image remained in my mind.
I couldn’t imagine another person beside her. My mind refused to accept it. As if the very thought of someone else’s hands, someone else’s voice, someone else’s name beside her was something unnatural, a mistake that had to be torn out of my head immediately.
And sitting in that office today, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t afraid of being free.
I was afraid of the reunion.
Because I hadn’t been living with the hope of a new life. I had been living with the hope of seeing a ghost from my past. And somewhere deep inside me lurked the fear that the little girl with the gray eyes—the one who had kept my mind from slipping into complete madness—existed only in my memories, while a completely different person was waiting for me beyond the hospital doors. The doctors believed it was the pills that kept me calm, but in truth, only one thing ever helped.
Her name.
But I was sure I’d survive it.
She would, too.
She didn’t have a choice.
Ten years.
The office looked exactly as it had hundreds of times before, but today there was something different about it.
Maybe because I was seeing it for the last time.
The cold glow of the fluorescent light drained the room of life, making it feel as though it had been cut out of an old photograph. The white paint on the walls had yellowed and cracked in places. An old air conditioner hummed quietly in the corner, pushing around the smell of antiseptic, medication, and cheap instant coffee. Behind the doctor stood a tall metal filing cabinet packed with folders—dozens of other people’s stories arranged in neat rows. On the windowsill, beside a withering ficus, lay a stack of five-year-old magazines. The clock above the door counted off each passing second so loudly it felt as if it were mocking me on purpose.
Sitting across from me was him.
My personal nightmare and my jailer—Dr. Erik Twardowski.
He was already well into his sixties, with deep wrinkles around his eyes and the heavy, exhausted face of a man who had spent far too many years listening to other people’s madness. His silver hair was neatly combed back, and the thin steel-framed glasses had slipped down to the tip of his nose. His dark blue tie sat slightly crooked, and gray stubble shadowed his chin, as though he had once again gone another night without sleep.
He was holding my file.
My life.
Ten years of observations, diagnoses, episodes, breakdowns, fights, sleepless nights—all recorded in someone else’s handwriting.
I hated him.
I’d hated him for so long that I could no longer remember exactly why. Was it the pills? His calm voice? The fact that he saw me broken every single day? Or because, to me, he had become the face of these walls? Sometimes I convinced myself he was deliberately dragging out my treatment. As if he wanted to keep me away from her. Of course, he had never actually said anything like that out loud.
And yet now, with my file lying open between us as his fingers slowly turned the last page, I felt something other than hatred.
Obsession.
Because beyond the door of this room...
She was waiting.
“You’re free, Viktor,” the doctor said calmly, finally looking up at me. “And strangely enough, that frightens you far more than the thought of ending up here ever did.”
For the first time in several minutes, I raised my eyes.
And found myself unable to say a word.
