Was it a dream?

Why do some memories feel more real than reality itself?

I’m sitting in my study in Geneva, February 2025. Forty-four years have passed, and I still can’t answer the most straightforward question: Did it happen?

The evidence surrounds me. Notebooks filled with levitation equations that shouldn’t exist. Soviet-era maps of Moscow with areas circled in red ink—areas that appeared on no official map. Photographs where my shadow doesn’t match my body’s position. And then there’s the letter from Katya, postmarked yesterday, though the woman who wrote it should be a child frozen in my memory.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Every investigation needs a beginning, even if that beginning might have been a dream.

February 15, 1981. Moscow State University, second semester of nuclear physics. The party was at Mikhail’s apartment, a cramped two-room affair near Belorusskaya that somehow held thirty students and enough vodka to fuel a rocket launch.

I remember the taste of pickled mushrooms. The scratch of Vysotsky’s voice from a bootleg cassette. The heat of bodies pressed together, discussing quantum mechanics and pretty girls with equal passion. These details feel real. Solid. But so does what came after.

The older professor—I never learned his name—appeared around ten-thirty. He wasn’t invited. Mikhail didn’t know him. Yet everyone acted as if he belonged there, this grey-haired man in a suit that looked expensive even by Western standards.

“You’re studying nuclear physics,” he said to me. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“Interesting times ahead.” He leaned closer, vodka and something metallic on his breath. “Have you heard about the Chernobyl experiments?”

“Chernobyl’s just a power plant.”

He smiled. “For now. But in five years...” He stopped himself. “Tell me, have you ever experienced zones of displacement? Places where Moscow... shifts?”

Before I could answer, he pressed something into my hand—a business card—and melted back into the crowd. When I looked down, the card read: “Institute for Anomalous Physics Research.” Below that was an address that my drunk brain couldn’t quite focus on.

Moments later, the mark appeared on my wrist: three intersecting circles, like a Venn diagram drawn in light. It burned cold, if such a thing is possible. By the time I reached the bathroom mirror, it was already fading.

Eleven o’clock. The metro would close at one. Time to leave.

I said my goodbyes, grabbed my coat, and stepped into the Moscow winter. The cold hit like a slap, instant sobriety flooding my system. Well, partial sobriety. The street lamps still swayed slightly, though later I’d wonder if that was the vodka or something else.

The walk to the metro should have taken fifteen minutes. Should have.

But I’m writing this in 2025, and I’ve realized that “should have” belongs to a simpler world than mine. In my world, that fifteen-minute walk turned into a journey I’m still trying to finish.

The first sign that something was wrong? The newspaper kiosk on the corner was selling tomorrow’s papers—February 16, 1981. I chuckled, assuming it was a mistake. But the vendor—an old woman with gold teeth—looked at me with such pity.

“You’re one of them,” she said. “The displaced ones.”

“Babushka, I’m just drunk.”

“No.” She handed me a newspaper. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. And that’s the problem.”

The paper felt wrong in my hands. Too smooth. Too light. The headline read: “Moscow Event Anniversary: Five Years Since the Displacement.”

The date on the paper: February 16, 1986.

I ran. Not from fear, exactly, but from a desperate need to find something solid, something real. The street beneath my feet was the same street I’d walked a hundred times. The buildings were right. The signs were right. But everything was wrong in a way I couldn’t articulate.

That’s when I noticed the others. People walking past me, through me, around me, as if I existed on a different frequency. Some wore regular winter coats. Others wore what looked like radiation suits. All of them avoided looking directly at the spaces between buildings, the gaps where reality seemed to flutter like a poorly tuned television.

Do you know how it feels when a memory forms the wrong way? When your brain tries to make sense of something it has no framework for? That’s what that whole night feels like, even now. Too vivid in some parts, too hazy in others. Real the way dreams are real—undeniable while you’re in them, impossible when you wake up.

But I didn’t wake. I kept walking through Moscow’s shifting streets, the newspaper clutched in my hand, searching for the metro station that should have been right there.

Should have been.

In my universe, “should have been” is just another way of saying “was, in a different timeline.”

The newspaper turned blank the next morning, of course. But the questions it raised have never faded.