Introduction
There were no colours in my childhood. There were only shades of grey.
The city where I grew up was built of concrete, iron and fog. Fog was not weather there; it was the very substance of the place. It smothered the sounds of the shipyards, blunted the edges of buildings and seeped into homes like a damp, silent intruder. In that city, everything decayed slowly, almost without notice, to the rhythm of rust eating through the cranes’ steel frames.
My father, Victor, was part of that decay.
In my memories, he has no clear outline. He is only a figure in a vest, wavering in the haze of cigarette smoke. Victor was static noise - a cough in the next room, floorboards creaking beneath an uncertain step, the smell of beer gone flat before he managed to finish it. He was a man who had surrendered to disorder.
And then there was Marcus.
Marcus had not stepped inside our house until then. He had kept to the yard and the workshop, but when he finally came inside, he did not merely enter it. He occupied it. He was the only point in my universe with sharp edges. While the world around me was blurred and fluid, Marcus was steel. Every movement of his had a purpose. Every word had weight.
The truth was almost too simple.
From the beginning, I looked for a fixed point in the chaos of Victor’s world.
I found no foothold.
I found fixation.
This story is not about love. Love is soft, imprecise and chaotic. This is an account of how a single image can burn itself into a child’s mind with such force that it rewrites every choice that comes after.
It is a study of how desire hardens into discipline, and how admiration becomes a prison.
It all began in Sector 0.
On the day the fog parted for a moment and I saw the truth for the first time.
