October 19, 1986. Sunday, although here the days of the week don't matter. Time is measured in medication doses and meal breaks. And sessions.
Today was the first one.
I'm writing this quickly, while I still remember who I am. The pen slides between my fingers because my hands are still damp with sweat. Not the ordinary kind that comes after running or with a fever. This is a sticky, cold liquid that smells different. It smells like fear distilled in a retort.
Rawski told us to come to the recreation room at four. Usually at that hour they're playing checkers or staring at the switched-off television, waiting for dinner. Today the room was empty. Chairs arranged in a semicircle. Six chairs. They had pushed the tables against the walls to make room for the equipment.
In the center, on a small stool, stood a metronome. A wooden pyramid with a pendulum — an old model, the kind I'd seen in music school. Beside it, on the floor, sat a large reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Grundig, and a black box with a row of dials whose purpose I didn't know. It looked like a piece of military radio equipment, not something you'd find in a hospital.
I sat down first. I chose the chair furthest from the window, because the rain drumming against the panes had been irritating me since morning. The drops struck the glass with an irregular fury that wouldn't let me gather my thoughts. I wanted silence.
Rawski entered last. He was wearing that immaculate white coat of his, pressed so carefully that the edges of the sleeves could have cut paper. He wasn't smiling. His face was smooth, free of tension, as though he had just woken from a long, peaceful sleep. That's what frightens me most about him — that absolute calm. As if he already knows what lies at the end of the road we're only just beginning to walk in the dark.
"Please sit comfortably," he said. His voice was quiet, but the kind that instantly fills an entire room. He didn't need to raise it to silence the shuffling of feet and clearing of throats.
Halina sat across from me. Her lips were pressed tight, her hands clasped on her knees so hard that her knuckles had gone white. She stared at the metronome with an intensity that suggested she was trying to burn it with her gaze. Zbigniew sat beside her, sprawled carelessly, wearing an expression of contempt. His heavy, workman's boots had left mud prints on the linoleum. He was muttering something under his breath — curses, probably — but fell silent when Rawski looked at him.
The doctor walked over to the black box. He turned a knob.
A sound appeared. On the very edge of hearing. A high, drilling whine that you felt more in your teeth than your ears. Then it descended into a bass hum that made your diaphragm vibrate. The air in the room thickened. I had the impression that the pressure had suddenly risen, blocking my ears.
"It's just a carrier wave," Rawski explained, not looking at us. He was adjusting something on the tape recorder. "It will help you focus. Ignore it. Focus on the rhythm."
He set the metronome's pendulum in motion.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The rhythm was slower than a heartbeat. Unnaturally slow. Each tick hung in the air for an eternity before the tock arrived. I waited for it with growing unease. My body wanted to hurry the process along, wanted to impose its own tempo, but the sound was relentless.
"Close your eyes," Rawski instructed.
I did. The darkness behind my eyelids wasn't black. It pulsed with grey in time with the metronome. The humming from the speakers seemed to crawl beneath my skull, vibrating in my sinuses.
"You are not alone here," the doctor's voice now came from everywhere and nowhere at once. "You are in a room, but the room is only a construct. Your minds are also constructs. Walls you have spent your whole lives building to separate the 'self' from the 'other.' Today we will try to open the doors."
I felt nauseous. My stomach rose into my throat. I wanted to open my eyes, stand up and run, but my limbs were heavy, as though gravity had doubled. I couldn't move so much as a finger.
Tick. Tock.
My thoughts began to tear. I tried to remember what I'd had for breakfast. Porridge. Bread and jam. But the image was blurred. Instead of the taste of jam I felt metal in my mouth. A sour, sharp taste of iron and grease.
Why grease? I have never worked with grease. I'm a student. My hands know paper, piano keys, the cool surface of library tables.
And yet I felt it. I felt a roughness on my fingertips that had no business being there. I felt a pain in my lower back — a dull, chronic pain, the pain of a man who has spent eight hours standing at a production line.
"Relax," Rawski whispered. "Let the barriers fall."
And then it happened. The barrier didn't fall. It burst like a dam.
Suddenly I was no longer in the recreation room. I was in a factory hall. The roar of machines was deafening. I felt the heat beating from the great furnaces. I saw sparks raining down from an overhead crane near the ceiling. It was so real that I flinched, afraid of being burned.
I looked at my hands.
They were not my hands. They were broad, with short, thick fingers, smeared with black oil. The nails were broken, and on the back of the right hand there was an old, whitish scar in the shape of a V. I knew how it had come to be there. A metal fragment, '74. I remembered the pain. I remembered cursing when the foreman told me to get back to work and just wrap a rag around it.
But that was not my memory! I had been twelve years old then! In 1974 I was sitting at home, learning to play Chopin's études!
I tried to scream, but in that borrowed memory I had no voice. I was trapped in the body of a stranger, seeing through his eyes, feeling his exhaustion and his rage. God, what a rage it was. Dense, red, burning through his gut. Hatred of the foreman, of the noise, of a life reduced to tightening bolts.
It was Zbigniew. I knew it. He was sitting next to me on a chair, but inside my head I was him.
Tick. Tock.
The metronome sliced reality into slabs. The image of the factory began to flicker. Another image superimposed itself. A garden. The smell of damp earth and dill. Hands — small, wrinkled ones, pressing seedlings into soil. Peace. A deep, sad peace. A longing for someone who would not return.
Halina.
I was in two places at once. I felt grease and earth. I felt Zbigniew's rage and Halina's grief. And somewhere in the middle of all of it was me, Henryk — a tiny point of consciousness, thrashing like a moth in a jar, trying to find a way out.
My own memories began to leak away. I watched them vanish, drawn into the whirlpool. My mother's face dissolved and changed into the face of a woman I didn't know — Zbigniew's wife? Halina's daughter?
"Good," Rawski's voice now sounded like thunder. "Hold it. Don't fight. Let it flow."
It was not a flow. It was a violation. I felt as though someone had broken into my home and started rearranging the furniture, throwing my books out the window and replacing them with strange, dirty objects.
I tried to recall the wallpaper pattern in my dormitory room. I needed something to hold onto. Something of my own. Yellow flowers. Yes, yellow flowers on a beige background. But every time I summoned that image, a wave of black grease washed over it.
Then I heard crying. Not in the room. Inside.
A quiet, childlike sobbing. It came from the very bottom of the chaos. It didn't belong to Zbigniew or to Halina. It was something else. Something older, or... newer? It broke through the roar of the factory and the hum of the garden.
I focused on that sound. It was like a lifeline. If I focused on the crying, I wouldn't have to be Zbigniew.
A child. A little girl. I glimpsed her for a fraction of a second, as if in a strobe flash. She was standing in the corner of a room I didn't recognize. She wore a red dress. Her back was turned.
Who are you? I asked in my thoughts.
She turned around.
And then the metronome stopped.
Rawski must have caught the pendulum. The silence struck me like a physical blow. The humming from the speakers went dead. I opened my eyes, gasping for air as though I had just surfaced from a great depth.
I was sitting on the chair. My hands were trembling so hard they knocked against my knees. I looked down. My fingers. Long, slender, clean. No grease. No scar.
But the taste in my mouth remained. Sour, metallic.
I looked at Zbigniew. He was pale, as if someone had drained the blood from him. He was staring at his hands with the same disbelief I'd just felt. Then he moved his gaze to me. There was no contempt left in his eyes. There was fear. Pure, animal fear. He knew that I knew. He knew that I had been inside his head and had seen things he had never shown anyone.
Halina sat motionless, her eyes closed. A single tear was sliding down her cheek. She didn't wipe it away.
Rawski stood over the tape recorder, writing something in a small notebook. He looked satisfied. That calm of his struck me now as obscene.
"That will be enough for today," he said, without looking up. "Please return to your rooms. Do not discuss with one another what you felt. Verbalizing distorts the experience. Let it settle inside you."
I stood. My legs felt like cotton wool. I staggered, grabbing the back of the chair.
On my way out, I passed Zbigniew. He recoiled sharply, as if I were a leper. He didn't want to touch me. I didn't want to touch him either. I felt revulsion toward his body, because for a moment it had been my body.
I returned to my room. I locked the door, even though I know the staff have spare keys. It's an illusion of safety, but I needed it.
I sat at the desk and began to write. I need to purge this grease from myself. I need to purge these images.
But there is something worse. Something that makes my hand tremble as I form these letters.
When I try to remember my twelfth birthday... I remember a cake. I remember candles. But I also remember that my father gave me a set of tools as a present.
My father never gave me tools. He gave me Bach's sheet music. He despised manual work.
So whose memory is that? Did Zbigniew also receive tools? Or perhaps... perhaps my memory has changed? Overwritten?
Rawski speaks of opening doors. But if you remove doors from their hinges, anyone can enter. And any draught can blow away what was inside.
I'm afraid to fall asleep. I'm afraid that when I wake up I won't know my own name. Or that I'll wake up knowing how to operate a lathe but having forgotten how to play the piano.
And that little girl in the red dress... She didn't belong to any of us. I'm certain of it. Her fear was different. It was cold. And old.
I have to stop now. The light is dimming. At 10 p.m. they cut the power to the sockets. I can hear footsteps in the corridor. It's the ward nurse with the medication. A sleeping pill. A forgetting pill.
I'll take it. Tonight I'll take it. Because I'd rather have an empty, dreamless void than return to that factory.
Only that taste... I can still feel that damned grease.