October 12, 1986
The rain hasn't stopped for three days. It strikes the windowsill with a rhythmic, numbing regularity that reminds me of Dr. Rawski's metronome. Tick-tock. Drop-metal. This is no ordinary rain. It's a curtain. It separates us from the world outside, from normality, from places where people think only their own thoughts. Here, inside, the damp creeps into the walls. The plaster swells like sick skin. I smell it everywhere — mustiness, boiled cabbage, and something else. A metallic taste on my tongue, as though someone made me hold an old coin in my mouth.
My hands are trembling. I can't keep the pen still. When I look at my fingers, they seem foreign to me. Long, pale spiders that do as they please. Are these the fingers of a pianist? When did I last play? I can't remember the melody. I only remember the hum.
This morning I woke with a thought about a red bicycle. I never had a red bicycle. Mine was blue, a Romet, with a bent handlebar from when I rode into the neighbour's fence. But the memory was vivid. The cold of the lacquer under my palm. The smell of grease. And the fear that father would see the scratch on the mudguard. That fear was so thick it clenched my stomach before I'd even opened my eyes. Whose fear was that? Not mine. My father never shouted over dead things.
Zbigniew was watching me at breakfast. He sat over his bowl of porridge as though defending a fortress. Hunched, elbows wide, gaze nailed to the table. But I felt his eyes on me. I felt them physically, like the touch of a dirty rag on the back of my neck. He knows that I know. Or perhaps I know that he knows? The boundaries are blurring. It's like a watercolour painting someone has drenched with a glass of water. The colours bleed. The greys run into the blacks.
"Stop it," he hissed when I reached for the salt. He didn't even look at me.
"Stop what?" I asked. My voice was hoarse, unused.
"Digging. Stop digging around in my head, you little bastard."
His hand tightened around the spoon so hard his knuckles went white. I could see a vein pulsing at his temple. And then, for a fraction of a second, I saw it. An image. A dark room, cigarette smoke, a woman weeping in the corner, and him — Zbigniew — holding something heavy. A wrench? No, a statuette. A heavy, brass statuette.
The image vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving nausea in its wake.
I pushed my bowl away. The porridge tasted of ash.
October 14, 1986
Halina doesn't sleep at night. I can hear her. Not through the wall. The walls in Górowo are thick, pre-war, built with screams in mind. I hear her inside. It's like a radio that can't be switched off, tuned to a station broadcasting static, from which words emerge every few moments. Single, severed sentences. "Not there," "cold," "bury it deeper."
Today in the recreation room she sat by the window. She wasn't knitting, though the needles lay in her lap like abandoned weapons. She was watching the rain. The young nurse — the redhead — came over and tried to straighten her blanket.
Halina flinched as though she'd been burned.
"Take it away," she said quietly, but in the silence of the ward it rang out like a scream. "Take that grief away. I don't want it."
The nurse pulled her hand back. She looked frightened. And rightly so. Because I felt it too. A wave of sorrow, sticky and faintly sweet, pouring from the girl. Had she miscarried? Left someone? I don't know. But Halina knew. Halina didn't merely know. She felt it.
Rawski entered a moment later. He always enters without a sound. His shoes make no noise, as though he floats above the floor. He smells of cologne and sterile cleanliness. When he saw Halina, he smiled. It was not the smile of a doctor witnessing a patient's suffering. It was the smile of a scientist watching the bacterial colony in a petri dish grow according to plan.
"Fascinating," he murmured, positioning himself behind her. He didn't touch her. He simply stood and absorbed her trembling.
"Doctor," I spoke up. I had to. The silence in my head was swelling. "What are you doing to us?"
He turned slowly. His eyes are pale, almost transparent. Like winter water in a lake. There is no evil in them. There is something worse. A complete, absolute indifference to cost. Only the result matters.
"Doing?" he repeated, as though tasting the word. "I'm simply removing barriers, Henryk. The human mind is a lonely island. It's an evolutionary mistake. Suffering comes from isolation. Imagine a world in which no one need ever be alone. In which understanding is immediate and total."
"This isn't understanding," I said, rising to my feet. My legs felt like cotton wool. "This is violation. She's suffering. Zbigniew is going mad."
Rawski stepped toward me. He was taller. I had to tilt my head to meet his eyes.
"Integration always hurts," he said gently, in the tone one uses to explain to a child why an injection is necessary. "The tissue must knit together. The ego must die so that community can be born. What you call madness is merely the resistance of the material. Your 'self' is fighting. That is natural. But it is futile."
He placed his hand on my shoulder. His palm was warm, dry, and heavy. I felt an impulse to shake it off, to hit him, to run. But I couldn't move. I felt my will draining out of me, drop by drop, absorbed by his calm.
"We are so close, Henryk," he whispered. "Don't ruin this with your fear. Fear is tedious."
He withdrew to his office. The door closed with a quiet click. We were left alone — me, Halina trembling beneath her blanket, and Zbigniew in the corner of the ward, stacking matchboxes into a tower and muttering curses under his breath.
And then it came to me. He isn't healing us. He is stitching us together.
October 17, 1986
Group session. Room number four. The windows covered with heavy drapes despite the grey outside. In the half-dark, only the red light of the reel-to-reel recorder glows. The reels turn lazily. Shush-shush. Shush-shush. That sound crawls under your eyelids.
We sit in a circle. Me, Halina, Zbigniew, and the new one — Marek — who says nothing, only weeps softly, without tears. Rawski sits outside the circle. In the shadow. He is nothing but a voice.
"Close your eyes," he says. His voice is velvet, deep. It vibrates in the breastbone. "You are safe. You are one. There are no walls. There are no secrets."
I don't want to close my eyes. I know what will happen when I do. The darkness won't be empty. It will be full of them. But my eyelids fall on their own. They are heavy as lead. My body betrays me. My body listens to his voice more than to mine.
And then it begins.
First, the hum. As though a thousand insects were beating their wings. Then the images. Not mine. I see hands caked with earth — that is Halina. I smell fresh-cut grass and see a small grave beneath a fence — that is her too. I feel pain in my chest, sharp, piercing — that is Marek. And then comes a wave of blackness. Thick, tarry hatred.
Zbigniew.
He doesn't want to be here. He is fighting. His mind is like a savage dog on a chain. It bites. It tears. I feel his hatred for Halina. Why does he hate her? Because she sees. She sees what he buried at the bottom.
"Liar," I hear his voice inside my head. No — not a voice. A thought, raw and unworked into words. "Old witch. She's looking at me. She knows. I have to silence her."
I snap my eyes open, gasping for air like a diver breaking the surface. My heart hammers like a piston. I look at Zbigniew. He sits across from me. His eyes are closed, but his face is twisted into a grimace. Sweat runs down his forehead. His hands on the armrests clench and unclench in rhythm with his breathing.
Halina moaned. Softly, in pain. She clutched her head.
"Stop it," she whispered. "Too loud. Too loud."
Rawski didn't stop. He sat in the shadow and made notes. The scratching of his pen on paper was louder than a scream.
"Let it flow," he said. "Don't resist. Resistance breeds pain."
Then Zbigniew opened his eyes. They were bloodshot, feral. He looked straight at Halina. And in that look there was no human being. There was only an animal cornered.
"Get out of my head," he snarled. He shot to his feet, sending the chair crashing over. The metallic clang struck the walls like a blow.
Rawski didn't even flinch.
"Sit down, Zbigniew," he said calmly.
"You won't tell me what to do!" Zbigniew screamed. Spittle flew from his lips. "She steals! She steals my thoughts! She sees everything! I'll kill the bitch if she doesn't stop looking!"
He lunged at her. I don't know how I did it. My body reacted faster than my mind. I leapt up and placed myself between them. Zbigniew crashed into me with the force of a tank. We hit the floor together. I could smell stale sweat and fear on him. His hands locked around my throat.
"You too!" he screamed into my face. "You're in there too! I saw you! I saw you looking at my hands!"
He was strangling me. The world began to spin. Black spots before my eyes. But the worst of it wasn't the choking. The worst was that the moment his skin touched mine, the barrier collapsed entirely. His memory flooded through me. Not an image. A sensation. The sensation of weight in the hand and satisfaction when the blow found its mark. And that thought: Finally, silence.
The nurses burst into the room. They tore him off me. Zbigniew kicked, spat, howled. They dragged him out. I was left on the floor, rubbing my throat.
Rawski came over. He stood above me, tall as a tower.
"Interesting," he said. "A very powerful defensive reaction. His ego is extraordinarily... territorial."
I looked up at him from the floor. I hated him. In that moment I hated him more than I hated Zbigniew.
"He wanted to kill her," I rasped.
"No," Rawski shook his head. "He only wanted to reclaim his privacy. But privacy is an illusion, Henryk. It's a disease. We will cure him of it."
He helped me to my feet. He brushed my shoulder, as though sweeping away invisible dust.
"Write all of this down in your journal," he instructed. "In detail. Every feeling. Every image that wasn't yours. These are invaluable data."
October 20, 1986
I can't write. The words keep escaping. When I try to catch a thought, it changes shape. Is it my thought? Or Halina's? Or Zbigniew's — who now sits in the isolation room howling at the wall?
Last night I stood before the mirror in the bathroom. I stared into my own eyes. I tried to find Henryk Czajka in them. A psychology student. A boy who loved Chopin and was afraid of spiders. But in the mirror I saw someone else. Someone who is the sum of parts. Someone made up of Halina's fears, Zbigniew's rage, and Rawski's coldness.
I began scraping the mirror with my fingernails. I wanted to strip away that reflection. I left bloody smears on the glass. I felt no pain.
Rawski says this is the success of integration. He says we are forming a new organism. A Gestalt. A superconsciousness.
I think he is creating a monster. A monster stitched together from our souls.
Halina came to me today. She was crying. She said nothing — she simply sat on my bed and took my hand. And then I felt it. Silence. While we held hands, the hum in my head eased. As though we had formed a closed circuit. Two castaways on a raft.
"We have to escape," she thought. She didn't say it. She thought it.
"There's nowhere to go," I answered her in my mind. And I knew that she heard me.
She looked at me with terror and with hope. It works. We are connected. But not in the way Rawski wants. He wants us to be a single mind under his control. And we are becoming... something else. Something that is beginning to understand that the cage has a door.
But Zbigniew... Zbigniew is lost. I can feel him down there, in the basement. A dark, festering hole in our web. He doesn't want to connect. He wants to destroy us, so that he can be alone again.
I must hide this notebook. If Rawski finds it, he will learn that I understand. That I see not only the thoughts of the other patients, but that I am beginning to see his thoughts as well. They are cold. Mathematical. And there is fear in them. He is afraid. Afraid that he will succeed. And even more afraid that someone above him will find out how he succeeded.
I know where he keeps the tapes. I know what happened to patient number four, whom no one speaks of. I saw it in his mind when he straightened my pillow.
Number four didn't leave. Number four is in the walls.
I must stop. Footsteps in the corridor. Elegant, quiet footsteps. The smell of Przemysławka cologne.
He is coming for me.