November 9, 1986.
The pen is blue. A Zenith 7. The ink dries on the tip, forming small, sticky clots that I have to scrape off with my thumbnail. The paper in the notebook is rough, grid-lined. These are facts. I cling to them desperately, like a drowning man to a razor blade, because only facts are mine. Everything else — memories, dreams, and even this damned fear crawling under my skin like a swarm of ants — may already belong to someone else.
I have to write quickly. The light in the corridor went out five minutes ago. The ward sister, the one with a face like a withered apple, has already done her rounds. I heard the shuffling of her felt slippers. Shuffle, shuffle, silence. Shuffle, shuffle, silence. The rhythm of a prison. A rhythm that burrows into your head and replaces your pulse.
Rawski calls it the "Mirror Phase."
It sounds harmless. Almost poetic. Like a chapter title in an optics textbook, or the name of a children's game. But in this building, words don't mean what they mean in the dictionary. Here, words are scalpels. "Mirror" in Rawski's mouth is not a pane of glass in which you check whether your tie is straight. It is a well. It is an opening through which your soul pours out, and someone else's trauma seeps in.
Today's session lasted six hours. Six hours in that room with walls the color of old cream. The windows were covered by heavy curtains that smell of seventies dust and cigarette smoke that can never be aired out. In the center stood that damned reel-to-reel recorder. A Uher Royal de Luxe. Two large, black reels turning slowly, hypnotically. Like the eyes of a giant insect.
The hiss of the tape. That is the sound of hell. Not screaming, not crying. The hiss of the leader tape.
We sat in a circle. Me, Halina, Zbigniew, and the new one. Maria. She arrived three days ago. She is slight, with dark hair she keeps tucking behind her ear, as though it were a nervous tic rather than a necessity. She stares at the floor. She rarely speaks, but when she does, her voice is so quiet you have to hold your breath to understand anything. She looks like someone who apologizes for taking up space.
Rawski walked circles around us. His shoes make no sound. That is unnatural. Every person should make a sound when stepping on linoleum. He glides. His white coat rustled softly with each step. He stopped behind Zbigniew. He placed his hand on his shoulder. Zbigniew flinched as if he'd been touched by an electric current, but he didn't pull away. No one runs here. Not anymore.
"Today we go a step further," said Rawski. His voice was velvet, calm. The voice you want to trust, even as you know it's leading you to slaughter. "Until now, you have been sharing stories. Narrating them. You were narrators. But a narrator is safe. A narrator stands apart."
He paused. I could hear my own heartbeat. It pounded in my ears, drowning out the hum of the ventilation.
"Empathy is not pity," he continued, now looking at me. His eyes behind his glasses were cold and analytical. He was not looking at Henryk Czajka, psychology student. He was looking at subject number four. At a collection of chemical reactions. "Empathy is identity. To understand another person, you must stop being yourself. You must become a mirror that does not merely reflect the image, but absorbs it."
He pointed at Halina.
"Halina. Look at Zbigniew."
Halina raised her eyes. Her hands, roughened by years of gardening, tightened on the armrests of her chair. Zbigniew stared at her with the hatred I have watched building in him for weeks. He hates all of us, because we are witnesses to his weakness. But he hates Halina most of all, because she sees too much.
"I don't want to," she whispered.
"This is not a request." Rawski did not raise his voice. He didn't even change his tone. He simply stated a fact. "You are in a state of deep relaxation, Halina. Your defenses are lowered. You are Zbigniew. Feel the weight of his hands. Feel the grease under his fingernails. Feel that day at the factory he told us about. Don't describe it. Be there."
And then it happened.
I saw it. I swear I saw it. Halina's face changed. The muscles slackened, then tightened in a different way. Her back curved forward, her shoulders dropped. This was not acting. This was transmutation. Her breathing became heavy, rasping — exactly like Zbigniew's breath when he grows agitated.
She began to speak.
But it was not her voice. Her vocal cords, yes — the timbre was a woman's. But the intonation? The cadence? The way she clipped the ends of her words? That was Zbigniew.
"The machine... it won't stop," she said, staring into nothing. Her pupils were dilated, black as wells. "The noise gets into your teeth. I feel it in my jaw. Bolt number eight. Always number eight. If I don't tighten it, everything falls apart. They're watching. The foreman is watching. I can't let them see my hand shaking."
Zbigniew began to cry. Quietly, without sobbing. Tears simply ran down his purple face. He couldn't look away from her. He was watching himself, trapped inside the body of a small woman.
I felt nauseous. My stomach rose into my throat. This was rape. The rape of a mind. Rawski was cutting us open and stitching us back together in the wrong configurations. I felt the boundaries of my self dissolving like watercolor in the rain.
And then it was my turn.
Rawski told me to look at Maria. At the new one.
"Henryk," he said. "She is empty. Fill her. Or let her fill you."
I looked at her. She sat across from me, hunched, in a grey sweater that was too large for her. Her eyes were dark, hollow with exhaustion. She looked like someone who had not slept in a decade. When our gazes met, I felt a blow of cold. Physical cold, as if I had fallen through ice.
And suddenly I was no longer in the hospital room.
I was in a small room. I could smell boiled milk and cheap soap. I felt a terrifying, paralysing dread. Not for myself. For someone small. For someone who was not in the room but should have been.
My mouth opened, but the words that came out were not mine. I did not know these names. I did not know these emotions. I, Henryk Czajka — student, bachelor, a man without children — suddenly felt in my gut the pain of a mother who had lost her footing.
"The voice..." I said. My voice was trembling. "She is there. On the tape. I can hear her. Why does she sound so grown? She is only three years old."
Maria raised her head sharply. Her apathy vanished. She stared at me with terror and hope at once. As though I were a ghost who had brought word from the other side.
"You can hear her?" she whispered. "Marta?"
"She is in the walls," I answered, but it was not me. Something was speaking through me. Some channel had been opened and dirty water was pouring from her mind into mine. "I cannot find her. I search in the wardrobe, I search under the bed. But the voice comes from everywhere. From the radio. From the tap. She is crying, but it is not the crying of a child. It is the crying of someone who already knows that no one is coming."
I felt tears running down my cheeks. Hot, foreign tears. I wanted to stop. I wanted to scream at Rawski: Enough! Turn it off! Disconnect me! But I could not. My body was nothing but a resonator.
Rawski stood to one side and took notes. He did not intervene. He let me drown in her grief for ten minutes. Ten minutes of being a mother searching for a child who... who what? I don't know. There was a hole in her mind. A black void where the explanation should have been. She herself does not know what happened. Or she knows, but she buried it so deep that even hypnosis cannot reach it.
When Rawski clapped his hands,