Patient File No. 7
Three days after seeing that shadow in my phone's camera, I decided to run.
Not escape in the literal sense — I didn't know if such a thing was even possible anymore — but flee from this city, from this clinic, from everything that connected me to Patient No. 7 and Mr. Monday. I resigned. I told Dr. Rostami I had personal reasons, and he, with a look that suggested he knew things he wasn't saying, simply nodded and wished me well.
I bought a plane ticket, to a city on the other side of the country, somewhere no one knew me. I packed my suitcase that same night.
I thought that if I could create enough physical distance, perhaps the connection would break. Perhaps whatever this thing fed on — proximity, familiarity, repeated presence — would weaken with distance.
I was wrong, but that night I was still hopeful.
---
The airport was crowded, full of the ordinary sounds of daily life — flight announcements, suitcase wheels on the floor, a child crying somewhere. For the first time in recent weeks, I felt that maybe the normal world still existed, somewhere I could return to.
I was standing in the security line when my phone buzzed. A message, from that same unknown number.
"You think you can leave? Monday is everywhere, Doctor. Just wait and see."
I ignored it. I turned the phone off, as if that could somehow help.
I boarded the plane. Window seat, exactly as I'd requested. When the plane lifted off and the city shrank beneath me, for a moment, I allowed myself to believe that maybe — just maybe — I was really escaping.
That moment didn't last.
---
About an hour into the flight, the cabin lights flickered — that familiar flicker. The passenger beside me, a middle-aged man, didn't notice a thing; he just kept reading his book.
But I smelled fresh bread.
On an airplane, at thirty thousand feet, the smell of fresh bread rose up, in a place where no logic could explain it.
I tried to tell myself maybe one of the passengers had brought food. I tried to stay calm.
I turned my head toward the window, and instead of blue sky and clouds, for one second — just one second — I saw something else: that street, that same Golestan Alley, from above, as if the plane were hovering directly over it, even though I knew it was impossible, even though I knew we had flown hundreds of kilometers away from that city.
I blinked. The sky was sky again.
But on the window glass, from the outside — from outside the plane, at an altitude where nothing should exist — a finger, slowly, traced a word, as if drawing on fogged glass:
"Hello"
My breath caught. No sound escaped my mouth.
When I looked again, there was nothing. Just sky, just clouds.
---
I spent the rest of the flight with my eyes open, terrified that if I blinked for even a moment, I would see something else. When we finally landed, the first thing I did was go to the hotel I had booked in advance — a strange city, with no familiarity, no connection to what I had left behind.
The hotel room was ordinary. Bed, desk, television. Nothing unusual.
For the first time in weeks, I slept — truly slept, without dreams, without sudden awakenings.
In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the first thing I did was check my phone's calendar.
Tuesday.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe — just maybe — it had worked. Maybe distance really had changed something.
I spent that day wandering the city, with no particular purpose, just enjoying the feeling of being an ordinary person again, a tourist, with no shadow following me.
In the evening, I was sitting in a small café, a cup of coffee in my hand, when my eye fell on a local newspaper left on the next table.
The main headline, in a language I didn't understand well, but enough to catch the key words: a name that translated to something like "The Lost Street" or "The Vanishing Alley."
With trembling hands, I picked up the newspaper and asked another customer to translate for me.
The article was about a small neighborhood on the outskirts of that very city — a neighborhood whose residents, according to the report, had been strangely complaining about small changes in their collective memory. An old bakery. A park with wooden swings.
My hand shook, and the coffee cup slipped from my grip and shattered.
The man beside me asked if I was all right.
I couldn't answer.
I hadn't escaped. I had merely, horrifyingly, arrived at another version of the same hell — or perhaps, worse, I had come to understand that the street was never just a place.
It was everywhere, in different forms, waiting for anyone who would listen.
That night, when I returned to the hotel, on the bathroom mirror, in the steam from a hot shower someone had taken — a shower I hadn't taken — words had formed:
"Did you think borders meant anything to me? I am Monday everywhere, Doctor."
I sat on the edge of the bed, my suitcase still half-open, and for the first time I truly understood:
There was nowhere to run.
There was only a place to confront.
---
To be continued in Chapter Twelve...