October 14, 1986.
It has been raining since morning. Not the kind of downpour that clears the air, but a sticky, dense drizzle that settles on everything in a greasy layer. The PKS bus window was fogged from the inside and dirty on the outside, so I watched the world through what felt like cataracts. When I stepped off, the driver didn't even kill the engine. The doors hissed pneumatically behind my back, as if the vehicle had spat me out and breathed a sigh of relief. The tires crunched on gravel. It drove away.
I was left alone with my suitcase.
Górowo does not resemble a place of healing. The building looms in the fog like a great concrete tooth rotting from the root. Fifties architecture, austere, stripped of ornament, built not for people but for the idea of order. The windows are narrow. They remind me of gun slits in a bunker. I stared at them and had the absurd impression that the building was blinking. Once. Twice. Slowly. Heavily.
The cold cuts through my coat. It is the dampness that respects neither wool nor leather. It gets into the joints. My hands — the same hands that yesterday played a Chopin étude on the out-of-tune piano in the dormitory — are now stiff and bluish. I cannot feel my fingertips. That is bad. A pianist must feel his fingertips. But I am not here as a pianist. I am here as a researcher. As a subject.
I crossed through the gate. The metal groaned, though no one had touched it. The wind.
The lobby smells of lysol and boiled cabbage. That smell is everywhere, pressing into the nostrils, settling on the palate. There is something biological about it, something that evokes digestion and decay, covered by a thin layer of chemical cleanliness. The floor is a checkerboard of terrazzo, worn down by thousands of feet that wandered here without purpose. My shoes are too loud. Each step is an accusation.
The porter did not ask for my name. He only pointed down the corridor to the left. Wing C.
There, the air thickens. Literally. You feel resistance when you inhale. The light from the fluorescent tubes is not white — it is greenish, flickering at a frequency that irritates the optic nerve. The buzzing of the lamps sounds like a swarm of insects trapped in glass. This is supposed to be a place of science? It looks like the antechamber of purgatory.
The room assigned to me has the number 14. A bed with a metal frame, a bedside table, a chair. Walls painted with oil paint halfway up, above that a dirty white. Everything here is hard. There is nowhere for the eye to rest. I placed my suitcase on the bed. The mattress sagged with a protest of springs. I sat down. I took out this notebook. The pen scratches at the paper. That is the only sound that is mine. I must write. I must catalogue reality before it begins to catalogue me.
4:30 PM. First meeting in the common room.
Common room is a euphemism. It is a hall with windows facing an inner courtyard where a single, stunted tree grows. Inside there are four of us. The chosen ones. Guinea pigs. Apostles of a new era of psychiatry, as Doctor Rawski called us in the prospectus.
I sat across from a man who looked as though he wanted to chew through the tabletop. Zbigniew Kutera. Short, compact as a fieldstone. His hands are enormous, roughened by labor, nails cut short, with grease worked so deep into the skin that no soap will ever wash it out. He does not belong here. He does not belong to the sterility, to the quiet. He is loud even when he is silent. His breathing is heavy, wheezing. He watched me from beneath bushy gray brows with a mixture of contempt and fear. When I pulled out a pack of cigarettes, he snorted.
"Student," he said. It was not a statement of fact. It was an insult. "Thinks he understands because he read it in a book."
I did not answer. I lit up. The smoke tasted sour.
"And what do you think you're doing here?" he asked, leaning forward. The tabletop creaked beneath his elbows. "You think this is a sanatorium? That they'll give you a pill for sadness and send you home? This is a slaughterhouse, boy. You just can't see the blood."
In the corner, in an armchair upholstered in faux leather, sat a woman. Halina Mróz. For the first twenty minutes I thought she was sleeping with her eyes open. She is so still she seems not to breathe. Small, grey, fading into the background. There is something in her of a timid bird playing dead so the predator loses interest. But her eyes — pale, watery, yet sharp as needles. She was watching us. Not looking at faces — looking at hands. At my trembling fingers. At Zbigniew's clenched fists.
"He will come," she said suddenly. Her voice was dry, like the rustle of leaves. "He is already here. He is listening."
Zbigniew spat on the floor. "Let him listen. Let him hear what I think of his experiments."
Then the door opened. There was no knock. No announcement.
Doctor Edmund Rawski did not enter the room. He flowed into it. He is tall, impeccably dressed in a suit that looks as though it cost three years of my scholarship. A white coat draped over one shoulder — not worn, merely slung, as if medicine were only an accessory to his elegance. He has the face of a Roman senator, smooth, calm, with graying temples. But it is the eyes that hold your attention. They are dark. Not brown, not black. They are like wells. Looking into them, you have the sensation of falling.
He stopped in the middle of the room. The silence that followed was a physical weight. Zbigniew stopped breathing loudly. Halina shrank further into herself.
"Good evening," said Rawski. His voice is a baritone, perfectly modulated. Every syllable in its place. No stuttering, no hesitation. It is the voice of a man who has never in his life had to explain himself. "I am glad you have decided to take part in the Resonance project."
He walked to the window, turning his back to us. He looked at the stunted tree.
"The human mind," he continued, as though resuming a lecture he had begun an hour ago in another room, "is like a house in which most of the rooms are locked. We live in the hallway. Sometimes we look into the kitchen. But the cellar? The attic? We are afraid to go there. We are afraid of the dust. Afraid of what we ourselves left there."
He turned abruptly. His gaze came to rest on me. I felt as though someone had pressed ice to the back of my neck.
"Mr. Henryk Czajka. Psychology student. Amateur pianist." He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes. "You seek structure in chaos, do you not? Music is the mathematics of emotion. And psychology? Psychology is the attempt to name the unnameable."
"I came to learn," I managed. My voice sounded reedy, pitiful compared to his resonance.
"To unlearn," Rawski corrected me. He stepped closer. I caught the scent of his cologne — expensive, spiced, masking the smell of the hospital. "You came to unlearn. Everything you know about the boundaries of your own self. A boundary is an illusion, Mr. Henryk. The skin does not end a person. Memory does not end a person."
He looked at Halina.
"Mrs. Halina. You know what I mean. You remember things you should not remember."
Halina flinched. Her hands tightened on the armrests so hard her knuckles went white.
"And you, Mr. Zbigniew," Rawski turned to the worker without changing his tone, "you believe only in what can be touched. A hammer, a brick, a wage. Pain. But pain is only an electrical signal. It can be switched off. Or... retuned."
Zbigniew stood up. His chair fell backward with a crash.
"I want to go home," he growled. But the confidence he had shown earlier was gone. There was fear in his voice. Pure, animal fear — the fear of a dog that knows its master is hiding a stick behind his back.
Rawski approached him. He did not step back. He was a head taller than Zbigniew. He placed a hand on his shoulder. Lightly. Almost tenderly.
"Home is where the mind is, Mr. Zbigniew. You will not go anywhere until we have cleaned out the cellar."
Zbigniew sat down. He simply sat down, as though the air had gone out of him. Rawski patted his shoulder and returned to the center of the room.
"We begin tomorrow at dawn. Tonight, please rest. Please listen to the silence. It has much to say, if one does not interrupt it."
He left. The door closed without a sound.
10:00 PM.
I am in my room. I turned off the light, but I cannot sleep. I lie staring at the ceiling, where shadows from the corridor arrange themselves into strange patterns. They look like maps of unknown continents. Or Rorschach blots.
It is quiet, but it is not an empty quiet. It is a full quiet. I can hear the hum in the pipes. Water circulates through the building like blood in a great organism. Sometimes there is a knock — distant, metallic. Someone walking on the floor above? But up there is only the attic.
I keep thinking about what Rawski said. About unlearning. About boundaries. I came here out of fascination. My supervisor said Rawski was a genius, albeit a controversial one. That his research into collective hypnosis could change the paradigm. I wanted to be part of history. I wanted to understand the mechanisms of the human psyche.
But now, lying on this hard mattress, I feel something different. It is not scientific curiosity.
It is a shudder.
I took the metronome from my suitcase. My old wooden metronome, which I always bring with me. I set it on the bedside table, but did not start the pendulum. It stands motionless. A silent witness to time, which here seems to flow differently.
A moment ago I went out into the corridor, to the bathroom. The corridor was empty, bathed in that cadaverous, greenish light. I passed the door to Rawski's office. It was closed, but beneath the threshold I could see a strip of light. And I heard a sound.
A hiss. Rhythmic, steady — the hiss of magnetic tape running through a machine. Shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. Like breathing. And a soft click, repeating every few seconds. As though someone were switching the recording on and off.
I stopped. I pressed my ear to the cold wood of the door. Through the hissing, another sound broke through. Very faint. Humming. Someone inside was humming a melody. A simple, childlike lullaby. But slightly off-key. Every note just slightly beside itself, creating a dissonance that made my teeth ache.
I stepped back. I fled to my room. I locked the door, though I know a lock is only a piece of metal. If Rawski is right and boundaries are an illusion, no lock will protect me.
My hands are still cold. The pen slips from my fingers. Tomorrow we begin. Resonance. What does it mean? What will we resonate with?
Zbigniew was right. This is not a sanatorium. I feel it in my stomach — the same heavy knot I had as a child when my father turned off the light in the cellar. The darkness here is not an absence of light. It is the presence of something else.
I must sleep. I must switch off my thoughts. But when I close my eyes, I see those wells in Rawski's face. And I hear Halina's whisper: "He is already here."
God, what am I doing here?
End of entry, October 14, 1986.