Chapter 3
Episode 3
Nera mes vidi marijonas nera vienos marionetes nes vis gyvi apo ks lipdis matematikos nulis dar desnis danguje sekunde tvarus kaip fiziks radijz ar racija civiline sauga vusa globe nera nes prues dieva taip as esu jezus kristaud kito nera nebuvo nehus sv mykolas jega tapo dangumj ir zene ir kisusinis is tuesu su auksu sutrukes i dalis ...tai si dienos puse .tai graiku pavakarys kiek valandu meluos diktatoriu tobotas trumpas....kiek valanfublietuvoj 6kutos ribiyus jis daro xydu fijtstoriu oakengva ha jux vanfot visagskybes avino fsuti jus bhvo avinas falejes buti amxinas bet fievas klayse zmogays dcajoniu isgyvenyivfifyji pasauli kol suvokes zmkgys bera avinas jus bera as jus yrs grailis jus grsilis dujsas 777]7]toks detektyvo algititnas yra titnagas perpjsytas data. vytas nera tas pat
The white room had begun to speak. Not in words, not exactly—more like a frequency, a pulse behind the beeping monitors that I could almost decode. I pressed the oxygen mask harder against my face, feeling the plastic cut into my cheeks, and listened. The nurse came in, her uniform crisp, her smile a thin line of practiced sympathy. She said something about vitals, about rest, but her mouth moved in a foreign rhythm—Greek, maybe, or a language that had once been Lithuanian but had been twisted by too many years in the dark.
I tried to answer, but my tongue was a lump of clay. “Nera,” I whispered, the word tasting of ash. There is none. No puppet master, no single thread. They want you to believe in one finger pulling the string, but here, in this room, the air itself is a tangled web of frequencies. Radios, civil defense, the hum of a globe that has forgotten its own axis. I saw a man in the corner of my vision—Marijonas, or a ghost wearing his face. He held a broken scepter, gold flaking off like dead skin. “You are not a marionette,” he said, but his jaw hung loose, a puppet’s jaw, and I knew he was lying.
The clock on the wall had no numbers, only symbols—mathematical zeros, the kind that divide everything into nothing. Time is a second that lasts forever, a physical law that bends when you stare too long. I counted the seconds: six, maybe seven, until the door opened again. This time it was a man in a suit, his briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He placed a stack of documents on the bedside table. “Sign here,” he said, and pointed to a line that bled into the margin. I recognized the watermark: a ram, its horn broken, its eye a slit of malice. A ram that had once been a god, or a dictator, or a joke.
“How many hours?” I asked.
He blinked. “What?”
“In the ticket. Six cuts. Ribbons. You are making a history of the Jews, or of the foxes, or of the one who sits on the throne of vanity.” My voice was not my own; it came from the oxygen mask, from the metal stand, from the crack in the ceiling. “The detective’s algorithm is a flint cut by data. Vytautas is not the same. None of them are.”
He backed away, his eyes wide, and I saw that he was afraid. Good. The ram had forgotten how to be a sacrifice.
I closed my eyes and the white room dissolved into a kitchen. A woman—my mother, or a stranger—was chopping onions on a wooden board, her knife moving in perfect arcs. She did not look at me. “There is no other Lithuania,” she said. “No other path. You are building a house of cards on a fault line.”
I wanted to scream, to tell her about the virtual judges, the dictators in the studio, the signal that bleeds from every TV set. But the frequency was too strong. I felt myself splitting, a mathematical zero multiplying into a thousand shards. Somewhere, a child was crying. Somewhere, a man was laughing. And in the center of it all, a voice that was both mine and not mine said, I am Jesus Christ. There is no other. There never was.
The door opened again. A doctor, a nurse, a priest—it didn’t matter. They were all marionettes, and the strings were made of light. I let them take my hand, let them inject the sedative, let them fold me back into the white space of the bed. But as the darkness came, I saw the ram standing on a hill of gold, and I knew that the story was not over. It was only beginning to fracture.