Chapter 2
Episode 2neregistruotas Morzės 0@kurti Voyager į mirtį kelių ir požemių vyksta 9.kolona 1+3/3+1(3+1/1+3)
Kodėl precizikos Berlyno durniu namų KGB agape išprotėjusiu be vokietija. vakar buvo.. morze0. Šiandien sinx0 cosx0. T y pitonas NATO o globe 24 valandos ir t t civilinės saugos naktis
The corridor lights flicker at odd intervals, not quite dying, not quite steady. I remain on the plastic chair, its surface sticky from the heat of countless bodies that have sat here before me, waiting. Yesterday—was it yesterday?—I thought I heard Morse in the drip of an IV stand. Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot. Morze0, they call it in the old tongue, the unregistered code of things that pulse beneath the hospital’s fluorescent hum. But today the rhythm is different. Today it is sin x = 0, cos x = 0—the meeting of zeroes, the axes of a graph that has no point.
A man shuffles past, dragging a plastic bag filled with papers. He stops, turns, and stares at me with the milky eyes of someone who has seen the inside of a Berlin madhouse. KGB agape, he mutters, the words slithering out like a secret. Agape—that Greek love they used to plaster on the walls of state orphanages. He taps his chest twice, then points at the ceiling. I nod, though I do not understand. He is the ghost of a precision that no longer matters, a former patient of the system that registered everything except the soul.
I recall a story an old man told me once, years ago, in a village that no longer exists on any map. He had been in the Voyager program—no, not the spacecraft, Voyager as in the Russian word for traveler, a soldier who crossed the border into the forbidden zone of the mind. Kurti, he whispered, to forge, to create—his fingers mimicking the motion of hammering invisible iron. Forge the path into death, into the underground. I thought he was drunk. But now, here, in this corridor that smells of bleach and stale cigarettes, I hear his voice again. 9.kolona, 1+3/3+1, 3+1/1+3. A column of numbers, a fraction that never reduces, a symmetry that locks itself into a loop.
Outside, through the barred window, the sky is the color of old concrete. A siren wails somewhere—civil protection night, the drill that comes every 24 hours, the NATO clock ticking in the globe room of some bunker. I am a python, coiled in the heat of the hospital, waiting for the moment when the numbers will align, when the sine and the cosine will both vanish, leaving only the raw, unregistered datum of a human being who was never meant to be counted.
The man with the plastic bag has disappeared. A nurse walks past, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum. She does not look at me. No one looks at me. I am the unregistered Morse, the message sent from a transmitter that no government acknowledges, a dot-dash of breath in the long night of the civil defense siren. I close my eyes. Behind my lids, I see columns marching into the earth, each soldier carrying a fraction of a whole that will never add up. And somewhere, in the Berlin madhouse of my memory, an abandoned agape blooms like a fungus in the damp.
I wait. The drip continues. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Morze0. Zero. The point from which all graphs depart. The place where faith and illness meet—neregistruota, unregistered, free.