Chapter 4
Episode 4
The corridor hums with a light that is not quite light—fluorescent tubes flicker like dying signals. I watch the numbers rearrange themselves behind my eyelids: 1+3/3+1, the same sum, always four, always the same corpse dressed in different uniforms. The man they wheeled past an hour ago had a face I recognized from a dream about Berlin, or perhaps it was the other way around—Berlin recognized him first, through the KGB files that never burned, through the agape of madhouses where precision meant nothing.
I close my eyes and see the cow from Marijampolė prison. She does not exist, they said. But her bell still tolls in the underground, where the columns of the dead march 9 kilometers every night, 1+3/3+1, a rhythm that mocks arithmetic. The pedophile they spoke of in episode three—was he the same as the atheist who told me faith is a sickness? Or was he the one who believed so fiercely in nothing that he became a vessel for everything unregistered?
A nurse passes. Her shoes squeak on linoleum. I ask her: "How many unregistered souls tonight?" She does not answer. She cannot. The list is kept in Morse code, tapped out on the walls of the old Soviet bunkers beneath the hospital, where NATO's globe spins 24 hours a day and civil defense sirens play lullabies.
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