In the beginning there was nausea. Not the sharp nausea from poison, which rises to the throat by emetic spasms yet giving at the same time hope for subsequent relief, but rather the viscous, dreary nausea of weakness after a long leaden sleep in a stuffy room—a nausea that fills the chest with caustic wadding, the mouth with dry muck, and the brain with pulsing lead. On the one hand, in such a condition the last thing you want to do is to get up and move at all. On the other hand, you understand that if you continue to lie down, the headache will grow even worse. So it is necessary to overcome your instinct and to get up. And it would not be a bad idea to open a window, even if it were winter outside.
Those were his first conscious thoughts. After comprehension came astonishment: he understood that he actually didn’t remember what season it was. While astonishment was turning into anxiety, and anxiety into fear, he realized that he didn’t remember what the day before was… or the day before that… or… He vainly tried to snatch from his memory any fragment of his life, but came across only emptiness. Or (this sensation arrived a bit later) the blank wall which cut his past off. However, the situation with his present was no better. He didn’t know where he was or how he got there.
He did not know who he was or even what his name was.
With an effort of sheer will he suppressed the growing panic. I need to analyze, he told himself. He can think: that’s good. I think, therefore, I am… This phrase came from somewhere. He did not know where but most likely it was not born in his brain. That meant that in the blank wall cutting off his past there were some cracks through which something can leak through, and if he consistently expanded them… scratched wider… tore them apart…
He opened his eyes.
Sight confirmed what touch had already told him: He lay on a rather rigid cot with neither bed sheets, nor blanket, nor pillow—only something like oilcloth, a dirty, sticky oilcloth under his naked body. He was, however, not absolutely naked. Here and there on his body were some rags and flaps, but they were not cloth. It was difficult to inspect them in more detail. He needed to bend his chin down to his chest, which immediately made his neck ache and, besides, the light in the room was too dim. The light came from a rectangular ceiling fixture covered with dust, burning obviously at half power and unsteadily: a shivering, agonizing light.
Accumulators are giving out: another alien, off-the-wall thought came to him. Accumulators? Why accumulators? Shouldn’t the house be connected to the local electricity grid?
Nevertheless, even such light allowed him to understand that the room was very small. Except for the cot, there was only a wardrobe on the opposite wall and a little table near a wall between them. On the fourth wall there was a door, and one more door to the right of the wardrobe. No windows at all. And it smelled musty, as if nobody had lived here for many years.
At last he sat up on the cot (a painful pulsation was felt at once in his temples and the back of his neck) and then stood on the floor, feeling with displeasure the dust and dirt under his bare feet. Even worse, when he took a step something revoltingly and damply crackled under his heel—something, seemingly, alive. More precisely, alive a moment before he stepped on it. A cockroach? Likely it was a cockroach… brrr, repulsive! He squeamishly dragged his heel through the dirty floor, trying to wipe off the remains of the creature. Then he approached the wardrobe and opened its door. Some plastic hangers were inside, but no clothing.
He stepped to a door near the wardrobe. Intuition told him that behind it there was not a corridor, but a bathroom. When he opened the door, a light automatically came on with a loud click that forced him to shudder. It was indeed a bathroom. It was very tiny but was more brightly lit than the room he had just left. On the left there was a toilet bowl, on the right a washstand, and directly ahead but behind an opaque blue curtain—the bath. Once everything here probably sparkled with radiance and chrome, but those days had long since passed. There was no stone or tile. They had been replaced with plastic. In brighter, though still unstable, light, the dirt on the floor and suspicious stains on the walls were even more clearly visible. It smelled of mold.
He turned to the toilet bowl—and frowned. Brown stains were on the seat and in the bottom. The stains, however, had dried up long ago. An association between an open toilet bowl and the bottom jaw of a skull suddenly flashed in his mind. For some time he stood, expecting the fulfillment of the usual physiological ritual, but not a drop came out. He just didn’t need to urinate. But he wanted to drink—more precisely, not to drink, but to get rid of the brackish taste in the mouth.
He turned to the washbasin. It was in no better condition than the toilet bowl. At the bottom was either sand or scales of rust, and the tap was spattered with some dried residue. No, he definitely would not drink from this tap. But he could at least rinse his face and hands. He turned the faucet handle. A squeezed hiss, like from a throat of a dying asthmatic, came out, but no water. Instead, gray dust fell from the tap. Then the sound changed, as if the air met an additional obstacle. He had already reached to return the faucet to its initial position, but at that moment the tap sniffed and spat out a whole handful of cockroaches. They hit the basin bottom and scattered in all directions. Some, however, began to stupidly rush and spin in one place.
His first reflex reaction was to jump aside before the insects, gushing over the edge of the basin, would start falling on his feet. However, he immediately realized that it was necessary to close the tap which was still spilling out new cockroaches. Hardly had he time to do it when he felt the disgusting tickling touch from insects crawling on his ankles. He executed something like a convulsive dance, shaking them off, and then jumped aside to the toilet bowl, looking with disgust at the creatures running on the floor. If he were wearing shoes, he would squash them all, but now he could only move back as much as was possible in a tiny bathroom and hope that they wouldn’t climb on him again.
Ridiculous, he thought. I, a human being, driven into a corner by some bugs. After all, they are not even poisonous. Nonetheless, he could not overcome his fastidiousness. These creatures always caused an insuperable loathing in him. Always? It seemed that one more remembrance broke out from his unknown past. But cockroaches, probably, were afraid of the man, too. Soon they spread out—some slipping from the room, some running under the curtain—but where the others went, he did not notice.
He raised his eyes from the floor and looked in the mirror over the washstand. It was dusty and dirty too, but in the middle there was an irregular oval seemingly of pure glass, as if someone had hastily wiped a window. The man looked at himself from a distance, then stepped closer, studying with displeasure the unfamiliar sickly pale rumpled face with deep shadows under the eyes and dissheveled tufts of hair sticking out over a bandage. A bandage, yes. His head at forehead level had been sloppily bandaged by something like a used compress. No—he leaned into the mirror even more closely—it was not a gauze bandage with an open weave, but some continuous, dense yellowish-gray fabric with torn, fringed edges. And some bandages somehow stuck—probably dried on—and rags were on many other places of his body, on his neck, his right shoulder, his left forearm, the left side of his breast, his stomach. And scars were on his fingers like marks from rings.
It seemed that something began to clear up. He had been in an accident, received a head injury (not only a head injury), and therefore he could not remember anything. But in that case, where was he? In a hospital? The architecture of the building looked to be government issue. But if it were a hospital, it was closed and abandoned, maybe fifty years ago.