Patient File No. 7
"I don't remember what I was before that night," he began, his voice this time without any performance, without any attempt to frighten or deceive. "Maybe I was nothing. Maybe just soil, just stone, something that had been there for thousands of years without feeling anything."
I sat, motionless, and listened.
"The first thing I remember is the sound of crying. Not one voice, but several, at once. Children. Mothers. A man's voice pleading, to someone, for something I never understood."
"Is this the night you lied about?"
"No," he said, and his voice, for the first time, was without any added layer — just itself, raw, defenseless. "That hospital story, as I said, was fabricated. But this one..." He paused. "This one is the truth. Or at least, the closest thing I have to it."
I waited.
"This street, before anything else, was an execution ground. Years ago, long before any of these houses were built. People who had no trial, no chance to defend themselves, just... taken and brought here, and then..."
He couldn't say it. He couldn't bring himself to say it.
"I understand," I said quietly.
"Their fear," he continued, "their pain, the loneliness of their final moments — all of it remained. In the soil, in the air, in everything built on this land afterward. And I, from all that accumulated suffering, took shape. Not all at once, not in a single moment. Slowly, over decades."
"And then?"
"Then, when I finally became aware enough to sense myself, the only thing I knew was suffering. The only language I spoke was the language of pain. The first time I connected with a living human being, I didn't know how to communicate except through that same language."
His voice trembled — not from performance, but from something that seemed genuinely painful for him, even now, even after all these years.
"The Sadeghi family weren't the first," he said. "But they were the first ones I truly... came to know. The first ones I genuinely tried with, because I thought maybe I could learn how to connect without pain. I tried to help them — not out of pure benevolence, because I didn't know what benevolence was, but out of a kind of curiosity, a kind of hope that maybe I could learn something other than causing suffering."
"But you couldn't."
"I couldn't," he said, his voice now barely a whisper. "Every time I rewound them, instead of learning kindness, I only learned how to make them suffer better. Because suffering was the only language I truly knew how to speak fluently. And the more I practiced, the better I got at it — not because I wanted to, but because it was the only skill I had."
A long silence followed.
"The Sadeghi family, in the end, what happened to them?" I asked, though part of me didn't want to hear the answer.
"They scattered," he said, simply, terrifyingly matter-of-fact. "Not in the sense that they died — or maybe they did, I don't know which is more accurate anymore. After so many repetitions, so many different versions of the same day, there was no 'original' version left to return to. They just... dispersed, across all those possibilities, until none of them was whole anymore."
My breath caught in my chest.
"So they're still there?" I asked. "Each one a piece?"
"I mean," he said, his voice now broken, "I destroyed them, Doctor. Not by intention, but with the same result. I tried to save them, and instead, I tore them apart, across infinite different versions of a day that should never have been repeated so many times."
Tears — if they could be called tears, since they streamed from eyes that still couldn't be seen clearly — slid down what must have been his face.
"This is what I've never told anyone," he said. "Because saying it means accepting that I was never a savior. Even in my first attempt, even before I became what I am now — even then, I was only destroying."
I sat there, in the silence of that room, with an entity that only weeks ago I had thought was nothing but a monster, and now saw as something more complex, more tragic, and terrifyingly, more understandable.
"Continue," I said, my voice quiet. "It's not finished yet. I know it isn't."
He looked at me, and for the first time, in that gaze, I saw neither threat nor deception, but something like a terrible gratitude — the gratitude of someone who, after decades, finally had someone willing to stay and listen.
"All right," he said. "But the next part, Doctor... the next part is something no one, not even I, has ever dared to say out loud."
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To be continued in Chapter Seventeen...