Patient File No. 7
His name was written in the file: "Patient No. 7, identity unknown." No date of birth, no address — just a single line at the bottom of the page, written in large, unsteady handwriting: "Please listen until the end. It won't be good for you, but it's necessary for me."
I didn't know what he meant by "necessary." That day, I thought it was just another strange sentence — the kind you hear often in this profession and learn to ignore.
I was wrong.
When I entered the room, he was already sitting in the chair, hands resting on his knees, staring at the wall behind me as if counting something only he could see. A man around forty, hair streaked with gray, and eyes that — when he finally looked at me — seemed to be gazing at some distant point far beyond where I stood.
"Are you the new doctor?" he asked. His voice was calm, much calmer than I had expected.
I said yes, gave him my name, and, following routine, asked him to start by describing himself.
He laughed. Not mockingly, but wearily — the laugh of someone who has heard that question a thousand times and knows the answer serves no purpose.
"I'm not a victim, Doctor. I'm the only one who got out."
I asked what he had escaped from.
He paused. He clasped his hands together, so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
"From a neighborhood. A street, actually. Maybe three hundred meters long. A bakery at the corner, a small park with three swings, old brick houses. A place no one else knows anymore, because anyone who enters it never really comes back out."
I wrote: Place-based delusion. Possible childhood trauma associated with a specific neighborhood.
It was as if he heard my pen moving.
"You're writing that I'm insane right now," he said, without any anger. "Everyone does. Until they see something themselves that can't be explained."
I asked what that something was.
"Someone lives there. We used to call him Mr. Monday."
The moment he said the name, the temperature in the room seemed to actually drop — or perhaps it was only my imagination, after all the hours I've spent thinking about this moment, and now writing it down.
"Why Monday?" I asked.
"Because our week never made it past Monday. No matter how far we got — Tuesday, Wednesday, once we even reached Friday — eventually something would happen, something small, and then when we woke up in the morning, it was Monday again. The same Monday. The same 7:22 in the morning, the same smell of fresh bread from the bakery at the corner."
I suggested that perhaps he was describing an experience of déjà vu or a disorder of time perception — something seen in certain psychiatric patients.
He looked at me then, directly, and for the first time I felt he was truly seeing me, not that invisible point behind me.
"You think I'm talking about a feeling. I'm talking about the calendar, Doctor. I checked the newspapers. The dates never changed. The calendar pages I tore off with my own hands were back in place the next morning, as if they had never been torn."
I fell silent. I stopped writing.
He continued, more quietly now, as if confessing rather than describing: "He said he came from the future. He said the world he came from was full of suffering, and that he had found a way to rewind time, to find the best version of each of us. He said he was saving us. He said if we cooperated, we would eventually reach a day when we no longer felt pain."
"And you believed him?"
"At first, yes. He seemed kind. He would put his hands on your shoulders and say: 'I know it's hard. But we're making progress.' Then one time…" His voice trembled for the first time. "One time I saw him through the neighbor's window, when he thought no one was watching. The moment he was… resetting one of the neighbors again. His face… Doctor, his face was smiling. Not a kind smile. The smile of someone savoring something delicious."
I didn't know what to write. My pen had gone still on the paper.
"That night I understood," he said. "He didn't want to save us. He just liked to watch. Every time he reset things, one small detail would change — a mistake, a new pain, a fresh reaction from us — and he would take notes. Like a child burning an insect under a magnifying glass, trying to see which angle makes it burn best."
I asked how he escaped. A question I thought was logical.
He gave a strange smile. It was the first time he had smiled, and that smile sent a shiver through my body.
"I didn't escape, Doctor. I'm still there. A version of me is still starting Monday over again — right now, at this very moment, while I'm sitting here with you. I just… found a way to send a piece of myself out. And for that piece to survive, I have to tell my story to someone. All the way to the end."
I placed my hand on the desk. "Why?"
"Because he's listening right now," he said, and he turned his gaze away from me and fixed it on the corner of the ceiling, on a spot where there was nothing at all. "And because a story, Doctor, is the only door he can pass through."
The clock on the wall, at that exact moment, stopped.
When I looked at it later, the hands were frozen at 7:22.
Monday morning.
---
To be continued in Chapter Two…