The old man—my doctor—is an evil genius. His assistants tie me to the chair and treat me against my will, supposing that the tumour is preventing me from making sound decisions. He knows how to stretch out a person’s life to make them suffer longer. He himself suffers, broken, motionless, dry as an old tree. I would be happy to send him to hell but, unfortunately, I won’t be able to finish what I started if I don’t complete the course. So I’m forced to listen to him.

The cannula of the IV line sticks out of the vein, like the beak of a raven, while sadness pours through the dirty tube in melancholic jolts. Hope and rationality dissolve in the distillate of chemotherapeutic agents. Pain throbs. My broken arm hurts. Ice on my hands and feet. The evil genius says it’s for cosmetic purposes, to preserve the nails. I don’t have the strength to object to this idiocy. I cycle through the procedures in my sleep, intermingled with memories and hallucinations, trying to place them in chronological order on the clock face above the racks of medical cards, yellowed by moisture and time. Hateful hours. Hateful clocks.

Who said that time heals all wounds? It leaves behind real scars.

If the treatment works, I’ll end up sleeping less. This will force me to once again be aware of what my life and the world around me has become.

The television. I’m trying not to look at it. Again, this tiny window into harsh reality. In fast forward, I look at the world through this flickering square behind the bars and see humanity lose its mind—past, future, present. Time moves in giant leaps. Seems like history has moved a long way forward since I left Catania. A new virus has been discovered in China. Russia has invaded my country, and put its nuclear warheads on alert. In the US, one mass killing after another. Floods, wildfires and hurricanes are raging. Bombs are falling on my grey city, but there’s nothing left to destroy, no one left to kill. Seeds falling into infertile ground. Years pass, ruins combine with more ruins in the space beneath the surface of time. There used to be many cities, but now there’s just one, grey, expanding—Slavyansk, Mariupol, Aleppo, Grozny, Mosul, Agdam, Stalingrad. The entire world is becoming one. A crumbling, rotting, exhausted monster plunges into chaos. A distorted reflection of myself.

Sometimes it starts to seem like my illness, suicidal ideation, and rage are the bitter consequences of what’s happening all around, but in the next moment the ruins I see in my dreams become reality, and I start to think that it’s the opposite: that I’m to blame, I’m the reason for all this. A war is raging inside me, people killing each other, throwing each other in cages, building walls. I continue to see the giant war machines of aggressive, expansionist nations, I see terrorists, patriots, martyrs, revolutionaries, and just people. At first, just images on a screen, names on a white wall, and later the people themselves, real, with faces, voices, and broken fates. And all of them are a part of me, and all of it is somehow interconnected, appallingly logical, but I don’t understand, I don’t have time, because it’s already one in the afternoon.