The moonlight glows brighter, filling the room with pallid feverish air. Everything around dissolves in it—the ward, the hospital, the whole world drowns in its slicing rays. I lift my hand to write on the ceiling in inky shadows. I write words. Dream. Fear. Passion. A world of images and sounds is born of them. I hear your voice, footsteps, the noise of the road outside. The centre of the ceiling sags and the walls recede, the windows collapse into a milky void. I retreat, plunging into the sheet’s lustre. The hospital is a single organism, a mixture of living cells and machines, a system of moving points in space. They multiply—the hydra biting off its own head only to grow larger. I hold a tape measure against reality and try to measure the distance between you and me. From point to point, from edge to edge, the visible, growing chaos bars my way to you. I only plunge deeper and resurface to trace sinusoids in the space of the ward with dreams.

I was in awe when they told us at university about how we find the Fibonacci numbers in biology, anatomy, and the Universe. The lecturer slyly winked with his hints about how God is but a set of numbers, a mathematical rule, and the universe a structure built on those principles. Every well-built home contains a fragment of God, everybody too. But human consciousness is a variable, an anomaly that destroys precision and harmony, human passion is the irrational grain of sand in the machine of the Universe.

I see on the clock that it’s twelve. A whole night lies ahead.

Better not to sleep so as not to endure these nightmares. But I can’t help it.

Why, professor? You’ve known me long enough.

And you still can’t say.

F.

Kyiv

Romodanov Neurosurgery Institute

Lost in thought, Maria twirled her hair. She’d cut it too short. Too bad. Maybe she’d lighten it next time. She looked at the clock. Midnight.

She sat in the empty kitchen and drank coffee, shuddering each time she laid the cup down too hard. She kept her eye on the time. The boys were asleep. One with a cat in his bed, small and sweet. The other in their shared bed, dependable and large. Unloved. Finally, she was free to do and think what she wanted. At night, the truth is not so mortifying. And the coffee tastes better. It was time for her to go to bed, but a pretty, brown semicircle was drying into a young moon on one of the letters. She wanted to wait until it dried so she could put it in her handbag and take it to work.

And she wanted a smoke, but there were no cigarettes in the house. She read the letters again. The hands of the clock crept across the face and froze at the number three. Four.