Chapter 7

I don't remember going down the stairs.

I only remember that it had started raining again outside — fine, drizzling, more like fog than real weather. And that I stood on the pavement with my head tipped back, staring up at the windows of my own office from below, as if someone's hand were about to appear there and wave me goodbye.

Try checking what you remember.

It was reasonable. It was obvious. But right then, with the feeling of a stranger's fingers on my keyboard and a stranger's coffee in my mug, reasonable things were hard to come by. I needed something to hold on to. Something official, recorded, acknowledged as real by at least one institution. The police were suited for exactly that — not as a source of help, but as a mirror. If I existed in their database, then I existed at all.

The police station was ten minutes away on foot. My legs carried me there on their own — a familiar route, learned years ago, when I'd filed a report about the theft of those same monitors. Back then the whole thing took twenty minutes and ended with a polite "we'll call you back," after which no one ever called.

The station building was squat, brick, with a battered blue sign, its letters flaked away in places so it read only "..OLI.. STATIO.." Inside it smelled of bleach and instant coffee — that particular, acrid smell of government buildings that seems not to change from one country to the next. Behind the counter sat an older constable with the tired, flat face of a man who'd already listened to too many stories about stolen bicycles this shift. Under the fluorescent light, his skin looked faintly green.

"How can I help you?"

"I want to report a break-in," I said, trying to keep my voice even. "Someone got into my office this morning. While I was out."

"Anything stolen?"

I hesitated for a second, aware of how absurd my answer would sound.

"No. But someone was inside. Drank my coffee. Left a file on my computer."

The constable raised an eyebrow slightly — not skeptically, more tiredly, the way you react to the tenth similar case in a week.

"All right. Let's get a report started. Your full name?"

"Michael Lawson."

He started entering the details into an old terminal, tapping away with two fingers in his usual way — slow, methodical. The room went quiet — just the hum of the fluorescent light and the distant ring of a phone behind the partition that no one was in a hurry to pick up.

The constable frowned. Then typed something again, slower this time, the crease between his brows deepening.

"Sorry, sir, could you spell that for me?"

I spelled it out. L-A-W-S-O-N.

He typed again, then leaned back in his chair and squinted at the monitor with that particular look people give machines that refuse to work the way they're supposed to.

"Strange. The system's not finding you in the citizens' register. Not at all. Not by name, not by date of birth."

"That's part of the problem," I said quietly.

He looked at me — really looked, for the first time in the whole conversation, his eyes moving over my crumpled coat, the bruised shadows of exhaustion under my eyes, the three days' stubble.

"Do you have your passport on you?"

I handed the document over. The constable turned it over in his hands, held it up to the desk lamp, ran a finger over the security hologram — the old, pre-computer way, which someone must have taught him at the academy twenty-odd years ago.

"The document looks genuine," he admitted carefully. "But you're simply not in the system, sir. No fines, no registrations, not a single mention. As if you'd never crossed the border into this country."

"I've lived here twelve years."

"I believe you," he said, and for the first time something like sympathy crept into his voice, tangled up with confusion. "But I can't take a report from a man who, according to the database, doesn't exist. Legally, it would mean the report was filed by… no one."

He said the word — "no one" — without any mockery, almost apologetically. But it still went into me under the ribs, colder than any needle, and for a second the floor beneath my feet turned unsteady, as if I were standing not on solid concrete but on something loose and unreliable.

"Listen," I leaned toward the counter, gripping its cold plastic edge with my fingers. "Someone physically broke into my office. That's a real crime that happened in a real city, on a real morning."

The constable sighed like a man who'd just been handed a philosophy problem in the middle of an ordinary shift, and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers.

"Tell you what," he said at last. "Let me log the incident without tying it to your ID. Just as a report against the address. The system will take that without a complainant's name."

It was less than nothing. But I nodded, because at that moment I was ready to grab at any straw.

He started typing again, muttering something to himself under his breath. Halfway through a sentence he suddenly stopped, reached into the bottom drawer of the desk, and a dull thud of shuffled folders came from inside it.

"By the way," he said, pulling out a battered paper form with a curled corner, "since the electronic system's being temperamental, let's fill out the old form too. On paper. Just to be safe."

He handed me a pen — cheap, blue, its cap chewed up.

I took it and froze, staring at the blank rectangle for a signature at the bottom of the form, at the yellowed paper, at the slightly smudged typeface. Something shifted inside me — the same feeling that had gripped me yesterday at the sight of Helen's grey folder. Paper. Paper again. The one thing in this entire city that still seemed willing to admit I existed.

I signed — slowly, carefully, tracing each letter of my surname with an almost superstitious precision, as if it weren't a formality but the last means left to me of leaving any trace at all.

The constable slid the form into a folder and carefully snapped the binder shut.

"If anything clears up with the system, come back. Honestly, sir, this isn't the first time in the last few months. It's been oddly common lately."

I went still.

"What do you mean, not the first time?"

He shrugged, clearly not attaching much weight to his own words, and reached for the next folder, as if the conversation was already over in his head.

"Oh, nothing. A couple, three months back there was a similar case. A woman came in, papers all in order, and the system — nothing. We figured it was a database glitch. IT checked for a week. Found nothing. Wrote it off as a bug."

"Do you remember her name?"

"No," he shook his head, not looking up from the papers. "Sorry, it wasn't my shift. Heard it from a colleague, in passing, over lunch — stories like that don't stick around here, we get dozens of reports a day."

He said it completely matter-of-factly, clearly not realizing he'd just dropped something that made the whole world tilt under me again.

I wasn't the first.

Those words kept repeating in my head while I thanked him — my voice sounded foreign, like it belonged to someone calmer than I felt — and I walked out into the street, into the drizzling rain.