Page 20 of Teddy Bear

From the hospital stretcher in which I was lying numb, I could now only see thick, gray smoke billowing towards the sky - that smoke was somehow a reminder that all this was reality and the only thing that pulled me out of my mild and gentle foggy stupor.

His smell was sharp, pungent, seeping into my nostrils, angry and heavy, giving me no peace, and telling me that my house was on fire, that my life was on fire, and that my childhood had already been burned a long time ago, fueled by maddened rage and my father's inability to cope with life's challenges.

In outline, I saw the edges of a grandiose mansion rising in front of a perfect green lawn, being eaten away by black, hideous, sticky tar.

I watched as the perfect, white facade turned yellow, brown, and then completely burned as the firemen tried unsuccessfully to put out the fire that had already engulfed the entire building.

How fitting, I thought to myself.

Indeed, I was scantily clad, but I don't think the cold I felt that night, half-alive or half-dead, pulled from the fire, barely conscious, lungs full of heavy, black tar stuck to the tiny tubes and passages inside my increasingly less functional respiratory system, didn't shiver from that.

I don't think it came from the icy January wind that was whipping very hard either, fanning the bright, orange fire that was now lasciviously licking the sky itself, climbing higher and higher up the walls and roof of the mansion; nor from the cold skin of the hospital stretcher that smelled of something foreign, unknown, alien; I have never felt so lost in my life.

That cold came from inside, from every vein of my body that was equally destroyed and burned, screaming - this is all your fault!

The knowledge made my whole body stiff and petrified like an iceberg. I sank to the very bottom of the deepest ocean of human contempt and pain, battered and crushed by its weight.

That knowledge was too difficult, too incomprehensible; it was just too much.

That knowledge made me shake all over, in helpless, dying, drowning shock, trapped beneath the surface of the icy lake of encroaching guilt in which my lifeless body would float forever.

It was a turning point - the place where the fragile threads of my psyche were irretrievably separated and plunged into darkness. It was a transition from still unsullied and easy innocence to leaden and cold madness.

At times I closed my eyes, overwhelmed by a terrible, mild fatigue that led me into a carefree, easy and short sleep, peaceful and haunted only by the blessed desire for rest and peace, but I would quickly open them again, after only a few seconds and listen to the unknown voices of men in uniforms, the sounds of sirens, firemen's snorts and police officers.

For them, this was just another case at work.

For us, it was an irretrievably ruined life.

I didn't see when my father was brought into the police van, nor when he was brought to the station, but between those sweet moments of desperate desire for rest and deep sleep and crystalline vigilance and tension, the image of his somewhat strangely hanging arms, tied with metal handcuffs, and his empty, almost expressionless face, grotesque as a mask, as two policemen led him out of the house, vividly jumped out before my eyes.

That face was no longer human; it was completely plastic, rubbery, without a single grimace or hint of life and humanity that would separate it from a dead object.

It was hung on his tall and scrawny body, almost planted, like some sad scarecrow devoid of expression and all movement.

It was the face of a man whose soul had been completely burned.

It was a face I had seen countless times in vivid nightmares from which I woke up screaming.

It was the face of nothingness itself, the abyss, destruction, and there was nothing human about it anymore.

I was trying to remember the exact moment my life took a wrong turn. The exact moment, the turning point.

I was rewinding a terrible movie in my head, ten years ago, trying to figure out what time I actually made an appointment.

At what point did I stop being good enough, valuable enough, deserving enough?

I was trying to remember the moment, the exact moment, when my father's face became a grotesque abyss.

I was trying to find the cause, the way, the solution, the culprit.

I needed to make it rational, consequential.

The knowledge that my father simply fell ill, that he refused to seek help for years, that my mother was a silent accomplice who sent him deeper and deeper into the bottom with her silence and arguments, was unbearable, impossible, unacceptable.

The idea that only a stupid and unjust combination of circumstances, misfortune and human negligence was responsible for everything was not acceptable.

There had to be a tangible moment, a cause, a mistake that was made, thoughtlessly, recklessly, a long time ago, in some rosy moment of perfection, that cast a black stain on our safe, warm world.