Everything Is Not Mine

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Guys, help me however you can. On my own, I feel like I won’t make it out of this thicket…

I wake up today as usual at half past one, out of long‑standing habit. I rub my eyes, look around—and everything is not mine: the walls, the floor, the ceiling, some curtains hanging on the window—everything is чужое, чужое. I jump up like I’ve been scalded, then catch myself—who knows who lives in this apartment; maybe I’m some kind of hostage, and if I bolt out in panic it might only get worse. I decide to look around the room. Spacious, bright, fresh—this is all a curiosity to me; I haven’t seen decent housing for about five years since I moved out from my parents. I pace back and forth, check the corners. It’s obvious the rooms aren’t lived in—sterile, kind of like a hotel. I sneak around, trying not to make unnecessary noise, looking for something heavy to grab just in case someone attacks, and suddenly I notice an open passport on the windowsill. I come closer, pick it up—and it turns out to be mine. Except the name in it is ANATOLY. What the hell, how did I become Anatoly? Since when? As long as I remember myself, I’ve never been an Anatoly and never had anything to do with them (honestly, I’ve seen even Yaromirs and Al‑Kharabs, but never Anatolys).

I start thinking, trying to remember my own name, and I can’t. I sit there straining, feeling that something is wrong. This isn’t me—even though it’s my face. The passport isn’t mine, the name is чужое, but who I am, what my name is, where I used to live—I can’t remember anything. Still, I do manage to resurrect one episode from memory before falling asleep yesterday—I move my laptop from my knees onto some boxes and fall asleep…

About twenty minutes later, exhaustion from this bad circus makes itself felt, and having still not found any means of self‑defense, I step out into a small corridor. At first I think it’s a dormitory, but then I look closer and realize I’m mistaken—two doors are visible from the small hall: one leads to the kitchen, the other to another room. After inspecting the premises, I find no strangers, but my confusion only grows. First, the apartment is frankly strange. The room where I woke up and the kitchen are spacious, half‑empty, with only the bare essentials, while the bedroom and the second room are piled with some kind of junk—not construction debris, not waste paper, but God knows what. Part of the mess consists of damp paper—completely blank, not a single scribble; the rest of the space is occupied by thin circular slices of some soft, silver‑colored alloy, and sheets of the same material are piled chaotically along the walls. I barely cleared these Babylonian heaps when nature called. That’s the first oddity. The second defies any logical explanation at all: wires are sticking out of the floor, and most importantly, none of the bundles do anything or lead anywhere—they just stick out from under the tiles and, if you pull them, they come out entirely; you can clearly see they aren’t soldered to anything.

I remembered my mother’s phone number. I went to call her. I barely managed to dial the numbers on the Soviet plastic phone with a rotary dial, but the call went through, and my mother picked up. My mother—my real mother! I’ve never in my life been so happy to hear my parents. I tell her this whole story about the passport, the wires, the other apartment, and she’s silent. Only after ten minutes of my emotional outpouring does she ask with bewilderment, “Are you feeling okay?” All my attempts to find out my real name and get an explanation of what’s going on just make her try to calm me down like a raving madman. Then she even says maybe she should call doctors or come herself and then we’ll call them together. Come where? You live in another city—how are you going to come?.. And then I learn that, apparently, she and my father live two blocks away from me. WITH WHAT FATHER?!! He left us when I was very young and moved abroad! What the hell…

I realized that if I continued the conversation, I’d definitely end up in a psych ward. My mother promised to be here in a couple of dozen minutes, if not sooner, but now it’s already the sixth hour (and I called around three in the afternoon), and no one has come. I call her again—no answer. I can’t open the apartment—it’s locked from the outside. I searched all the cupboards—no key, no money. At least there was a computer in that very room with the junk. And what’s strange is that it has all my documents and games on it. Absolutely all the files are identical to my computer—everything! Even the last opened web pages, the logs—everything old.

So here I am writing all this in a semi‑shock state, and I have no idea what to do next—break a window, wait for my mother, call the police, bang on the radiators? A real nightmare. Oh, right—I forgot to mention: I found a half‑empty bottle of mineral water on a little table in the hallway. There were fingerprints on it, as if the hand had been dipped in some gray solution. I found a bag and put the bottle in it. If I get out of this hell alive, I’ll definitely try to find out whose it is (though I don’t know how).

I was terribly hungry and found black bread in the kitchen, and it had clearly been sliced this morning, no later—the edges hadn’t dried out.

So, guys, don’t let me down. What should I do? What could this be?..