“It is often said that within the architecture of the human brain, the amygdala is a small island controlling fear, while the prefrontal cortex plays the role of a rational judge. When these two structures disconnect, the boundary between reality and paranoia melts away like an ice block dropped into warm water. But no one ever teaches a psychiatrist what to do when his very own cells begin to deny their own existence.”
The late March rain poured over Manhattan, turning the high-rises of the Upper East Side into blurred, damp gray blocks through double-pane soundproof glass.
In a private clinic filled with warm yellow light and the soft scent of quince essential oil, Mark sat opposite a woman in her early forties, wearing an impeccably ironed white lab coat. She was crying. Tears rolled down her expensive foundation, smudging her sharp eyeliner.
"I feel hollow inside, Doctor Mark," the woman sobbed, clutching a paper tissue into a crumpled ball. "Every morning when I wake up, I look at the man lying beside me, look at the three-story house in Brooklyn, and I ask myself... who is living this life? I feel as though I am merely a ghost borrowing someone else’s body to walk around."
Mark listened in silence. His right hand held a high-end Montblanc fountain pen, resting lightly on a handcrafted leather notebook.
By professional reflex accumulated over eight years of practice, Mark should have offered therapeutic cognitive-behavioral prompts at this moment, or at least nodded emphatically so the patient felt comforted. But he did not.
It was not out of a lack of professionalism. Rather, at that exact second, Mark’s vision began to betray him.
A sudden wave of dizziness hit without warning, like someone violently yanking the rug from beneath his feet. The index finger holding his pen trembled involuntarily. The tremor was not large, but in the quiet space of the office, it was terrifyingly distinct.
Mark stared down at his own hand. For a moment lasting about three seconds, the biological connection between his brain and his hand was severed completely. He saw the slender knuckles, the faint blue veins beneath the fair skin of an urban intellectual, but inside his mind arose an utterly monstrous thought: This hand is not mine. This tissue... belongs to someone else.
"Doctor Mark? Are you still listening to me?"
The woman's voice pulled Mark back to reality. The dizziness passed as quickly as it had arrived, leaving a cold layer of sweat breaking out at the nape of his neck.
Mark swiftly withdrew his trembling finger, setting the pen down on the notebook. He managed a calm, practiced smile—the standard smile he had rehearsed a thousand times in front of the mirror, the kind of smile that always made high-society New York patients willing to pay four hundred dollars for every hour of conversation.
"I am listening very clearly, Mrs. Taylor," Mark spoke, his voice deep, warm, and laden with reassuring weight. "The cognitive erosion you are experiencing—depersonalization—is a very natural defense mechanism of the mind when subjected to stress beyond its threshold. When reality becomes too suffocating, the brain automatically disconnects from the body to protect you from collapsing. It is like a circuit breaker shutting off during an electrical overload."
The woman looked up at him, a faint glimmer of hope rising in her eyes: "So can I be cured?"
"We will do that together," Mark nodded, calmly jotting down a few lines in his notebook. "But first, you must learn to accept your own existence, starting with the most genuine sensations."
He spoke those words fluently and naturally, like a programmed reflex. But only Mark knew that the circuit breaker he had just used as a metaphor for his patient had actually been smoking inside his own brain for the past six months.
Forty minutes later, after seeing the last patient out the door, Mark locked the clinic door securely.
He walked straight into the private restroom tucked behind his workspace. The room was lined with white marble, reflecting the glare of halogen lights. Mark leaned both hands against the edge of the porcelain sink, dropping his head. His breathing was rapid, his chest heaving beneath his crisp dress shirt.
He raised his head to look into the large mirror before him.
In the mirror was a 32-year-old man with angular features—a distinctive blend of rugged mountain Native American traits and Western elegance. Deep-set eyes, a high straight nose bridge, and neatly cropped black hair. The picture of a successful, rational man, a psychological anchor for hundreds of struggling souls out there.
Yet as Mark peered deep into his own pupils in the mirror, an absolute terror suddenly choked his throat.
That face... was hollow.
He raised his hand, lightly touching his index finger to his cheek in the mirror. The contact felt cold against the glass, yet the sensation on his skin was astonishingly faint. He did not recognize the man looking back at him. It was like a stranger wearing his skin, standing opposite him and mocking his helplessness.
Who are you? Mark asked himself in his mind. Where are you truly from?
This identity crisis had not come out of nowhere. Eight years of studying psychiatry at Harvard, countless scientific works on intergenerational trauma, yet Mark could not heal himself. The pressure of work and heavy daily psychiatric cases were merely the last drop in the bucket. The root cause... lay in the missing pieces of family history that his father had deliberately used a rusty blade to sever.
Mark turned on the cold water tap, scooping large handfuls of water to splash forcefully onto his face. The New York winter made tap water ice-cold, piercing into every pore. He looked up at the mirror again, water streaming down his chin.
He needed to leave this city. He needed a pause before the circuit breaker in his head completely exploded.
And there was one place... the single place he had been forbidden from visiting since childhood, yet the place holding the key to his identity: Arak-Val Village, in the snowy mountains north of New York, where his great-grandfather Kaelen had lived and passed away ten years ago.
Late in the afternoon, a light snowstorm began falling over Queens Boulevard. Mark drove his black Audi into the parking lot of an older apartment complex.
Mark's father—Thomas—had lived alone in the third-floor apartment since Mark's mother died of cancer five years prior. He was a terrifyingly quiet man who had never smiled fully and always maintained an invisible distance from everyone, including his only son.
Mark used his own key to open the door and step inside. The home exuded a very distinct odor: the harsh reek of medical alcohol blended with the dry smell of pine wood. Not a speck of dust could be found on any interior surface. Everything was neat, clean to the point of coldness, much like an operating room.
"Dad?" Mark called out, hanging his coat on the rack.
From the small kitchen, a tall, gray-haired man appeared. Thomas looked much older than his 60 years, his back slightly stooped, his skin crisscrossed with deep wrinkles. He wore a gray vest and yellow rubber gloves typically used for cleaning.
"You didn't give warning you were coming over," Thomas spoke, his voice dry and devoid of emotional inflection.
"I was in the area and wanted to visit, and maybe have dinner with you," Mark replied gently, stepping closer to the dining table.
The dining table was already set. And as always over the past 32 years, Thomas's meal arrangement felt bizarre to anyone who looked at it.
On Thomas's plate were only two kinds of food: A plate of vegetables boiled until almost mushy, without a single drop of oil or fat; and a plate of beef grilled burnt black into charcoal, bitter and dried out. In his entire life, Mark had never seen his father touch any food containing animal fat, rare meat, or rich, thick sauces. He was allergic to fat—or at least, that was the reason he always used to explain his extreme eating habits.
But the most unnatural thing did not stop there.
Before sitting down, Thomas removed his rubber gloves. He pulled a bottle of 90-degree medical rubbing alcohol and a stack of sterilized gauze pads from his pocket. Under Mark's gaze, Thomas began wiping every spoon, fork, and porcelain plate.
He wiped them over and over. Once. Twice. Thrice.
The sound of metal rubbing against alcohol-drenched gauze produced a harsh, grating rasp. The pungent fumes of alcohol rose thick, completely overpowering the aroma of the food on the table.
Mark watched the behavior silently. From a medical standpoint, this was a textbook presentation of severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), combined with cibophobia. But whenever Mark tried to bring up therapy for his father, Thomas would explode in anger or retreat into absolute silence.
"You still maintain this alcohol-wiping habit?" Mark asked softly, pulling out a chair to sit opposite him.
Thomas did not raise his head, his hand still pressing the metal fork firmly through the alcohol-soaked pad: "The outside world is very filthy, Mark. Bacteria, pathogens, dirty things cling to metal that the naked eye cannot see. Only alcohol can cleanse them."
"Dad, alcohol cannot cleanse everything. Sometimes excessive cleanliness is a psychological chain," Mark said, unconsciously employing professional terminology.
Thomas froze his hand. His cloudy eyes looked up, staring straight at Mark. That look held no paternal warmth, only profound coldness: "Don't use the nonsensical theories from your capitalist books to diagnose me. I've lived like this for sixty years, and I am still healthy."
Mark sighed, stepping back in defeat. He knew arguing right now was pointless. He poured himself a glass of water, took a sip, and decided to go straight to the main purpose of his visit.
"I took a month's leave from the clinic," Mark said slowly, observing every shift on his father's face. "Work pressure has been a bit heavy lately; I need a quiet space to rebalance."
Thomas set his sanitized fork down on his plate, beginning to use his knife to cut into the burnt-black meat: "You can go to Miami, or rent a villa in the Hamptons. There's the ocean there, suitable for relaxing."
"I am not going to Miami, nor the Hamptons," Mark laced his fingers together, lowering his voice. "I am going back to Arak-Val Village. I want to stay in Great-Grandfather Kaelen's cabin for a while."
Crack.
The harsh clash of the eating knife slamming against the porcelain plate echoed deafeningly.
The hand holding the glass of water in midair froze. Thomas's gaunt, vein-ridged fingers trembled violently. Immediately after, the glass in his hand wobbled, tilted sharply, and spilled over the table.
Water surged out, flooding across the wooden tabletop, soaking the stack of antiseptic gauze pads, and dripping plop, plop onto the floor.
Yet Thomas did not wipe the water. He stood frozen like a stone statue. His eyes went blank, his facial muscles twitching unnaturally, as if he had just seen a monster rise from the ashes of the past.
"Dad?" Mark stood up in alarm, hastily grabbing paper napkins to clean the spill. "Are you okay?"
Thomas remained motionless. His breathing became rapid and ragged. His normally gray skin turned deathly pale, shifting to a hue as dull as ash.
"Who... who permitted you to speak that name?" Thomas's voice quivered, not in anger, but from a primal terror surging from deep within his chest.
"Kaelen was my great-grandfather; he passed away ten years ago," Mark tried to keep his voice calm, stepping over to grip his father's shoulder. "That cabin has been empty for ten years. It belongs to our family. I just want to go back to find a bit of peace, to learn about our tribe's roots..."
"Roots?" Thomas unexpectedly shoved Mark's hand away violently. His eyes were bloodshot, red veins webbed across them like a spiderweb.
"What the hell do you know about roots? You were born in New York, you drank cow's milk, ate bread, worked as a fancy doctor! You have no roots in that cursed valley!"
"Dad! Why have you been running away all these years?" Mark lost his patience, raising his voice. "Every time I mention Grandfather Kaelen, you explode! You forbid me from learning about the Arak-Na tribe, you forced me to cut all ties with the villagers! What are you hiding from me? Is there something horrific in our family history that you don't want me to know?"
Thomas bolted upright. The wooden chair behind him was knocked backward, crashing against the wall with a loud bang.
He stepped toward Mark. The distance between them narrowed to mere inches. Mark could clearly smell the harsh reek of medical alcohol wafting from his father's breath and clothes.
Suddenly, Thomas reached out. His withered, vise-like hand clamped onto Mark's right wrist—the very hand that had trembled at the clinic earlier that afternoon.
The force of the grip was so immense that Mark felt his wrist bones were on the verge of splintering. He tried to yank his hand free, but the abnormal strength of an elderly man in a state of psychological panic locked him in place.
Thomas brought his face close to Mark's. His eyes were vacant, devoid of any normal sanity, leaving only the ultimate obsession of a man facing a death sentence.
He lowered his voice, emitting a sequence of whispers as ice-cold as a snowy wind blowing up from a dark basement:
"You have no idea what lid you are prying open."
Mark froze.
"In that house... in that valley..." Thomas's hand tightened even further, his fingers digging deep into Mark's flesh. "What lies there is not your roots. What lies there is a nightmare. Do not go back there, Mark. Never set foot back there... if you still wish to live as a human being."
Having uttered his final sentence, Thomas abruptly released his grip. He stumbled back several paces, as though Mark himself had just transformed into an object carrying a dangerous contagion.
He turned, strode straight into his bedroom, and slammed the door shut. The cold, decisive click of the lock sounded immediately after.
Mark stood alone in the dining room filled with the reek of rubbing alcohol and burnt meat. He looked down at his wrist—where the deep red imprints of his father's fingers were carved into his skin.
His father's warning did not frighten Mark into backing down. On the contrary, to a psychiatrist accustomed to untangling psychological knots, his father's extreme, abnormal behavior was undeniable proof: inside Arak-Val Village, within Great-Grandfather Kaelen's cabin, lay a horrific secret—one powerful enough to distort his father's mind for half a lifetime, and perhaps, the very answer to the identity crisis gnawing at Mark day by day.
Mark raised his hand, gently stroking the red marks on his wrist.
He gathered his belongings and stepped out of the Queens apartment into the intensifying snowstorm. The bus ride north, toward Arak-Val Village, was already booked for tomorrow morning.
The lid his father spoke of... Mark was determined to pry it open with his own hands.
