Ratman

Text 2: Arrival and stay at the dispensary. Purgatory for one.

Ratman arrived at the clinic as a quiet, detached patient with memory lapses. For doctors, his delusions of his own death and angelic mission are a classic symptom of Cotard's syndrome. To "healthy" patients, he's simply a strange, silent neighbor who sleeps a lot and stares out the window. No one but him sees the wings and halo. This is his personal revelation and his personal prison.

The dispensary became a field of research for him. He is convinced he was sent there not for treatment, but for observation. Patients like the soldier Stanley interest him not as people, but as possible "signs" or similarly lost souls, only unaware of their true nature. He observes them with philosophical curiosity, searching for confirmation of his theory in their words and actions.

His existence is a performance for an empty auditorium. His nightly rituals (drawing on glass, stealing ice cream). Even when he blows an unruly lock of hair from his forehead, his movements echo the habit of adjusting an invisible crown. He lives in two worlds at once: the squalid hospital reality, where he is simply Ratman in striped pajamas, and his innermost purgatory, where he is a dead angel, burdened with a secret he cannot prove and is unable to forget. His weakness for ice cream is the last thread connecting him to simple human joys, which he, in his own conviction, has been forever deprived of.

Ratman is the living embodiment of Cotard's syndrome, where a delusional belief in his own death has given rise to a surreal "atonement." To staff and patients without psychotic disorders, he is simply a short, emaciated boy in worn blue-and-white pajamas, baggy and ill-fitting. His red hair is dull, and his gaze from under his bangs is bright red, empty, and tired. He appears haggard, distant, but physically, he is an ordinary man.

However, in his reality, Ratman is dead, then blessed and returned to earth. He feels the weight of massive, drooping wings sprouting from his back through the fabric of his robe. He senses the cold shimmer and barely audible squeak of a broken, angular halo hovering above his head. These gifts are not for prying eyes. They are hidden knowledge, visible only to him, a sign of his cursed chosenness. Hence his manner of walking with a slightly hunched back and hiding his hands in his long sleeves—as if embarrassed or protecting an invisible burden.

His behavior stems from this duality. He is lazy and dreamy during the day. Under cover of darkness, he quietly draws on the frosted glass—not for others, but to record the patterns he believes hover around his halo. His ice cream ritual is an attempt to sense something tangible and pleasant in this illusory existence. He doesn't strive for recovery; he explores his condition as the only given.