Even ten years later, Maxim Golikov still cannot remember how he managed to get out of the psychiatric hospital. The black spot on his personal calendar stretches from the confusion and apathy of the late nineties to the eighth year of the new century, pretty much splattering many more pages, but this is precisely what he regrets least of all. Everything that happened before is a dotted line, the strokes of which mark events that are important or rather worthless and are interspersed with voids lasting from several minutes to several days. But this is only approximately, because, trying to remember what was lost, he can judge periods of time only indirectly, and about what happened to him - from hearsay. In any case, he found himself free, still not freed from the constant feeling of danger. The only thing that saves him from final paranoid exhaustion is that his entire previous, present, pre-hospital life, stolen by someone, has long ago become for him like a shadow on glass: he peers into this shadow, realizing with a distinct chill that the shadow does not belong to him, and in at the same time, he cannot discern whose it is: whether it is a person who is trying to look from the darkness reigning outside into the illuminated house and, probably, return home; or perhaps it is the shadow of a tramp, forever deprived of home, peace and even the memory of better days, who has wandered off in vain attempts to end a journey that you would not wish on your enemy.