ABSOLUTE
ZERO

A first-person account. I am telling it exactly as I remember it.

Back then I lived in a small town an hour’s drive from the city, where I worked. A taxi came for me at five in the morning. I would sit in the car, and it was the only hour of the day when nothing was required of me.

The work was heavy. Not because there was a lot of it — though there was. It was heavy because it never let go. You hold dozens of other people’s problems in your head at once and are not permitted to be wrong about a single one; and even at home, part of you keeps turning them over. I slept little. Not for a week, not for a month — for years.

I think part of the answer is hidden right here. When the brain lives for a long time on too little sleep and constant strain, it seems to start looking for anywhere to rest, and switches that rest on at the first opportunity. And there was only one opportunity: five in the morning, half-asleep, a warm cabin, and music in the headphones closing off every outside sound. No stimuli, no decisions. Just sit.

And one more thing — I have thought about it for years. I was awake, but I was still asleep. My body sat in the car with its eyes open, while part of me was still back in the place I had just pulled myself out of. I once studied hypnosis, and I remember how it was put: the conscious and the unconscious are two brothers who usually work together, in step. That morning they seem to have parted ways. One woke up, the other did not. And in the gap between them, I found myself.

That morning was autumn. Cold, still dark, with that particular damp when the air smells of wet asphalt and woodsmoke from the private houses. I got into the front seat, said good morning to the driver, and put on my headphones — small ones, held by a band at the back of the head so they wouldn’t fall. I loved them: I took them running, I took them when I went out to photograph. I put on something calm, without words.

An ordinary trip. There had been hundreds of them.

The first thing I noticed was that it went quiet.

Not in the headphones — music was playing there. It went quiet inside.

Anyone who has worked hard with their head knows that constant background hum: the half-finished thought, the undone task, tomorrow’s conversation you rehearse in advance. It isn’t loud; you get used to it the way you get used to the hum of a refrigerator — and you notice it only when it switches off.

It switched off.

And in its place there was calm. Not the calm that comes from exhaustion, when nothing matters anymore. This was a clear, awake, clean calm — as though someone had wiped a dusty pane, and it turned out there had been light behind it all along.

I felt extraordinarily good. For no reason. Simply good.

And then I looked at the driver.

Here I need to be very precise, because everything downstream depends on precision.

I heard no voices. No one told me anything — not inside my head, not outside it. I saw no pictures, no “film reel,” received no images. Nothing of what they show in television programs about psychics, where someone supposedly dictates the answers to a person.

I simply knew.

The way you know your own name. You don’t recall your name — you don’t search for it, don’t derive it from anywhere. It is simply there, ready, the moment you need it. It was like that here. I turned my attention to a person — and the knowledge was already there. Without an intermediate step. Without any sense that I had done something to obtain it.

He was thinking about the trip. Thinking about how many runs he would manage today. Thinking that he was hungry, working out where and what he could buy for breakfast.

There were many thoughts in his head, all at once. They did not come in turn — they hummed, like a swarm of bees. And the more closely I focused on him, the more of them I could make out.

And then I decided to check.

I asked him whether he was thinking, right now, about the house key — the duplicate he had promised to make for his schoolgirl daughter to replace the one she had lost.

He turned and looked me in the eyes — with surprise and fear, forgetting for a moment that he was driving down a dark road.

Then he answered. In a weak, slightly frightened voice: yes.