They move a man into the cell opposite mine. He’s clearly not in his right mind and immediately starts picking a fight with a prison guard—really just screaming obscenities at him. The guard stands by the door, muttering something under his breath and obviously provoking him, while the inmate, addressing the cop in both masculine and feminine forms, shrieks at him to go away. My cell is directly across from his, and the ventilation shaft is nearby. I can hear everything perfectly. This goes on for an hour, then two... Furious, I bang on the door and call for the inspector. “Have you no conscience,” I say, “why are you harassing a mentally ill man?” “No one is harassing him,” the inspector says, and walks away. So I think: bastards, I’ll file a complaint against you. But the psycho and the cop keep arguing until lights-out. In the middle of the night I wake up, nearly falling off my bunk from a wild scream: the guy is driving the officer away, and the officer is still muttering something back at him. And then I realize there was no clanging of doors or footsteps—the sounds that usually wake me up. There’s no one in the corridor. The guy really is, like in Hitchcock’s *Psycho*, talking to himself in two different voices the whole time. At five in the morning I went to turn in my mattress and confirmed that there was no one outside his cell, while inside he was wildly screaming at some woman to get out. Over the weekend he yelled so much that it was impossible to read in my cell. I don’t know what’s wrong with his head, but his vocal cords are clearly made of adamantium. What’s interesting is that when the guards occasionally tell him through the door, “Keep it down,” he answers in a completely normal voice: “Sorry, boss, I’m sick.” All of this, by the way, once again shows the stupidity and cruelty of the prison system and prison medicine. The man is obviously ill—what’s the point of punishing him for it and keeping him in SHIZO (a Russian punishment cell, solitary confinement)? He needs treatment, because at this rate something is clearly going to happen. But there was one great moment in all this. While throwing yet another imaginary woman out of his cell, the psycho spent two hours tearing into her with fifteen swear words in different combinations—not especially interesting. But then suddenly he howled one particularly terrifying insult: “NIGHT DESMAN!!!” I think that’s magnificent. I already texted Yulia to say that now I know what I’ll call her in moments of irritation 😀