She asks him to tell the story of himself, and like Scheherazade he begins anew each day.
As with many other things, this comparison is imperfect. The Ravencroft Institute is hardly a palace and neither of them could pass for royalty. She sits in a chair across from him over a carpet the color of sawdust. Her walls are lined with insects pinned on display. Not many butterflies, quite a few beetles. On a bookshelf Dmitri sees The Metamorphosis nestled between non-fiction texts more relevant to her profession. He thinks maybe it's an inside joke she has with herself, but doesn't say so.
He's received an invitation to call her Ashley instead of Dr. Kafka and doesn't know whether to accept. It might be to make him more comfortable. It might be something else. In her late fifties Kafka is built from delicate features, and he suspects the lines around her eyes mean they crinkle when she smiles. Short black hair, beige suit, only jewelry a pair of diamond stud earrings. Dmitri thinks she looks like a mother, but not his.
Her weight sinks into leather, darker than the floor. The couch he rests on matches. He finds himself leaning forward with one elbow propped on his thigh, the other locked in a cast suspended by his neck. There is something reassuringly empty in the gray fabric of his uniform, cheap and utilitarian and harmless. Dmitri's wrists are thin, but then he's lost a lot of weight recently. He probably wouldn't be able to run as fast as he used to, but then circumstances would be the same anywhere he went so that really doesn't matter. His espionage days are over. His free arm is shedding in flakes but at least his skin is dry. Clean.
Dmitri no longer looks like anyone, unrecognizable to himself. A face without much in the way of edges, short nose. Weak chin. Mismatched eyes that shift between green and blue and brown and every other natural hue as moments pass into minutes pass into hours. Dark blotches interrupt his forehead and chin. They will peel in new patterns across a span of days. For the most part though, he is pale enough to trace veins where his body seems on the brink of spilling out.
It's been a while since he shaved his head and the hair that grows back is almost foreign. An unruly mess of black, blond, brunet, and red—strands as unlike in texture as anything else. The mask that made him Chameleon was white plastic embedded with hardware. Left deformed after trying to resemble others in flesh too many times, it allowed him to duplicate any face, any body he could remember. More than holograms, the most complete sensory illusions technology could perform.
Without it, Dmitri feels stripped.
When Kafka looks at him she's receiving constant signals and missing none of them. The moments he needs to turn away, flat monosyllabic turns of phrase he chooses or resorts to or blankly accepts as his own. It doesn't have to be this way. It isn't comfortable and he doesn't even trust it's not calculated. But she's going to notice no matter what he does at this point, and lying about it doesn't do anyone much good. They both know why he's here.
When he first arrived, he'd barely been able to use his own voice—borrowing from countless men and women he'd seen or heard or impersonated before. Dr. Kafka had been behind her desk at the time, and she'd been careful to keep her questions simple and symptomatic. She didn't ask why he insisted on coming here when he was drugged past coherence at New York-Presbyterian. He could have opted for civilian care. Treatment at Ravencroft alongside the criminally insane was a decision. Dmitri doesn't doubt she'd read the police report verifying that the house stocked with knives and guns, disguises and fake IDs, all the tools of his trade and his illegible records, belonged to him. Kafka probably knew that any blood he'd left caked into the carpets belonged to him, too.
"Your information will remain confidential," she'd explained, her gaze as even as her voice. There is little in her presentation, her office, her effects to betray a life beyond function. Dmitri notices, absently, that she wears no wedding band but can't reach any conclusion. Maybe she takes it off for work. Maybe she never had one. Maybe she threw it away. "Security here is a priority for us. You're safe."
He didn't have an answer for that, but shifted his gaze to the desk instead. No photographs. A desktop computer that needed to be replaced before it became much more outdated.
"What are you hoping to get out of this, Dmitri?" she'd asked.
Slowly, he looked up. Her brows knit and formed creases. Concern for a stranger.
"I want," he'd said, and it almost ached to speak, "to be fixed."
The first story Dmitri tells is about a spy who lost his memory, finds himself pursued by enemies and former friends unable to decipher the difference. He doesn't remember, he explains in false confession. He doesn't have much more to tell her.
Kafka catches his reference, and this time she lifts her eyebrows to ask if he's a Ludlum fan. His smile twitches into being—on reflex more than amusement. There are other authors but he seems successful. They talk about the genre from James Bond to Jack Ryan for the rest of the session, and she does not press the issue.
The second story is about a hero in costume, soaring between rooftops on silver thread. He drops lines about responsibility, offers a few quips, takes offense to headlines that exaggerate his mistakes. He's supposed to be somebody the city can look up to. Maybe it started as some kind of social experiment but by now things have gotten carried away. Kafka holds his gaze. Dmitri doesn't doubt she's almost as familiar as he is with the circumstances of his survival. A commuter and a hysterical vigilante one night in January, dodging traffic from the George Washington Bridge to the doors of the hospital. Kafka asks how he feels about spiders. He doesn't miss a beat to tell her they're good for a few things.
They move through workplace dramas and Shakespeare productions, political thrillers and biblical narratives. A walk around Tolkien once to mix things up. In each session, she quietly indulges him—even bothering to laugh in all the appropriate places.
Dmitri realizes Hitchcock is a mistake almost immediately, but by then it's too late.
"There was once a boy trapped in a house with his mother." This is true and it isn't. There was once a boy trapped in his house and his mother was there. His father was there too. He doesn't mention his father, and he doesn't mention his brother.
"We were poor. We worked hard to keep ourselves fed and clothed and less than an embarrassment. I probably could have worked harder. Mother," he begins before stumbling over himself.
The story he's telling isn't hers. Whatever else she was, Sonya Smerdyakov wasn't Mrs. Bates. He remembers her voice as the beginning of an echo, forever following someone else's lead.
And so he followed her.
She was bright like a light going out. She was gentle without being kind. Her fingers were short and delicate and she touched him as little as possible. He found her attention in the way she avoided his name.
"My mother," Dmitri says again, to remind himself. He knows at last he's been noticed. Kafka thinks he is going to tell her something. He thinks he'd rather not.
"My mother wanted to use me and possess me and I let her."
His mother never wanted him for anything. He was an embarrassment and he was less.
Sonya was always more of a consolation prize than a second wife. Her cost went well above what his father could comfortably afford.
Sergei was four years older than Dmitri. Nikolai Kravinoff was the parent they shared, a businessman who brought about his own financial ruin. It wasn't gambling and it wasn't drink—the mistakes of an ordinary man. Dmitri always knew his father in the sharpness of his shoulders, the heaviness of his brow, full lips that neither son inherited. Anna Kravinoff was Sergei's mother. From what Dmitri understood she had been very wealthy and very beautiful and very unhappy about her change in fortune.
The three of them left Moscow for greater opportunity before he was a remote possibility. Then the Kravinoffs hired a Russian sitter to look after Sergei while they worked to rebuild some fraction of their losses. Sonya was dutiful in her responsibilities, she was a familiar comfort in an unfamiliar package, and where Anna was furious she was sympathetic. In time, Nikolai went to her.
Anna, his father said, had been insane. She took too many sleeping pills not long before Dmitri was born. Her absence bled through their lives like cancer. Father took the pictures down. He told his eldest child how she'd loved him. But the older Sergei got the less he remembered, and the less he remembered the more he was left to imagine everything that wasn't there. For her part, Sonya apologized through the courtesy of space that came with a position she'd stolen but could never live up to.
And so silence spread between them all in degrees.
"It was always just the two of us," Dmitri finds himself saying. "She didn't want to share."
The story he's telling isn't hers.
He doesn't know if his parents ignored him as some kind of punishment or because it made their lives easier. Over time the unanswered questions died on his tongue, attempts to make eye contact drifted, plays at spectacle dwindled and ceased altogether.
Dmitri isn't sure if what he remembers is the last time he screamed at them. Nothing about the situation was a surprise. They were eating breakfast. Sunlight hit faded wallpaper and made it seem brighter than it was. He brought his toast to the table. Conversations faded, expressions flattened, spoons tapped against plastic. Even then, there were scrapes on the tiles beneath their chairs.
But Sergei, with his dark hair and his scuffed knees, couldn't keep a straight face while refusing to explain what he'd missed.
Of course it escalated. They were children.
In the end, Nikolai dragged him out by his forearm. It probably wouldn't have hurt if Dmitri hadn't struggled. There was no lecture and there was no disappointment. He was simply locked in the storage closet and left there.
It took a long time before the door finally opened. When it did, he found Sergei alone on the other side. The lights were out, casting the world in shadow. "I saved you dinner," said his brother, in the same tone he might have used to announce replacing a carton of milk or taking out the trash. "No one will care if you eat in the kitchen."
Sergei stayed when he asked him to.
"I would have done anything to keep her happy," says Dmitri. It's as if someone is drawing the words out of him. He can't bring himself to resist. Kafka does nothing to stop him, leaning against the arm of her seat. Dmitri can't remember the last time she blinked. Only the image of a person, devoid of substance or potential.
At first it was easy commands, easy reactions. Come. Stay. Sit. Stand until I give you permission to stop.
It was like a game that they both won. A challenge he was happy to accept. Back then Sergei's eyes were brighter than his own, amber at the center before darkening. Dmitri can't recall the exact shade of mud his irises were, but Sergei didn't look away. Sometimes he smiled.
Sergei wanted five dollars from dad's wallet. Ten dollars. Twenty. A bottle of beer from the fridge. Potato chips lifted from the store.
Dmitri remembers the tight line of their father's mouth, the pressure of a hand closing over his shoulder. Cars slowing in the street as they passed by. His mother was the one who apologized to the clerk for everything. It wouldn't happen again.
Of course it would.
Later, Sergei came to the closet door. "Do better," he said, his tone without inflection. There was nothing else.
In the dark Dmitri cried his brother's name like an animal around tears and snot and spit until his voice grated in his ears. He let his hands fall, bruised black with clouds of yellow. At some point the door went still. It made no difference. When his mother let him out in the morning, she offered no comment.
He'd disappointed his only friend. This was between them.
When Sergei slipped a bar of soap between his teeth Dmitri didn't struggle. He did shudder against the bitterness that slid down his throat, burning his nose, spilling over his lips as white froth. It was only fair.
Spiders were more difficult. Initially, he said no.
The world broke around his skull as he slammed into a wall. Dmitri's vision spun and his knees buckled and Sergei repeated himself.
He remembers the initial scuttle, then twist of legs in his mouth. The lump of a small body going down. He's forgotten the taste but finds himself thinking of iron.
"I… I would have been anything she needed me to be."
In the privacy of his room, Dmitri began talking to himself.
Celebrities. Teachers. Children. The flat, steady rhythm of his father's voice. The words and intonations favored by mother. Sergei's laugh. He lost himself in a fantasy of conversations, strode through space to mimic confidence he didn't feel, flashed teeth in front of his mirror like other people.
Once, Dmitri raised his voice. And when his older brother came, eyebrows knitting in confusion, he found himself full of stammered explanations, hands fumbling at his elbows, stumbling over his tongue to make sense of it.
Just making stories for himself. A game with no ending. That was all.
Sergei asked him to tell him one. Being the young chameleon he was, Dmitri could only mimic what they shared.
There was once a young man who was not a prince, but whose bloodline was pure and noble. He lived in a city of carved bone with towers that spiraled and cobblestone streets that repeated every sound back. The young man had many servants but one favorite who would give anything to keep his master safe. They shared adventures everywhere they went, cheating the spoiled and the stupid, never getting caught. When their bone city fell it was a tragedy, betrayed in revolution by the very people who gave it life. But it was an old place and its time was up and the world was big.
So the young man took his most trusted servant, took his glory and what remained of his success, and he remade every new place in his image. Together, they became immortal. Together, they conquered all the wilderness of the world. Together, they became myths.
What could that be but a miracle?
And at that moment, Sergei smiled.
"Inevitably, the house and its contents began to lose their allure."
Eleven, Dmitri found himself empty of anything to say. At school there were times his classmates attempted to sit with him, to find someone new to engage. He liked to listen. They didn't like the way he removed himself from his own expressions.
Sergei at fifteen was hard, angled shoulders, growing stubble, set brow. He'd taken to smoking as they walked home together. When Sergei bought his first knife people began to get nervous. It wasn't something he discouraged.
Students didn't try to talk anymore, after a while, and his brother explained that this was because Dmitri wasn't there for other people. They didn't need him, but he shouldn't worry. Someone did.
When Nikolai found out about the cigarettes, his shouting resonated in every room. Sergei's too. Calling their dad a deadbeat ass-licking cocksucker earned him his first blow across the face. It shouldn't have been a surprise.
Sergei was convinced he'd been told on. He wasn't careless, after all.
It took about a week for the cigarettes to return.
Dmitri found his wrist clenched to crush, jerked forward. The ember burrowed into skin just beneath his shoulder, rippling flesh pink and red, senses invaded by smoke, mind searing white in a scream he can't remember making.
Sergei cleaned the spot afterward, glaring, and outfitted it with a bandage.
Much later, when he'd decided justice had been done and forgotten, Sergei would take out a pack of smokes. He would offer to share.
"She turned her eyes elsewhere."
At some point Dmitri couldn't bring himself to respond anymore.
His brother, patient and generous, wanted him to respond.
Teeth in the crook of his neck. Fingers scrabbling against his torso. Arms and hands and legs unnecessary pieces to be shoved aside. Hair damp, skin slick, breath a saw in his lungs. The universe blurring into nothing. His body forced full of someone else.
He overflows. A raw, sticky, bleeding thing on the floor.
Shut up.
"I…I begged. And she was indifferent."
Sergei no longer made eye contact.
Sergei, seeing them both now spoiled beyond repair, no longer had anything to say.
Someone needed to say something. He needed something.
Dmitri sees himself at fifteen. He remembers Sergei through with education, uninterested in college. Fifteen he is thin in hand-me-down clothes that are the nearest he will ever consider his own. He smells like cigarettes all the time. Sergei is ready to leave.
Sergei doesn't listen. Sergei can't stand the house or anyone in it.
He announces his departure. He doesn't say goodbye.
"Without him," Dmitri says. Stops. "Without her, I was by myself."
He would have died in that town under the eyes of speechless parents. Dmitri remembers the confusion that took his peers when he found a job for people who spoke for themselves. They thought he might be growing up.
He could lie. And when he began he understood it would always be a game with no ending.
Dmitri lost himself in a fantasy of conversations with real people and a voice that didn't belong to him.
They asked a stranger to sign their yearbooks without even realizing it.
And then he was eighteen, and he left to continue elsewhere.
He didn't announce his departure.
"Of course people will do crazy things, stuck in their heads for too long."
He was forced to make his own way with what talent he had. Initially, that meant being a lookout for Fisk and his people—long before the man started calling himself Kingpin or achieved any criminal notoriety. Back then, it meant a kind of security through association. It also meant he could afford a room with a bed, no television, and some pest problems. When Fisk caught the eye of a freelance spy going by Chaeran Ma, who moved with calculated precision and could dissolve into crowds between breaths, Dmitri made his appeal directly. She'd remade herself an instrument to channel language, and it was a language he understood but was not fluent in. Not yet. Whether it was promise or charity or some combination of the two, she took him in.
What followed was years of training, years of research. He memorized innumerable parts he could play, received clients who would pay obscene quantities for the right information. To achieve this he could become a doctor. A lawyer. A waiter. A garbage man. Forging himself names he liked better. Creating and destroying himself anytime an act grew stale or people began to recognize the person he wasn't. Over time he amassed a reputation and drew the attention of others who wore masks. He met Spider-Man, and he escaped over and over again.
But inevitably, reality intervened.
He learned about Sergei's death days after it happened. There had been a hunt. Sergei's last prey was himself.
When Dmitri tried to wear his brother's skin and steal his brother's voice it lasted several weeks before he found himself standing at the edge of a bridge. The person he'd sought help from laughed in his face.
"You look down and realize your clothes don't belong to you and never have. Your face is not your own, the words you choose belong to somebody you can never capture."
Miracles did not exist.
Sergei had become a stranger. There was no resurrecting him and there was nothing he could say.
He fell.
He says nothing.
Kafka continues to study him. In her hand, a pen is still.
"You did well with that one," she says quietly, eventually. He looks at his knees. It occurs to him that he's left her chasing an ending he can't explain. She continues anyway. "Thank you for telling me."
He's not sure how long the silence lasts.
"I'm not Russian," says Dmitri quietly, without looking up. "People assume I am because of my name, but I was born here. I let them believe it."
"I believe you," says Kafka.
"It's the truth."