The Jellyfish Effect

by Ufuk Özden

  THE

  JELLYFISH EFFECT

  UFUK ÖZDEN

  Copyright © 2020 Ufuk Özden

  Finland 2020

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Any references to places, historical events, real people, or real goats are used fictitiously.

  ISBN 978-952-94-3124-3 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-952-94-3125-0 (E-book)

  Imprint: Independently published

  Cover illustration by Nikola Taylor

  www.uobooks.com

  Acknowledgements

  Many humans, beasts, objects, late-night space documentaries, and inter-city bus trips inspired me to write this book. As much as I would like to name and thank them all, I can only mention a few of them here.

  I would like to thank Colleen O’Brien for her selfless support throughout the writing process. As if she wasn’t busy enough juggling her papers and grant applications, she took the time to help me make The Jellyfish Effect less of a mess than it would have been.

  Meanwhile, Nikola Taylor did a terrific job at capturing the essence of the book with her front cover illustration. You can see more of her work on Instagram (#gigglemut).

  I would also like to thank Ken Darrow for correcting a few million mistakes that I made while I was writing this book. Such a wonderful editor to work with. If you’re willing to read the rest of the book, you should be grateful too!

  Special thanks to my wife Suvi for putting up with me spending long nights at the kitchen desk writing or pacing up and down whenever I got stuck. She even promised to read the book. It’s always amazing to have your support.

  Last but not least, I would like to thank the universe for usually letting me be. Thanks for the existence. My carbon atoms say hello.

  CONTENTS

  A Midsummer Night’s Snack

  Waking Up Is Strange

  The Very Next Morning

  An Evening In A Bar

  A Morning Of Regret

  Where Things Are Expected To Shine In A Mystical Way

  A Small Family Reunion

  The Coach Of The Year

  Phantom Pain

  The Goat Whisperer

  The Beautiful Cosmos

  The Trip

  The Final Play

  The Toll Road To Heaven

  The Next Stop Is The Final One

  Pushing The Wrong Button Can Kill A Clerk

  The Junkyard

  It’s Hard To Open The Curtain

  The Last Script

  We Were Never Going To Be Happy Anyway

  A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S SNACK

  M y appointment is in two hours, and I still haven’t written a letter to my cousin. Not that he’s been looking forward to reading it, mind you, as he’s been dead for years. His life was the only one that was lost in a perplexing accident that involved two trucks, three busses, half a dozen cars, at least two motorbikes, one forklift, and an unmanned glider. My psychiatrist on the other hand, is alive and doing quite alright, thank you very much; he insisted that I write this letter to unburden myself. I believe therapeutic letter is the term here. He even gave me a small notebook and a ballpoint pen to write it. If my cousin is still keen on reading letters, which he most certainly was not when he was alive, he’d better brace himself for some first-class revelations.

  “My dear cousin,” I begin writing down. “I hope this letter finds you well. How have you been?” I consider scribbling the last two sentences out, but eventually decide to carry on.

  “I’m sorry that I’ve been using your memorable passing as an excuse. I know it was not your intention at all, but somehow, you’ve managed to leave this world rewriting the constitution of Murphy’s laws. Anyway, I am truly sorry for the way I’ve just lowered my head and mentioned you each time I failed and needed to defend myself for it. I even gave people the puppy look. And each time, it worked. It was my crippling anxiety, sluggishness, and foolishness all along, but I’d realised that people were happy to stop judging me once I’d begun talking about how traumatising it was to lose you like that. Thanks to you, I dropped out of school, quit half a dozen jobs, and picked up a few nasty habits while I was at it. My anxiety had gotten worse and worse for real, but it wasn’t your doing. The day you died, after the initial hassle had calmed down, I watched a series on my mobile and had some strawberry ice cream. Not because I didn’t care about you but because there was nothing that I could do to make anything any better for anyone. The grief was manageable.

  We weren’t even close, as you may agree. It was a long summer break under the scorching sun, and I’d offered to visit you alongside my dearest uncle and sweet aunt for a few weeks so that I would have an excuse not to look for a summer job. Days in your household weren’t necessarily more amusing but I was happy to sit still and be worried about everything. And we occasionally had a few good moments, like that one time we saw the film with sociopath dwarves.”

  I pause for a moment and scribble out the whole letter, tear out the page, and try again. All I need is a prescription from my counsellor so that I can stay comfortably numb and mildly overweight. There’s no need for uncalled confessions.

  “My dear cousin,” I start again, “You wouldn’t have believed what happened four years ago. It was an arguably uneventful Wednesday night in July when every single human being who was asleep had the very same dream. From beggars to prime ministers, from backpackers to accountants — everyone had the same dream. The young and the old, the wise and the retarded, the ugly and the uglier; they all saw a face that they did not know.

  “In our dream, there was a middle-aged balding chubby man in a baggy dark blue suit. He was huffing and puffing, trying to catch his breath. His necktie knot, which was as baggy as his suit, was the size of a clenched fist. He looked around while he was scratching his nose. His wrinkled white shirt was poorly tucked into his trousers. He looked around for a moment like some people do when they’re looking for the nearest restroom. When he finally spoke, the setting didn’t get any more epic.

  ‘I’m standing here to announce the departure, the confirmation of your departure, from your planet,’ he murmured. ‘They’re calling back the carbon atoms. They need them somewhere else, obviously. I’ll spare you the details.’

  “The man in our dream tried to fix his tie knot by pulling it hard, by which he simply shrunk it down to the size of a walnut. ‘Busses will be arranged for the departure and you’ll be notified in due time.’ That was about it. Some woke up from their already fragile sleep. Some simply groaned or didn’t do anything at all, which is common with sleeping people.

  “It was going to take people a good couple of months to put the pieces together for various reasons. First of all, the whole setting lacked the drama that you could wake one up in excitement to tell the nearest person. It simply didn’t have the high production quality of those dreams where your dead relatives smile at you while pointing at a tall birch tree in a beautiful garden before they hop on a well-fed white horse, which doesn’t smell of horse shit, and flies away. Therefore, few people bothered telling others about the dream that they had the night before, unless they were desperate for some small talk.

  “Secondly, dreams have a nasty habit of going bad like crackers left out in the open that shatter into a thousand pieces when you take a bite. If it wasn’t for those dreamers who hadn’t woken up, we surely would have remembered less. Some dreamers only remembered his funny tie knot whereas some more attentive ones remembered him mentioning carbon atoms and busses. But eventually, thanks to the miracle of the World Wide Web, hereinafter referre
d to as the internet, people came to realise that they might have all had the same dream. However, it was going to prove difficult to celebrate the coming of a new prophet. Putting his poor presentation aside, more than half of the population on Earth was too awake to have any dreams. The doomsayer prophet obviously hadn’t taken time zones into account. His timing led to billions accusing billions of a well-organised prank attempt. And yet, no one’s still entirely convinced about whether it happened.

  “Search engines were constantly being addressed with queries such as “What is a carbon atom?” or “Do I have any carbon atoms?” It was nothing like the doomsday that we’d dreamt of. The man in the suit didn’t mention an afterlife either. Anyone who believed in a commonly acknowledged deity was quick to call it a fraud. Conspiracists were sure that it was an experiment run by some lab coats as instructed by some suits in high places. Some started bus churches with a confused congregation who didn’t know what to pray for but still made generous donations because their bus needed winter tyres or an oil change. It was hard to establish a system of faith based on the words of a sweaty middle-aged male in a baggy suit who appeared in your dream.

  “However, things got a bit more curious when it turned out that the man in the dream was once indeed a man who had walked the earth. He was the owner of a small company selling tires. He’d paid all his taxes. He had competitive prices and offered good customer service. He was happily married with one kid, if you could ignore the fact that he was seemingly having a fling that day. He had disappeared from his hotel room a few hours before we had that mystical dream. No one knew for sure, but the desk clerk said that he had checked in with a woman who had left in a hurry around midnight. Obviously, it was one of those premises where no questions were asked. There was no footage since their cameras were broken, for which the hotel had often received positive reviews on the internet.

  “The police found a pile of rumpled clothes next to the cabinet and a condom on the bed, which supported the theories of infidelity. The photos from the scene revealed the used condom, which was filled with his naughty fluids, lying on the bed like a grounded jellyfish.” I pause to go over my lines briefly then carry on.

  “My dear cousin, I’d always felt that we deserved the most epic end to our existence. Most of us still do. Your ending was also ambitious, I’ll give it to you, but I’ve been talking about the end of the world here. So please stop bragging. A man who vanishes into thin air while testing the waters of adultery only to show up in our dreams as our doomsayer missed the target by a long shot. I don’t think it was a satisfying announcement. And that’s why it clicked with me somehow.

  “Then there was the question of who would need our carbon atoms and what they would want them for. We were also clueless about why and how the busses would step in. The dots didn’t connect, the concept wasn’t favoured, so humanity has rapidly lost interest in the matter, joking about the whole incident as it being a demonstration of a mass-scale cosmic trolling.

  “Thus, everyone has gone back to fighting, loving, beheading, buying, selling, living, and dying. Although it was late at night where I was, I didn’t have the dream. I was wide awake, having some pasta in the kitchen. Sadly, I didn’t have any sauce to put on it, but I assume this is a trivial detail. I missed the alleged doomsday announcement. But somehow it sucked my anxiety out and replaced it with boredom. The banality of the whole incident chased away my worries, I guess. These days, I feel empty. Not empty because I’m devoid of any materials on the inside. Think of the insides of a plush toy. Filled up with synthetic fibre. I feel like there’s nothing of interest inside me that I can pull out and play with. Instead, I have this urge to do something, anything. My counsellor could probably explain it better to you. I have to run now, take care!”

  I meticulously fold the paper like a pupil proud of his homework and walk to the bus stop. A seagull stares at me for a moment before it flies away. I wave after it. Perhaps, writing letters to the deceased can indeed lighten one’s mood.

  WAKING UP IS STRANGE

  S omeone must have left a cuckoo clock in my chest. People can leave anything anywhere these days. As the alarm goes off, worn-out clock cogs with sharpened rusty edges begin to move. They get faster imitating my pulse. The entire clock begins to tremble. It gets airborne hitting my ribs. The wooden bird inside gets its head stuck between them the moment it pops it out. I can’t breathe. The clock is ricocheting inside my ribcage. Can it break a path through my chest and launch itself into the air, taking my heart with it? Probably.

  I grab my pillow with my right hand. I take a deep breath and squeeze it. Then I scratch my pillow cover with the nail of my index finger. I try to focus on the sound it makes. This is what I do at night when I need to ignore the sound of my heart. Scratching is a small price to pay. I’m ready to keep on scratching. It’s an affordable compromise. I have a wild clock that cannot be tamed. And it’s got my heart.

  It’s been a few weeks since my counsellor decided that I would no longer need any medication to treat my cheerful anxiety. I’d felt the same back then, got cocky and proud, trusting in my mental willpower to handle the matters. I’d thought I could tinker with the malfunctioning machine that is my mind. Surprisingly, it didn’t go as well as I’d hoped it would. Then again, I’ve never been good at building or repairing things. This last breakdown of mine has opened some new doors of perception though. I can lie back and enjoy the fear of dying while wishing that I were dead at the very same time.

  The palpitations make me nauseous. I turn my head the other way. It feels empty and fuzzy like a balloon. Do I still have a skull? Drops of sweat erupt from every single hole on my skin. My body, soaked in sweat, is sinking into the bed like a piece of some ragged cloth dipped in mud. I’m sinking. My heart kicks. I rise and stand up after I rub my eyes.

  I find it hard to find my balance. I stop so that I can move forward. Standing straight makes me dizzy. I’m a pile of jelly with a racing heart in a dilapidated bedroom. But I can stand. Very good. Let’s see if I can walk. I feel weightless. The vein behind my ear imitates the pace of my heart, making loud zipper sounds. It just zips and unzips. I stagger. This is how I usually wake up these days. I can do it again. I wobble along. The floor is cold. I curl up my toes. I need to make it to the kitchen.

  I turn on the light once I crawl into the kitchen. It clicks with a slight echo. The ghost of the young woman who has been haunting my flat stands in front of the cupboard. She’s holding a small notebook. She turns a random page in the worn-out notebook and stares at it for a few minutes; then she slowly closes it and gazes into the void. Her face is devoid of expression. She rinses and repeats. She slowly turns her head as I pour some water into a glass. She doesn’t look at me though. The cold water running down my throat cools me down a bit. I take a step towards her, with the glass in my hand, attempting to see what’s written in her notebook. She immediately closes it and turns around to stare at the wall. I have some more water. The water puts out some of the embers inside my stomach. The ghost’s back to checking her notebook. She’s been doing this for two weeks. Before that, she was slicing up an apple for a few days. My heart rate slows down. I take a breath and return to bed. I flip my pillow which has been soaked in sweat. I watch the cracks on the walls that I poorly painted over with my friend. The man at the hardware store had told us that we could easily do it ourselves. We’d gone home with buckets of paint and a high amount of self-confidence only to fuck up the walls in a majestic fashion. Every single stroke of the brush left a patch in a random shade of blue and we eventually started to swear at each other. My friend left before the job was finished as he had to pick up his aunt from the bus station. Or that’s what he’d said. I had to finish the job and leave the brushes inside the paint buckets, just to make sure that I could never use them again.

  Anxiety disorder isn’t worrying about things that may happen but it’s feeling what you would have felt had they actually happened. It’s being dragged behind a par
ade of disasters, witnessing and digesting every horror that one could animate in their mind. No details are spared. The more vivid and horrendous, the better.

  My mom’s walking in front of the parade, proudly waving her flag of disasters to come. She’s calling me to scream in terror for a couple of minutes, out of breath, crying out loud. Something happened to my grandfather. He was doing so well in the morning, he had good appetite, he downed two sausages, he took his time chewing them up but that was quite alright, dipped a few small pieces of toasted bread into his egg, and enjoyed his tea, commented on the news, but in the afternoon, he said he had this nasty headache and went to bed early. He never woke up.

  My father’s walking behind my mom. He calls me next. Mom had a heart attack. She just collapsed. And the ambulance arrived late. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference had they arrived early.

  The man in scrubs is shaking his head from left to right, from right to left. Five-year survival rate is ten per cent. Nope. No upcoming new drugs with promising trial results. I see. It’s the circle of terror and disaster closing around me. I need to bomb down this parade. My mind’s closing in on me. I need to change the song.

  I have a friend. I believe I had more back then, but we’ve been scattered around over the years and wound up having nothing to tell each other. I know one that got married and one that died. The rest should be doing all right, at least to my knowledge. Although it’s been a good few years since we’ve met in person, we’ve never ceased to exchange silly messages online. I ask him if he’s awake. He obviously is.

  Why didn’t you ever eat the desserts your mom brought us when we were kids? That used to bother me, I say. His mom would always give us a slice of cake or some pudding. The cake had either some cream or a strawberry on it. I liked them. He didn’t. He would just stab the cake with his fork but hardly ever take a bite.