The Jellyfish Effect

by Ufuk Özden

  She listens to me in silence, suddenly stands up, closes her eyes. Her skinny figure makes me wonder who will have all the food that we bought. Then she sits down, grabs my hands, moves her body back and forward to tell me that I should release the spirit. She claims that it is a soul that is trapped because I keep stalking her. The spirit cannot leave when a mortal’s following it around. Woe unto me. I tell the psychic that she doesn’t seem to care about my presence unless I try to read what’s written in her notebook.

  “The fire needs to burn!” she screams and then coughs a few times. She moves on to explain that just because a fire reacts to water or gas, it doesn’t mean that the fire has consciousness of its own. It’s in its nature to react. Hardcoded. Thus, I shall set the spirit free. “You are dismissed,” she adds then commands, “Set the spirit free.” I guess she needs a smoke or something.

  “What happens to the spirits after The Trip?” I ask. She says I need another session for that information. “Thank you for your time,” I say, and the guy walks me out.

  The earth turns its mountains to the setting sun. It’s getting colder. On my way home, there’s a shop selling used clothes. I walk into it, smell the scent of unwashed clothes that were kept in the attic for too long. After having browsed through the wares, I stumble upon a topcoat that smells of naphthalene. The scent is a sweet spot between cliché loaded noir and the nonchalance that comes with middle age. And it’s not even missing any buttons. So, I go ahead and buy the smelly grey topcoat. I gently tap on the fabric and promise my topcoat that I’ll never take it to be dry-cleaned.

  As I unlock the door to my apartment, an odd flip-flop floating in the air greets me. I find the ghost in the same corner, painting the wall with her aubergine, and she’s only wearing one flip-flop. “Today I went to great lengths to help you,” I say. She keeps on waving her aubergine around. “She said I should ignore you,” I say. “I’m sorry if you felt like I’ve invaded your personal space.”

  I collapse on the couch and turn on the telly after a session of meticulous button mashing. The telly, which I’ve acquired by the courtesy of my uncle, is a bit too smart for my fancy. The screen is simply too big for my ungenerously planned living room space. It also allows voice-control, but I’ve been too shy to try it.

  Because of the unfortunate way my cousin perished, the TV channels took a special interest in the footage. The accident was shown on all the national news except for a channel that only showed cat videos and people who had skateboarding accidents.

  At first, they shared some accurate information about my cousin’s identity, age, and the location of the accident. Then such details began to blur out. They used the footage of his demise whenever they seemed to need a two-minute-long filler content. My cousin kept on dying in different countries. He was once fifteen, once twenty-four, and twice nineteen when he died.

  He was usually killed between the dreaded world affairs and cheerful local news. My cousin had to die again between a refugee crisis and the pigeon beauty contest. He turned into an anonymous young man who went by many names. He was riding his motorbike all around the world, looking for the next overpass to get killed on.

  My uncle and aunt couldn’t take it anymore and they quickly found out that there was nothing they could do about it. They packed their TV and shipped it to me.

  Next year, they bought an even smarter one. They could control it with small hand gestures, and they found it easier than screaming at it. They also said they never ever wanted to feel cold again after having to identify my cousin’s body in the morgue.

  And yet, they got an air conditioner the next summer, when an unexpected heatwave struck. And I had to buy a fan.

  The evening news tonight shows the footage from an accident where two bus churches crashed into each other. No one got seriously injured but both congregations immediately started punching, kicking, and biting each other after having taken a brief moment to make sure that they were still alive and well. The news ends with the police chief asking citizens to cease the blindfolded driving rituals, which have become a common practice amongst various sects of bus churches.

  I turn off the telly after having pushed all the wrong buttons. Then I put on my topcoat, check myself in the mirror, and see if I look any better in it if I properly raise my eyebrows. My reflection seems passable, ignoring the fact that I smell like a piece of wet clothing that was left inside the washing machine for two days.

  I walk around the house in my topcoat, trying to ignore the ghost for her own good, and condition my hair with some wax.

  My phone also informs me of numerous missed calls and unread messages from my ex-colleagues whom I left in the bar for a greater cause. I ignore them for the moment. Their memory gets stale quickly. It feels like an unwanted household item that I’d been meaning to dump for a long time, like an iron or an apple slicer.

  I text my father to announce my coming the next day. “I’ve taken a few days off of work,” I say before I book my flight. Trying to ignore the floating flip-flop in the air, I order a burger. One of the persons who somehow initiated the accident that killed my cousin was a chef with bipolar disorder. When interrogated, he was going to put the blame on the vocational pressure he was dealing with. He would say that he felt like an artist who was expected to paint three perfect paintings every two minutes, and his obsession with cooking the best edible thing had become unbearable. He was at least right about his analogy in terms of the time he was given to create a masterpiece: he was flipping burgers in a grill kiosk that was open from 11 PM until 5 AM with a long line of impatient drunks waiting outside.

  I want to turn my head and ask the ghost if she’s hungry but the medium said that I should not. Luckily, my order arrives before the loneliness can sink in.

  A Small Family Reunion

  I t’s been two days since I bought an old topcoat and quit my job. The odd flipflop was still floating in the air by the time I left home to head to the airport.

  The flight was bumpy, and my shoes pinched my feet, which made things even less pleasant. My body was also enthusiastic about having a panic attack in the air, but eventually it got distracted after I put some pasta into it. The panic turned into boredom, as it has in many aspects of my life.

  After we land, I turn on my mobile phone to inform my father that I’ll be home in an hour. I hop on a tram at the airport, hop off it when it grinds to a halt at the right stop, and walk down the street where my parents’ old house stands.

  The scenery that I remember hasn’t changed, save for a new fast food restaurant and a plump seagull that zooms by me. It’s common knowledge that seagulls consider flying a last resort as they have a habit of taking casual strolls and occasionally screaming in seagull language, and this particular individual is no different. I stop to turn around and walk after it. The seagull seems indifferent to its stalker. Our parade of man and seagull goes on for two minutes while I’m trying to adjust my pace to keep the distance. All that I want at this very moment in my life, is to find out where a seagull is walking to. Dedication works in funny ways regardless of the outcome. We turn around the corner, and after a moment of pause, the seagull flies away, shitting over everything while airborne.

  I backtrack to my parents’ house, which hasn’t changed either. It’s still where I would like it to be. I’ve learned to appreciate the stillness. You never know where momentum may take you or what would happen to you if you lost it.

  Soon after I knock on the door, my smiling mother pushes it open. She quickly climbs up on a small kitchen ladder to hug me. I see my father right beside her, waiting for his turn to greet me. Unlike the house, they’ve changed. They’ve both shrunken down to one third my size, which is much smaller than the last time I saw them.

  Both my parents have been diagnosed with a condition that serious looking humans in scrubs could not really explain. Although they both used to be very tall with wide shoulders and a thunder-like bass voice, they’ve started shrinking in a perfectly pro
portional manner. It’s a curious case as it’s nothing like what serious humans in lab coats observed in the event of crippled telomeres. No organ failure, no deformed bone structure, and no signs of unusual cell formations.

  It was a perfect symphony of two bodies shrinking, including their skin and bones, in a perfectly symmetrical way. Despite all the technical brainstorming, literature scanning, and further testing with prototype machinery, neither people in scrubs nor people in lab coats have been able to determine when their shrinking will end.

  My parents have been perfectly healthy since the diagnosis, as proven by some painful tests, except for my father’s snoring and my mother’s low blood sugar. And yet, they keep on shrinking and watching telly games before they go to sleep after my mother puts in her little earplugs.

  Before I get a chance to start a conversation, they scream at once in joy. “Have you heard the news?” they ask in unison. I tell them that I have not. I was stalking a seagull down the street. What happened? “Someone just got a bus ticket for The Trip,” they reply, again in unison. We run to the living room to see the flashing news.

  All channels, except for the one showing only cat videos and skateboarding accidents, have stopped their broadcast streaming to show a woman who claims to have found a bus ticket in her pocket when she was looking for her keyring. It appears to be a small piece of paper, no bigger than a matchbox, with a very basic vectoral bus illustration on it. And that’s all there is. We’ve seen many crooks claiming to have received their tickets to seek attention to satisfy their ill needs. However, this woman, a mother of two, tears her ticket up and tramples on it to make sure that the paper is dead. She looks right at the camera pointing at her pocket from which she pulled out the ticket. And she pulls out another one. She does it again and again and again. Tickets appear in her curly hair, inside her boots, in her bra, and soon after in her all pockets which were all meticulously checked by the dazed reporter on live broadcast. After destroying numerous tickets, she collapses as she’s gasping, and pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of her mouth.

  The Trip was announced in a dream while I was having pasta. The first bus ticket was delivered while I was busy stalking a seagull. I seem to be hungry or dumb when good and exciting things happen. But if it’s an unpleasant occasion, I have to be there. Like the time I was eight years old and saw a body because I had a sore throat. They’d taken the body to the small health clinic in a station wagon, wrapped in a bed sheet, hoping that he was still alive. We were waiting outside for my appointment with my father. He was an old man, seemingly asleep. That’s what I’d thought until I heard the screams.

  “I knew we would need it!” says my father as we watch the commentaries. “It’ll be a mess for those without a bus. Her ticket doesn’t even say where the bus will leave from.”

  “But they said they were going to arrange busses for everyone. I think this is proof,” grumbles my mother.

  “But they don’t have busses like the one that we have,” says my father.

  My parents have been together for longer than they remember, for reasons unknown to me and especially to themselves. It’s been one of the reasons why most of my good memories in this household are still frames. Where there was momentum, there were snarls, estrangement, curses, and the toxic silence.

  Both my parents are small enough to fit in the armchair by the fireplace and yet they’re sitting on separate couches, which they have to climb on as if they’re mounting a stallion. Having argued with passion for decades, they came to repel each other like mispositioned industrial-size magnets. However, their arguments seem to have toned down greatly which is probably because they gave up on each other some time ago.

  The reporter is trying to talk the ticket bearer into tearing her ticket up once more to see where it will come out of this time. The lady declines. My parents, who have been captivated by news of The Trip, are waggling their little feet in excitement. My father taps himself on the head and tells me that he’s sorted it all out. He has always bragged about sorting things out and, indeed, he’s always sorted things out in his own way. For instance, he bought me and my mother bicycles after he’d gotten drunk and crashed his car into a hotdog cart.

  Despite all that happened, my parents have united in shrinking. They go shopping for children’s’ clothes and have them fixed by a tailor.

  “Come and see our bus!” says my father. I nod and follow my parents into their garage. The house has been installed with many platforms, planks, and ladders for my parents’ convenience. Fortunately, they’re still tall enough to open doors, which is what my father does to lead me through the storage room and into the garage. He turns on the light with the crane that he uses for this job and I find myself looking at the smallest bus that I’ve ever seen.

  It’s a brand-new white coach bus with tinted windows and luggage compartments. Slightly higher and longer than a sedan, it looks like a perfect model. My father gently taps on the bus with his cane and the smooth metal clinks back. He then rushes to open the front door to get in and turn on the lights. My mother’s standing still with pursed lips and crossed arms. My father urges me to take a good look inside. I circle around the bus to take a good look inside. The interior seems cosy with wide leather seats providing plenty of legroom, seat screens, and a restroom. There’s also a small microwave, a mini fridge, and a hot water dispenser. My father knocks on his driver’s window to get my attention. He starts the engine with a grin and the small engine pulsates.

  My mother does not look amused, she rarely does. She tells me that my father sold the other house that they had to finance his toy. My father gets off the bus to run back to me. With a wide smile on his shrinking face, he asks me how I’ve found it. He tells me he came up with the idea right after the man in the baggy suit appeared in his dream. He rushed to a real estate agent, not before he had a cup of tea and checked the recent house listings and called all the companies making busses afterwards. “Pay no mind to the ungrateful!” says my father, swinging his little cane. He says that billions will be trampling each other to death at the bus stops, stepping on heads, torsos, and noses. And while those human-made towers are rising up to the sky, my father will be enjoying his breakfast with a hard-boiled egg before he takes the wheel. And he shall let my mother take any seat that she would like, like the proper gentleman he is. My mother declares that she won’t be serving him any coffee and warns him to watch out for hotdog carts.

  After the family dinner, we sit by the fireplace that has never been lit while we’re watching the newsflash. More and more people have found their bus tickets and they seem eager to tell the world about it. No one seems to look for their tickets though, they seem to find them by instinct once they appear in their pockets, glove boxes of their cars, cupboards, under their pillows, or attached to the beaks of their hens.

  We scatter around the room, lying on the couches in a vegetable state right after dinner, just like we used to when I’d lived with my parents. Back then, these were my favourite moments as they were both pacified by insulin spikes. These were my lucky strike moments for they were too tired to argue. I could enjoy my favourite series without any screaming or cursing, if not without my father snoring.

  The way I see it, the perfect marriage is about being able to have the exact same life as you had before, but this time being married. Anything else would be asking for too much.

  I like my parents in my own way. I like them from afar and I never fail to call them on Wednesday evenings. Our conversations on the phone are usually ended after having asked questions on a checklist, but that’s all we need.

  This is a moment that I’m happy to reanimate and remember, under the flickering bright white lamp, on a hard couch, with a bloated stomach and mild abdominal pain, watching mediocre stuff on telly with my parents.

  This is heaven. I text my friend, telling him that heaven could only be a collection of memories that we find pleasant for our own ridiculous reasons. He is quick to reply, telling me
that I’m likely to have a very small collection. I’m quicker to disagree. I’ve had my numerous trivial moments of ecstasy and I’d love to keep them with me forever. I’ll just need to edit some small rough details.

  You cannot forge memories for your viewing pleasure. The master copies will haunt you, says my friend.

  Watch and learn, I say.

  As I yawn on the couch, my father clears his throat and asks me if I’ve arranged my bus ride. When he hears that I have not, he nods and goes silent for a moment.

  “I know that our bus is too small for you to fit in,” my father says. “But I have this trailer designed. They say that it can be built in two weeks. I think you might want to see it.” He sends me a few rendered images of a small trailer in a text. I have to admit that the interior is striking. A large bed, air conditioners, a small but practical kitchen, a big TV screen, a shower, a meticulous design that crams a whole cosy apartment into a nutshell. A comfortable box for The Trip with my parents at the wheel.

  “The bus has a high drive power, so don’t you worry about pulling your trailer,” says my father who misinterprets my silence.

  “That’s very kind of you Dad,” I say. “But perhaps, you could have a more pleasant trip if you don’t need to tow me around all the time. I’ll find my own bus to move on.”

  My parents are disappointed. They’ve often talked about whether I would ignore them and make my own plans for The Trip. They say I’ve always been distant. Obviously, I’ve been a sealed-box and it usually sounds like I am merely doing my duty whenever I call my parents. They tell me that they were convinced that, for one reason or another, I would find an excuse and get on another bus, ignoring my poor old shrinking parents.