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by Hakan Günday

  Perhaps that was why Rastin sustained this spiral scheme of seating. This way the people remained unaware that they were part of an ultradictatorship. After all, they were almost face-to-face with their leader, certainly on the same level. It was like their leader was one of the people! Plus when you looked from a distance, they appeared to be a closely connected group, gathered together, with no trace of a hierarchy to be seen. If Rastin had asked me for a stool, for instance, that would have been different. Rastin could have sat on the stool while everyone else sat on the ground and the thirty-centimeter discrepancy in height would have exposed the dictatorship to the naked eye. Instead Rastin insisted on the spiral dictatorship that was entirely his invention and inserted this innovative ruling scheme into political science as a class that could conceivably be taken at least four hours a week, although it was now unknown.

  Of course, as with any structure, this too had its drawbacks. For instance, the context of the demands issuing from the outer rungs of the spiral deteriorated or altered by the time they reached the center. Or an order issuing from the center would have been modified completely by time it made it to the end of the spiral. But ultimately we were talking ultradictatorship. Due to the Chinese whispers mode of communication, it was completely natural and acceptable for such divergences to occur in the leader’s orders or the public’s demands. Compared to the level of communication my father and I had, the transmission of information in the shed was practically telepathy! In the meantime Ahad had returned and right away asked:

  “They give you any trouble?”

  “No,” I had said. What else could I say? He wouldn’t have understood anyhow. Or, I wouldn’t have been able to make him understand, anyhow …

  The morning of the twelve-day anniversary of our reservoirland, I took my place in front of the monitor to see the women gathered in a corner facing the wall, eyes closed. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on. For at the other end of the reservoir, the weakling that usually assumed the tail end of the spiral was totally nude and under barrage of tens of fists and feet. All of this was happening so fast I couldn’t think of anything to do. I looked at Rastin. He was just watching. As always.

  Several times I cried, “Stop it!” but he wouldn’t listen.

  It was like he couldn’t hear me. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to lose any goods. What I was watching wasn’t one of the shows involving people whipping or slapping each other or doing push-ups until they were out of breath. They had the man shoved up against the corner where the wall met the ground and were kicking him like they meant to bury him in that very spot. I had to find a way to stop it immediately. The first thing I could think of was to kill the power in the reservoir.

  And only then did Rastin pull himself together and shout, “Okay, Gaza! It is finished!”

  When I turned the power back on, I saw the weakling on the ground in his own blood, trying to breathe, and yelled at Rastin, “Why’d you do that?” But he was unruffled.

  “Not me!” he said and gestured to the people around him. “They did it!”

  “They wouldn’t do anything unless you told them to!”

  He shook his head several times first, slowly, then, “They would,” he said. “They would …”

  Then he ordered the owners of the fists and kicks that were flying around a moment ago to help the man, who shuddered with every breath, to stand and to clean the blood off him. They did so, listlessly as though they were gathering up pieces of a broken machine.

  “Tell me!” I shouted at Rastin. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” he demurred at first, but then told me what that nothing was …

  It had all begun with the weakling claiming that he could sneak up and disarm me next time I opened the lid of the reservoir. “I’ll take care of the kid, take the gun from him, and this whole ordeal can finally end!” he had said.

  But the others countered that such action was highly risky, that everything was under Rastin’s control and that surely someone would come fetch them soon and send them on their way. At that the weakling accused them of cowardice. Accusing the public of cowardice, the ultimate taboo in ultradictatorship, had earned him the punishment he had deserved!

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. I just stared. I watched the people. I watched the man they dressed and dropped in a corner like a sack, the women who weren’t the least bit surprised by what they saw when they opened their eyes and turned around, Rastin who sat in the center of the reservoir, and the spiral that formed around him. Then I looked back at the weakling. I think he also looked at me. Or I was imagining things. I printed out the article I was writing about reservoirland and shut down the computer. The screen went dark and buried the ultradictatorship below ground …

  I spent the next two days penning corrections onto the article. Perhaps only to keep myself from going to the shed. But on the third day when I could no longer help myself, and turned on the monitor, the first thing I saw was the motionless body of the weakling. They had covered his face with his jacket and laid him down in front of a camera so I could see him. I had turned on the microphone and expelled the first syllable of, “Is he asleep?” when Rastin’s broken-spectacled face covered one-sixth of the monitor and spoke:

  “Dead!”

  For a second I wanted to ask, “Are you sure?” Another second later I changed my mind. It occurred to me to say, “Fuck!” but I didn’t say that either. I wanted to talk about coming forty-third place in all of Turkey or my mother wanting to bury me as soon as I was born, but that didn’t happen, either. At some point I even wanted to ask, “Where’s Felat?” That definitely didn’t happen.

  Left at a loss for words by all these things that didn’t happen, I got up and went over to the reservoir lid. I went down on my knees and opened the lock with the key in my pocket. Instead of the world’s most beautiful girl, a thin man came out of the reservoir. And his exit was exactly as he’d described to the others! I brought out his body from underneath the lid that I opened two hand spans’ width and went to call my father. He was drinking beer.

  “What?” he said.

  Not knowing the real words for anything that happened aboveground, I said, “Something’s happened. Come!”

  He stood and began walking to the shed. He was a step ahead of me. I was on his left, looking at his swinging left hand. Once upon a time, I used to play a game on the pavement of the town’s only main street. I’d come up about a step’s length away to women walking ahead of me and try to catch their swinging hands with my dick. It wasn’t hard at all. In fact, it would be such a casual collision that some women would apologize. And I, flustered by the momentary contact, would say, “That’s all right!” and keep walking. What I wanted to bump into my father’s hand as we passed through the garden was my right hand. Perhaps our hands would collide and hold on. We might even walk into the shed hand in hand. No matter who I was, what I was, he wouldn’t let go of my hand, he would hang on. But none of that happened.

  Upon his first step into the shed, he saw that the dark purple lips that left no space for anything else on the man’s face and cursed. First at the body that lay at his feet, then at me! After all it had been my task to watch the goods. To boot, it had been my idea to place cameras in every corner of the reservoir! That left me as the sole culprit. I had put us out for nothing! Suddenly I thought of Dordor:

  “Whatever I owe, I’ll pay!” I said. That shut Ahad up. He inhaled and exhaled a few times and scratched his head. Possibly he was calculating for how long he would have to suspend my pay. He had made it to the week’s worth of growth on his neck when he abruptly stopped. He must be done with the calculation. We were into the month of March. That was why his voice was cold. Not because he was a monster.

  “Go, bury it!” he said, and pointed in the direction of the arbor.

  It took me two hours to bury the weakling. One hour to dig the hole, another to cover it. My father had buried Cuma the same way years ago. I ha
d even asked, “What if someone comes?” and he had replied, “We’re burying a hole here, not a corpse, don’t worry!”

  Turns out that really was the case. Digging a hole and filling it was a matter of two hours. Burying a hole. If it had been a matter of burying a corpse, if I had stopped to consider for a single moment that what I was burying was a person, it probably would have taken ages. Especially when the person initiated into the earth was one that had died by my hand …

  Perhaps that was how my father had stayed calm when he had buried Cuma. Because he hadn’t killed him personally. Although he was directly responsible for the death, but not the hand that killed him … like me. I wasn’t the one that killed the weakling. No matter that I was utterly responsible for his death, I was neither one of the ones who beat him nor one of the ones that watched the beating in silence. I was the same thing that had sent Rastin to prison instead of master’s studies at Istanbul University: fate! I was fate! I was the sum of the living conditions of those people. And that sum came out to zero. A colossal zero, large enough to swallow us all! A zero as large as the rings of Saturn!

  That was why I wouldn’t be the one to hear that weak man’s voice in my ear for the rest of my life. It was Rastin! He now had a Cuma of his own. A scrawny man that would come to life for all the times he died and make all the deserted islands of the world hell for Rastin. For the ones that beat him were deaf! Their eardrums and their consciences were long perforated. The weakling’s voice would bounce off all those deaf ears and sooner or later find a way into Rastin’s mind. I knew all this because I remembered killing Cuma. I hadn’t gotten out of bed just because I was mad at father, and so I hadn’t turned on the air conditioner. Rastin wasn’t any different. He hadn’t intervened in the brutal beating of the weakling because he hated his people. So he could scoop up all his people in one move and toss them into a bottomless pit of guilt.

  But Rastin had miscalculated. Because that reservoir had had no room for any guilt except his. If there had been, they wouldn’t have kept their peace back when Rastin and his friends were going to prison and dying for them. Even if they were unable to make anything resembling a sound, they could have at least opened their mouths and puked on the streets that a handcuffed Rastin was being dragged over! At the very least they could have done that. But I couldn’t recall any news of collective puking in Afghanistan. Therefore the dead voice of the weakling would follow only Rastin. Because it had nowhere else to go. In the end, ghosts knew it all. They knew who was a wall of flesh and who was human. Some they passed through, and into some ears, they whispered everything they knew.

  1 Turkish for “help,” also a boy’s name.

  2 A play on Gaza’s name, which in Turkish means “crusader.”

  3 The Turkish national anthem, based on the poem by Mehmet Akif Ersoy, a poet, academic, and champion of the Turkish War of Liberty.

  The Power of Power [1st draft]

  Crisis as a Source of Power [Crisis: A Political Socket?? Fuck that! Not scientific at all!]

  INTRODUCTION

  There are two types of information in the world: information you seek to find and information that finds you. If information seeks to find one, it has without doubt been produced for marketing something. Either a political lie is being hustled [not scientific! Find another word!] as truth or a new cell phone needs selling. Furthermore, information that finds one is soiled from all the slithering it has done and stinks of shit [take that out not scientific!]. Consequently, the only information of value is the information that is sought to be found. This is what should be trusted.

  The information gathered from the experiment in the reservoir may, by exactly this reasoning, be accepted for fact. Because the Researcher has invested extraordinary [don’t flatter yourself! Flatter yourself with scientific terms!] effort in gathering said information. Fluctuating information [you said there were two kinds of information? Say this is a subtype!] is information of which the truth and validity constantly varies with time. For example, information pertaining to humanity is fluctuating information. [A person is fluctuating information for another!] Especially information pertaining to close relations. Meaning friends, relatives, etc…. [redundant, cut this bit!] Therefore, the Researcher has taken the route of considering fluctuating bits of information on a different level and comparing them with information from other sources to test their validity. The other sources are the tools of mass communication.

  Among the sources for this research, besides the tools of mass communication, is the newspaper called From Kandalı to the World. In addition are hundreds [don’t be lazy, list them all!] of websites and TV channels. Lastly, the Researcher, believing that a scientific study must be imbursed by personal observations, has done his part and has had no reservations about reflecting his thoughts on the paper.

  [Pile of shit! Rewrite the whole foreword!]

  ARTICLE

  Bulleted for scientificness. [Take this out!]

  1. A leader who in ordinary times is in communication with his public, retreats into himself in times of crisis and begins withholding information from the people he leads for the sake of avoiding scrutiny later. Another reason for this behavior is to prevent panic and uphold social order, and by extension his authority.

  2. Due to his withdrawal and the strain of crisis, the leader who in ordinary times believes himself to be part of a corporate effort, begins regarding leadership as a personal responsibility. As a result, he begins to consider the time and effort he has extended for his people as a sacrifice. As the crisis is prolonged, the sacrificial feeling brewing inside the leader begins turning into an inflamed indignation against the people. Due to this, the smallest disharmony he experiences with the people he would once “give up a kidney for” causes the inflammation to leap into his realm of thought. This in turn results in the exacting of spontaneous revenges on his “thankless” public.

  3. However, since crisis is still in effect, the public overlooks the leader’s rising authoritarianism and reactions verging on the vengeful, due to its viewing him as its sole savior.

  4. Hence the crisis takes the form of a psychotherapy session where the public suffers the consequences of the leader’s whining, yelling, and defamations.

  5. During the crisis, the dealings with his people are based in self-satisfaction and sexuality. The people’s regard of the leader, on the other hand, is centered on the father figure, bearing a familial aspect. Hence in times of crisis, the leader-public relationship is incestuous. By nature, it is a scandal.

  6. In legitimizing the over-authoritarianism of the leader, the crisis becomes an alternative source of power. It’s imperative that the leader stabilizes his country on the level of “sustainable crisis” so he can profit from this source to the maximum. For this, it’s essential to devise small inner conflicts. The fine line between civil war and inner conflict is the boundary of the crisis’s sustainability. The leader that engenders hundreds of inner conflicts without ever setting off a civil war holds extraordinary power as long as he is able to keep his country walking that fine line.

  7. A leader’s power is measurable by the number of airports, universities, stadiums, squares, boulevards, dams, bridges, and newborns that are named after him while he is still alive.

  8. The leader’s fear of death, which is the meaning of his life, is balanced out by his assurance that his legacy will outlive him, and the psychotherapy session ends on a positive note.

  Appendix 1:

  As can be derived from the aforementioned, the principal task of the people is to treat every leader that reigns over it and enable him to die a peaceful death. This is called the People’s Hospital. In return the leader erects Public Hospitals in service of the people. The branding of those that don’t fulfill the task of treating the leader as traitors may be presented as a new topic for inner conflict put to use in prolonging crisis.

  Appendix 2:

  A country’s entire defense mechanism is formed around the objective t
hat in the case of mass deaths, its only remaining citizen in the world be the leader. According to this, the human race is to be perpetuated by the mating of said world leaders. [??? No observation no experimentation not scientific! Don’t be presumptuous!] Therefore leaders do not say, “It’s either me or him!” They say, “Either you all or me!”

  Sources:

  From Kandalı to the World

  Hundreds of websites [list them! don’t forget the municipality webpage]

  Tens of TV channels

  The reservoir

  Thirty-three Afghanistan citizens

  Fifteen-year-old Gaza [you don’t get to be both researcher and source!]

  [Spiral scheme of leadership]

  [The weakling or the child]

  [COMMAND ←

  DEMAND → ]

  I sat in the arbor, lost in thought. I stared at the spot where I had buried the weakling and asked myself if he might have had a family. Inasmuch I knew the answer! Because he had come from such a place that he must have had at least nine siblings, six children, three grandchildren, and forty-six nephews and nieces. So it didn’t do much good to assume that his parents were no longer alive. He had grown up in a land where people were born in heaps and died by the dozen. And all that he had wished for was to go to a land where people were born alone and died alone. But his journey had ended in Kandalı. And in Kandalı, people were buried as soon as they were born. At least people like me were … then some were stillborn. Such as the weakling … out of the womb of the reservoir he had been delivered stillborn, to be buried and eradicated the same second.

  “Gaza!”

  I turned my head to see my father step into the arbor.