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by Hakan Günday

  “Don’t worry,” said the doctor who came to my side, “You’re going to get better. Then we’ll send you off to Istanbul. I gave my word to Bedri Bey.”

  But the doctor wouldn’t be able to keep his word. I never went back to Istanbul, let alone got better. For a person without a family, his city of residence no longer held much significance for the state. Social Services were ubiquitous, and no one thought I should go back anywhere. I’d also unfortunately survived long enough to turn eighteen. With myself … there was no space left for anyone else in my life of eighteen years.

  A suitcase with my things arrived from Istanbul a few days later, and I was put on a white van. My destination was decided. A hospital in Gölbaşı. A bed in a thirty-four-person ward, next to Şeref … I’d been there four months and Şeref was still talking:

  “So when exactly is it never too late to turn back? I mean, where exactly is that? Because not turning back is also fun up to a point, right? Don’t you think?”

  4 Naturally formed volcanic rock pillars in central Anatolia, used as cave dwellings in 7 AD by persecuted Christians, a major tourist attraction in present-day Turkey.

  5 Ahad is daha backward, Turkish for more.

  6 A religious holiday or feast, on the first day of which relatives and officials alike visit each other and pay their respects to their elders in the form of hand-kissing and pleasantries.

  7 Greeting Turkish nationalists prefer to the widespread greeting of kissing both cheeks.

  CHIAROSCURO

  One of the four basic techniques of Renaissance painting. Signifies the maximal emphasis of light and dark to separate them sharply from each other. The prominence of the clash between light and shadow results in deeper perception of depth and gives dimension to form.

  I’d hidden myself away from everyone and locked all my doors from the inside. The 317 hours I’d spent in hell had been dormant for three years to surface again in that government office and suck me back in. It really was odd that all the commas of my life, that is, its turning points, had to come about in government offices. Maybe I had some sort of allergy to governmental chambers, I really don’t know. All I knew was that I’d really assumed that I had left that black hole behind and been under the delusion that I could go on living as though nothing had happened. When in fact life for me had ended among those rotting corpses and I hadn’t known it. My efforts to go on breathing along with other people had only lasted three years. No matter how much I tried, I hadn’t been able to race fast enough toward the future, and the past caught up with me. In the end I found myself being repulsed by people and stealing Şeref’s capsules of morphine sulfate.

  Unlike me, madness wasn’t the only one of Şeref’s problems. He also had brain cancer that he deemed “meant to be!” He had three delightful tumors playing patty-cake with metastasis. These masses, blinding Şeref’s eyes with the light they released into his brain, were sure to kill him. But they wanted to make sure he suffered enough before they did. That was why they flooded twenty-one-year-old Şeref’s body with pains of unendurable weight. The pains would turn Şeref into a submarine, and together they would sink into the depths of his bed. Şeref was given thirty-milligram capsules of morphine sulfate every twelve hours to keep him afloat, but then I butted in. I’d seen what those little blue capsules did to Şeref, and I wanted the same.

  When I met morphine sulfate, it was addiction at first sight! All I had to do was look into Şeref’s eyes from where I lay as though I was listening to him. In a brief time, our transaction turned into routine. The nurse who brought Şeref’s capsules didn’t check underneath his tongue, so I could retrieve my share of morphine sulfate after she left. Despite the fact that it was covered with Şeref’s saliva, a second mouth capsule was no less effective. Naturally it took a while for him to understand that he was supposed to put the capsule on the stand between us, instead giving it to me directly, but we were all partaking in the initiation period. Şeref had been initiated to me too. He talked to me but didn’t try to touch. In return for the capsules he deposited on the stand, he got a constant listener who stared fixedly at his face as though he were listening. Having someone to listen to him mattered more to Şeref than suppressing the pain flooding out of his skull. In the end each got what he wanted. That meant that we weren’t all that insane. Not all that insane …

  The reason it wasn’t thought a medical necessity to give me a single one of the morphine sulfate capsules produced on earth in multitudes was because Emre, the young psychiatrist appointed me, didn’t believe I had any aches. He was absolutely certain that I had no chronic pain. But I was really chronic all over!

  Thanks to Azim the archive freak, who’d included my hospital records from Kandalı in my files and painstakingly passed on this official legacy to Bedri, Emre had the majority of information about my condition. Bedri, whom I’m sure must have felt like a betrayed lover, short of hurling my things out of the window of my room on the third floor of the dorm, had been quick to mail every document concerning me to the hospital in a rage of similar vein. So neither Emre nor his young colleagues, despite being informed of my little adventure with the dead at the foot of Kandağ, thought it possible that such an experience could cause maddening pain. That was predictable really, since they’d never been confronted with someone rescued from underneath a bunch of corpses. So to them I was more like someone rescued from underneath rubble after an earthquake.

  Emre’s diagnosis, for instance, was definitive:

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder, for sure!”

  That was what he told his colleagues. In my presence too! And they would at first nod and then rest index finger against jaw in pretense of thought. And the most impatient would start the show named Contradiction Just for Kicks:

  “But the symptoms have acute properties, no? It’s been three years since the occurrence, but it still seems to be in the acute phase …”

  Another would up and start relaying his own dream:

  “I believe it can be approached as a subtype of trauma-related social anxiety disorder …”

  But no one liked this argument and the chorus kicked in.

  “Hmm …” they said, in unison.

  Then there was a solo. By a different voice …

  “We’re going to Chez Le Bof when work lets out, just so you know. Emre has a crush on the waitress, looks like he’s buying!”

  Since the chain was complete, it was Emre’s turn again:

  “I don’t have a crush, I just like the way she takes that cloth napkin and puts it in my lap.”

  Chorus:

  “Hmm!”

  The one with the invalidated dream gave one last attempt:

  “You have social masculinity disorder!”

  But no one cared for or laughed at his little joke and dispersed to different corners of the ward in a figure out of a synchronized dance. After all, there were the ones waiting for a chance to bash their skulls against the wall so they could break it open. True lunatics! Although as a case I was interesting enough, I was no study anyone would spend hours on.

  In truth, whatever disorder it was I had, its symptoms were very clear: I could touch no one, let no one touch me, and be alone with no one. I had to either be all by myself or in a crowd. Otherwise I’d start to shake and scream before being suffused by pain that clogged every one of my pores. Aside from that, there was another significant detail: I didn’t speak.

  But that was more of a preference. I could talk if I wanted, I might even never shut up, but I had no more interest in expressing myself. Anyway, how many more times was I supposed to? How many more times was I supposed to part my lips to say the same old things like a politician attending rally after rally or a beggar boy imploring with the same words a thousand times a day?

  For three years I’d spoken mouthfuls and in the end found myself in a loony bin. It would appear that loquaciousness hadn’t done me much good. It didn’t have any other use than to tire out my tongue. Plus you couldn’t
pick a fight if you never talked. Because every word meant a fight. Those who claimed “In the beginning was the Word” were right, because I was sure at this point that fighting came before everything in this world. As many words as there were fights! The ward was filled with savage boxers trying to land punches made of curses from where they lay. A whole bunch of crazies who’d split their brains to hold one lobe in their left hand and the other in their right woke, pretended to be alive, and slept inside one circle.

  But you couldn’t say we were that badly off. The psychiatrists’ gang that surrounded us, who were yet of insufficient age to have reached the budget for opening one’s own practice, tried to be as creative as possible in the treatments and discharge us as soon as they could. For instance, my treatment in Gölbaşı went as far as to entail making me observe a birth. Emre, who hadn’t covered much ground with his PTSD theory, had decided to go with the flow completely, crossing over to the world’s most scientific method, trial and error. Of course having me watch a birth had been Emre’s idea, but there was a problem with the application. It wasn’t very easy to find a pregnant woman who’d volunteer for something like that. Since there wasn’t someone around dying to have some lunatics watch her as she gave birth, I had to make do with recorded images. Maybe it was in everyone’s best interests that this technicality kept me from witnessing any births. I was sure I might feel an irresistible urge to shove the newborn right back where he came from.

  Emre, however, was stubborn. With a single-mindedness that took even me by surprise, he’d relayed the matter to the administration of the zoo in Ankara and asked them for help, as he thought it absolutely imperative that I observe a birth. And so I started setting out on tours of the zoo to watch wild boars or llamas giving birth. All this effort was spent, in Emre’s words, to reintroduce me to the vitality I’d become detached from. And to figure out whichever point it was where vitality and I had become detached, even if I was unable to, and glue us back together …

  Alongside all that I was also on meds, of course. Antidepressants heavy enough to numb most of my brain and turn me into a voodoo doll … My days, in fact, worked exactly according to the workings of a voodoo doll. Of course it wasn’t as if someone else felt pain when I was pricked. My curse was of a different kind. My right hand, for example, hurt all day, and in the evening something bad inevitably happened to it. I’d either punch the wall until it bled all over or skin it with my teeth. Sometimes it was the back of my neck that hurt all night until, in the morning, I was either bitten in that spot by a mosquito or slapped on my way to the toilet by some dickwad who couldn’t control himself. Ultimately it appeared that my body, with the help of the meds, saw the future and sent me signals in the form of those aches. Yet I could also see Emre’s efforts to solve the matter through actual therapy, not just chemicals. I could see everything. In any case Emre was also starting to see the light. Especially since my blood test results started showing traces of Şeref’s capsules, he’d had a mind that I might not be as sick as I looked. After that he switched Şeref’s station to get him as far away from me as possible. But Şeref could still find a way to give his most loyal audience the payment for listening …

  I wasn’t off the hook for my thieving of drugs, however. Declaring that we were on to the next step in my treatment, Emre ordered me to scoop up my own excrement with my hands and study it. Its stink wasn’t all that different from those of the rotting corpses. Although I wasn’t quite sure what my excrement was supposed to reintroduce me to, I was trying to do as I was told. Either that or I was hallucinating and doing this in secret by myself in a toilet cabin. Then I’d wash my hands and go to the hospital library.

  I actually spent the majority of my days there. I read all the time. But it never seemed enough, as my eyes never went bad. The library had been founded with books donated by all the psychiatrists who passed through that building. Most of it was on art, the rest on politics and philosophy. Perhaps for the sake of doing archeological excavations in the pit that was humanity, the psychiatrists had abandoned, along with their books, their dreams of becoming politicians or philosophers.

  I saw Da Vinci’s The Last Supper in one of those books and read the whole story. Since I was crazy, it reminded me of the photograph in From Kandalı to the World. This was actually a benefit to being crazy. Because for the sane, the life passing by in front of their very eyes didn’t evoke shit. They only believed what they saw. Whatever it was they saw, that was life to them. It was what it was …

  Then one day, I came across them in a book I was riffling through: the Buddhas of Bamiyan … Almost the entirety of the sculpture-related book was dedicated to Buddhism and those two Buddha statues. I’m sure no one who’d read that book to this day could have shed as many tears as I did as I turned its pages. I carried those two gigantic statues in my pocket, Dordor and Harmin in my dreams, and Cuma inside my very bones …

  I should admit I went a bit far in my relationship with that book. I tore out its pages and spread them underneath my bedsheets to spend a few nights with those two statues, thinking of Cuma … Unfortunately, the nurse noticed them when she was changing the sheets. Then she went and ratted me out to Emre. He in turn told me to eat the pages featuring photographs of the Buddha statues. I couldn’t disobey Emre. I ate twelve pages and so, in my next shit-monitoring session, was able to witness the statues rising up out of my palms.

  So you couldn’t say my life wasn’t entertaining. For instance, there was this pair of compasses in the pen box in Emre’s room where I saw him for forty minutes every Monday, which, in my opinion, was extremely interesting. Although there was an aide with us in every session, since in the first months I couldn’t be alone in the room with Emre, I could now manage with just the open door. I could see the people in the hallway from where I sat and relax, remembering that I was among people. But what interested me most was that mysterious pair of compasses in that pen box. Perhaps Emre was a secret child that liked drawing circles in his time off or had some circular theory he was developing in the psychiatry field, I can’t say. Those pair of compasses sat there and waited to be used by me.

  On yet another Monday, the second I sat down in front of Emre, I just plucked the pair of compasses out of the pen box. Fearing I might harm myself or him, Emre stood up immediately, but by the time he walked around the table to reach me, I’d gotten hold of a piece of paper and started drawing the image I’d visualized the first time I’d seen the compasses. Becoming aware that I had no desire to stab the compasses into anything other than the paper, Emre stopped and watched.

  The first thing I did was close the legs of the compasses all the way and draw three quarters of the smallest circle possible. Without moving the sharp end I’d fixed right in the middle of the sheet, I cranked the compass slightly wider to draw another circle made of broken lines. After I’d rotated it fully I opened it a bit more and drew a third circle, again broken. After that came the fragments of a fourth and a fifth circle, each wider than the preceding one. Understanding that the outcome was a circular labyrinth, Emre sat in his seat and shook his head in wonder. Our eyes met for a moment, and we smiled at each other. Then I drew the sixth circle and moved on to the outer wall of the labyrinth. I left a narrow gap in the seventh circle that became the exit of my labyrinth. Finally I joined the integrated circles with short lines in order to form corridors. Only then did I remove the sharp end of the compasses from the sheet to proudly contemplate my work. I wasn’t selfish. I wished to make Emre proud too and spoke for the first time since I’d come to the hospital:

  “Go on, solve it!”

  Pretending that hearing me utter a coherent sentence hadn’t taken him aback, he took the piece of paper from me and pulled a pen from his breast pocket to start working on entering through the single door of the labyrinth to get to the small circle in the center. I, on the other hand, glanced around the room to dwell on other things and saw Rastin everywhere I looked. And also the spiral hierarchy scheme …
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br />   “There!” said Emre and showed me the paper. He’d figured out the labyrinth, although not without some difficulty.

  I still said “congratulations,” so I wouldn’t get him down. He was so pleased to finally have a modicum of communication with me that he went as far as to say, “Thanks,” and extend his hand to shake.

  And although I did my very best not to stab him in his extended hand with the compasses, I wasn’t successful. Then I did what I should and apologized.

  Though Emre said “That’s OK!” as he clutched his bleeding hand, this move on my part got me locked in the isolation room for two days. That was how I was able to understand that the duration Yadigar had kept me in that holding cell for had a standing in the science of psychiatry! Forty-eight hours of isolation was the cure for any ailment.

  For me, the isolation room was more appealing than anywhere and anything because its isolation enabled me to close my eyes and return into my body. Becoming an astronaut inside myself, doing the cellwalk, not the moonwalk, was amazing! I even thanked Emre when I got out. What I said exactly was:

  “Thank you for sending me to myself … By the way, I have a recommendation. I propose that, rather than public restrooms, public cells be placed in the streets. Anyone who wishes should be able to go inside and close himself off. Just like in restroom cabins, there’d be a red sign in the lock signaling that it’s occupied. Then other people could leave things like food or water through a hole in the door to show their support for the person who wants to be alone. Wouldn’t that be great? I think it would be fantastic!”

  Through Emre didn’t consider my proposal, he smiled with contentment at hearing me speak fluently and attempted another handshake with his bandaged hand.

  At that I asked, “Do you have some gloves?” After a short search through the hospital, I was presented a pair of leather gloves and was able to shake hands with those on. It really was a grand day! I’d made a tremendous leap in the fifth month of my treatment and was able to touch a person, even if through fabric!