by Ufuk Özden
She always said that those desserts were full of sweet junk and asked me not to eat them. They were meant to be cheap treats for voracious guests. She gave me a plate as well so that you wouldn’t feel offended or something he says. That’s a scheming and manipulative family for you. My friend was indeed skinny. Skinny and tall. He had these long fingers that curled up like a colossal spider’s legs. Basketball balls would look so small in his hands. And he was quite cheerful. He’s always been. His father was hit by an ambulance the moment the family walked out of the hospital after he was born. He survived with lifelong hip pain and had to quit his job which most definitely affected his parents’ financial and emotional well-being. But he never seemed to be affected. Or hungry, when I come to think of it.
Are you doing okay there? he asks.
Affirmative, I say.
If you’re feeling blue, think of what Baco Bobonts would do, he says.
He would be bound to come ferociously, I say. Baco Bobonts was the subject of one of our inside jokes which probably wouldn’t sound amusing to any third parties. In fact, we’ve hardly found it funny ourselves. Baco Bobonts was the stage name of a porn actor that my friend and I discovered on a VHS tape that we’d somehow laid our hands on. He appeared in two short scenes with his conditioned moustache and waxed hair and ‘acted’ without a trace of expression on his face. He wouldn’t even blink. He didn’t have many lines, even by the standards of the porn industry, but the few lines he had were somewhat memorable. “I am bound to come ferociously,” was only one of them.
I yawn, rub my eyes, and eventually fall asleep.
THE VERY NEXT MORNING
T he phone’s ringing. I hear the distant sound of cars and what sounds like a truck moving in reverse. I can tell from the way it beeps. The truck stops and I pick up the phone. It’s an acquaintance of mine that carpools with me in the mornings.
He says the wretched car wouldn’t start. He turned the key many times and yet the engine only briefly sighed. He felt like he should give the car another chance. He tried to listen to the sounds coming from the engine and tried to apply the right amount of pressure to the relevant pedals. The engine sneezed once and died for good. He got out of the car, lifted the hood, inspected a few pipes, nudged the battery, but he didn’t know what else he could do. Then he closed it again and kicked one of the tyres. He puts the blame on new cars having a cover on their engine blocks. I asked him which tyre he kicked. He says he can’t recall all the details but, given the position the car was parked in, it might have been the front-right tyre.
“Does it matter?” he asks. I tell him that it doesn’t. He says we could still meet at the bus stop near my apartment and take a bus together. I agree. He hangs up.
Although the sky’s bright outside, the rays of the sun seem to weaken and sicken as they enter my bedroom through the dirty window. I imagine little photons coughing blood into their tiny tissues. And then there is my carpet, which stinks even worse in the mornings. I inherited it alongside some other pieces of furniture when my grandmother died on a perfectly random day in June. My friend often says that I should have dumped it (meaning the carpet, not my grandmother) a long time ago. He says it smells of cat piss. My grandmother never had a cat to my knowledge, but she had Alzheimer’s. We’ll never know if her medical condition was somehow connected to the scent and we surely wouldn’t want to find out. What we would want to know, though, is what sort of a cat it could have been. My friend says it had to be a white cat.
“White cats are straight from the abyss!” he would say. He would claim that white cats would abhor you and all possible versions of you in every parallel world. I’ve never had the enthusiasm to come up with a counterargument.
I get up, put on my gaudy red work hoodie and set a course for the kitchen to boil some water for tea. The ghost is now texting someone on her mobile phone. Her fingers never stop tapping on the screen. I have no idea where she keeps all her items. Perhaps, somewhere in the flat, she has a ghost stash. She knows the spots that I never check. I’ve got dozens of drawers, boxes, and suitcases that I never use. She might have picked one of those. She’s got the whole of eternity to discover the best spots. And she knows how to keep herself busy. Personally, I have lower expectations. I would have done nothing but remind myself that I had all of eternity so that I no longer had to worry about anything anymore. And occasionally I would sneak into movie theatres on the weekends.
I leave the flat and immediately come to a halt. Could I have left the gas on? I imagine the explosion when I come back home and turn on the light. I saw such footage once. Someone turned on the light and there was a bright flash. Three people were killed. I go back, leaving the door open to let the gas out, and check on my stove. It’s off. My hand goes back into my pocket just to make sure that I really have the key.
I take a brief walk to the bus stop to meet the guy. He immediately begins to curse at his car when he sees me. “It’s not just the engine,” he says. Apparently, the radio is also being funny. He says it’s manageable when he takes a left turn, but if he turns right, he loses the signal. He says it’s very distracting. I nod. Shortly after the bus stops and swallows us both whole.
We’re lucky to have found free seats on the bus. I take the window seat and try not to think of any horrendous accidents like I used to. I’m not supposed to look at the road ahead. What would I do if a truck crashed into our bus? That’s what trucks do, right? Tons of metal making sudden wrong moves. Unlike even slightly good things, the most horrible things happen in an instant.
I need a distraction. “Did you know that today’s my last day at work?” I ask the guy. “I quit.”
He says he wishes he could do the same and asks me what I’ll do next.
“I have a plan,” I say. “I’ll get a job when it’s a job that only I can do.” He smiles.
When we’re ten minutes into our trip, I notice the long line of people with some papers in their hands. They seem neither impatient nor cranky. They seem to smile at each other, in fact. I ask the guy if he knows what they are queuing up for.
“The Trip,” he says, stressing every single letter. He says that it’s perfectly natural for people to sort their documents out and make some arrangements as the departure may – or may not be- nigh, and so such queues were normal. Anyone who’s willing to make any arrangements should have done it a long time ago and moved on with their lives. He says that this is a saddening demonstration of irresponsibility. “What sort of arrangements could you possibly make for The Trip?” I ask. The man in the baggy suit didn’t mention anything that we were supposed to do. “What are they expecting to achieve here?”
“They want to have their names put on the lists, of course. I took care of the paperwork years ago.” He shrugs and chuckles, but the chuckle lags behind the shrug – he never gets the timing right – so he looks like someone who was dropped on his head when he was a baby, on a regular basis.
The busses,” he continues. “Do you remember what the suit man said about leaving on busses? They’re trying to figure out, should The Trip happen, whether they can pick a seat on their bus.” Obviously, there are some idealistic entrepreneurs who are promising to find a way of contacting the man in the dream, so that they can forward seat-related requests to help everyone have a pleasant journey. And how do they hope to contact him? They claim to have spotted an anomaly in the records detected by some radio telescopes the night we all had that dream. They believe that a thorough analysis of the signals can provide them with the means to spot the source of the unusual pattern of signals which are presumably related to the place where the guy in the baggy dark blue suit was speaking from. And they’re confident that they could send a signal regarding people requesting specific seats across the universe.
“Radio signals surely take their time when they travel across the universe,” I say.
“Well,” replies the guy, “they presume that whoever put the man in our dream might have hidden some receivers nearby
. They must be keeping an eye on us, don’t you think?”
I shrug. “I hope they’re enjoying what they see.”
The bus shakes, trembles, and arrives at our stop. The guy’s shining in his black suit and polished shoes. What would I do if he just collapsed with his eyes still open? With pupils going all the way up north. People who get a chance to close their eyes before they die are lucky. If he had a heart attack, I would probably scream for help. It’s hard to figure out what to do when you’re holding an unresponsive body with open eyes. Would people around us simply ignore me? How would I explain what happened to the passers-by? Would I just point at his face? I’m just glad his heart is beating. We wave goodbye to each other and walk down our own paths after he wishes me good luck.
Before I walk into the shopping mall where my workplace is, I text my friend to tell him about people lining up to reserve a seat on their busses for The Trip.
It’s pleasant to dream about it you grumpy goat, he says. I ask my friend about what happens to those who don’t get in that line. He grunts. He says we’ll all depart if it happens when we’re still alive. It doesn’t matter how stupid we are. This isn’t a matter of obligation, obviously. There’s no hierarchy or senior management.
He moves on to tell me about someone he’s met. She’s petite, she’s beautiful, she’s smart, and obviously their feelings seem to be mutual. They went to an electronics store and she was so cute when she hit the enter key on all the keyboards as they walked down the display aisle. Surely, this wasn’t their most marvellous moment, but he thinks I should hear about it as I also happen to work in an electronics store. Keyboards are indeed very heart-warming.
The Afternoon
Sometimes I find it gruelling to say anything. The words are like little critters bouncing the moment I try to grab them. I cannot pick and sort them out in the right order. They stick to each other, mix into each other, and turn into a slurry. I can hardly move my jaw, and when I can, I throw up soggy words mashed inside my mouth. Like biscuits dropped into a cup of tea. Not the ideal feature that one would seek in a sales assistant. Even though it’s his last day at work.
People are approaching me, constantly walking towards me, eyeing me. Then they ask if I can help them. I most certainly can. “How can, or may, I help some of you?” I could help everyone here. They all come, they all ask, and they all move away. I’m sweating. Someone asks how Philips TVs are. “They’re doing okay,” I say. I shouldn’t have said that. She says they’re cheaper in the next store and walks away. It sounds like everything’s better in the store next door. I wish we were all born, lived, and died in there.
My tongue is swollen, and it moves slowly as if it’s covered in tar. I feel dizzy and my back hurts when I look left. We’ve been playing the same scene from the same documentary on the TV screen displays. It’s about a snow leopard chasing a markhor. I’ve never seen the end of the hunt because it’s basically a five second loop, followed by a bunch of lilacs, a renaissance painting, and a waterfall in a forest. Everything feels off somehow, like remembering a dream within another dream.
A wild supervisor appears down the aisle and smiles at me. “We’ll miss you,” he says. He won’t. He used to complain about how absent-minded I was. He often had to wave his arms around to get my attention while I was on a casual stroll and scream my name. Then I rarely bothered checking price tags. I knew I was about to get sacked, but I drew my gun faster and resigned. “I hear the boys have organised a farewell party for you tonight,” he says. “You’ll need to excuse me though; I need to work overtime tonight.” He doesn’t. But I don’t mind. “That’s sad to hear. It’s been a pleasure.”
Let us freely exchange pleasantries on this marvellous day.
Once my final shift is over, I go to the restroom, take off my hoodie, and dump it in the trash can. It had mayonnaise stains on it anyway. I put on another hoodie, one without any logos on it, and walk out.
The mall’s teeming with the young and cheerful. Well-fitting clothes in striking colours. Low body fat and no obvious muscle pain. Here they are, emitting their energy, moving their limbs with ease as their atoms radiate. Being very good at what they’re trying to be good at.
Then I lean back, take a breath, and remind myself of a simple fact: they’ll all die. Their planes will crash, their cells will mutate, their hearts will stop, their brains will turn into a soggy sponge that oozes white fluids out of their nostrils. They’ll all stop at one point, never to be kickstarted again. The sense of unity and fairness gives me peace. These images of abrupt destruction help me deal with my nightmares. I’m not dying alone; I’m eventually bringing the entire planet down with me. If The Trip doesn’t happen before, that is.
An Evening In a Bar
I walk into the dimly lit bar as agreed. It has the vibe of those bars that follow an unspoken rule not to leave any empty space on their walls. Old movie posters, album covers, records, road signs, a bicycle, you name it. There’s an arcade machine in the corner installed with an old beat’ em up game that my friend and I used to play a lot. Some say that the antagonist is the mayor of the city, but I’ve never bothered to confirm it.
One of the guys texts to let me know that they’re running a bit late. Obviously, none of them wanted to arrive before the others and enjoy a silent and awkward one-on-one moment with me. We were never that close.
I grab a beer and pick a table. The fatigue is running through my body. I have an ache on the left side of my head. I take a sip from my drink. And then I take more. I can see the street from my table. They’re closing down the shops. The sharp edges disappear at night, making both the world and the humans look smoother and less harmless. I grab another beer.
A couple walks in and sits at the table next to mine. The girl has small feet, I can tell from her shoes. Her steps seem so small and yet rapid. The bar has a screen showing some classic rock concerts on mute. That’s when my ex-colleagues appear out of thin air, asking if we can sit outside so that they can smoke. I agree and follow them. I feel like I could follow anything anywhere provided I get to keep my beer. We find a table outside and they all rush back in to grab a drink.
When they’re back, we spend a few minutes staring at each other, all of us regretting that we’ve decided to follow the company tradition of gathering around after someone’s last day at work. The weight of boredom is crushing; it paralyses me, mashes me. The thoughts are rounded, meaningless, and gnarled. The words are even worse. I smile and tell them that I’ll never ever miss them. Off to dreaming.
I’m on a boat gently rocked by waves. I’m lying on a perfectly soft mattress, smelling the gentle breeze like when a dog smells the air on a car trip. I’m in the middle of an endless sea. There is no land anymore, not that I need any. The land has sunk with all the death and pain on it. I’m here to watch the crimson sky on an eternal voyage.
They smile back. Our feelings are exclusively mutual. After the first round of drinks, the inspiration for small talk rears its ugly head. One of the guys say that The Trip won’t happen and argues that it was merely a distraction ordered by the government to pass the taxing laws. He read this article on the deep web about a secret project that allows the broadcast of dreams. Only the wealthiest can afford it. Another article stated that they had to shut down the project because artificial dreams were very hard to code, which explains the ridiculous dream that we had.
My heart beats sixty times a minute like a perfectly adjusted and quiet engine. Here in my boat, I lie down, inhaling pure existence that’s meant to last, deprived of all absurd and sudden endings. Everything is coloured in warm pastel tones like in a children’s book with fluffy things that don’t prey upon each other. So much for the realistic fiction. It’s the pure joy of existence that lacks a meaning but serves an everlasting moment of joy, as it shall continue forever.
Another one says it must be the aliens’ work. They’re too weak to invade us, obviously, since we have these powerful missiles and all, but they’re tr
ying to sneak into our minds. They’ll take over our minds, take our jobs, work their way up to the top and zombify all humans. We’ll be too dumb to resist their invasion then. The busses will take us to human farms where they’ll harvest us for our spine fluid.
I’m having what my friend would refer to as a jellyfish episode. He invented the term back in the days when I was being somewhat treated for anxiety, in reference to the immortal jellyfish species and my poor life choices. Instead of trying to make the best out of their adult lives, these little ones would simply go back to being polyps that weren’t necessarily cuter than their adult versions. They would do so in the face of the slightest challenge, only to grow back so that they could rinse and repeat. And that was their master plan to live as a jellyfish forever. When he read an article about them sometime somewhere, my friend immediately thought of me. He often says that I want to stay alive but avoid finding any joy in my life. He would argue that a foreseeable eternity wouldn’t mean much when you were a plastic bag with tentacles.
I disagreed with my friend when he came up with the analogy for the very first time, but I eventually came to see his point which has later become my point. I’ve always been scared of being happy because of the fear of losing it.
The ocean starts to boil with pieces of severed fish bits, cracked seashells, fat-headed eels, and jellyfish floating in it. The sky turns grey as my boat sinks down. Bubbles that smell of sulphur appear where she used to be. Lost with all hands.
At some point we wind up playing the arcade game although I have no recollection of how we got here. I pick the mayor while my ex-colleague picks a young guy who might be the mayor’s daughter’s boyfriend according to what I might have read. Enough with the pixelated family drama. Being the city mayor, I have a bad feeling about beating my potential voters to a pulp, but they surely don’t seem like law-abiding citizens. We have gotten rusty and we get abused harsher than we’d like to. However, we seem to have an infinite supply of coins as the loser runs to the bar and buys more coins. We curse and laugh, mostly at each other, and finally beat the final boss who shows up in a wheelchair. And I’m already wasted.