by Ufuk Özden
“For once,” I say, “stop assuming that I do what I do because I love or hate you. I might have my own reasons. Can I just go to bed? Well, yeah, I must be tired. Good night all and see you tomorrow.”
As I lie down in my old room, I ask my friend if he knows about the whereabouts of the girl I had a crush on in high school. We barely talked but she’d once chuckled when I read my short story in the class.
She’s dead, says my friend. She got hit by a car while she was cycling. Two days after she got her PhD in bee breeding techniques. She had two kids. They buried her months ago.
I bet they did, I say.
I book my flight back home and think of someone who no longer walks the earth. There’s so much pointless horror and there’s a cursed pattern that cannot help but repeat itself. It repeats itself so often that it becomes mundane and absurd. Back then, it used to terrorise me. Now I can only shrug and wait until it’s my turn. When it’s my turn, all those terrible things that have missed me will stop missing me. Fair enough.
The Coach of the Year
T he day after a mother of two found her ticket, the human race’s enthusiasm for The Departure went through a metaphorical roof. The common checklist for anyone who has found their ticket seems to include two items: taking a selfie with the ticket first and then checking the internet for bus pooling groups. I quickly browse some of the groups’ social media pages. And, apparently, there’s a bus for everyone. Vegan busses, pet-friendly busses, musicians’ busses, visually impaired peoples’ busses, singles’ busses, couples’ busses, swinger couples’ busses, CPAP users’ busses are just a few promising examples.
Some people, on the other hand, like my parents, would rather have their own custom-made busses, and, unlike my parents, they seem to have really high standards. Some channel has already started shooting their upcoming reality show, which lets us take a peek at some of the magnificent busses that are designed for those who deserve the best.
I left for the airport for my return trip after having promised my parents that I would consider their offer. I boarded an aircraft only to disembark from it due to a technical issue that needs further examination. We returned to the terminal after we were promised a perfectly fine aircraft which shall arrive as soon as possible.
The promised aircraft hasn’t arrived yet, but I got a complimentary sandwich. I check the internet for something to watch, preferably a documentary with some bestial bloodshed. I’d discovered the power of documentaries back in the old days when I’d spent my days waiting for the sudden coup de grâce. They’re simply mesmerising and soothing. Therapy in its purest format: watching that lovely balance of nature at work that apparently cannot be maintained without stabbing, burning, mauling, deceiving, biting, stinging, and spilling giblets all over the place.
Documentaries do not only get into the trouble of showing everything explicitly, but they also do the thinking for me. They show a fierce beast running fast and catching up with its middle-aged prey with ease while telling me about how fast the predator can run and how helpless its prey is. Talking about history, the narrators passionately praise a low budget empire, talking heartily about its good old days, only to conclude their story with an emphasis on what’s left of them. What’s left of the once glorious empire is nothing but a stone wall, an arrow tip, and the jawbone of someone who seemed to have a very bad day. They always tell me how poor, desperate, happy, mighty, or hungry things were as they’re showing the obvious. Documentaries always comment on how it must have felt, from the point of all parties involved, including the zebra who’s being casually consumed by a cheerful family of predators.
Anyone who compliments nature on balance is either a carnivore or a tyrant, I text my friend.
Just be grateful that you can go to a grocery store for food and walk around without being assassinated. You wouldn’t have survived long on either side, he responds.
And while surfing the internet, I find a forty-five-minute award-winning documentary called The Goat Whisperer, which was made by a group of activist students who wanted to show the impact of conflict and war on animals. I’ve found the link in an e-mail sent by a nature conservation organization that I’ve been following on the internet for a while. If memory serves, I subscribed to their mailing list to participate in a competition. I think the prize was a T-shirt.
The documentary seems to tell the story of a young veterinary doctor who moved onto a small island habited by a goatherd.
It’d all started during a traditional conflict session between two neighbouring countries who loved to have conflicts. Both nations were quite similar for all the wrong reasons and, naturally, they decided to take it out on each other.
There was no feasible way of building proper infrastructure for humans on a rocky island that was slightly bigger than five football pitches. Therefore, a bunch of battle-ready soldiers took a dozen goats to the island to claim it in a symbolical way. It was unclear whose idea it was. In response, the opposing party brought in even more goats. They rinsed and repeated.
It was an arguably funny conflict, although no one ever laughed about it. The goats didn’t laugh about it, for starters. As radical as it was, the two countries realised that dumping goats on a piece of land to claim it, wasn’t only useless but it was also bad for PR. There was nothing impressive about an army that was capable of deploying goats on an island. So, they moved on to discuss who made what coffee first, leaving the goatherds to their fate without any food. A group of environmentalists also came to the herd’s aid but eventually moved on to bigger cases once they ran out of food and weed.
The goats didn’t know how to handle the situation, so they reproduced and butted each other for a while on a small piece of land with limited freshwater supplies. Most starved to death when a small boat with medication, a water tank and lots of hay berthed. Since then, the young vet, who goes by the name Baco Bobonts, has been living on the island in a tent, only sailing away to resupply. He’s built three water tanks and two silos. He also went to the trouble of cultivating the little land he could find and planting herbs that the goats seemed to like.
“I’m doing what I would like to,” he says in the interview. “I was a tourist and the trip was getting boring.” He has the voice of a text-to-speech app, and he looks straight into the camera with a fixed expression on his sunburnt face.
He is exactly the same Baco Bobonts that hypnotised us with his performance when we watched that porn movie on VHS on a tranquil afternoon. He’s a bit more tanned but his perfectly conditioned hair and moustache defy time. And curiously, he doesn’t seem a day older than he was on tape.
It’s difficult to talk about goats for more than twenty minutes unless you’re targeting a very specific audience. The producers push forward to squeeze some more personal details out of Baco Bobonts. Where is he from? He says he set sail from the mainland nearby. But where is he originally from? From the land. Does he have a family? They’re far away. How does he spend his time on the island? He takes care of the herd and sometimes he sleeps. Or he makes crabs fight on a rock, but he intervenes when it gets too violent. Does he play with the goats? Does he name them? He does neither.
He only provides care for them, without which they’d be unlikely to survive.
The reporter pushes forward for one last filler question and asks him what he eats on the island himself. With his mummified stare into the camera and without a muscle twitching on his dried tomato coloured face, he replies, “Goat meat.”
Baco notes that he especially prefers the kids’ meat if the newborn population reaches a sustainable number. And he moves on to tell how he marinates the meat. “I’ve planted thyme, which serves the purpose,” he explains. “It really gives a strong taste to the meat. Like a mild hint of spice.”
The documentary ends shortly after the reporter runs out of questions.
He looks exactly the same as he did in that movie.
Budget psychiatrists don’t usually grasp the weight of their w
ords when they advise their patients to let it go. It usually works with most people, I guess. But those annoying patients who are terrified of their existence and what could possibly go wrong with it turn into freaks testing the limits of their impulsiveness. You burn yourself for the sake of burning and you want to find out how long you can stay on fire. And unlike the literal one, humans can survive a metaphorical fire for a lifetime.
I’ll never have the courage to test my limits in literal pyromancy. But I’ll do my best to raise a few eyebrows.
It’s so easy with The Trip coming soon. I am free to drag myself around and be stupid. Like an overloaded lousy suitcase with broken zippers, at least one faulty wheel, and an unreliable compass for the decorations.
But I have one priority over everything else. There’s a sick ghost in my flat that I need to check on.
Phantom Pain
A floating pen is the first thing that I see when I open the door. My flat looks like the international space station with notebooks, aubergines, noodles, sweaters, glasses, cigarettes, and forks floating in the air.
The ghost is in my living room and she’s surrounded by apples orbiting her phantom body, which is upside down. She’s slowly spinning like a kebab with a fixed stare in her eyes. My finger goes through her shoulder when I try to nudge her. I can clearly see the wall behind her as she spins around like a dead jellyfish.
It’s an instinct but I know that the ghost is dead. Whatever powered her up as she happily haunted my flat for years is gone. She must have depleted her spirit battery.
I open all the windows and fan her with a towel. Still upside down, she floats away through one of the open windows. The ghost bounces off a few houses and satellite antennas before she ascends and dissolves, leaving nothing but a spinning flip-flop behind. A moment later, all the items that she left behind disappear.
So, this is how a ghost dies, I text my friend and tell him what I have just witnessed.
I think there’s nothing glorifying about anyone’s or anything’s last moment he replies. That’s why the dying needs to dramatise it before they die. And the living needs to dramatise what happens after the dying die. We should really focus on life, try it for fuck’s sake.
He’s right this time. We all need the drama to deal with cold bodies with loosened muscles unless we work in the healthcare business.
That’s how I’ve embraced the idea of The Trip. Leaving is no longer terrifying when you know that everyone else is on board. No one will be left behind to enjoy or fear anything when we’re gone. It’ll just be a matter of getting a good seat, preferably without someone sitting next to you, and having frequent breaks, especially if you’re a smoker.
I start packing up while planning the route that will take me onto Baco Bobonts’ island. After three long flights and a short private boat trip, I should be there.
While I’m trying to match my odd socks, a part of me is still trying to digest the idea of going on a one-way trip to that island. Feeding off of my own impulsiveness is a tricky bet in the long run, and I’m more than likely to come to my senses midway before it’s too late to reverse what I’ll have done, or too early to run my fool’s errand. It’s a common way for humans to wind up.
When my cousin died, there was a blue sedan driving right behind him, and in that blue sedan sat a man in his early forties. He was also interviewed days after the accident, and he said he’d decided to study medicine when he saw my cousin’s body quickly turning into a body. To put it mildly, he was feeling blue after his pizzeria had gone bankrupt because he used the best cheese unlike all the other restaurants, which increased his overheads. And yet, when he saw my cousin die, he realised that nothing was worth more than saving lives.
To my limited medical knowledge, there was nothing anyone could do to save my cousin but who am I to judge an inspired spirit?
The inspired spirit in question opened a burger restaurant called Burger MD the next year. The place has some good reviews on the internet. Their onion rings are very crispy, and the service is of outstanding quality.
At times, I’m bored of hearing my own thoughts. I’m boring and so are my stories to tell. Back then, when I was younger and usually shit-faced, I thought there could be something genuine about who I was, what I would do, or what I would say.
Now I’m bored with everything that I’ve ever thought or said. I’m sick of anything that I’ll ever think or say. I’m merely repeating what has been repeated many times in many places. That’s why I need to make noises so that I can’t hear my own noise.
Once I put my topcoat in the suitcase, I’m ready. It’s possible to outrun boredom as long as you lack the wit. And I’m lacking lots of it.
The Goat Whisperer
T he cheerful captain of the small vessel cannot help but chuckle when I agree to his price offer after our brief haggling through a language barrier. The only word that we know in common seems to be “goat” and it seems to provide enough details for navigating the calm sea in a sunny afternoon. The island is a two-hour trip away from the mainland, which gives the captain enough time for silent small talk and to show me some photos of the bus that he bought for The Trip on his mobile phone. He seems so proud as he merrily taps on his screen. The captain must be used to carrying helpful passengers to the island where Baco has built a goat farm. He even seems to have printed out a business card so that they can ask for a trip back to the main island once they start having regrets about what they are doing if they are wise enough to save their batteries. The unwise are transported back to the mainland by Baco when he needs supplies. He’s been such a dearheart.
The captain stops the vessel’s small engine when we arrive at the island’s dilapidated berth. I quickly abandon the ship like the good payload I am. Baco’s small boat is moored on the other side of the berth. I walk the only path that I can, dragging along my suitcase, where I greet the first goat that I’ve seen on the island. And it greets me back by ignoring my presence.
I don’t know where Baco is, I don’t even know whether he’s on the island at the moment. However, the goats are here, and they seem very healthy while they’re enjoying their afternoon snacks from their feed bunks. The bunks seem to be connected to small silos through network of pipes. It appears that Baco has also gone to the trouble of digging up wells that were filled with rainwater that is carried through various aqueducts around the island. He also built shelters without fences with comfy looking hay piles.
The fierce afternoon sun is burning up my neck while the thirst is burning up my throat. There’s a reasonable part of me urging me to call back the captain while I can. It’s not too late to go back to my parents and wait for The Trip while discussing possible upgrades to their bus. I could bargain for a dishwasher in my trailer.
But the universe has its own ridiculous settings that keep me on track. Just when I’m ready to leave a restaurant after having waited to be served for a good twenty minutes, a kind waiter shows up with an apologetic smile, putting me back in my seat. And just when I’m ready to leave a seemingly deserted island save for the goats, a nude Baco Bobonts with a postman’s bag appears behind the rocks.
“I wish I knew you were coming,” he says. “I need some ivermectin.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t check with you beforehand,” I say. A moment of silence passes by. “Are you the Baco Bobonts who co-starred in an old porn movie by any chance?” I ask. “You once said, ‘I am bound to come ferociously,’ in the film, if memory serves. I think I know you are.”
We stare at each surrounded by a couple of goats eyeing us. I’m sweating and scratching my head, trying to figure out a way to explain why I am here. If only I knew it myself. Baco on the other hand, stands still and relaxed, motionless, not unlike a naked mannequin that needs to be dressed for corporate decency before the store opens.
“That is correct, it was me who said that in an old visual production intended for adults,” he says. “I would not expect any humans to notice and remember that one.
Indeed, I am Baco Bobonts,” he says. “I’m an interstellar suicide tourist, as one would call it.” He says he’s come to Earth for The Trip. He walks towards me and extends his hand.
A bigger silence follows our handshake. I don’t know what to say. And neither do the goats. Oh, so you’re one of those interstellar suicide tourists doesn’t feel very natural.
I ask him if he’s just claimed to be an alien. “I am, regardless of what I claim to be. I might have claimed to be a human or not claimed anything at all. Things in themselves exist in their own space without definitions or claims. Besides, you said you knew who I was.”
“That’s not what I thought I knew,” I say. I ask Baco if this is how he introduces himself to people. He says that he usually does not hesitate to disclose his identity when the subject is brought up, which it almost never is. I ask him if it ever got him into trouble. Nope. “There is little practicality in concealing the truth for protection when no one would believe the bare truth in any case,” he says.
He looks up to the clear skies for a moment and loudly burps. “I am bored,” he says in a lifeless voice. “And The Trip is nigh. If you wish to entertain yourself with chatting, our benefits could be mutual. Interaction with the locals is often recommended for a satisfactory travel experience.”
Baco suggests that we initiate our conversation in the gazebo that was built by some activists who visited the island. The abandoned temple stands on three wooden pillars and has a piece of navy-blue canvas stretched for a dome. They also left some timeless artifacts such as cigarette butts and cans on the floor. And yet it is a marvellous structure as it provides the one thing that I need, which is shade.