The Jellyfish Effect

by Ufuk Özden

  “Does anything remotely good ever happen in this universe?” I ask.

  Baco shrugs, stands up, and asks me if I would like him to shapeshift for sexual intercourse. “With enough visual reference, I’ll only need a couple of hours as I’m already in a humanoid form,” he says. I can only stare. “If you’re worried, I would like you to know that I’m infertile in any form,” Baco goes on. I stare at him until I run out of stares.

  “No, but thanks, no,” I say. “Let’s go hit that stage.”

  The Toll Road to Heaven

  W e’ve been on the road for a week. Life on Earth is still pretty much the same except that it’s significantly calmer in the violence department. I told Baco that we aren’t used to having goals that do not require destroying each other in one way or another. Securing a seat on a bus has given us a purpose that stands on top of the pyramid of our needs. So much for self-actualisation. All we needed was a simple and practical quest that requires no prophets but a user-friendly booking system and a few hundred thousand hardworking mechanics.

  The global dynamics of the economy have changed overnight. The companies pay their employees in food vouchers and bus seats. A comfy bus seat has become the greatest benefit one could have ever hoped for. Bus seats have become our new currency. There are no doors that a few bus seats cannot open. With their fleet of busses and army of mechanics, all metropolitan municipalities have declared their independence, threatening to destroy their busses if attacked.

  Meanwhile, human engineers have been quick to design extendable safe transportation decks between the busses so that we can connect to other busses on the road. It is a highly praised design and only twelve people died during the beta testing phase. Major companies have introduced their service busses where you can shop or watch films. They have busses intended to be used as birth clinics, wedding halls, hospitals, hospices, and crematoriums.

  If only they knew what The Trip is about. I entertained the idea of telling people but Baco argued that it would be fool’s errand. I agreed and yet still told my friend everything Baco had told me about the trip. I guess we’ll live and see. Anyway, I’m meeting my girlfriend’s parents tonight. I’ll wear a suit, he said. So very heart-warming.

  Then there are these church busses, one of which Baco is willing to get on. The transportation systems are still functional, and we have the financial means for boarding an aircraft and sipping fancy drinks in business class. Baco on the other hand, insists that we take our time. He says that he wishes to remind himself of the pattern that turns everything into another dull combination for the mere sake of existence. The landscape, the architecture, clothes, skin colours, languages, the names of grocery stores change and yet they are all reskinned modifications that came out of the same sandbox. He wants to make sure there’s nothing left to miss out there.

  “Thank you,” I tell Baco who’s been checking his phone for a while, “for helping me realise that boredom will always catch up.” He shrugs.

  “They should be here anytime,” he says. He tells me that we are soon to get on a church bus doing an eternal trip until The Trip. “They are all dedicated mechanics,” Baco tells me, “which might indicate that they’re close to what humans would label as fanatics. Getting off the bus could prove problematic.”

  Soon after, we spot a bus coming our way. Quickly putting his mobile phone back in his pocket, Baco raises his hands like a prophet greeting his flock while I’m wrapping up my wallet and passport in a plastic bag to keep them safe. The bus, painted in white, stops before Baco. From its opened front door, a young man with curly hair emerges. For a moment, he stands on the stairs eyeing us. Baco tells him that we would like to join the divine bus ride. In response, the man tells us that we shall be allowed on the bus provided that we have the true faith, which they obviously have. “Tell us,” he says, “tell us about the foundations of our faith. The pillars of our divine religion. If it is the one and true path, you cannot be mistaken as your hearts will have been become one with the engine. And you’ll need to take an oath that you shall never attempt to get off this bus.” I think about asking him what happens when the bus breaks down or they need fuel or a shower, but then I remember that most religions do not allow any questions except for those on their official FAQ list.

  Any kind of religious propaganda has always sounded cheesy to me. You couldn’t market an actual, perfectly working weight-loss pill with no side effects the way you would market a religion. Everyone would think that you’re a schemer without a trace of shame. Obviously, the fundamentals of marketing do not apply to religion. You can get away with pretty much anything as long as you have a graphic description of your reward and punishment mechanics.

  Baco calmly asks for a piece of paper and a pen, thank you very much, and then he gets on the bus, gently pushing the preacher aside. He puts the paper on the dashboard and begins to draw. It only takes two minutes until he holds up the paper, which gives me an excuse to get on the bus as well to take a look at it. People in their seats raise their heads up to do the same.

  It’s a perfectly illustrated engine, which is detailed enough to be a blueprint. However, a more dedicated look reveals that some parts of the engine is made of perfectly aligned organs. The crankshaft is a spine, the distributor is a heart, the belt is made of intestines, connecting rods made of tibiae, and pistons made of little legs.

  “When it was said that God created man in his own image, humans assumed that God was referring to them,” Baco says while he’s walking down the aisle to show his drawing to the curious members of the congregation. “However, humans were a mere tool created to recreate the true image, which was nothing but a bus engine. God is an engine. A divine engine that never breaks down. It never needs fuel, oil, or any maintenance. We have fulfilled our purpose by designing bus engines that are powerful enough to satisfy the Almighty. When the Almighty was pleased with the torque and horsepower of the engines that we designed, he invited us to his heaven.”

  The congregation stares at Baco in awe. Someone in the back shouts “Praise the bus engine!” and everyone on board repeats his line, as they get lost in a session of chanting.

  “I see a bus full of underpaid mechanics whose souls were touched by the divine pistons,” Baco says. “Now the eternity awaits us. We shall drive this bus into the divine realm and get off at the heaven where mechanics who served the engine shall live in joy forever. Let there be grease, machinery, the sound of humming engines. We shall always pick the right wrench and we shall feast and get shitfaced at night. We shall then wake up without a shred of hangover the next day and answer the call of engines forever and a day.”

  A pleased uproar slams into my eardrums. When the silence settles back in, someone asks about the engineers’ position in this. Baco says that engineers will go to a lesser heaven when The Trip happens. If the afterlife is a hotel, there will still be an open buffet and a free bar for them, but everything will be of lesser quality. Mechanics are the ones who the almighty promised blood, toil, tears and sweat before the ultimate salvation. Baco says that the engineers merely made calculations and gave instructions without a drop of oil on their hands. The mechanics kept the machine alive and running.

  The travelling pilgrims are quick to make arrangements and empty two seats on the front row for us. Baco is the preacher from bus heaven and I’m his seemingly quiet and undoubtedly dimwit squire apostle carrying the backpacks. We quickly repeat after the pastor and take our vows. Soon after we’re served food. Two sandwiches, a cup of orange juice, and a chocolate bar. Food fit for champions. I only get a sandwich while Baco gets all the other treats. Chewing on my sandwich, I quietly ask Baco what the fuck we are doing. He tells me that their destined route will bring us close to our destination, where a middle-aged man is working on the final play before The Trip.

  “As opposed to their devotion, they drive in circles on a long route with many filling stations and repair shops,” Baco says. “Humans are creatures of habit who seek for sa
fety at all times. That’s why most of your faith systems promise a stable afterlife with an everlasting routine. Or threaten with it. A fixed mind in ecstasy or agony with no distractions.”

  Baco’s remark makes me think of whether the promised hell would have had the same effect on its believers if annual leaves were allowed. Even eternal damnation sounds manageable if it’s only during working hours with bonus benefits. Then again, hell for me would have been a place of anxiety; it would have been the constant sense of terror without the need for a reason. Pure, paralysing, plain, unprocessed fear that never goes away.

  I tilt back my seat while Baco’s having a friendly conversation with the pilgrim mechanics. The bus is driving on a road that goes through big farmyards. Before I close my eyes, I see a cow lying down for the first time in my life.

  The Next Stop Is the Final One

  I t’s our third day on the bus and Baco whispers into my ear that we’re leaving soon. He advises that I should walk up and down the aisle if my feet are swollen, which they are. I do as he asks and walk through the aisle which probably smells like a military submarine would after a five-month patrol. The pilgrims do not get off the bus to take a shower as they’re afraid of missing the ride to heaven. I return to my seat once the blood flows back into my feet.

  The followers of the church bus indeed believe that they get a sinner’s ticket every moment they stop and it’s crucial that they are on the bus when The Trip happens. Only selected potential martyrs step out to refill the tank, check the engine, or buy rations. The rest are not supposed to get off under any circumstances no matter what they reek of or how serious the heart attack they’re having is. Like this one time when a pilgrim’s heart had stopped beating yesterday. They opened the back door to dump his body. They were kind enough to chant after him though.

  Baco asks me if I’m ready.

  “Do you have a plan?” I ask. “They wouldn’t hesitate to lynch us. They’re all armed. I’ve seen some of them hug their wrenches while they’re sleeping.”

  “I’ll require your trust in this matter. Tell me when you are ready to execute our escape plan.”

  What plan?

  It’s in the middle of the night and most pilgrims are sleeping. Once I give him the green light, he stands up and stands still in the aisle for a moment. He stands still for a good ten minutes until the bus slows down before an intersection. With a swift move, Baco punches the driver in the neck to knock him out, tosses him aside like a pile of laundry, and pushes the pedal to apply the air brake and open the front door. We stop in the middle of the road with a loud whoosh sound. The pilgrim on the watch, who is a young skinny man in his twenties, runs toward us until Baco kicks him right in the chest.

  He collapses where he stands, and we run out of the bus. We run into the fields and no pilgrims seem to get off the bus. Baco says that he doesn’t expect them to come after us. Just as he assumed, the pilgrims do not leave the bus to chase us. Instead, they open fire.

  “It’s advisable to throw yourself on the ground,” Baco says. We crawl, crouch, and finally begin to walk for two hours. “I should have calculated a better escape route,” Baco says. Funnily enough, I find myself nodding without a shred of anxiety inside me.

  We walk for two hours until we reach a huge grey dilapidated building complex, which seems to have been built a few decades ago. The front door with a rusty metal framework opens easily but not without a squeaking sound. Standing at the entrance, I only see grey halls, grey stairs, small windows, and old wooden doors. “We’d better wait until the morning,” Baco says. “Most humans are diurnal.”

  I lay my topcoat on the floor and curl up into a foetal position. And for reasons I cannot put into words, I feel just fine.

  I wake up with a hard slap and straighten up in panic to see Baco Bobonts crouching by my side.

  “Excuse my confusion,” he says calmly. “I seem to have forgotten that the acceptable use of body language in this situation would be to give a nudge. Now I do recall.” Not the best awakening, but on the light side, I no longer wake up drenched in sweat with a frenzied heart since I’ve begun doing stupid things, even though unintentionally, Baco has helped me with doing very stupid things so I owe him one.

  “I can tell that you’ve been thinking,” Baco says, “and you’re very slow at that. Don’t burn your neurons on it, we’ve got work to do.” He points at the middle-aged man who posted about the last great play on Earth. Baco says that he’s already made the introductions so I shouldn’t bother. The man waves at me. I wave back. With a thick moustache that conceals his mouth and his union suit pyjamas, he looks friendly. If I’m not mistaken, he’s smiling at me.

  I apologetically tell him that I’m an Earth-born human which makes me feel mildly ashamed in the heat of the moment. The man laughs and tells me not to worry about it. He tells me that, besides working on the final play, he’s the janitor here and invites us to the breakfast before his day shift begins. We follow after him into the basement, either for an actual breakfast or getting murdered. It doesn’t turn out to be the latter and we wind up sitting around a small table that struggles under the weight of the food that it carries. It’s a pyramid of sweet desserts, and sweet desserts only. The janitor tells us that he loves to bake and he’s lucky to have the kitchen of the abandoned cafeteria.

  I ask him what the building was originally built for. “It was built by the government with many facilities before the civil war broke out,” the janitor says. “The dispute over the borders went on for a long time and this building stood on no man’s land for two decades. They’ve built a new one far away with a proper plumbing system and aeroducts. This one was abandoned until the clerks and I found it.”

  The janitor tells us that he was in high school when everyone woke up and decided to murder their neighbours. Since he didn’t want to kill his neighbours, he stayed in school and built cardboard houses for the handiwork class in the toilet under the light of a kerosene lamp, with gunshots heard from the street.

  They used to watch the news on the telly whenever they had electricity and the news would tell them that everyone else was evil and deserved to be slaughtered. “Our snipers were shooting down kids going to their school and we didn’t know that,” the janitor says. “The reporters kept on repeating how right we were about what we were doing.”

  The janitor’s father was blessed with the ability and technical training to repair televisions and radios, which had turned out to be one of the most needed services during the civil war. Most of his customers paid in food, which was worth more than the ridiculously devaluated currency, so they managed to survive the war on a relatively full stomach. There he learned the art of resurrecting antique electronic hardware while helping his old man.

  The janitor had managed to graduate from high school and went to see a movie to celebrate. Just when the movie had begun, the lights were turned on and a member of staff walked into the theatre to tell them that they were under attack. “It was the whole world dropping bombs on us,” he says. I ask him what movie it was. He says it was a historical romantic movie, although he doesn’t remember the title. It was mostly couples in the theatre.

  “We had no idea when they would stop. The military bases, civilian trains, streets were bombed. We just waited, not knowing what we were waiting for.” The bombing eventually stopped, the war ended like it’d begun, and he moved into a better paying neighbouring country to repair tellies.

  He was doing quite all right until humanity eventually moved on to LCD screens and abandoned their good old dead-heavy CRT screens for the sake of a future in higher resolution.

  “I’d quickly learned how to repair them too,” he says. “But they looked different, felt different. I precisely remember that afternoon. I was replacing this broken screen with a cheap counterfeit one, expecting a good profit. Something behind my own screen clicked.”

  It was an abrupt moment of enlightenment.

  Without the cathode ray tube, he’d felt that
somewhere some ties were severed, freeing him from the memories of war. “The moments were still there,” he says. “but they no longer reminisced about fear, violence, and desperation. Nothing but scenes from the past. I realised that I left that basement a long time ago. I wasn’t tightening screws in dead silence, with the occasional explosions in the distance, desperately trying to help my father who was repairing an aerial amplifier in exchange for a handful of coins, a bag of rice and two apples, if our customers felt generous.”

  But the war was over, he’d moved into another country, his father had died in his bed, and it was a sunny afternoon when he worked on that flat LCD screen. It looked nothing like that those clumsy tubes with a primitive circuit circling it. And he was no longer scared. The urge to keep doing what he and his father had been doing for decades disappeared.

  I felt that I was done with this job,” he says. “So, I walked out, locked the door, and went to study to become a confectioner.”

  He sold the repair shop with everything in it to the first buyer whom he met in a pizzeria that night.

  “I appreciate that you’ve decided to share your life story with us,” Baco intervenes. “Can we see the script, please?” The janitor laughs and tells us that outlining is a fool’s errand for a writer. “First you build the stage,” he says. “the best stage that you can dream of. Then you design the costumes. You sew, you knit, and you weave to bring down the walls and reach the universal idea, which is a pure manifestation of the essence. The costumes become the stories and even without a single line from the actor who wears them, they create, enhance, and progress the narrative.”

  Baco and I eye him for a brief moment. I grab another piece of car shaped cookie before I ask the janitor if there was anyone else who came to his call. He shakes his head. But he already did lots of work as The Trip seems to be nigh. We nod.