by Michael Helm
—
A muddle of streets ran downhill off the square. With no memory of leaving the park, I’d gotten lost. I needed to hear Dominic’s voice but, overburdened, couldn’t risk feeling his decline more acutely. I pictured myself down at the water, signing up for ship duty, entering a seagoing adventure, as likely a prospect as any. The next minutes, the next years, were blank, as if I were already dead. I needed to feel more settled before calling Amanda. I’d got myself turned around, passing the same antique shops twice. I chose an uphill path. By the time it plateaued at an intersection of fruit stores and cafés, I was out of breath and feeling better. I sat in the doorway of a closed dress shop and called Rome.
“Okay, where are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe the fringes of a neighbourhood called Cihangir. I ingested something strange last night.”
She led me through my explanation, that I’d taken a drug and woke to find the moments in my day randomized and not quite making sense.
“You were making sense last night. Have you checked out the address?”
“What are you talking about?”
It took a minute for each of us to understand what the other was saying, longer than that to believe it. The previous night she’d called my cell and we had a version of the conversation we were now having again. Things had come about. They were hurtling toward a conclusion, and I would be standing there for it. She backed up in her story but spoke very quickly. She said that Pierluigi had enlisted all branches of the Keyholers in a hunt for the Poet. Someone in the Berlin branch discovered a likely internet protocol address and a corresponding actual one in Paris. Two members of the French branch staked out an apartment in the Eleventh Arrondissement with a lone occupant, a tall man, who they believed might be the Poet—
“Hold on. How did they find him?”
“I don’t know. Software and intuition. The Germans set up a dummy metasite and mined it and followed the hits. The Italians planted stories and worked out timelines. The French circumvented a googlewhack. They all followed the money. What does it mean? I’m not into geek procedurals.”
“The Poet is a tall man in Paris.”
“Not anymore. They followed him and took a picture. Yesterday he went to Charles de Gaulle and boarded a plane.”
“A plane.”
“Maybe this is all a goose chase but if the Keyholers are right, you could be in danger. Pierluigi got one of the Istanbul hackers’ sisters to meet the plane and follow the Poet into the city, which she somehow successfully did. Or at least the guy she followed looked like the guy in the picture.”
“Here.”
“The tall man is in Istanbul. Since yesterday evening. See your emails. I already told you to come back to Rome. You asked me to send you his picture and address. You said you think you’ve flushed him into the open, that his appearance connects to your parents. You’re already determined to confront him. You already think this is your one shot.”
—
Inside the lost time I’d had a phone call, I’d sounded lucid, a thought I had to process along with the news about the Poet. That he should be in Istanbul wasn’t a coincidence. My emails were encrypted but I’d had dozens of conversations, in person, by phone, about my hacker theory, the Keyholers, my trip to Turkey. And of course I left a data trail everywhere. It was easy to assume he knew it all, knew where I was staying, what I looked like. It was natural to think that he was here for me. I’d followed my father, who might have been murdered, and murdered for a reason, and so I’d made myself a threat like he did by coming to Turkey and asking questions. I’d hatched a notion. And I was the solitary, with no protectors, no family or real lover or close friends except a man across the ocean losing his memory. Did he think I could be bought off or threatened? Made to drop my investigations? What leverage did he have? Was he violent?
Ludicrous. Root meaning in “sportive, jesting,” from the Latin ludicrus, from ludicrum, meaning “stage play.”
The picture had arrived in my inbox just before midnight. The graphics told me I’d already opened it. I called it up again and there in my little phone window was a tall man apparently in midlife, midstride, approaching the camera. His head and hands were large. A high forehead, pronounced brow, notched at the eyes. Short hair, maybe light brown. His nose was slightly out of true. He was dressed in brown pants and a faded red canvas jacket.
The man—or was it the photo?—looked vaguely familiar. According to my search history I’d already called up the phone map for the address. It was in the Beyoğlu neighbourhood, not far from Davide’s place. I told myself, unbelievably, that I had to get the drop on him. This was the extent of my plan. I worked my way across the high streaming traffic of Tarlabaşi and looked back to see if I could remember crossing the wide avenue. I had it for a second and then it was gone. As I headed north into the little streets I felt in need of a revelation, a useful cha-cha, but cha-chas could not be induced. My thoughts were now desperately linear, blind baby vipers at speed. I was prose-headed, story-bound, seeking logical connection as I navigated by phone through the neighbourhood’s mix of old, condemned-looking buildings and renovated ones with fresh plaster faces covering the cracks that seemed to run vertically on every structure. I came to the street but wasn’t sure the phone had it right. It was unmarked, dead end, two blocks long.
I approached the building. There was no number but Pierluigi’s friend’s sister had said to look for a “flock of birds” above the doorway. I stared up at a horizontal line of three blue-and-yellow ceramic tiles with dozens of black chevrons or birds in flight painted on them. I realized I’d seen the motif before, above the entranceway to Durant’s apartment building. Back in Rome the black marks on the blue and yellow had reminded me of the birds in Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, likely his last painting. Van Gogh, who wrote that he wanted to be “a poet” of landscapes, died two days after receiving a gunshot wound he said was self-inflicted. Through his agony he told his hosts not to blame anyone, which led to speculation that he’d been shot, maybe by accident, maybe not, maybe by a local farm boy. In the 1950s someone even confessed to the shooting. As I looked up and thought of his last crows, they seemed obviously in their flocking beauty an ascension in the heart, and I was sure his death wasn’t suicide, which left accident or murder, the question I couldn’t get free of, and so landed me back in my shoes.
From the windows of the upper floors plastic sheeting billowed and snapped in a light wind. All but one of the ground-floor windows were tacked over with plywood. The one next to the front door was wide open, likely why the door was closed but unlocked. I stepped into the dark foyer, where dim light revealed openings on either side of a staircase. The whole building felt empty and I began to suspect that Pierluigi’s friend’s sister had steered me wrong. Without bothering to be quiet I walked into what used to be an apartment. The floors were scarred and dirty, the kitchen appliances pulled out from the wall. There was no furniture. In one of the corners were graffiti drawings and writing in a pencilled script but there was no sign of recent habitation. Apartment to apartment, the story was much the same, down to the graffiti.
The discovery was on the fourth floor. I entered an apartment identical to the others, but in the living area, near the window, were a green sleeping bag, a small flashlight, a half-eaten loaf of bread. I registered all this in an instant and then I was on my knees, searching the sleeping bag, and there I found a notebook. Glued on to the hard cover was a postcard reproduction I recognized as Velázquez’s painting Head of a Stag, which the Londoner and I had seen in the Prado museum. The composition, even the texture, the colours, retained the breathing life of the original, the moisture in the fine chin whiskers. It was as if I’d come across the animal in a woods or the museum.
The stag’s head marked a spot. It made the notebook seem the centre of something, the home space in the game. The beauty of the little reproduction held me. The word was execute. Representational artists create an o
riginal, which is in fact a copy of the world, and sometimes execute a copy, after the original. But the idea of execution doubled when I recalled why the Londoner disliked the painting. Velázquez had rendered the stag at the request of his patron, Philip IV, who sometimes wanted portraits of animals he’d killed. “So of course the stag is regal,” she said, already walking away, into the next gallery. “The forehead furrowed like royal satin, the horns a crown. The powerful kill the innocent and force artists to play along.” She was prone to these broad declarations, assigning values always through this way of understanding. By turns her views were enlightening, self-evident, lacking in nuance, but her conviction was soulful. Too bad for me if I loved two souls at odds, hers and that of an artwork she didn’t like. Power presumes to bend art and nature.
But nature, and sometimes art, can resist. If she was an infiltrator then her disgust in the Prado was an act. But it was genuine, I was quite sure. She hadn’t betrayed me, after all, I decided, or at least only in the conventional, sexual sense. My nature now had me flipping through the pages in the notebook. Most were empty but near the back was a page of handwriting, letters in minuscule script. I tilted the book to catch the obscured windowlight. The words were English. The first line:
The sun is warm.
Had I already been here? Had I come last night, read these first four words and unconsciously recalled them an hour ago in bright Gezi Park? Or had the Poet sat here in the plastic-filtered light, just as I had sat in bright Gezi Park, both of us inspired to the same assertion, then both falling to our native confusions? The other words were set down in fragments, little bursts of meaning and half meaning that didn’t come together.
The border mass pension. You missed your foreigners.
Potatoes that fortified your military. Graves are turned up.
Like the garden. As you called the thin winter. You thought of them.
Dashed the thought against hutments. And fences.
Deer of your retirement. Today you won’t be forgiven. Your sanctioned en masse. Bring yourself close but the sun warms mercies. Across your memories of the open wild.
There’s no place for them now. You feed them all on the backs
of your hands. What this is today the trucks. And it’s a good
day. Inspired habit of saying all others.
All the lost in all times have known.
Knowing are coming this is today.
The words, like the day, had fallen out of sense. The day, like time, like the city, was prone to radical emancipatory outbursts. The lines looked randomly generated, as if by an algorithm, but there was something here too private, too intimate, and I felt it drawing me downward. These weren’t recorded thoughts but the rudiments of thought itself, an innermost sound. I couldn’t read and I couldn’t not.
I reread the page several times. There was an order to things but I couldn’t know it. Reality was unsecure. It could shift in any direction. It simply was, not was as if. The idea of as always stands in the way of the real.
And so it was not as if, but that he really was already coming up the stairs before I heard him. My instinct was to hide and wait for a chance to make the stairwell but hadn’t I come to confront him? If he’d been following me, he would know I was here. It seemed obvious now that he’d chosen this time and place to meet me. But why this building? Because it was abandoned. Because someone could die here and remain undiscovered for days or weeks, if the wind was right.
The steps were in steady rhythm, passing the third floor. Timing my footfalls with his, I left his apartment and crossed into the one opposite. The room was veiled in plastic sheeting. I turned my shoulders, stepped through. Everywhere were power tools.
He made the top of the stairs and I took a tool in hand, its name lost to me, and he heard me and approached. His form was vague behind the sheets. Then he stepped through and I knew him.
—
We went down to the street and sat in the open sun.
I explained all I could.
“All these buildings, we get squatters,” said Davide. “I get to know them, let them stay as long as no one steals the tools. Some come for the protests. When I’m done my work, my father sends his crew in and they chase out the squatters.”
“Have you seen the one here now?”
“It’s been empty. He must have come last night. Like you said.”
“How many buildings around here are being renovated?”
“Many. Thirty. Fifty. The world is buying the city.”
“This can’t be a coincidence. He chose the one you’re working on.”
“It’s strange if he had money to fly here and take a taxi from the airport.”
“What do you mean ‘crew.’ Who are your dad’s crew?”
“I just clean the places and do general repairs. Then he sends in the guys for the wiring and pipes and plastering and painting. They make the big money.”
“Where does he find them?”
“Same guys always. They’re American. He flies them all around. He doesn’t care about local workers. Sometimes he pays off the unions.”
—
It’s only when you leave the sun and stone that it becomes hard to know what’s real. The doubt is ancient and ongoing, from Plato’s cave shadows to current anxieties over the smooth fictions of government, media, even fiction itself, the suspect common surround.
That afternoon I moved into the derelict building. From the junkman with the cart, who was younger up close than I’d realized and who tried to interest me, sans English, in what seemed to be the hose of a hookah pipe, I bought a plastic pen with an elongated picture of Atatürk on the side and copied out the words from the notebook page. I bought fruit and bread in the neighbourhood and at evening walked with Davide fifteen minutes to his apartment for ablutions and a change of clothes.
I stayed awake most of the night, under a blanket of Davide’s. Next to me were my cellphone and, I confess, a long screwdriver, weapons-grade. I had no choice but to embrace the lonely absurdity of my position. My parents’ decades had been as chaotic as mine, but the tone they managed was sure, constant, polite, not especially funny, never absurd. Their need for meaningful work had taken them to the most fraught border in the world. My need for meaning had landed me in the dark with simple tools. The Poet failed to appear.
The next day Davide and I worked our way down to the first floor, pulling out wires, sweeping up glass and plaster, repairing nothing. He spoke of playing music, of working for his father, who paid him well for unskilled work but didn’t respect him or his friends. In the afternoon two of them dropped by, the drummer in the porkpie hat and the second guitarist with the rings. They hugged me in greeting and Davide invited me to take a break with them, but I stayed and worked on the poem I’d found, if that’s what it was, trying to make it make sense.
When he returned Davide questioned my move into the cold, plumbingless building.
“If the squatter is a poet, maybe he came to find me,” he said. “Maybe he wants the One Two. It’s good for the imagination.”
“That wasn’t really my experience of it.”
He said there were three illegal labs in Europe. They shared information and agreed to keep the sale price as low as possible. Whoever was behind the drug viewed it as enlightening, community-building.
“One Two is the future. Our future. The young.”
I tried to imagine a future in which the recent past had been lost to collective gaps in memory. Who wouldn’t want to forget periods of trauma or embarrassing fashion? But we remember with more than our brains, I told him. And anyway, we are both our actions and our memories of them. It was hard enough to hold an identity together in the new century without voluntarily fracturing the self.
“Maybe we won’t know who we are,” he said. “But we’ll know who we are not. My father and his friends are very sure of who they are. They could use some doubt. All they have is greed and fear. This is my last job for him. Then I disappear.”
<
br /> —
At dark I was alone again, waiting for the Poet’s return, reading the words from his notebook over and over by flashlight. I began to form a sense of the man in the photo. I wanted to believe he understood me, that he wrote the poems under some injunction or debt, half against his will, more or less as I read them, though he was or once wanted to be a real poet, and even he didn’t know the full dimensions of the machinery of deceit he’d been made a part of. Maybe out of necessity, I convinced myself he hadn’t come to Istanbul to harm me. He wanted me to know I was known.
With my Atatürk pen and a small notebook of my own I worked on the scrambled words, trying to make them come clear. The phrases and lines seemed shuffled out of an original order. The idea bore some relation to anastrophe and hyperbaton, figures of speech in which words in a sentence or line appear out of their usual sequence. The intended effect was to produce alter-senses, competing levels of meaning. I tried arranging the words into short lines. I could fashion no obvious rhyme scheme, find no pattern in the sounds, but the echoes of meaning were localized, so I attached one fragment of sense to another that seemed promising. My notebook pages were soon a mess of circles, numbers, lines, and arrows. Every time I thought I was making headway, the sense would break down, but with every attempt one certainty grew clearer: the poem, if I could only rescue it from chaos, was about my father.
After five hours I had fourteen versions of the poem. In the sixth hour, past midnight, I finally cracked it. I called it “Çodhir.”
The sun is warm. Across the border mass
graves are turned up like the garden
potatoes that fortified your military
pension. You missed your foreigners,
as you called the thin winter
deer of your retirement. Today
you thought of them, dashed the thought
against hutments and fences.