by Hakan Günday
By my fourth year at the hotel, I was on the streets all the time. Every day! I was in front of, behind, and next to people constantly. I got on elevators with them, pressed the same buttons they pressed, and retrieved the bottles they threw in the trash to bring to my lips. I drew up close to women from behind the way I used to as a boy and got their hands to bump against me. I got on buses at rush hour and let people brush against me. Felat would have been proud! Each invention I made in the service of approaching people was a true gem! I did everything I could! Everything!
And on my fourth year at the Ship, a miracle happened! I experienced extraordinary intimacy of a different kind, one that hadn’t occurred to me until that day. I was finally compensated for all the time I spent on the streets in a transformative moment I stumbled upon by coincidence. It changed everything!
It was October. The sun shone as though in announcement of the miracle that was about to take place. It was the afternoon and it happened all at once:
I joined complete strangers in the lynching of a complete stranger.
I stood there, just staring at the sun. It stared back from its perch over the most elaborate building in the square, the watchtower. The haggling over trinkets had long been cut off by the back-to-your-rooms gong, the frequency of which was only audible by tourists such as myself, sweeping most of the crowd under hotel towels. Those remaining in the square before dinner kept opening their shopping bags to try to subtract the weight of their finds from the degree they’d been ripped off. For this they would stop every three steps, the sunlight spilling over their shoulders like golden capes each time.
I’d also heard the gong, but I didn’t want to leave my spot. From where I stood, I saw everyone silhouetted against the sun. They neither had mouths to talk about me behind my back with, nor eyebrows to rise and fall or eyes to ignore me with. The people were between the sun and me, and they’d all gone dark. I couldn’t make out any of their faces or read any of their thoughts and savored the self-deception. Their shadows, as dark as their bodies, stretched out around them and made a world of giants of the square’s pavement.
From where I stood, I watched them pass by underneath my feet and crushed their heads. I didn’t have to take a single step. They were the ones extending their arms, legs, and bodies under my soles to be smashed to pieces. I may have been standing on the shadows and not on the actual people, but for the moment it was enough. It was more than enough for someone who felt his only viable chance at being close to anyone was an organ transplant …
Right then I felt a humming in my ears. Then suddenly the earth started shaking. I saw the giants run from their land and immediately looked up to scan my surroundings.
The people had suddenly vanished. A child whose mother tried to drag him away by the hand was pointing an ice cream at something behind me. I’d started to turn around when something dashed by me. It was so fast I had to blink twice to see that it was a person. At first I thought it was a pickpocket. But it was more like the guy was running from a tsunami than the police. Not for freedom, but for his life. Spinning around on my heels, I saw said tsunami. After all, two-thirds of the human bodies rushing at me like lava from an erupting volcano were water. In fact, the water flowed from their mouths in the form of foam, while their arms, which they swung to run faster, undulated like the gears of a harvester ready to chop down everything in its way. I was either going to get trampled by them, or start running, or throw up my hands and cry, “Stop!”
I didn’t have much of a choice because I had the courage to neither be trampled nor talk. So I was going to run. But how? The smallest miscalculation in timing would mean being trampled by the racing crowd or, if I got too close to the man, contaminate me with whatever crime it was he’d committed. I had to run in such a way I could blend into the crowd without any damage.
It was too important a decision to be left up to me. So I unconditionally turned over the command of my body and mind to fear. The tyrant known as fear readied me like a relay race runner so I made a perfect start as soon as I felt the breath of the crowd on the back of my neck. If all the trapeze artists of the world, who made a living hurling themselves into thin air at the right time so they could catch a pair of hands, could witness me setting out, they would have envied me; so flawless was my timing. And I didn’t even have a net below me. Only dusty concrete with feet wearing it out, waiting for someone to fall so it could scrape off their skin.
I was so merged into the mob that I felt as if we’d been together since whenever it was they’d started running. As if we’d been running shoulder-to-shoulder since we were born, even. I was no longer in the front lines but some way off in the back. In the midst of the people. Fear had picked me up like a baby and swathed me in numbers. It was no longer my tyrant but my god. And just like any other god, it needed a sacrifice. I didn’t have to look too hard, since the sacrifice was some distance ahead, screaming as he ran. A few more steps and our voices caught his ears first, and then our hands his shoulders. Though he tried to shake free one last time, our numbers quickly swallowed him. It was as though he was losing not a finger or an arm, but his entire body, to a bench saw. I’d shoved past the two necks in my way to see him up close when something struck the inner corner of my eye.
At first I thought it was a small pebble or the finger of one of the people near me. I was still running, though with one eye closed. It was as if my eyelids were glued together and sealed closed with red wax. I knew I had the color of the wax correct when I looked at the finger I reflexively rubbed my eye with. My fingerprint was red. But what sealed my eyelids together was blood, not melted wax. The first blood of the sacrificial victim had sailed through the air like a fishing line and struck me in the eye with its hook. I was seeing blood.
I realized right then that I was now ruled by something other than fear. Fear had assumed god form to rise to the heavens and so excitement had gotten hold of my body and reason. The excitement of moving as one with and in the same direction as the people I hadn’t been able to be near in years. The excitement of chasing the same ideals as people I’d have difficulty looking in the eye on a regular day, let alone touch! Just a few minutes ago, I’d been taking pleasure in crushing their shadows and now they had me by the hand, inviting me to crush someone else.
I felt freer than I’d ever been. The walls of my prison of loneliness were demolished! No one judged me or thought I was crazy. I was the society and its influence, and I was drunk on it. The mob and me, as I blissfully melted into it, we were magnificent. Like a gigantic stingray undulating in the air. A perfect leviathan. Our feet left the ground and our hands tangled. We collided, tripped, held on to one another. We rose and descended, fell and got up and ran without a glance behind. Breathless, elbow-to-elbow, we traversed walls of dust, our sweat spilling onto one another’s shoulders. We didn’t blink or ever stop shouting. It didn’t matter what we were saying or where we were going, because we were after him. That precious bloodied body. The body that was redder every time it rose above the sea of hands and emerged more naked every time it sank into the crowd below.
If they could, his ravaged nostrils would’ve inhaled us into his lungs instead of oxygen. His eyelids, if there were any left to open, could only close by rubbing against us. For we were all around him. There were a hundred of us, perhaps a thousand! Who knows how many nails we had, how many teeth? How many of us had eaten, how many shared a name? None of it mattered because we were now one.
He was our soul and we were his flesh. And like all souls he was ahead of the flesh. A kick would send his head flying just as it got ahold of his hair; his body would be dragged away just as it was about to crush his torso. We shook off the hair wrapped around our fingers, still attached to their roots, as our soles beat the ground. We couldn’t hold on to him. From hand to hand and foot to foot he flitted like a butterfly, its wings open in appeal. We couldn’t reach him. Billowing bonelessly above our heads like a flag, his body, in a split second, turned into a d
eflated ball and bounced off our toes. He was a tree trunk being carried off by the current, and we were the current itself. He vacillated between existing and not existing, bobbed up and down on the waves. And there was just one thing we desired: to get to him before he died. To douse our ears with his final scream, our faces with his final breath. Don’t let it end, I screamed inwardly. Whatever it is that’s called now, don’t let it end! Because I didn’t know what I’d do when it did … but it did end.
First we were surrounded by mist and we started coughing. Then our eyes watered, and there was a barrage of police batons. Every drop went in through the backs of our necks to spill out of our mouths. Down the corners of our lips, leaving broken teeth. We dissipated like smoke under lashes from pressurized water. Everyone ran or hobbled back to where they’d come from, the undulating stingray vanishing. Leviathan was dead.
I watched the rest on TV. On the evening news. Police had found the soul we’d abandoned in the square, drenched in blood. I found out his identity from the anchor: B dot F dot.9 He was a retired literature teacher. A rapist that filled a fourteen-year-old student with himself instead of with poetry. He’d spent eight years in the cell he’d been put into as a protection from the other inmates and was assaulted by a person, and then God knows how many people, on the day he’d been released.
“Incredible!” said the anchorwoman, whose shade of blond looked like it would require serious surgery to obtain. “It’s incredible that he escaped unharmed from the assault of a mob of such magnitude! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, as you can s—”
The power went out, and I found myself staring at my own reflection on the dark screen a few inches away. I sat on the foot of my bed in the narrowest room of the Ship. The most valuable piece of furniture in the darkness was now the light that emanated from the glass onto the wall, which in turn came from a streetlamp. It and its halo stared at me like St. Giraffe of the streets. The perpetual hum of the air conditioner, usually running at maximum so as not to leave guests any room to grumble, was silent. Though it had kept me warm ever since it had gotten colder, or at least that’s what it had felt like …
Time stood still first. Then cold filled the room in a flood, and I started shivering so hard I thought I’d drown. So hard that it made me nauseated. I could neither stop my jaw nor my hands. Even my eyes must have been shivering. If someone took a photo, I’d definitely come out blurred. The room was so narrow there was nowhere to throw up except on myself. Difficult as it was, I clamped my lips shut to hold back the remnants of the last meal I’d had, which now came up all the way to my teeth. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t have caught something. Yet perhaps!
Had I by any chance contracted a virus from the crowd I’d been a part of? Why not? That much hate was bound to infect me. A really peculiar disease with a name I’d have to ask the doctor to repeat at least three times before I got it! Arms wrapped around myself as though in an invisible straitjacket, I shivered as I tried to pinpoint the reason. It didn’t take long. It found me: fear. It struck me on the brow like a hammer from the heavens. I fell backward. As I writhed on the bed like a living person inside a body bag, I saw the room turn into fear. First, the white-maned horses in the shitty hotel painting above my head took on the form of fear and trampled me into the ground. Then the wall across from me took on the form of fear to collapse onto my legs and the ceiling took on the form of fear to collapse on top of me. Finally, the power, in the form of fear, came back on.
I got off the bed so fast my head spun. “Right away!” I said.
“Right away! Right now! I have to go, I’ve got to run! They’ll discover what I’ve done! They’ll discover that I was there today! There, in that crowd! Did I hit him? Was I able to hit that man? Does it matter? Isn’t it enough that I was there with them? They’ll put me in prison! I’m screwed!”
My voice, rising in volume, had started to echo within me and then off the walls when someone knocked twice on the wall I’d braced myself against to keep from falling. I shut up and held my breath. Who was in the next room? Would he turn me in? Had he heard me yelling? Would he call the police? Then there was another knock. And another. And another. And another. And another and another. It ended on a groan. A violin wrapped up the drum solos. The panic, the shivering, the fear, and everything else … were ejaculated into oblivion.
No one was looking for me! No one would call the police! No one cared! The people in the next room, the people next to them, and the people underneath and above them, and all those who’d climbed over one another in that square to kill a person and seemingly failed, they were, every one of them, screwing, or had screwed and were busy digging tunnels to dreams. Life went on so hard I was embarrassed at being scared. I laughed. When in Rome, do as the Romans do! Wasn’t that how the saying went? But I was a Spartan in Rome! So I screwed neither myself nor anyone else.
Instead, I broke open two morphine capsules on a piece of paper, crushed the miniature bubbles with a lighter, and patiently dissolved the dusty powder in cold water before drawing it into a filtered syringe. Then I sent it into my bloodstream through the space between the peace-sign fingers on my right hand like I was boss of the motherfucking world.
Two days went by without anyone knocking on my door. I wasn’t arrested, nor did anyone come nosing around. In the meantime I recalled Baudelaire, his famous quote: My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it. I myself was one of the beasts now. To boot, there was no penalty to eating hearts if there were enough of the beasts. If there’d been, Baudelaire would have added: Then the day came and holes riddled each of their hides! But there was no such line in any of his poems. So it would seem that the lynching kitchen had one principal rule: no matter how much dirt you get on your hands, you’ll be clean when you leave! So that’s what I did, washed up and left the room. It was clear where I was headed.
I returned to the square where it all began. It was at least as clean as I was. There was neither a bloodstain nor a molar in sight. One more battlefield had been wiped clean from history by a firefighter’s hose, allowing tourists to replace the killers and the bodies. Fine, but could the act of lynching be counted as battle? I was dwelling on this question when I spied a couple taking turns photographing each other. This reminded me of the homework I’d presently assigned myself. I now gave myself simple assignments and tried to complete them no matter how hard. I’d progressed from pen and paper to vocal cords. I managed to talk to people even if only slightly.
“I can take your picture if you’d like.”
They were so absorbed in taking up the frame that it took them a few seconds to process my words. The young woman, smiling, acted before the man.
“Thank you so much. If you could please snap us in front of the tower …”
Her boyfriend was taken aback by her abrupt acquiescence. He hadn’t had the chance to look me over to determine whether I looked like I’d run with the camera. He might have handed it over with more assurance if he’d had five more seconds. Since he couldn’t very well say to a stranger, “I’m worried you might be a thief. Would you promise you’re not a thief?” he was obliged to point out the shutter release. I took the camera and took four steps back. I brought it up to my face and squinted into the viewfinder with my left eye.
First he put his hand on her shoulder. Then she turned and flattened the length of her body against him and put her hand on his chest. They bared their teeth in unison. The moment they’d been waiting for had arrived. They probably looked like a pair of dumbasses in the majority of the photos they’d taken that day. They’d cut the forehead off one or the nose off the other trying to include in the frame, not counting themselves, buildings, statues, fountains, horse carriages, horses, and other horseshit. Anyhow, it was really none of my business. What concerned me was my treatment, and I’d faultlessly completed the first step, the offer to take a picture.
The second half of the assignment, however, was more difficult. In no way could I let myself be intimidated by the
se two people as they struck the pose of their lives in front of me and held it for at least thirty seconds, in spite of the discomfort behind their frozen smiles. And I’d only been able to inwardly count to six.
The woman was the first to react. After all, the responsibility for letting me into their lives rested on her. Without her smile wavering, a very impressive feat, she asked, “Isn’t it working?”
I didn’t reply. This was a medical condition. It was a cleansing process. Pressing that shutter within thirty seconds was like an addict taking up heroin once again. Resistance was excruciating. These people standing in front of me like taxidermied pets weighed so hard on me that it was as if their stares pierced my throat and their teeth—between lips I suspected must be getting numb—tore off my ears. Or that was just how I felt. All they did was stand there and stare at me. Or at the camera in between us, to be accurate. Now the man asked:
“Isn’t it working?”
Once again I didn’t reply. That they asked this, really, was proof of their goodwill. Instead of saying “Why aren’t you taking the photo?” they placed the blame on the camera by asking, “Isn’t it working?” I couldn’t do this to them any longer. But I was a dam that must remain standing until the very end, straining under the pressure of human existence. Just as he started to take his hand off her shoulder to move toward me, I cried:
“All right, here I go!”
It was a kind of hurrah. He resumed his pose, and I pressed the shutter. Thirty-three seconds exactly! It was an extraordinary achievement! We’d all passed the test of forbearance! They’d shown me how civil they could be while I’d assured myself that I wasn’t afraid of them. Two steps each brought us together, and they looked first at the photo on the camera’s screen and then at me. All three of us were smiling now.
“It’s come out great, thank you so much,” said the woman, obliging me to complete the next level of my assignment.