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by Günday, Hakan; Beler, Zeynep;

  When I entered the ward with a smile on my face, however, the first piece of news I received made it freeze. While I was in the isolation room, Şeref, my supplier of morphine sulfate, had died. The first thing I thought then was that no one else in the ward had cancer. I wished someone did, but they didn’t! No one else other than Şeref was on morphine sulfate. So as I walked from the door of the ward to my bed, at the sixteenth step if I remember correctly, I made up my mind: I was going to leave that hospital as soon as I could. That way, I’d rob the first pharmacy I came across and wouldn’t have to start all over again.

  In the hospital, no one would shut up about it: starting all over! I had absolutely no intention of doing that. All I wanted was to pick up my relationship with morphine sulfate where I’d left off. I must also do this inside a cell where I could run the fuck into myself. There was no life for me outside my skin. Another person in the same situation would surely think, “Fine, but where’d I find a cell?” but I was in luck. I was so lucky, out of the billions of men on Earth I’d had Ahad to call dad. Now he was dead, leaving me with an inheritance of a cell. Now I had an isolation room of my own, and it was in Kandalı. I pictured myself lying in that reservoir in the dark, surrounded by capsules of morphine sulfate. I smiled to picture it. If I’d had a pair of compasses, I could have drawn the picture of paradise without ever moving the sharp edge propped against the paper! For I knew what it looked like. I’d furnished it with Ahad’s money. So it could be hell for others … but it turned out to be paradise. For me at least! As the biggest sinner on Earth, my plan for redemption was laid out: going to paradise and dying there. Never through suicide … but through time.

  I had to either be discharged or escape as soon as possible! And since this was no adventure novel, I had to go for the former first. How hard could it be to fake recovery? After all, my insanity wasn’t the kind to show up in X-rays or blood tests! I carried a disease no X-ray could identify! I could even travel around the world without anyone knowing. But first I had to get out of that hospital. For that, unfortunately, I had to touch someone barehanded. What was more, I had to do it without screaming or my face crumpling under the weight of the ache flooding my insides. I thought that I should perhaps start with a few exercises. A few experiments …

  Naturally there was the whole history of medicine at hand, and I had to carry out my tests on animals like all scientists of conscience. I’d touch them first. The rest would surely come. How much of a difference could there be between touching a chimp and touching a human? Weren’t they both descended from the same primate? A primate named Adam … Sure, one was smarter than the other, it’s true! It had followed its instincts to go the way of the chimp and continued to evolve in harmony with nature. The other, on the other hand, with all its idiocy, turned to a creature hell-bent on dissatisfaction and found itself excluded from nature.

  But I didn’t care about any of that because it didn’t matter if the flesh I touched could count or bring about the end of the world. Flesh was flesh in the end! It was gross, but I had to touch it. Then I’d have to go one step forward and be able to touch humans. I tried to console myself by thinking that if I was in another place and time, a cannibalistic tribe in the seventeenth century for example, I might even have to eat humans, much less touch them. That was also a type of culture, after all, and the chances of being born into it were purely mathematics. Just as the Buddhas of Bamiyan were products of a culture, so was the Taliban that blew them up. In fact, the people that built those statues 1,400 years ago were of the same Buddhist culture as the people who kill Muslims in Burma today. One ought to not make a big deal of the concept of culture. After all, culture was the concern of obsessive maniacs who piled up their die-hard habits by passing them from generation to generation, effectively turning the world into the house of a hoarder! Sure, it was also collective memory, but was under high risk of Alzheimer’s! Plus if a presentation were made today introducing everyone to all the cultures of the Earth, telling them, “Go ahead, pick one! Free transportation. Whichever culture you like we’ll drop you off in, so you can live there forever,” I wonder what esteemed high-culture areas of the world would be deserted in about three seconds? I thought of all this, but of course none of it was any use to me.

  When I told him I’d start touching animals and move up in levels, Emre hesitated at first. After all, it wasn’t his idea. People needed a certain period of time before they could accept thoughts from the minds of others. They needed to take the idea presented to them and, in that period, personalize it by making some changes. This made it possible for them to own up to an idea as if it had been theirs. For Emre this period of self-deception took about four hours. He came to the ward to lean against my bed frame and say:

  “All right … we’ll do as you say … but I’m going to ask you to assist in the labor of an animal!”

  Assist in the labor of an animal? I loathed this guy’s obsession with birth! Maybe he didn’t even care about the births that much but was just making up random treatments on the go just so he’d have something to add to my idea. I still had no choice but to accept. I was in a hurry.

  “When?”

  “Let me have a word with the zoo, and then I’ll let you know. Maybe we’ll find a farm instead … let’s just see …”

  He left … and the second he did, my stomach started aching. The image of a different animal rose up in my mind every time I blinked, and I could feel their jelly-like placentas in my hands. The ache was becoming more violent and I shook. I sat in bed and looked around desperately. Right then I thought of the most harmless animal I knew. I took it out of my pocket and started touching it. I rubbed it against my face. Against my neck … Like a balm, I rubbed it into all the aching spots … and the pain began to fade. I must confess it was Cuma’s paper frog that saved me that day.

  Three days later, accompanied by a driver, Emre and I headed to a farm near Polatlı so I could kneel in front of a cow going through a difficult labor. As the farmer took the pair of hooves poking out of the cow and pulled on them, I asked, “What can I do?”

  “Stroke her,” he said. “Just stroke her …”

  I glanced first at Emre and then at the gigantic animal lying flat against the wall of the barn, took a breath bigger than myself, and touched its hot back. I yanked my hand back as though it would burn, but then took another breath and touched it again.

  The animal turned its head and said, “Don’t be afraid.” It was Emre who’d spoken, but I didn’t care. I stroked her … and stroked her …

  The pair of hooves became a pair of spindly legs and the calf’s head emerged between them. The instant it was tugged out into life and separated completely from its mother, I started to weep. My tears soaked my temples that should have already started throbbing with pain, and I wept as if it were me who was born. Then I took the farmer’s hands to say, “Bless you! Thank you …”

  Emre was so happy on the way back that he told me several times that he was proud of me. After all, we’d killed a bunch of birds with one stone. I’d been able to touch both the animal and the farmer. I even went to extremes and touched Emre’s arm by way of reply the whole way back. A bunch of times, even …

  “Just stoke her!” we said in imitation of the farmer, laughing at each other. “Just stroke her …”

  When we returned to the hospital, Emre and I parted ways, and I went in the bathroom. Standing in front of one of the sinks, I turned on the tap and began removing the dried egg whites adhered to the palms of my hands like a second skin. I wasn’t that dumb. Not all that dumb … The surest way to avoid touching a person or placenta was to cover my palms and the insides of my fingers with another placenta. For this method I actually owed Ahad for wasting me by pressing down on the cigarette burn on my wrist on the day I left Yadigar’s holding cell. It was when he’d finished his spiel and taken his hand off my wrist that he’d told me, “Go break two eggs … separate the whites, and whip them good, put them on there! It’s
good for your burns!” I’d done what he said but it didn’t do a damn. The only thing I’d observed was those egg whites coating my hands like a pair of clear gloves.

  Thus the only thing I needed for my performance at the farm was a couple of eggs, and there were plenty of those in the hospital kitchen. The rest was acting. And I’d been acting since I was born. For Gaza was not the name of a person, but of a part. A character. That’s how it was supposed to be. I’d have long killed myself otherwise. Had Gaza really been a person, there’d be no tolerating his existence. Loving him, even less of a possibility! Therefore Gaza was really just a double. A double specialized in action scenes! That was exactly how he’d been able to utter that sentence so naturally: “Just stroke her!” He’d repeated it over and over … stroke the cow, love yourself, love people, love life … just love them. Is that so? Fuck you! You’ve ever known a Gaza in your life? Why don’t you try and love him if it’s so fucking easy? In the end, I was probably a nutcase … but not so much of one as to go touching people.

  We stood in front of the entrance of the building and watched the snowflakes drift around us and melt as soon as they landed on our shoulders. Or I did. Emre wanted to shake hands. I first looked at his hand, then smiled and embraced him in a way he didn’t expect at all. The same way Ender apprehended me years ago, so I did Emre. This time around I wasn’t the one who had to worry about where to look during the embrace! Emre was the one trapped and bewildered between my clasped arms. I held that pose for as long as possible so he wouldn’t be able to tell that my intention was to touch the fabrics covering him rather than his hands.

  I even whispered in his ear, “Thanks for everything.” Then as abruptly as I’d embraced him, I withdrew.

  Slightly shaken by such a heartfelt farewell and at a loss for words, Emre took out of his pocket the piece of paper on which I’d drawn the labyrinth and showed it to me, saying, “See, I’ve been keeping this …” Then he added, “You’re a very smart guy, Gaza!”

  I remembered that from somewhere. Hadn’t the prosecutor said something of the like? He’d said “kid” instead, I think, but now I was grown up. At least that’s how I appeared on the outside.

  Though I tried not to look at the dried blood on the paper, my gaze slid to it and I raised my head, saying, “I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it! It was my fault,” Emre said, about to put the paper back in his pocket when I spoke again:

  “That’s not the real solution to the labyrinth, though.”

  “It isn’t?” he asked, peering at the paper in his hand.

  “Give it some more thought.” I smiled.

  “Okay,” said Emre. “I will. Good-bye, Gaza.”

  I left the hospital in Gölbaşı in a van similar to the one that brought me there. I’d entered the building as a nutcase and left as a nutcase and an addict. All I had in my pocket was Cuma’s frog and some money raised by Emre and his colleagues. It was cold. Everything was covered in a merciful layer of white. But the tires and I were fitted with snow chains. Neither mercy nor the snow could stop us. We weren’t stranded and never looked back …

  I got off the hospital van to board a public bus to Ankara, thrusting into the crowd like a reluctant fist. There wasn’t much I could do. The bus was so crammed I had to either make either shoulder or elbow contact. Human flesh surrounded me, and I had a long way to go. The best I could do was keep my eyes shut as much as I could and grit my teeth. As I brushed past all that meat and fabric, I felt like the real solution to the labyrinth that I’d mentioned to Emre. For Emre to get to the solution, he’d have to erase the labyrinth completely. That would just leave the trail he’d drawn with his pen. That trail was my secret I’d built the labyrinth around. When the labyrinth was erased only the letter G would be left on the paper. Not for Gaza, of course, but for khat!8 I felt like a hunk of khat on that bus to Ankara. Just the same as always … as though I was being chewed up … to finally be spit out of the bus.

  I was at the terminal. Nineteen years old and on the trail for morphine sulfate … I walked past the two pharmacies in the building dozens of times until it was time to board the bus that would take me to Kandalı. The place was crawling with cops, however. Or I was hallucinating. That’s why I wasn’t able to enter either one of the pharmacies and threaten, “Give me the morphine sulfate or I kill you with my invisible gun!” Anyway, how was I supposed to rob a pharmacy without a weapon? I knew then that I had no choice but to make do with the Tolvon in my backpack. I’d just sleep on the matter …

  I boarded the bus that pulled up to the platform an hour before departure, took a near-overdose of Tolvon, closed my eyes, and promised myself not to open them again until I reached Kandalı. By a miracle I was able to keep my promise. I’d skipped over the hours-long trip in a single slumbering step. Had I not been able to, I would likely have been out of my seat before the bus had traveled a hundred kilometers, gone over to the driver, and grabbed the wheel to swerve off road. Had I not been able to sleep, I’d be the first one to sail through the windshield … but sleep I did!

  That was the way in which I set foot in Kandalı, which I’d left at fifteen, four years ago, claiming I’d never come back. A different person might have felt an emotional turmoil or three, but I felt nothing. I just walked on the paving stones. First I walked past the gendarmerie station, then the restaurants where I’d placed orders for the world’s most beautiful girl. None of it mattered to me. My home wasn’t Kandalı as much as the reservoir at the end of Dust Street.

  After a half-hour hike, I passed the sign reading “good-bye” and saw my own. It was still there. Although slightly changed … there were four bullet holes and rust on it. Someone had shot my sign. Though it had died on its feet. I brushed it with my fingertips as I passed and entered Dust Street.

  I inadvertently sped up with every step until I encountered a pitch-black wreck. I laughed. Ender really was some arsonist. He must’ve known what he was doing. It was like he’d used lightning bolts instead of gas. He’d burned the single-story house right down to the ground, leaving behind only its skeleton. Its walls resembled the rib cage of a dinosaur. Half the roof had fallen in, leaving the building, once a stately abode to Ahad, like a rotted tooth. Really, Ender couldn’t have done me a bigger favor. Not even all the hate within me could have enabled me to start such a flawless fire.

  The arbor and shed remained as I’d left them. Even the hole where they’d dug out the weakling’s body was still there … I opened the door to the shed and saw that everything was gone. Looters from Kandalı had taken all that they could get their hands on. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d looted the shed itself piece by piece! The only thing that interested me was the reservoir. Police had most likely smashed the lock on its lid. The manhole lid was still there, however. It was interesting that the looters hadn’t hauled it off to sell as scraps. Maybe they’d been too afraid and tried to stay out of the reservoir to evade Ahad’s curse.

  I lifted the lid with both hands and set foot onto the first step leading down to the reservoir. I descended the stairs slowly and flicked on a lighter. I’d been mistaken about the looters. They’d cleared out the reservoir too. They’d taken the fans and the cameras. Only the camera that Rastin had broken with the metal bucket had been left behind. They’d taken the clock off the wall as well. Of course, they wouldn’t have known that I’d messed with its mechanism. Who knew whose wall it hung on now, making time lag?

  I smiled. Home at last … I put out the lighter and sat down right where I was. Then I lay facedown onto the cold floor. I don’t remember which one had taken the first blow of my life, but I turned my left cheek to rest against the ground. I stretched out my arms as far as I could on either side of me and pressed down on the sawdust with the palms of my hands. I was cold but absolutely did not care. I was embracing my home! My eyes watered, though I was smiling. I rolled over onto my back and raised my hands, running them through the darkness all around me so I could touch
it. I was overcome with laughter. I stroked the air of my paradise and filled it with mirth that bounced and echoed off its four walls. “I’ve arrived!” I hollered.

  “I’ve arrived at last! I’ve returned to you! I have nowhere else to go, that’s why! You’re the only home I’ve ever known! You’re the only thing I know …”

  I wept. As much as I pleased, at that. This was true freedom: weeping as much as one pleased. And perhaps also, weeping about whatever one pleased.

  I had so little money that I was going to have to make some decisions. Like the decisions Rastin once forced his people to make … I would either drink or eat. I would either have warmth or light … I picked the bottle and candles.

  Then came turn for another decision that had nothing to do with the amount of money in my pocket. A decision concerning the amount of sickness in my cells: I’d either have to rob a pharmacy or shut myself up in the reservoir to try to forget about morphine sulfate completely. Both were tough. Really tough … especially robbing a pharmacy! There was no way I could be alone in a tiny shop with a pharmacist. With customers inside, however, I’d definitely be caught. I didn’t know what to do. I’d left the hospital so I could have access to morphine sulfate. At least that’s what I thought up until the moment I went inside the reservoir. Maybe it had been calling to me all along: the reservoir … and morphine sulfate merely the backdrop for my paradise. I can make it, I thought. I can seal myself off from everything and leave the morphine sulfate outside.

  I tried … but neither the antidepressants in my backpack nor my attempts at holding my breath to get underneath my skin were any use. Morphine sulfate withdrawal was blindness at first sight! No matter how hard I shut my eyes, a blinding light remained behind. Nothing was dark enough. And I was definitely not isolated enough! Who knew what was drifting through the air? What kind of bacteria? What microscopic monsters raining down over me? I might not be able to see any of them, but I knew for sure that I was swallowing a thousand every time I opened my mouth. Even if I pressed my lips together and pressed my palms over them, I knew they were inside the breath I drew in through my nose!