More: A Novel (37 page)

In my ninth month at the hotel, I decided I would no longer resist the intoxicating effects of morphine sulfate. I took a great leap and started taking walks in the morning. Going down to the shore, I weaved my way through the people. It really was a great enough leap to make me weak in the knees. I had to put up with people bumping into me as they passed by or saying, “Good morning!” In truth I intended these excursions to prevent me from doing something worse while on morphine sulfate. There was no limit to the things I might do in that state. I might even solicit a prostitute and find myself having sex with her. Anything could happen! So if I possessed even the smallest spark in the way of getting well,
I
had to be the one to turn it into a forest fire, not the person I was under the influence of morphine sulfate.

I started lightly experimenting with this. I’d go sit in a café and eavesdrop on the conversation at the next table. Next-table conversations were completely harmless. I wasn’t being spoken to or addressed, but I was somehow involved in the communication. I was trying to reintroduce myself to people …

A while later, I figured out what types of conversations took place at which café or bar and started scheduling my daily tours to correspond. For instance, I’d go to one place to listen to middle-aged women, another place to listen to girls my own age, and yet another place if I wanted to listen to men of all ages talking about those girls. Eavesdropping on next-table conversations was really like gazing at the fireplace. It was one of the safest types of socializing because there was no responsibility. It was like those times I’d get out of my seat and stand over the waste basket in the corner of my class in grade school to sharpen my pencil. I felt invisible as the whole class went on right next to me. Unfortunately you couldn’t sharpen a pencil forever. Likewise the conversations didn’t last either …

Then I took a further leap and joined an Internet chat room to communicate with people, no matter that it was only writing. That, however, was a total disappointment. I knew as soon as I’d joined that I was fooling myself. I could converse to death over the Internet on any and every subject imaginable, but this wouldn’t help me utter even as much as my name in real life. So I realized that the Internet wasn’t really all that different from morphine sulfate. It was like reading the minds of the completely unfamiliar people I passed by in the street. And that wasn’t what I needed. There was enough noise in my head as it was …

Aside from this I also joined guided tours a few times. I followed the rambling guides through ancient ruins and on hikes. Soon I also gave up on that, however, because someone would always try to talk to me on snack breaks and I’d clam up. When anyone turned to me and asked me something, I’d feel dizzy, my heart would constrict. I’d forget everything I knew and stammer, turning into a complete imbecile. I was starting to believe that my people allergy was biological rather than psychological. Because whenever I was near them, my neck itched, my face burned, my palms sweated, and my temples throbbed with pain …

I recalled the words of the young psychiatrist at the hospital in Gölbaşı whose diagnosis Emre and the others hadn’t taken seriously: “A subtype of trauma-related social anxiety disorder …” He had been right. In light of my more recent situation, at least, the correct diagnosis for me was this: social phobia or anxiety or worry or whatever the hell it was! I’d been able to pass Emre’s test of reconciling me with vitality, even if only through self-deception. It was time to become ordinary. To perform the social endeavors ordinary people undertake in their ordinary lives without even thinking about it … yet no matter how hard I tried to convince myself, I never felt safe among people and could never believe them. I thought they would surely harm me and close in on me on all sides and suffocate me. I was afraid they would bury me inside themselves. I was afraid of being crushed under their emotions and thoughts, of the weight of their bodies breaking my bones. I was threatened by their constantly moving lips, their restless hands, and their teeth that flickered in and out of sight. Those thirteen days and five hours of hell had ruined me. My sickness was too severe for any amount of recovery to help! At least that’s how I felt. No matter how much progress I made, I was sure I’d never have any real relationship with anyone.

As a young boy, I used to say, “When I grow up, I’m going to be all by myself!” Well, here I was, all by myself! But now I was trapped by my loneliness. I’d merely wanted an isolation pocket I could go in and out of whenever I wished. So I could get away from Ahad and the immigrants … an isolation pocket with a door … but now there was no such door. All those corpses had walled off the entrance, leaving me alone with my breathing. Inasmuch as my body had departed the reservoir in Kandalı, I was still gazing at the walls of that dark cell. The reservoir followed me everywhere like the imaginary moat that once surrounded me. That was the reason my loneliness was a snare. I’d been hunted down by life and waited for the hunter to come collect me. Just like morphine sulfate, loneliness also came in doses and that was where I lived … but the human inside me, the survivor against all odds, searched for a way to go among his own, that is, other people. But I resembled a haystack on the inside, and the chances of a needle finding a way out of there were very slim. So my days were either drenched in a waterfall of morphine sulfate or found me drenched in sweat on the treadmill.

Aside from that, I read. I only read. I read about the world, the people, and the time that I was missing out on. There was nothing else I could do. Perhaps I could also kill myself, but I left myself no time for that. I always nodded off before I could hang myself.

I lived in that hotel for ten months. Due to the speed at which I was depleting my money, however, I was compelled to move. Not to an apartment, but to another hotel … it was named the Ship. That’s why I picked it. In memory of Dordor and Harmin … One of its two stars had been scratched into the wall of the elevator, probably with a key.

I spent at first months, and then years, on that Ship. In the beginning I became even more reclusive, never mind getting better. I became so introverted I turned into a whirlpool. I started to suck myself into a vortex and everything got mixed up. My past resurfaced, and it was more horrifying than it had been in the reservoir. Because it was invisible! It was only aural. It resembled Ahad’s voice. It was muffled as though it was coming up through the earth. My only resort was to emerge from my whirlpool to scream, “Enough!” and add:

“You are not my past! My past isn’t anything like this! I’ll tell you what my past is! Listen to me good because this is the last time I’ll tell it! And whatever it is I choose to tell, I’ll believe in from this moment on!”

Where I should begin was evident:

“If my father hadn’t been a killer, I wouldn’t have been born …”

When I finally finished the story and was silent, I was no longer a whirlpool but a calm expanse of water. Then I picked up living from where I’d left off …

My single-serving life, as usual, was a disciplinary sentence. I did every single thing with a precision to the millimeter that I perfected over time. I knew how much dirt I would get under my nails due to which activities throughout the day, how many times I would consequently need to scrub them with the nailbrush until they were completely clean, the number of words I could memorize in one reading, and how long I could stand on one foot, left and right respectively. I knew how many people’s birth and death dates I could reel off and how many Renaissance artists I could name while doing sit-ups without my back or heels touching the floor.

My memory was a code of conduct for discipline, and I was discipline itself. After all, there was nothing to keep me busy except myself. So years passed by in the service of upgrading myself as if I were a piece of technology. In a laboratory I’d laid the bricks to surround me, since after all the only information I needed to produce me was myself, but of course it always fell short at one point. Naturally it was the fact that I’d never had a chance to test the final product, myself.

Needless to say, my attempts at quality control didn’t count, as my sickness would start smothering my consciousness as soon as I went out among people. I couldn’t repeat something with someone else present even though I was perfectly capable of it on my own. My potential capabilities, which blossomed in a controlled test environment, chemically reacted with the carbon dioxide expelled by random strangers and were rendered nonfunctional.

As stupid as I was when surrounded by human flesh, I was that much more intelligent when on my own. A mortal when everyone else on the streets was god, I was the god of gods between the walls I shut myself up in … Really it was all a matter of putting in the hours. I had the time to be the god of gods, was all. Others, however, were subjected to all the side effects of living together and put the majority of their resources into it. But they didn’t even know it and thought they were supposed to live together. And now I also wanted to believe.

Whenever I went out, however, I’d hit the wire mesh called reality and start to shake. I talked to myself constantly and couldn’t stop. I sat on a bench and talked about whatever I felt like. People glanced at me and walked away, unsettled. I tried to shut up but couldn’t.

Then it occurred to me to write. “If I write, I might stop talking!” I thought. I started going down to the shore with a notebook and pen. I tried to write everything that went through my mind in the book to keep from talking. But after a while I found myself writing letters to the people around me. In truth they weren’t letters but cries for help. Similar to my cries when I was beneath those corpses … I may not have been able to touch these people or talk to them, but I tried to make some sort of sound in writing at least.

An old man would sit next to me on the bench and I’d write in the book:

Hello … my name is Gaza.

But no one could hear what I was writing. Then I wrote in capital letters. Letters that shouted! But they were still inaudible! The old man got up and left, and a young woman sat in his place. I turned a page in my book and tried again:

Hello … my name is Gaza.

My first three years in the Ship passed by like this, as I could do nothing but improve myself and look for ways to escape from my prison of loneliness. I made hundreds of plans for escape and used them all. I was caught every time, but I never gave up. It was hard to escape from a prison guarded by one’s own self! But sooner or later I’d make it.

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!”