More: A Novel (23 page)

Now my knees were near enough I could rest my elbows on them. I’d lost a space of not thirty centimeters but at least half a meter! I would never be able to stretch my legs any more than this. For a second I thought I might be able to sit on the body behind me to make room for my legs, but the boulder above me wouldn’t allow that. It wasn’t high enough. What was all this for, then? I was about to find out!

First I put down the lighter and then unbuttoned my trousers. I was in such a hurry my hands shook, and I couldn’t open my zipper. Finally, with my feet against the body opposite me and my back against the body behind me, I was able to raise myself momentarily and unzip my trousers to pull them down.

Then, in the dark, I began to caress the breasts, the locations of which I’d committed to memory, while with my other hand I began touching myself inside my underpants. It was all very cold. Colder than my hands. And nothing was happening. The blood inside me wasn’t pooling where it was supposed to, and I couldn’t feel the breasts I was touching to be the pieces of meat I’d been aroused by a minute ago. Nothing was real! Nothing at all! Me being there, caressing the breasts of a corpse, what I was doing to myself, none of it!

So, eyes filling with tears, I struggled for the unachievable. All was gone. All my hopes had disappeared into such a black hole that not a single trace was left behind. There was no way I could ever get them back out. I’d found myself sitting on that ice-cold piece of earth, kneading a piece of clay that would never harden. I was wringing, releasing, and caressing a dead pair of breasts and feeling nothing.

But I had no intention of surrendering to all the lifelessness. Everything was dead enough as it was, but I wasn’t! Despite some difficulty, I bent my head to tuck my feet underneath me and gripped the breasts to pull myself forward. I took my left hand off the chest to lean my forehead against it, and slowly coasted my face over it. My eyebrows, eyes, cheekbones, nose, and cheeks. I wanted every part of my face to touch the chest that was cold and hard as marble.

Then I kissed the spot I imagined the veins of the marble to knit together. My lips parted and the two tips met. The tip of my tongue drifted over and around the nipple.

I was doing all this so ponderously that it felt like every movement took hours. I started sucking. Eyes shut, I knelt on my knees. One hand clutched the breast while the other clutched at me. As I sucked on the nipple with my lips and tongue, so I touched myself with five fingers. Neither faster nor slower. My fist moved back and forth as though sharpening a knife, the heat rising inside it. As it rose it became bigger than my fist and forced my fingers apart.

I was thinking of the world’s most beautiful girl. And of the others … I’d completely forgotten where and who I was. My eyes shut tight, I waited for that one moment. That moment would bring an end to everything, suffusing my harrowed body and mind with such pleasure that it would all cease to matter. Pain and pleasure would become so level that life would be stretched like a line between them and I, tightrope walker, would do cartwheels on it. I could feel it. I could feel the last drop roiling inside me before it made the glass overflow. A river was about to flow out of my loins, I just knew it.

Just as I was poised to meet that instant with all my cells opening like floodgates, breath held, a bitter taste filled my mouth! A sticky, viscous, bitter fluid! At first I thought it was blood! What else could it be in the midst of all those bodies? Surely it was blood! Who knows what part of the woman it had come from all the way to her nipple? Who knows how much of it I’d sucked in, even swallowed?

I jerked backward. Sailing like a spring toy on my knees, I knocked my head against the boulder before falling on my back onto the body stretched out behind me.

With a scream I sat back on my heels and immediately began spitting and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. But it was too late. I’d already swallowed at least a few drops! I wasn’t about to go looking for the lighter I’d left on the ground. I took the pack out of my pocket, pulled out the other lighter, and lit it.

First I examined my hands. There was nothing on them that resembled blood. There was only a yellow-tinged clear fluid forming fine bridges between my fingers. The fluid I was after was more or less the same color, but it was clear what I was seeing hadn’t come from me! I looked up quickly and looked at the woman’s breast. There it was! It oozed out of the nipple like a fat teardrop and dribbled onto the earth.

The drop I’d seen must have been the last as nothing came after it, and everything dried up. I couldn’t make sense of it at all. Why, I was asking. How could it be? What is this stuff? Some kind of disease? An infection? Why would a woman’s breast leak that kind of …

I stopped! I’d hit such a wall that I had no chance but to stop. I’d come to such an understanding that my shoulders collapsed under its weight. The breast I’d been sucking on belonged to the pregnant woman. The woman who’d have named her child Rastin if it were a boy. She’d said she was four months pregnant. Her body had long prepared itself for the baby but hadn’t been any the wiser when it died halfway. What I’d sucked on had gathered in that breast for someone who’d never be born. I’d tasted mother’s milk for the first time in my life. My own mother hadn’t done it, but in the end somebody had nursed me.

I didn’t know what to think. Or what to feel … I wasn’t even sure I felt shame. The lighter remained in my grip, lighting up everything like a torch, but I hung my head and saw nothing. My trousers were around my ankles, and I was sitting on them. I flicked the lighter off and put it between my teeth. Then I sat up slightly to stretch my legs in front of me, despite some difficulty, and gave my back to the body behind me. Extending my legs as much as I could, I pulled up my trousers and zipped and buttoned them. Sitting up again, I folded my legs underneath me and dropped onto my heels. I took the lighter from between my teeth to put in my pocket, shut my eyes, and held my breath.

I started to wait. I waited for the clock face to appear in my mind’s eye … but it didn’t. I was unable to conjure up the picture in my pitch-black mind. No matter how long I held my breath, the clock face appeared neither in front nor behind my eyes. That was when I descended one level lower into hell. For I realized that I was unable to remember the hour of my arrival in it. What had just transpired left my mind so ravaged that nothing was left behind but pain. The pain took up so much space that my mind had dispensed with all else to make room for it. The hour of arrival, naturally, was part of that and it had been cast out with everything else.

Now I could go mad and I did. I started hitting myself. Slapping at myself! Then I hit the bodies. Anything that came across my fists, I punched. I hit legs, bellies, chests, and other things I could guess at but didn’t want to think about. I’d lost it. I just howled as I played the skin-covered drums surrounding me. I rose and fell on my feet, striking my legs, my bent knees, and my groin! I struck the piece of flesh I’d desperately embraced in hopes of the pleasure it would give me to abate my pain. I flailed at the entire world given to me in that tiny space. I’d no longer be sure of anything. Neither the passing of time, nor anything else!

“You may’ve been here for days!” I started to scream. “How would you know?”

How would anyone know, really? Who could tell me this when even I didn’t know? Maybe I’d been here for weeks. Yes, only that would explain everything! Would I have lost myself enough to consider making love to a corpse if I hadn’t been here for weeks? Of course not! But then shouldn’t everything have rotted?

I yanked the lighter out with such force that I tore my pocket. I don’t know what I hoped to see when I lit it. Was it more preferable that they had rotted, or that I’d gone so insane that I’d wanted to fuck a corpse before they even had a chance to? Which was it? When the lighter was lit, everything would come to light. I’d either have to see the decay or accept that I was decayed on the inside!

Taking a breath, I struck the lighter and opened my eyes. I looked at them all. At everything! Into their dulled eyes! At their discolored lips! Their bloody noses! Their shredded skin! The bones poking out of their flesh! Whatever it was life offered me, I looked at it all, one by one. There was no decay at all. So it seemed that I was the one who was decayed. My history of being buried preceded all theirs. My decay had begun the night my mother tried to bury me like a rock. I’d been rotting for fifteen years!

I hated my mother so much then that brought the lighter flame to the nipple I’d just sucked milk out of and waited for it to burn. As I waited I hated my mother that much more and covered both breasts in burns.

Since there was no more initial hour in my mind to write in soot, I sucked in all the smoke. As I expelled the smoke after it had traveled every possible place under my skin, I studied the reservoirful of people around me. Then I thought of the others. The other people that had come through the reservoir on Dust Street … I saw the world’s most beautiful girl in the smoke coming out of my nose. Then the other girls … though none of it had felt like rape, all the girls I really had raped …

“Now,” I said, “that’s how you take revenge!”

For now I understood. They were the ones who’d presented me with those breasts, knowing I’d go after them, making my coffin even narrower and causing me to forget what I should never forget. They’d done this so they could have their revenge on me!

“See?” they said. “You wanted to touch us. And we accepted either out of fear or because we were dead. But in the end it’s you, not us, who’s gone mad! You!”

And I said, “Not enough! This much suffering is not enough! Give me some more! More, more!”

But now there was no reply. Whoever it was that had said, “More!” was no longer speaking to me.

Perhaps that was because, through a gap the size of a keyhole, it had seen all I’d done and me for the monster I was. It wouldn’t even say that one word anymore. Or it had already croaked! It had drowned in its own blood inside its confinement to become another brick in the flesh building over me. I wasn’t interested. Whether it was dead or alive, I didn’t care one bit. After all, I could yell enough for us both. I could stare at those dead faces flickering to life in the lighter flame and say, “More!” As many times as I wished! “More!” Until my throat cracked! “More! Come on! Isn’t there any more? Is this all there is? More, come on! Whatever it is you have to give, give me more! Whatever will happen, let there be more of it! More! More! More!”

Gaza! Calm down and flick off that lighter. Then close your eyes and hold your breath. The numbers you’re looking for are three and fifteen. When you came here, it was a quarter past three and that was twelve hours ago. This is the last time I help you. It looks like you won’t be hearing my voice again. Because you don’t deserve it. Now, let go of your breath. Good-bye.

Really? You’re going to leave me here alone? Fine. Go. Do what you want! So I don’t deserve to hear your voice! All right. Leave me here! Fuck off! I don’t need anything! I can very well survive without you! I might go mad, but I’ll live! I won’t just check out like you! I’ll live a long time yet, Cuma … Cuma! Was it you? Was it you all along who said, “More”? Cuma … Cuma!

I kept thinking of Dordor and Harmin trapped below the earth, unable to step onto it. Or I was hallucinating. Or I was sleeping and watching dreams revolve around my head, holding one another by the tail. I couldn’t tell if I was awake or not. I burned a mark into a leg, owner unknown, every twelve hours, keeping track of the passing time that way. On another’s back, again with the lighter, I’d written
03:15
in a burned shade. So I had no problem concerning the time and date.

I even hollered at the top of my lungs once every hour for at least five minutes, just in case someone heard me. I’d found an unopened pack of biscuits in the pocket of one of the bodies. Every four hours I put one in my mouth and let it melt on my tongue in a five-minute long ritual, believing myself to be full. I also continued to drink the rainwater distilled by human flesh …

Though I wasn’t sure how much of this I did awake and how much asleep, I was leading a more or less orderly life. The slave merchant, finally stranded on his deserted island, was already accustomed to it! Moreover, aside from all that, when I lit the lighter, I was able to witness something no one could get accustomed to! True, at times I’d been able to assist myself by picturing autopsy specialists, but this time it wasn’t working. After all, no autopsy specialist had ever had to climb into the refrigerator in the morgue to sleep with the cadavers. But I did! And this way I could closely observe the way they swelled up. Their faces and especially their bellies inflated, their skin distended, and tiny flies buzzed around me. Slightly disappointed that I wasn’t dead like the others, they soon vanished back into the darkness they’d emerged from. I lived there, too, really. I hid in the dark because I had nowhere to escape.

Everything, everywhere, and everyone stank so badly that I sat there with two pieces of fabric I tried to keep wet shoved as far as possible into my nostrils. My lips dried because I breathed through my mouth. Though that wasn’t an issue. The issue was that the flies, exercised in flying into gaping mouths, could also visit me and my tonsils. So I lived with a shawl wrapped around my face, covering my mouth and nose. I’m not sure that it stopped the awful stink, but I felt that it did. Finding fabric wasn’t a problem. Clothes were all around me. Shoes, shirts … there was even a coat. It was all a matter of fabric! Whenever I wanted to, I could grab some and tear it all off. But the three sweaters I was wearing were sufficient. I’d spread a coat and a thick woolen vest underneath me. All in all, it was clear I wouldn’t freeze to death.

Though staring at the bodies changing colors as they became more and more naked with every piece of clothing I pulled off, now that could be deadly! So my eyes were mostly shut. Despite the fact that life had scribbled over us in its inability to undo us, and left us in such pitch darkness …