More: A Novel (32 page)

Emre, however, was stubborn. With a single-mindedness that took even me by surprise, he’d relayed the matter to the administration of the zoo in Ankara and asked them for help, as he thought it absolutely imperative that I observe a birth. And so I started setting out on tours of the zoo to watch wild boars or llamas giving birth. All this effort was spent, in Emre’s words, to reintroduce me to the
vitality
I’d become detached from. And to figure out whichever point it was where
vitality
and I had become detached, even if I was unable to, and glue us back together …

Alongside all that I was also on meds, of course. Antidepressants heavy enough to numb most of my brain and turn me into a voodoo doll … My days, in fact, worked exactly according to the workings of a voodoo doll. Of course it wasn’t as if someone else felt pain when I was pricked. My curse was of a different kind. My right hand, for example, hurt all day, and in the evening something bad inevitably happened to it. I’d either punch the wall until it bled all over or skin it with my teeth. Sometimes it was the back of my neck that hurt all night until, in the morning, I was either bitten in that spot by a mosquito or slapped on my way to the toilet by some dickwad who couldn’t control himself. Ultimately it appeared that my body, with the help of the meds, saw the future and sent me signals in the form of those aches. Yet I could also see Emre’s efforts to solve the matter through actual therapy, not just chemicals. I could see everything. In any case Emre was also starting to see the light. Especially since my blood test results started showing traces of Şeref’s capsules, he’d had a mind that I might not be as sick as I looked. After that he switched Şeref’s station to get him as far away from me as possible. But Şeref could still find a way to give his most loyal audience the payment for listening …

I wasn’t off the hook for my thieving of drugs, however. Declaring that we were on to the next step in my treatment, Emre ordered me to scoop up my own excrement with my hands and study it. Its stink wasn’t all that different from those of the rotting corpses. Although I wasn’t quite sure what my excrement was supposed to reintroduce me to, I was trying to do as I was told. Either that or I was hallucinating and doing this in secret by myself in a toilet cabin. Then I’d wash my hands and go to the hospital library.

I actually spent the majority of my days there. I read all the time. But it never seemed enough, as my eyes never went bad. The library had been founded with books donated by all the psychiatrists who passed through that building. Most of it was on art, the rest on politics and philosophy. Perhaps for the sake of doing archeological excavations in the pit that was humanity, the psychiatrists had abandoned, along with their books, their dreams of becoming politicians or philosophers.

I saw Da Vinci’s
The Last Supper
in one of those books and read the whole story. Since I was crazy, it reminded me of the photograph in
From Kandalı to the World
. This was actually a benefit to being crazy. Because for the sane, the life passing by in front of their very eyes didn’t evoke shit. They only believed what they saw. Whatever it was they saw, that was life to them. It was what it was …

Then one day, I came across
them
in a book I was riffling through: the Buddhas of Bamiyan … Almost the entirety of the sculpture-related book was dedicated to Buddhism and those two Buddha statues. I’m sure no one who’d read that book to this day could have shed as many tears as I did as I turned its pages. I carried those two gigantic statues in my pocket, Dordor and Harmin in my dreams, and Cuma inside my very bones …

I should admit I went a bit far in my relationship with that book. I tore out its pages and spread them underneath my bedsheets to spend a few nights with those two statues, thinking of Cuma … Unfortunately, the nurse noticed them when she was changing the sheets. Then she went and ratted me out to Emre. He in turn told me to eat the pages featuring photographs of the Buddha statues. I couldn’t disobey Emre. I ate twelve pages and so, in my next shit-monitoring session, was able to witness the statues rising up out of my palms.

So you couldn’t say my life wasn’t entertaining. For instance, there was this pair of compasses in the pen box in Emre’s room where I saw him for forty minutes every Monday, which, in my opinion, was extremely interesting. Although there was an aide with us in every session, since in the first months I couldn’t be alone in the room with Emre, I could now manage with just the open door. I could see the people in the hallway from where I sat and relax, remembering that I was among people. But what interested me most was that mysterious pair of compasses in that pen box. Perhaps Emre was a
secret child
that liked drawing circles in his time off or had some circular theory he was developing in the psychiatry field, I can’t say. Those pair of compasses sat there and waited to be used by me.

On yet another Monday, the second I sat down in front of Emre, I just plucked the pair of compasses out of the pen box. Fearing I might harm myself or him, Emre stood up immediately, but by the time he walked around the table to reach me, I’d gotten hold of a piece of paper and started drawing the image I’d visualized the first time I’d seen the compasses. Becoming aware that I had no desire to stab the compasses into anything other than the paper, Emre stopped and watched.

The first thing I did was close the legs of the compasses all the way and draw three quarters of the smallest circle possible. Without moving the sharp end I’d fixed right in the middle of the sheet, I cranked the compass slightly wider to draw another circle made of broken lines. After I’d rotated it fully I opened it a bit more and drew a third circle, again broken. After that came the fragments of a fourth and a fifth circle, each wider than the preceding one. Understanding that the outcome was a circular labyrinth, Emre sat in his seat and shook his head in wonder. Our eyes met for a moment, and we smiled at each other. Then I drew the sixth circle and moved on to the outer wall of the labyrinth. I left a narrow gap in the seventh circle that became the exit of my labyrinth. Finally I joined the integrated circles with short lines in order to form corridors. Only then did I remove the sharp end of the compasses from the sheet to proudly contemplate my work. I wasn’t selfish. I wished to make Emre proud too and spoke for the first time since I’d come to the hospital:

“Go on, solve it!”

Pretending that hearing me utter a coherent sentence hadn’t taken him aback, he took the piece of paper from me and pulled a pen from his breast pocket to start working on entering through the single door of the labyrinth to get to the small circle in the center. I, on the other hand, glanced around the room to dwell on other things and saw Rastin everywhere I looked. And also the spiral hierarchy scheme …

“There!” said Emre and showed me the paper. He’d figured out the labyrinth, although not without some difficulty.

I still said “congratulations,” so I wouldn’t get him down. He was so pleased to finally have a modicum of communication with me that he went as far as to say, “Thanks,” and extend his hand to shake.

And although I did my very best not to stab him in his extended hand with the compasses, I wasn’t successful. Then I did what I should and apologized.

Though Emre said “That’s OK!” as he clutched his bleeding hand, this move on my part got me locked in the isolation room for two days. That was how I was able to understand that the duration Yadigar had kept me in that holding cell for had a standing in the science of psychiatry! Forty-eight hours of isolation was the cure for any ailment.

For me, the isolation room was more appealing than anywhere and anything because its isolation enabled me to close my eyes and return into my body. Becoming an astronaut inside myself, doing the cellwalk, not the moonwalk, was amazing! I even thanked Emre when I got out. What I said exactly was:

“Thank you for sending me to myself … By the way, I have a recommendation. I propose that, rather than public restrooms, public cells be placed in the streets. Anyone who wishes should be able to go inside and close himself off. Just like in restroom cabins, there’d be a red sign in the lock signaling that it’s occupied. Then other people could leave things like food or water through a hole in the door to show their support for the person who wants to be alone. Wouldn’t that be great? I think it would be fantastic!”

Through Emre didn’t consider my proposal, he smiled with contentment at hearing me speak fluently and attempted another handshake with his bandaged hand.

At that I asked, “Do you have some gloves?” After a short search through the hospital, I was presented a pair of leather gloves and was able to shake hands with those on. It really was a grand day! I’d made a tremendous leap in the fifth month of my treatment and was able to touch a person, even if through fabric!

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.