More: A Novel (40 page)

According to the anchorwoman who must’ve been resurrected after death by bleach, this had been the biggest assault of its kind in years. It looked like there was no point in remaining in this city. I couldn’t wait years for another lynching to take place. I couldn’t expect to luck out the same way twice in a row. So, since the lynching wasn’t coming to me, I’d go to it. How, then? How did one catch up with a lynching before it even happened? They didn’t abide by a schedule! Or did they? Maybe they did.

After all, I’d spent my whole life seeing various mouths on TV utter the words, “These are pre-organized acts by obscure dark forces,” in reference to the lynchings that took place in various parts of the country. If that were true, it meant that someone went around organizing lynchings as if they were concerts, setting up a whole show. So how could I get to those dark forces? Could I myself even conceivably become a dark force someday? Was there hope for me in that regard?

First I had to make a list. The probable lynch list. I must spread out a world map and mark all the places where lynching was a probability. For that I had to study the lynch histories of nations and cities and find out if the societal conflicts that gave rise to lynchings still prevailed or not.

The incident three days ago that had brought a city back to the Middle Ages, even if only for half an hour, was exceptional. The assault of an ex-convict was too specific a situation to be able to foresee in advance. Since I couldn’t very well keep track of the release dates of all the child rapists on Earth, the lynchings I had to concern myself with were of the political kind. The enlightening ground for all the world’s ignoramuses, the Internet, held all the information I needed.

I spent the following week studying the political conflicts still prevalent in the world. But figuring out which one was a potential ground for a lynching was impossible. Still, something worth mentioning did take place that week when I watched this piece of news on TV: a few hundred Americans, gathered in their town’s largest avenue to welcome home soldiers returning from Afghanistan, attempted to lynch four Afghanis who wanted to protest the procession. This gave me an idea.

Really, the person or group that was targeted in a lynching was always the most hated one. Only the tiniest spark was needed to set the lynch mob going. In the end, Americans assaulted Afghanis every day with their accusing stares, on the street, in the store, but waited for the right moment to actually try to lynch them. What I had to focus on, therefore, was hate.

If I could figure out who hated whom, I’d also figure out where to go to lie in wait for the lynching. But it had to be hatred of a magnitude at which one took the mere existence of the other as an insult. So, who hated whom for merely existing? Why, racists and bigots, of course!

When I researched the regions where these two types of discrimination were at their most prevalent, I was presented with a most fantastic world tour. I’d struck a goldmine. The only things I needed were a passport and a few visas. I was going to be the world’s first lynch-tourism agency and customer. The world’s first lynch-tourist! It wasn’t too shabby for someone who hadn’t amounted to anything up till now. After all, just ten days ago, I’d been trying to seek solace in crushing people’s shadows. In fact, twenty-four years, five months, and thirteen days ago, I’d been crying just because I’d been born.

A month had passed since the lynching incident, and I didn’t feel great at all. My condition had so declined that I had to write down the lines I’d have to utter throughout the day and memorize them. This way, when I said to the bellboy that brought my breakfast to the room, “Can I get another orange juice?” or the housekeeper, “You don’t have to clean the room today,” I avoided partaking in the exchange by reeling off sentences I’d committed to memory. Reciting words from heart protected me from having to make any decision during communication. It wasn’t me who spoke but rather my memory and vocal cords. Thanks to this method, I was able to feel somewhat as if I wasn’t present, which eased the pressure. When my lines were predetermined, I didn’t get flustered thinking about them and tried to exist without drawing any attention.

It was actually quite similar to how a soldier crawls on the ground to advance under fire. In reality I’d never seen a soldier crawl except on TV. Speaking of which, due to the hotel owner’s cooperation with the district municipality, the Turkish Armed Forces showed up on my doorstep,
¹¹
but for whatever reason assumed my depravity was contagious. With a certificate of disability proving that I singlehandedly posed a threat to the entire army, I had them tell me, “Go putrefy on your own!” I was all the more assured I could crawl more discreetly than any soldier in any army in the world. In every sense of the word …

As much as it was referred to as
daily
, life was anything but, always finding ways to surprise me. Events always took turns that caused me to forget my lines, screwing up the communication guidelines I’d prepared. I didn’t matter to any of the people I had to talk to. My skits or I weren’t included in their interests. They had no qualms about complicating even the simplest of dialogues, always had new questions, and practically competed in taking me by surprise. Needless to say, such situations rendered my memorized sentences useless.

Since the basis of law lay in overlooking the identities of those one encountered, that is, taking every person, including me, as equals, I had been on quite amiable terms with the law in recent years. When the sentences I used were out of line with life, or I felt bad, I’d take the Turkish Criminal Law booklet out of my pocket to read. The juridical texts in that book carried no names, surnames, or personal information. Instead, there was some guy in a state of constant dismay that kept oscillating between winning and being sentenced, and he was referred to as
one
. One whose right to expression had no importance, mute or blind, one-legged or five-eared as one may be!

In reality the anonymity of law was, of course, just a fantasy. Nothing on this planet could be anonymous. No king was ever tried on the same terms as a pauper, nor would he ever be. Still, whenever I felt like my throat was being constricted by the identities of those around me, thinking in juridical terms gave me somewhat of a relief.

One of those terms was
act of God
¹²
… vis major
! It was the lawful correspondent of an excuse that was acceptable in the event one didn’t come through with any number of one’s responsibilities. Act of God! It could be an earthquake, or it could be a heart attack. In my case, it was the sum of life. Life itself was an act of God! I was in a never-ending earthquake with a case of perpetual heart attack. So I tried to calm myself by pretending to be exempt from any kind of action. That, however, was also no longer working …

I was aware of being mercilessly judged by people even though they didn’t know me! I was worse off than a pauper caught in the web of the legal system. At least paupers could talk. In fact, their special beggar powers enabled them to instantaneously pick someone out in a crowded sidewalk that couldn’t resist their demands, that is to say, me, to materialize near me with their upturned palms. Their mercy-dars must also be receptive to weakness, since they could always find me, even in a crowd of thousands.

I had no such powers and could find no traces of game in my radar other than myself. So I could neither prove my innocence in the makeshift courts of the everyday nor escape the wrongful sentences.

No sooner would the police officer in the passport department ask, “Your job, what do you do?” while waving in my face the form on which I’d left the box for profession blank, before tending to the person in line behind me, than the security guards would see the sweat accumulating on my brow and search me like I was a live bomb, and the visa attendants, skeptical of everything I told them, would check all my information three times and keep me waiting two hours for procedures that should take five minutes.

Yet as one whose whole life was an act of God, reciting from memory was the best defense I could come up with for now. Every time I went back to the room, I patched up my tattered shield by writing alternative scripts and implored the people I would meet the next day to fall in line with the reality of life, though they didn’t know it. Naturally none of them heard me. Not when I implored them from my bed, not when I stood in front of them and asked when I could have my passport back …

During this period of doubting my personal recovery, I was roused by an unexpected incident. On my final visit to the consulate for the visa needed for my World Lynch Tour, I saw a crowd gathered in front of the building. Holding banners, shouting slogans, kicking the walls.

At first I hesitated, but then recalled the lynching in the square. The ease with which that crowd had accepted me … You didn’t need an invitation to a lynching because everyone was invited! Though timidly, I approached the intoxicated people, and one of them spoke to me even though he didn’t know me at all. In fact, he looked into my eyes and yelled:

“God is one!”

Though I enthusiastically opened my mouth, the same enthusiasm choked me up, but no one noticed. For right then the others roared in unison like a well-rehearsed choir. It made my innards tremble. It lifted me to a high only attainable by cocaine and at similar velocity. Inside the moment I was freed to be myself!

By the time the police showed up to personally define the limits of savagery, I’d torn up four pavement stones, two waste bins, and one banner stick and hurled them at the building, screaming incoherently. I felt like such a part of humanity in that brief interval that when I got in line in front of the building again the next day, I was much more at ease. More importantly, I wasn’t repeating my lines to myself over and over again. I didn’t feel the need any more. Sure enough, I didn’t suffer the slightest communication problem in any step of the visa procedures that day. What’s more, I improvised each one. After all, I’d had my lynching fix! Though rather inadequate, something resembling a lynching was running through my veins. A kind of methadone that could be substituted for a lynching. A situation the law might define as a social incident. A social substance that could take similar effect in the absence of lynching itself. Though of course I’d gotten my start on lynching, the most potent stimulant there was. So I knew lynching was the real medicine necessary for my treatment. Protests or similar demonstrations had no importance for me. That’s when I thought of football games.

I attended six games, three weekends in a row, at which I dissolved into tens of thousands of people, in bleachers where it didn’t matter a bit where anyone was from, this time as part of a Mexican wave instead of a tsunami. In these games, the effects of which were ephemeral but violent enough to enable me to be ordinary for a few days, I cursed at the top of my lungs with complete strangers, at complete strangers. Naturally each time I joined the larger group of supporters. I’d lived long enough as Don Quixote and it was time to become a windmill. And that was easy. All you had to do was buy a few accessories. A few uniforms and scarves that I alternated depending on the game sufficed to make me invisible. The crowd was such a magical thing that once part of it, neither name nor body remained. The masses swallowed them both and provided release from the responsibility of having an identity. The crowd was a spectacular suit of armor shielding one from oneself and everything else. It didn’t look anything like the piece of tinny shit Don Quixote wore. It was so sturdy that I could sling the worst curses at people I wouldn’t have dared even look at slantwise anywhere else.

Yet once the game was over and it was time to queue up and leave the stadium, I noticed that the people I’d cursed in unison with just a while ago felt at least as uneasy as I did. Just like me, they were also dying to get onto a bus, a cab, or into their car and hightail it out of there. Alone, no one wanted to encounter the people they’d collectively hurled insults with up until a half hour ago. That was why we pushed against and cowered behind one another like a herd as we walked out of games. None of us wanted to wander away from the herd until we felt safe. Though some among them were deranged enough to have joined the lynch mob in the square, most resembled me. But I didn’t want a mob made up of ten thousand copies of me. I wanted a lynch mob. Not a mob pretending to be lynch mob!

So before I set out, I followed the news constantly and slept only four hours a day in the hopes of catching a lynching somewhere in the country. But not much loomed on the horizon. So I started to watch footage of old lynchings and fantasized. Some of them were extraordinary. Especially the Sivas massacre
¹³
or the Rostock riots. True lynchings, each one! Torching buildings, vandalism, killings, the whole deal. Or: the social
purification
movement that surfaced in France as soon as WWII was over! Those black-and-white images of French women believed to be colluding with the Germans as their hair was shaved and they were dragged through the streets until they turned into pulp! It was all so magnificent! But those kinds of things didn’t happen every day!

Still, in purblind hope, I did leave my room to go to the airport and board the first plane I could find. I boarded seven more planes in twelve days and covered more than four thousand kilometers within the country. Shoulders hunched in hotel rooms bruised by humidity, I waited for hate to dawn. But nothing happened.

There was just the once when, completely by chance, I ducked into a small crowd to rail and curse at two people I later found out were members of parliament. But that lasted for mere seconds because police surrounded us like tentacles and we were outnumbered three to one. All you had to do was to look at one of the people sprawled on the crowd. There were three cops per each one of us. I’d ended up being the lynchee instead of the lyncher and almost got arrested. Of course what I thought right then was that I should be a cop. I had to be on whichever side was bigger mob! I’d never stand by the weak and the few! I wished to be a thousand against one! Ten thousand! A hundred thousand! A million! I wanted a mob! I wanted a bigger mob! And to holler: “Which religion doesn’t have déjà vu? I’ll take that one!”