More: A Novel (22 page)

The voice, which I hadn’t heard in the past half hour, replied, “More!”

“I’m going to live!” I said and in return came another “More!” I laughed.

All this would pass! Pass and be through! Once I was out of here, I’d go back to school! Everything would be different. Ahad would be dead. I’d start life afresh. I was only fifteen. It wasn’t too late for anything. I could pretend I’d emerged from my mother’s womb after fifteen years and be a completely new Gaza! I wouldn’t repeat any of my mistakes. All that I’d lived through until then would have been a test drive of sorts! A test life or something! A rehearsal that had been bequeathed me so I could see potential traps and mistakes and take precautions before real life started. My head had turned into a volcano and erupted, spilling optimistic lava all over me. It was hot, but it didn’t burn. I was warmed by optimism. My skull had burst open so wide it bloomed like a flower out of my hair. It resembled the crown of a king. A crown made of bone, looming over my brow and ears! Encased in the crown, my velvety brain! No one knew it, but I was king of the world. All I had to do was sit and wait, until I could declare my kingship in a whisper into the ear of my savior. I wanted to be reborn as soon as possible. Born again! I’d been buried a fool but I’d be born again as king. I just needed to be patient. And survive, of course! For that, I had to have some water. No matter what it was, I had to drink the corpse water dripping onto me. All I had to do was reach out my hand.

I did and opened up my palm. The first drop fell and the second came thirteen seconds later. I filled the cup of my palm in two minutes and twenty-nine seconds, checking it against the watch on my other wrist. Then I brought it to my mouth and spilled half the water down my chin and the other half between my lips. In the instant I swallowed, however, the four pieces of my skull, agape like the four corners of an envelope, locked together and my crown disappeared.

For I’d been reminded of the face of the weak man I’d buried in the garden. For after he’d been beaten and tossed aside, no one had given him water and he’d laboriously raised his hand and reached for the wall near him. He’d intersected one of the trails of water formed on the wall due to the dampness in the reservoir, wetting his fingers first and then his lips. When I collected water in my open palm, we’d resembled each other so much that it hadn’t taken long for that image of him to spring to my mind. But far from coming alone, that image of his gaunt face had also brought with it the expression he had after he died. And with that image marched in all the dead faces surrounding me, and together they wrenched my kingdom away from me.

The heat of optimism abruptly vanished and left in its place a spiky March chill that bit into me from every direction. I was shaking. I gripped my jaw to stop my teeth from chattering. My hand, however, was also shaking. From both fear and the cold. I knew that if no one came to save me very soon, I’d have to watch all those faces decay. With the exception of the boulder that I leaned my back against and which covered me, allowing me to survive, everything around me would rot sooner or later. My whole world would be infused with decay. Who knew what kinds of insects had already formed an army and started marching toward the foot of Kandalı to feast on the giant cake waiting for them? Maybe they were already coming up through the earth. Right in the spot I was sitting! They would beeline between my legs to gnaw on whatever dead thing was in their path. What was I supposed to do then? Was I going to have to eat them to survive? I didn’t know the first thing about how bodies decayed. My expertise was elsewhere. It had to do with another kind of decay.

The decay I could tell from a glance was the one that happened aboveground. I knew all about the decay that began when a person was still breathing, with mold forming over the heart or brain. That was as far as I’d been able to progress in the classes life had thrust me into by the scruff of my neck. I didn’t know anything further.

What’s more, the last class I’d had was on burying the dead. That was as far as I knew. Burying and moving on. Nothing beyond. Beyond that was a huge mystery. Wasn’t it the same for everyone anyway? Who cared what happened to his mother, his father, his lover, his brother, after they’d been buried? Once they were in the ground, who cared what became of those bodies he’d loved and even worshiped? All the ordinary people of the world and I, all we knew about was the part up to the burial. Maybe we even sometimes said, “Now the insects will eat them.”

Really, everyone should be cremated! That was what should be done! At least then we’d know what happened after death. “One becomes ash and scatters,” we’d say, and no one would contradict us.

But below ground was at least as complicated as above. It was at least as colossal a mystery as above. I hated nature! Everything eating everything else! I hated that the entire cycle was sustained by everything eating everything else. Wasn’t there some other way? Any other choice? Was this the almighty and faultless nature everyone spoke of? Whatever or whomever it was that had created this nature, what kind of a sadist did you have to be to say, “I’m going to set up such a system that everyone will go bumping one another off just to stay alive!” All those animals eating one another, all those people eating everything, all those bugs eating the bodies, all the other bugs eating those bugs …

“Fuck them all!” I was yelling. “Fuck whoever it is that dreamed up this world, and fuck to hell everyone that ever regarded all this flesh-eating and blood-drinking as a miracle and gave thanks!”

I was so furious that had I had a pen and paper, I’d immediately have written a petition. Seeing as all those faiths had been penned and made into books, that was obviously the most sensible mode of communication. I’d write a letter of complaint and toss it into the air, or wherever Allah or God or this or that was! As the Quran started with “Read!” I’d start that letter with, “Why don’t
you
read
this
!”

“Just you wait until I leave this hole, I’ll do it all!” I said, and in answer, I kept hearing the voice, “More!”

But now more than before it seemed to be asking, “More?”

In reply I said, “No more! That’s it, for fuck’s sake!” and wept. And also checked the time.

I was numb. I was numb all over. My legs, my arms, every muscle, and even my tongue and lips were numb. Once again it was a quarter past three, and I’d been sitting there for exactly twelve hours. I was pretty sure that the thing pressing against my shoulder was someone’s head. In fact, whoever it was, I’d felt their ribs when I’d tried to shove them hours before now. Maybe that had been someone else’s body, I couldn’t know for sure. At my right shoulder was someone presumably folded up jaw to knees. At least I thought so. Just beyond was the face, the mouth of which I’d inserted my fingers into in the dark. Where the rest of the face was, I had absolutely no idea. I could no longer remember the scenery I’d glimpsed for a few seconds in the lighter flame.

Really, if not for the watch in my hand, I’d have been able to remember very few things. Everything blended together. First of all, it felt like the accident was years ago. Yet when I drank the rainwater dribbling off the bodies, it was as if it had only been minutes. Apparently I was losing my mind and that terrified me. So being rescued wasn’t enough, but I had to be rescued before I lost it. I was so afraid of spending the rest of my life as a loony that I now prayed to all the divine powers I’d cursed at and knew by name a few hours ago that I would die before I could go mad. That was all I wanted: to die before I could go mad.

But nothing helped me remember the chronological order of events. Neither incessantly following the seconds indicator, nor counting the seconds out loud at the top of my lungs, even. I always started to mess up after a while. I’d count seventeen after five or zone out staring at the seconds indicator and panic when I came back around, not being able to figure out how much time had passed.

Then I’d hold my breath and shut my eyes, waiting for the face of a clock that read a quarter past three to appear in my mind. A clock face that read a quarter past three was, for me, the beginning of everything. It was a milestone. It was like history’s propelling clock or some such thing. If I lost it, everything would go up in the air. It would go up in the air in a jumble, and I’d never be able to add up the time I’d spent in that hole. If I couldn’t add it up, surely I’d go mad. There was no time in there. Even if there were, I wouldn’t know it. Because there were schools you needed to go to in order to know. Schools people went to who could tell, from just a glance, the time of death of a body … All I had was an onset hour and that was all. It was my past and everything I had. If I forgot it, I’d be obliterated. I’d be nothing more than a grain of sand hurtling around in empty space. And if I really were a grain of sand, I could only be one inside an hourglass.

So I tried to ingrain the clock face showing quarter past three inside my mind as much as I could and held my breath until it loomed behind my closed eyes. Though my heart picked up speed and it was a strain, I didn’t let go of my breath until I saw that clock face. It both calmed me and helped me remember the time. Calmed me, because I felt like holding my breath severed all my ties to the world. No more transactions took place between us. My body still sat there and I still sat inside my body, but in a sense, I evaporated. I evaporated into thin air and felt myself exempt from everything. That was my solution to the panic attacks. But I still had to find a way to write down, someplace or other, the clock face showing quarter past three.

What was more, since the clock face in my hand was to point to a quarter past three every twelve hours, I had to mark those as well. I had to put a nick in a certain spot every twelve hours. Of course, thinking about all this drove me into deeper panic. All of this preparation meant accepting that I wouldn’t be rescued on this day. So, I’d again hold my breath and wait for the panic washing over me to recede. The worst part was that I’d have to light the lighter again in order to make the marks. Besides, where and how was I supposed to write these numbers down? They might be washed away if I wrote them in the mud.

I’d started glancing around as if I could see anything. I wasn’t able to, of course, but when I raised my head, I came up with a solution. I could write on the boulder above me with soot from the lighter flame. But then I’d use up too much of the lighter fluid. I had to make a choice. I’d either be left without light sooner than I should or there would come a time that I’d forget everything I knew in relation to time and go mad.

It wasn’t really that hard to make a decision. After all, I was too afraid to light the lighter. I even had a spare. The lighter inside the pack my father had given me. So it seemed to be decided. The date and time would be inscribed on the rock above me in soot.

But now I was wondering how I could avoid seeing the things that would come to light along with the flame. How could one avoid seeing hell? Was there a way? Of course there was! To think of all the autopsy specialists in the world! Who knows how many people’s utterly cold gazes, right in that moment I was fearful of seeing all those corpses piled on top of one another, were studying the bodies they tore apart with their steady hands, the bloody spectacle in front of their eyes? If they could do it, so could I. At the very least I could light the lighter and ignore the bodies as I went about my business. I could raise my head and fix my eyes on the rock. In the end we were all flesh, me included. We could very well be on sale by the pound in another planet’s butchers!

With sudden determination I leaped into the future like a first-time skydiver. I raised my head and flicked on the lighter. Yes, I could feel the bodies, and my eyes knew they were there, but I stubbornly stared at the boulder. Yet though I held the flame to a single spot in hopes of seeing a soot stain appear, there was no change in color, or none that I could see. The rock was wet. Maybe that was why it didn’t work. As my hand started to burn, I couldn’t hold out any more and was about to put it out when I looked down and saw a pair of breasts. A woman’s breasts … then I took my thumb off the lever.

I was in the dark again but the breasts hovered in front of my eyes. The woman’s neck and head, caught between the legs of another body, had been out of sight. The part below her waist also extended over the pair of legs of another and disappeared into the darkness. She stretched forward and up like one of those wooden female torsos on the front of pirate ships. Her back arched backward like a bow. All I could see was the part between her neck and her slightly distended belly. There was no rest of her. The buttons of her shirt had popped off, causing it to sag open to either side, and her breasts spilled out from inside a white bra.

I was so aroused by this vision I’d glimpsed for only a second that I wanted to flick on the lighter again to gaze at it, and even find some way to touch those breasts. But they were out of my reach. To do that I’d have to lean forward. That would cause the two masses of flesh on either side of me to instantly fall and fill the space between my back and the rock behind me.

Maybe I could remove my shoes and touch them with my toes. Or I could lunge forward with no regard to the possibility that the load on my shoulders might fall when I was out of the way. What did I have to lose anyway? If anything, a gap of thirty centimeters. I didn’t think the body on my right could move much anyhow. After all, it was folded up between the boulder and other bodies as though it had no bones. But I was sure that the body on my left would fall, if only its head.

I was so frenzied that I disregarded everything and flicked on the lighter so I could stare at those breasts, and only them. There was a face right next to them. I was trying to avoid looking at it at all costs.

And I did! I leaned forward to slide my finger underneath the band in the middle of the bra to pull it up. Both breasts were left exposed when the bra was lifted. The bra itself slid up to rest somewhere above the breasts, near the woman’s vanishing neck. At the same time there was an earthquake behind me! The corpse on my left dropped behind me, not just the head but the entire body, filling the space between me and the boulder.