“Oh! Wait! I’m sorry,” Cheese said suddenly, interrupting himself. He covered his mouth in feigned surprise. “You still don’t know what’s going on here, that’s what you’re asking about. Oh, sweetheart! Innocent babe in the woods! But c’mon... you’re on to us now, right? C’mon, say it.”
Several moments passed before Tufan finally managed to croak out the words, “I... I’m... dead?”
“Bravo!” replied Cheese.
“B-but...”
“See there, the ambulance has arrived.”
Tufan spotted the vehicle parking along the coastal road, about fifty meters away. Its lights were off. You could only tell it was an ambulance because the orange light on top shone beneath the streetlamp. They weren’t in a hurry, of course. That’s why they’d taken their time, cruising to a halt, no siren. Tufan watched as two people waltzed out of the ambulance, opened the back doors, and took out the stretcher.
“You mean... I...”
“I mean you, boy,” said Cheese, placing his hand on Tufan’s shoulder. “You took a bullet in the back at the end of that chase a little while ago, as you jumped onto the breakwater. And the guys who shot you have been waiting by your body over there.”
At a loss for words, Tufan turned to Ekber Amca.
“Ekber Bey had a heart attack ten minutes before that, and collapsed into the sea. Someone’ll find his body in the morning, I suppose.”
“Cheese, son,” said Ekber Bey, as he stood up, using his hands to push himself off the ground, “I want to ask you something.”
Cheese smiled. They’ve always got questions. Sooo many questions. He folded his arms. He looked at the old man approaching him, and then at the dealer. “Yes, Ekber Bey,” he said... No, I’m not the one who’s going to do your account. Yes, you can rub the heads of people walking in the streets, they’ll let you do that... Sure, why not?... Nah, it’s not that bad. Of course, it depends on how things add up for you... No, I have no idea when Yeliz is coming; they only give us the lists of the people we have to pick up... Well, I’d love to stay and chat, but I’m in a bit of a hurry. Work, you know. Ha ha ha! I’m lying, of course. Why would I want to stay and chat with you guys? Well, you know, I can’t always act as formal as they want us to, but then, who can, right? He looked up again. Besides, even He knows this job’s unbearable if you play by the Book all the time... What’s that?... Yeah, right, of course, of course, it’s around here somewhere. Whatever.
The spirit of Philosophical Vitriol
by Lydia Lunch
Tepebaşı
Some days you just want to fuck shit up. Spread the misery around. Louse up somebody’s life. Even the score. Find an unsuspecting, but not undeserving mark and dump a truckload of shit on his head. Because you can. Because some perverse mean streak needs exorcizing before it contaminates the whole of your being and you in turn do something horribly ruthless to a public building, a strip mall, a shopping center, a city block, an entire neighborhood, the necropolis you’re stuck in and all the mindless zombie breeders and their greedy offspring who roam this parasitic planet as it spirals toward its imminent extinction, when the bomb in your head wants to explode in your hands and take a couple hundred thousand people with it. I get ugly like that sometimes.
I was burned out, bitchy, and bored. Again. Had a couple of hours to kill before the train to Athens would signal the close of a month-long low-rent aimless ramble instigated in a spastic fit of dementia. I started the journey suffering under the delusion that my rotten moods were the by-product of stagnation and lethargy exasperated by routine and monotony. Doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do to earn a living, to pay the rent, to keep the lights on and the wind out, the same job done over and over again for any period of time becomes a mind-dulling prison sentence which sends sensitive nerve endings into a St. Vitus dance of agitation. Brain dead but spastic. Numbed of all but the most negative emotions. A harvest of superhuman willpower and extreme focus the only defense against a scorching desire to flail arms and legs blindly like a punch-drunk boxer shadowboxing in the dark, hellbent on murdering the invisible enemy which has become an all-encompassing surround. As if allergic to the air itself. Day in, day out will do that. Truth was, I was just as much of a miserable cunt when there were no responsibilities, deadlines, headlines, nosy friends, or dying relatives to ruin my day. Bitter. I was praying that a break in my routine would break me of my bullshit.
Keep dreaming.
Twenty-nine days ago I purchased a cheap ticket from a Midtown bucket shop specializing in no-frill flights. I landed in a city I had no intention of visiting. I bought a bargain train pass good enough to get me a seat on the off hours. I did not consult an atlas. I packed nothing. I told no one. There was no one to tell. I needed to disappear from the city, state, country, culture, global stranglehold of hypocritical doublespeak, corporate slave trading, universal insanity, and my addictive predilection to the minutia of every possible encroaching disaster, which was leeching precious energy from the wellspring of my being. I thought by playing a stint of runaway fugitive with a strain of wandering-gypsy shape shifter that I could outmaneuver a vindictive part of my personality which had become increasingly hostile and was battling for dominance as a natural reaction against the world at large. I assumed that divorcing myself from negative elements, information overload, satellite TV, the Internet, radio, newspaper reports, telephone updates, and local gossip, I could somehow purge myself of this overwhelming need for retribution, revenge, violence. I needed to physically remove myself from a world that was making my psyche sick.
Tramping through Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, night stalking dead zones, stopping in crusty post-industrial villages free from the ravages of tourists, football hooligans, vacationing families, hen parties, business men. Rummaging for an hour, a day, thirty-six hours, just long enough to explore the haunted remains and ghostly remnants, the garbage and wreckage of life dispossessed. A deserted farm house, her roof collapsed under the weight of a century and a half of blustery winters, rotting wood, and termites. A dilapidated factory, a victim of her own contaminants, battered blood-red by rust and erosion. At one time a proud workhorse spitting out spare parts for armored tanks and land rovers, now a decayed orphan whose guts had been ripped out and sold for scraps. Slivers of copper wiring scattered like auburn gossamer refracting sunlight. Empty hollows which had sucked life into their vortex and existed now as a testament to mystery and disappearance forming a beautiful vacuum devoid of humans. This was bliss.
And therein lies the problem. I was almost completely depressurized, left alone to moon vacantly into the ruins of collapsed architecture, rambling absently through dusty towns and half-deserted villages, mingling with humans only long enough to request a bottle of water, something to eat, a place to sleep. The joy of not understanding any but the most rudimentary of foreign phrases turned even the most grating of native tongues into a brutal symphony of discordant melodies. The dull ringing in my ears, a revolt no doubt from overexposure to the chronic chattering of Western mouths in love with the sound of their own voices, had vanished. The palpitation of my jugular, a sure sign of the thickening of my arteries filthied by the poison of close proximity to the contagions which overpopulate every city, had quelled. The painful spasm in my left pinkie, a simple decades-long nervous twitch, had within the space of four weeks subsided. I felt a renewed vigor in my bloodstream. My head didn’t hurt. My eyes no longer stung from the endless dribble of Visine or their perpetual narrowing into slits as thin as razorblades in an attempt to filter out the grotesque barbarity that passed itself off as humankind.