VII
Sometimes I listen solely to my instincts, like an animal.
After that night we corresponded almost every night on the internet, an infinite universe beyond reality, where everything is possible – fantasies forever unfolding – and there is nothing to stop you or ever slow you down.
Every day and every night you are born again online to live a completely different life. Hurtling through endless space, far from the rules of the world, its standards and routines. Seeds sprout faster there, relationships develop more quickly.
I was new to this world but I soon discovered the possibilities. Although we became more intimate day by day, I never suggested that we should see each other in person.
My instincts told me that we should first spend time in ‘space’ before we met again in the real world.
So I led a double life.
At night it was a life with a woman I never saw and never touched, sharing secrets, nourishing an intimacy – a life that was ours alone.
I spent my days in the coffeehouse next to Remzi’s restaurant. It was the heart of the town, absorbing stories and then pumping them back out.
The proprietor of the coffeehouse had a limp and wore a perpetual frown. They’d given him the nickname ‘Centipede’. I never learned his real name.
At first they kept their distance from me. They didn’t reject me altogether – I suppose because of what Remzi had said about me – and they certainly weren’t hostile, but they didn’t invite me into their circle. And I didn’t try to ingratiate myself with them. I just sat there on my own, reading my newspapers and books.
My first real contact with them was through the newspaper. They’d come over one by one to ask if they could see the newspaper I had just finished reading. And I was always happy to pass them along. Every day I bought new ones. I would read through one, put it down on the table then wait for someone to come and pick it up.
They weren’t in the habit of buying newspapers, but if they came across one they would flip through it. They especially liked reading the paper the day after a football match. They would pore over the sports pages, exchange papers with each other and then lose themselves in a heated discussion. Eventually they even started reading the front pages, and the magazine section.
Coming into the coffeehouse every morning with newspapers under my arm, I could sense they had been waiting for me. Centipede would scamper over to me with a coffee. There was silence until I had finished my first paper, but as soon as I’d put it on the table the person closest to me would ask if he could read it.
I used to enjoy watching the way they would read, studying their movements and reactions.
Soon I had my regular table – it seemed they had made some kind of agreement, because no one ever sat there – and when I came and sat down people would scramble for tables near mine. The person closest to me always got the newspaper first. Tables near mine were like prime opera boxes. I was startled to see how I’d become the most esteemed customer in the coffeehouse just because I bought newspapers.
Later they started to ask me questions when they discussed politics. I gave them brusque answers and they could never quite work out what I really thought. But there was a sea change when they discovered that I knew more about football than they did. I told them I used to play for the Beşiktaş youth team but had to give up football because of a knee injury. It was a lie. But they didn’t doubt me for a second.
I had become the coffeehouse sage.
They consulted me about almost everything.
That’s how I managed to seep into the inner workings of the town.
They told me all the gossip: tragedies and trivial misfortunes, sumptuous weddings and fiery disputes over land – some even said that the entire town would be razed to the ground and rebuilt – the project for a monumental hotel on the beach, the church on the top of the hill, supposedly built by an apostle of Jesus Christ, whose body was rumoured to have been buried there, and how there was a vast treasure beneath the church; they told me about promiscuous women and the strained relations between various gangs, murders and blood feuds, now and then stopping to roll a joint and offering me a drag. I would smile and politely decline.
One night I imagined the town rising up on a cloud of marijuana smoke before it vanished into the sky. I wanted to stay sober so I could see that day.
Everyone was always a little stoned. Even the women in town. ‘What do you expect, abi? Even the kids smoke,’ they would tell me.
But they were always guarded – even when they were a little high – and only gave me half the story, repeating the same rumours over and over, never touching on what really piqued my curiosity, never telling me what was happening on a deeper level.
Then I met someone who would lead me to the other world.
He was a young man who occasionally came to collect Hamiyet in the evening. I wasn’t sure of their relationship, but he called her his ‘aunt’. And supposedly he was staying with her.
I often saw him at the coffeehouse. He hardly spoke to anyone there. He would sit alone, never joining the discussions or arguments, never laughing at other people’s jokes. He just sat there and smoked. They used to say that he was smoking away all the money that I paid his aunt.
He always gave me the impression that a chasm lay between him and all the other regulars in the coffeehouse. He wasn’t cowed or sheepish; he was a strong and powerful young man. He didn’t seem to need other people. He was content with whatever it was that separated him from the others and didn’t want to share it with anyone.
It was the first time I’d seen a state of happiness so completely independent.
Then I realised that every afternoon he disappeared for a couple hours. And not just him: all the other young men disappeared too.
One afternoon I stood up and said that I was going for a walk, and I followed the young men. I didn’t have to go very far: they were all packed into an internet café on the street just behind the coffeehouse.
It was a dim and clammy little shop that reeked of marijuana.
I only had to go to the place a couple times when it wasn’t busy to work out just which chat rooms they were visiting.
Then I started going home in the afternoons. It wasn’t long before I tracked down the young men in different chat rooms, and I would strike up conversations with them using various fake identities. Soon I knew just how each person communicated and I could put a real face to a persona in the virtual world. I got to the point where I had infiltrated the town’s entire online network by tracking everyone’s online address, their usernames, the groups they belonged to and the chat rooms they visited. For the most part, they were chatting with women.
In the afternoons nearly half of the town vanished into this virtual world where they changed their identities and searched for people with whom they could share their secrets, people who were like them, and they would make love.
Over time I came to know who was looking for a man or a woman; and when people found each other they engaged in a conversation full of all kinds of unimaginative sexual banter.
Some
