After James (25 page)

“You're in a dark time in your life,” said the drummer. “The pill will help you through.”

I didn't know what it was or what it did or, really, who had given it to me. I picked it up and held it before my eyes, as if inspecting a strange insect, put it in my mouth, swallowed it. The others raised their bottles and glasses to me, and I to them.

My dreams that night almost killed me. When I woke they had balled into a headache so intense I couldn't move. In the dream that stayed with me I was walking in a landscape dark with floating petals of black ash. I stepped a few feet in one direction, then changed course and set off in another, then another, unable to find open air or the promise of light. At
some point a shape appeared and began to grow before me, a human shape, coming closer, a woman with a skin of dry mud. She took my hand and led me into a cave, along a firelit rock face. We came to drawings of horned animals I couldn't name, and she held her palm before me, showed me the cake of ash in it, and then spit into her palm and began to rub out the drawings. I understood that one by one she was extinguishing not just the drawings but the animals themselves, not just the animals but the species. I squeezed her wrist but she was too strong, her hand could not be stopped, and as she moved along the wall the animals grew more and more familiar, they stood, their heads turned, they looked out at us with familiar eyes, our eyes, blinking. We ourselves were there on the wall, she and I, watching us disappear ourselves at the end of the world.

The headache had receded by the time I woke again. It was late morning, I knew, maybe noon. Somehow I'd slept through two calls to prayer.

The experience of lost time is a dissociative amnesia of the kind reported by alcoholics and alien abductees. I had no memory of having left the bar or walking to Davide's place, no idea if I'd done so with him or alone. Had I seemed drunk to others? Balanced of mind and body? I might have done anything and not known it. Was some Istanbul cop right now stringing together security footage of me scaling a wall or smash-and-grabbing window sweets from a baklava shop?

Davide was out, presumably renovating his father's building. He'd left a note apologizing for leaving just a
single egg for breakfast. I was looking at the French coffee press or whatever it was called and then I was sitting in the sun at the little table on the balcony without any memory of having made the coffee. I looked at the floor, which I must have just crossed, but didn't even have a sense memory of my bare feet on the wood. I grew very still, told myself not to move. Somehow I'd wandered into a Godard movie. The term
jump cut
seemed especially unpleasant there on the third-floor balcony. Through a narrow gap between buildings I looked off at the Golden Horn, minarets in the haze. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them Davide's girlfriend was standing at the balcony door, smiling at me. She wore a red T-shirt and white pyjama bottoms. Terrifying. Was she real? Her smile fell and she said, “You look confused.”

“That pill I had last night.”

“Oh, the One Two hangover.” She came and sat at the table opposite me. Her hair was all over the place. “The first time it happened to me I thought I'd been trapped in a French New Wave film. I thought this must be how Jean Seberg felt in
Breathless.
”

“I just had the same thought. Godard.”

“She was killed, Jean Seberg. Did you know?”

“No. When does it go away, this feeling?”

“Half a day, a full one. Some say the pill works for days. Stories differ.”

“Did I leave with you and Davide last night?”

“You left alone. You were asleep on the couch when we came in. Should I make us some breakfast?”

“There's only one egg. He left a note for you. What happened to Jean Seberg?”

“The FBI tapped her phones, followed her constantly. Then they planted a story in the press that her unborn child wasn't fathered by her husband. She went into labour early and the child died. That was the beginning of the end of her. For years she was suicidal on the anniversary of the child's death until finally, on one of those anniversaries, she overdosed herself to death.” Strange phrasing, I noted, then remembered she was Swedish. “All this because she supported the rights of natives and blacks.”

“Surveilled to death. Are you an actress?” She laughed but didn't answer. “In my condition, is it safe to be moving around?”

“It's safe, yes. You know what you're doing as you do it, even if you don't remember. Davide loves One Two. He's involved, buyer and seller. He wants to be a player. Davide the drug lord. It's stupid. It's not him.”

“Maybe he wants to piss off his father. He seems to hate Carlo.”

“He doesn't hate his father. He hates himself for loving him. It makes him bitter.”

Now that I looked at us, we were both fully dressed. Apparently I'd elided two conversations.

“I think I'll go out for a while,” I said. “I'm sorry I don't remember your name. Unless it's Anna.”

“Yes! That's the One Two. It makes you know more than you know.”

One Two had me in trouble. As soon as I left the apartment it seemed I was sitting on sloping grass in Gezi Park, looking out at Taksim. There was a rally of some sort, a lot of men, all men, carrying red flags with yellow sickles that looked very like the national flag, though with some slight differences I couldn't locate. There were more than a hundred of these men, maybe more than two hundred, and they seemed angry. Many held up large poster images of someone I assumed was a political candidate or dead victim. Beyond them were riot police, and around the rally and the police walked passersby not paying them much attention.

I tried to hold a sense of continuous memory. An old man crossed the square, a face with the half-cloaked world in it. On his head he was balancing a tall stack of pretzels,
simits
, they're called, and he walked past me up the slope and began trying to sell them to people seated at the patio tables outside a tea kiosk. A young waiter appeared and I expected him to shoo the guy away, but instead he beckoned him and bought one of the
simits.
Then he went into the kiosk and came out and handed him a cup of tea and a cigarette and the two of them stood there looking out at the park and the square, talking, and when the tea was gone the old man went on his way, paying nothing. Simple transaction, made in kindness and respect. I'd never seen anything more dignified.

A strong urge overcame me to record the scene in writing—when had I last had this urge, not to interpret but describe? It had been a few years, my early twenties, back when I thought I might someday be a poet—but I had nothing to write with. I climbed up the slope, took one of the
patio seats, ordered tea, got a pen from the same young waiter whom I was about to sketch in words. From my back pocket I pulled out the folded boarding pass from my flight of four days ago and stared at the blank side.

After fifteen minutes I'd written one line. “The sun is warm.” I couldn't get past it. I tried again, stayed longer, until clouds moved in and the line was no longer true. I was not a poet. I'd already reconciled myself to the fact, but not to those parts of myself, griefs and dreams, I seemed to need fixed extra-cranially, in something beyond myself. The poem I'd wanted to write was about more than the waiter and the old man, even as it would be, like all poems, at the same time, about nothing. It was about those two things. I needed very badly to write about everything and nothing.

As the waiter cleared away the teacup and left the check, I was breaking down, becoming a mess. In time I was aware of a hand on my shoulder. The waiter was trying to comfort me. He spoke English but I'd seen him with the old man, I knew him, and I knew he wouldn't ask what was wrong. I was sure he understood that once you try to answer, once you truly commit to such a question, you'll never reach the end of what needs saying.

A muddle of streets ran downhill off the square. With no memory of leaving the park, I'd gotten lost. I needed to hear Dominic's voice but, overburdened, couldn't risk feeling his decline more acutely. I pictured myself down at the water, signing up for ship duty, entering a seagoing adventure, as
likely a prospect as any. The next minutes, the next years, were blank, as if I were already dead. I needed to feel more settled before calling Amanda. I'd got myself turned around, passing the same antique shops twice. I chose an uphill path. By the time it plateaued at an intersection of fruit stores and cafés, I was out of breath and feeling better. I sat in the doorway of a closed dress shop and called Rome.

“Okay, where are you?” she asked.

“I don't know. Maybe the fringes of a neighbourhood called Cihangir. I ingested something strange last night.”

She led me through my explanation, that I'd taken a drug and woke to find the moments in my day randomized and not quite making sense.

“You were making sense last night. Have you checked out the address?”

“What are you talking about?”

It took a minute for each of us to understand what the other was saying, longer than that to believe it. The previous night she'd called my cell and we had a version of the conversation we were now having again. Things had come about. They were hurtling toward a conclusion, and I would be standing there for it. She backed up in her story but spoke very quickly. She said that Pierluigi had enlisted all branches of the Keyholers in a hunt for the Poet. Someone in the Berlin branch discovered a likely internet protocol address and a corresponding actual one in Paris. Two members of the French branch staked out an apartment in the Eleventh Arrondissement with a lone occupant, a tall man, who they believed might be the Poet—

“Hold on. How did they find him?”

“I don't know. Software and intuition. The Germans set up a dummy metasite and mined it and followed the hits. The Italians planted stories and worked out timelines. The French circumvented a googlewhack. They all followed the money. What does it mean? I'm not into geek procedurals.”

“The Poet is a tall man in Paris.”

“Not anymore. They followed him and took a picture. Yesterday he went to Charles de Gaulle and boarded a plane.”

“A plane.”

“Maybe this is all a goose chase but if the Keyholers are right, you could be in danger. Pierluigi got one of the Istanbul hackers' sisters to meet the plane and follow the Poet into the city, which she somehow successfully did. Or at least the guy she followed looked like the guy in the picture.”

“Here.”

“The tall man is in Istanbul. Since yesterday evening. See your emails. I already told you to come back to Rome. You asked me to send you his picture and address. You said you think you've flushed him into the open, that his appearance connects to your parents. You're already determined to confront him. You already think this is your one shot.”

Inside the lost time I'd had a phone call, I'd sounded lucid, a thought I had to process along with the news about the Poet. That he should be in Istanbul wasn't a coincidence. My emails were encrypted but I'd had dozens of conversations, in person, by phone, about my hacker theory, the Keyholers,
my trip to Turkey. And of course I left a data trail everywhere. It was easy to assume he knew it all, knew where I was staying, what I looked like. It was natural to think that he was here for me. I'd followed my father, who might have been murdered, and murdered for a reason, and so I'd made myself a threat like he did by coming to Turkey and asking questions. I'd hatched a notion. And I was the solitary, with no protectors, no family or real lover or close friends except a man across the ocean losing his memory. Did he think I could be bought off or threatened? Made to drop my investigations? What leverage did he have? Was he violent?

Ludicrous.
Root meaning in “sportive, jesting,” from the Latin
ludicrus
, from
ludicrum
, meaning “stage play.”

The picture had arrived in my inbox just before midnight. The graphics told me I'd already opened it. I called it up again and there in my little phone window was a tall man apparently in midlife, midstride, approaching the camera. His head and hands were large. A high forehead, pronounced brow, notched at the eyes. Short hair, maybe light brown. His nose was slightly out of true. He was dressed in brown pants and a faded red canvas jacket.

The man—or was it the photo?—looked vaguely familiar. According to my search history I'd already called up the phone map for the address. It was in the Beyoğlu neighbourhood, not far from Davide's place. I told myself, unbelievably, that I had to get the drop on him. This was the extent of my plan. I worked my way across the high streaming traffic of Tarlabaşi and looked back to see if I could remember crossing the wide avenue. I had it for a second and then it was gone.
As I headed north into the little streets I felt in need of a revelation, a useful cha-cha, but cha-chas could not be induced. My thoughts were now desperately linear, blind baby vipers at speed. I was prose-headed, story-bound, seeking logical connection as I navigated by phone through the neighbourhood's mix of old, condemned-looking buildings and renovated ones with fresh plaster faces covering the cracks that seemed to run vertically on every structure. I came to the street but wasn't sure the phone had it right. It was unmarked, dead end, two blocks long.

I approached the building. There was no number but Pierluigi's friend's sister had said to look for a “flock of birds” above the doorway. I stared up at a horizontal line of three blue-and-yellow ceramic tiles with dozens of black chevrons or birds in flight painted on them. I realized I'd seen the motif before, above the entranceway to Durant's apartment building. Back in Rome the black marks on the blue and yellow had reminded me of the birds in Van Gogh's
Wheatfield with Crows
, likely his last painting. Van Gogh, who wrote that he wanted to be “a poet” of landscapes, died two days after receiving a gunshot wound he said was self-inflicted. Through his agony he told his hosts not to blame anyone, which led to speculation that he'd been shot, maybe by accident, maybe not, maybe by a local farm boy. In the 1950s someone even confessed to the shooting. As I looked up and thought of his last crows, they seemed obviously in their flocking beauty an ascension in the heart, and I was sure his death wasn't suicide, which left accident or murder, the question I couldn't get free of, and so landed me back in my shoes.