Yasemın Aydinoğlu - Istanbul Noir

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.

I should have folded myself into a tiny package, hid under a rock, and relished the last remaining unfettered breaths before catching the night train that would deposit me at an inhospitable airport en route back to the overcrowded necropolis from which I had escaped. I could have remained firm in the conviction that although each day is indeed riddled with innumerable aggravations, I had now conquered enough distance, squandered enough time, to outrun the demons who are forever forcing the execution of that Herculean battle between control and desire. I could have ambled quietly into the nuclear sunset of a fading Eastern European hamlet and patiently awaited the arrival of the next train out. But I needed to reacclimate back into the real world before boarding my impending nine-hour trans-Atlantic flight stuffed between screaming children, grubby teenagers, talkative grannies, and inebriated single men. Newfound Zen be damned! The potential for strangling a stewardess, rushing the cockpit, screaming “fire in the hole,” grabbing the controls and taking the whole seething mass into a watery grave was a preoccupation I fought every time my brain cells began to tweak on pressurized cabin air. I opted instead to stop in Istanbul.

The dense heat slaps my head like a wet blanket soaked in urine. I disembark just in time to be serenaded by the haunting sickness of the midday call to prayer. My irritation returns twofold as I’m jostled by a gaggle of terminally old women scurrying like lizards, overloaded with wicker baskets full of rotting fruit. I scamper aimlessly ahead of them, no clue where I am, where I’m going, or what the hell I was thinking when I decided to just drop in for a few hours of exploration. In order to truly understand this freakish divide which both straddles and separates the East from the West, Asia from Europe, would take the most astute detective decades of investigation. Ripe with intrigue, filthy with an undercurrent of sexy repression, her sinister underbelly shrouded in aromatic blossoms whose fragrance can never fully disguise its festering malignancy. Istanbul is a beautiful bitch languishing on a hotbed of winding passageways steeped in sleazy mystery where crusty cousins with dirty fingernails wheel and deal anything that yields a price tag. The art of bartering, badgering, and hustling, if not invented in Constantinople, was long ago refined here and is now practiced by nearly all of its estimated fifteen million sweating bodies. If I hadn’t already, I was about to lose my fucking mind.

A petulant gang of six-year-old boys had been following me for blocks, barking with insistence that I purchase a pack of their ratty Kleenex. Their skinny arms and legs encouraged visions of tiny morsels of grilled meat slathered in chili sauce and served on a stainless steel skewer sharp enough to puncture tires. With blood pressure skyrocketing, blood sugar plummeting, I needed to eat before adding cannibalism to my lengthy resume of hate crimes.

I ventured up a dusty side street in search of libations. A scattering of mismatched tables offered miraculous refuge at a deserted café. Empty save for a litter of dirty tiger kittens frolicking after a cloud of iridescent horse flies at the feet of two outstanding specimens of hyper-sexed American stupidity. The twin towheads sporting sun-kissed cheeks, broad shoulders, and aviator shades intensified my hunger. Now it was more than food I craved. I slid into a grimy seat at the next table.

I summoned the waiter, placed my order, and sitting within earshot of their inane conversation felt my blood pressure hike itself up another notch even before the lamb chops arrived. I started getting itchy. My pinkie began to twitch. My eyelids burned. Spoiled shits with Mommy’s money pillaging through Eurasia stoned on hash and horny as hell flipping through incriminating photos on expensive cell phones while relaying a running commentary of their recent female conquests: “Anal in Varna,” “Organ Grinding in Odessa,” “69 Plus One in Sarajevo.” Sounded like a laundry list of bad alt-porno, further evidence of which I was sure could be found on the palm-fitting camcorder coyly snuggled against the blonder of the two’s semi-erection.

“Shit, she’s a gaper,” the bulging one sidelined, inching closer to the phone.

“I’ll give you that one, holmes, but Dirty Sanchez be damned! Two can ride for the price of one!”