written by Meriç Kayalı
THE SILHOUETTE MASSACRE
Blood, sweat and tears. These are what occur when I find myself writing unconsciously. I hate it, yet it happens almost every night. It sometimes happens during day, too, when I’m too stressed to be awake and to sleep. I don’t like what I write, either. I think they’re full of terror. And, to tell the truth, they indeed are. They’re the most savage, brutal and sadistic things to be done to people. You may be asking “Then why would you write them?” The answer, obviously, will be hidden in these pages I am writing now.
I really am sorry for what is about to happen in the following pages.
It’s kind of a night that stars are invisible. I’m in my room and out of control. The pen that I’m holding is making words exist. It’s my handwriting, but am I the one who writes?
I wipe my sweat with my arm. I stop yet don’t drop the pen. I look at what I’ve done, what I’ve written. I’m irritated by my own mind. My eyes are now on my pen. I think of doing something... something to punish myself.
I look at my pen and wonder if it’s sharp enough. “Sharp enough to what?” I ask myself. Do I intend to stab myself? Kill myself? But, to me, death isn’t a punishment. To punish me, one should do something more painful. Something to make me remember it. Then I think of an old friend of mine. She used to say to me that my hands were beautiful. She thought they looked like the run of a river which separates in more channels when my veins got more visible than usual. Thinking of this, I look at my hand. Would it be hurtful enough? Would it leave a scar? “No,” I say to myself. “I shouldn’t think these. I’m over that shit! I’m better... better than this.”
Even I don’t believe what I say. I know I’m not over that shit. I’ve never been, probably never ever will be. Thinking what to do, I remember the eyes of an old friend of mine. Those deep blue eyes which look like an ocean that one can easily drown in. I close my own eyes and then take a deep breath. I see them ocean eyes. I don’t exhale. I wait. And I wait.
There are no blue eyes now. They’re gone and have left their place to the pure darkness of a graphomaniac young’s mind. “This never happened before,” I think. “Getting out of control twice at one night?” I exhale. “Fuck.”
I open a new page on my notebook. I start to write but, once again, I am not the one who writes. My sweat drops down to the page. My illness doesn’t care. It continues. I write and write. There’s a single drop of tear in my right eye. Once I blink, the tear draws its way down to my cheeks and chin. I try to breathe in, but my body doesn’t allow me to. Then I want to breathe out, but I can’t, either. I’m choking. My body’s choking me.
I seek for a way to stop myself but I’m not even my own now. I keep writing for half an hour without stopping and my hand starts to hurt so much that I cry even louder. I shout at the page I’m looking at, yet, unfortunately, I don’t stop. I’m so tired that I feel like I’ve been running for hours. I close my eyes with the hope of losing my consciousness and faint, therefore dropping the pen. But what I hope isn’t important anymore. It’s my graphomania what matters.
I’m lost in my pages, which means I’m lost in my mind. I wish I knew it like I own it, but I sometimes ask myself the question whether I own it or not. It hurts, it really does. I stop thinking about my pathetic situation because I hate to feel like I’m making people pity me. I open my eyes and realize I’m in a dream... or a nightmare, perhaps.
I don’t mean what I’ve been doing and feeling was a dream. They were real but the fact that I hoped to lose my consciousness and faint seems to be happening.
In my dream I’m in my room but it’s darker than before. I look at the walls and there happen to be lines of blood. I get closer to a wall and put my finger to the end of a red line. Blood doesn’t stop or keep flowing under my finger but creates a way on it. I try to get it back but it’s stuck there. Blood covers my hand and slowly turns my arm, shoulders, chest, waist and finally my legs and feet red. I can’t move. I’m reddened. I can taste it, the blood.
I manage to open my mouth and I feel dozens of bugs entering. I can’t cough to get rid of them so they keep going deeper in my throat. I feel them in my stomach, they’re biting it. They’re consuming me from the inside and I’m about to be a complete food to bugs. When they’re done with my stomach, I separate in two pieces. My waist and legs fall, my chest and head stand still as my finger is still stuck on the wall. However, I can see the blood of mine squirt everywhere, causing the blood-lined walls to be covered in more blood.
Then there I see a familiar face on the wall that I’m looking at, since I can’t move yet. The face is made of wall and red lines of blood are flowing down from its eyes to cheeks, looking like its tears. I don’t know where I know this face from but I do know I know who it is, who he is. He looks directly in my eyes and opens his mouth made of wall. He simply says two words. Two words that turn this horrible nightmare even more terrifying: “Your fault.”
Suddenly the frozen blood covering my body shatters and I’m free. Then I realize I’m separated. I become able to feel the pain of being cut in two and I use my arms to move away from the face on the wall. I’m crawling. I still don’t know why I think he’s someone I know but I’m aware of the fact that what he called fault is something I’m running away from. And this means he’s right about it being my fault. The face must belong to someone I hurt before.
I find my way out of the room and I feel my legs once again. I look at the back of me and see myself full. I stand up and start to run but I don’t know where to. I hear a million bugs running after me. I somehow know they still want to consume me. I’m the victim in my own dream.
When I think about being the victim, the same face appears on the wall next to me but it’s moving as I do and says “Don’t play the victim, Andy!” I feel like I’m shot in the head when I hear this name. There has been only one person who’d call me this abbreviation of my name and he died in a car crash. I wonder if he thinks I’m responsible for his death. But... it was a car crash. How can I be responsible for that?
The face disintegrates. The bugs’ sound disappears. I’m all alone in a corridor full of mystery and blood. I look at my hands and some kind of scar appears. I close my eyes and scream because of the pain but when I dare look at them again, I see the scar is a sentence written on my hand. My right hand says “Madness is endless,” and left says “But you’re not.”
I wake up with tears in my eyes. I suspiciously look at my hands and am delighted because there are no words written, although I can still sense the pain.
My delightfulness doesn’t last for long as I look at the notebook before me. I turn the pages and see I’ve written thirty pages of terror. I don’t dare read it, though a part of me wants to. Somehow, I glance at the last sentence of this new bloodshed: I wrote “My madness is endless but I’m not.” This gives me chills and I lose that weak urge to read the whole thing at once.
I throw my notebook away and close my eyes with my hands. I can feel the tears in my eyes ready to fall down on my cheek. I keep myself as possible as I can so that I wouldn’t get lost, again, in my mind.
I hear someone falls to the floor and wonder who that might me in the middle of the night but as I share the house with only one person it’s quite obvious who it is. I remove my hands from my eyes and scan the room for five or ten seconds to be aware of where he’s standing. For a second, I feel like I’ve fallen asleep again. Then I open my eyes and find him next to the gray sofa which he’s owned since his childhood; at least that’s what he says when I ask him to make money by selling it.
He looks at me curiously and asks what he always asks after a crisis of mine: “Can I read this time?”
I take the notebook back and throw my deadly looks to him. “Not until I die.” I joke and laugh. It’s good to have someone with whom you laugh together when something bad or sad happens.
“I don’t want to wait for fifty years,” he complains.
“Fifty years?” I ask. “I’m already nineteen... make it thirty years.”
“Do you have plans on building a life in thirty years, sir?”
“No,” I answer. “But I’m not planning to live after my sixties.”
We laugh hard and my tears of sadness turn into tears of joy.
I wish this night could continue this way with him but it always ends in a bad way. For this time, it’s worse. We hear a gunshot near the house and look each other with fear in our eyes. Our laughter slowly disappears and gives its place to stone-cold faces. He hurriedly gets up and finds himself on the window, looking around. I dare get up and look out from another window and it appears that mine has a better view.
I see a man running from a hound and I recognize the hound as our neighbor owns it. “Did you see that?” I ask. “It was Mrs. Shades’ hound.”
“Why isn’t it at home?” he asks back while he’s coming to my window.
Suddenly another gunshot is heard. This time, it’s obvious where it was shot. I wonder who shot whom. Then, five seconds after the gunshot, my roommate has a hole in his head and he’s down.
I wish there were stars. The sky seems so dark and it bores me. I put a cigarette between my lips and flick the lighter; the ongoing trial of killing myself. I breathe in the smoke and feel it down in my lungs. I don’t want to let go. I want the smoke to stay in there and I want to keep feeling this same old bittersweet pain forever. But it also bores me to feel it for more than five seconds. I breathe out to take another breath of the cigarette.
I am neither of the people you’ve already met. I am so much more and I am so much less. I am an enthusiast and I am an unwillingness of my own desires. I used to be a husband, a father, and sane. Now I’m lost because I have lost my wife, my son and my mind. I am a dedicated man, a policeman, head of the police department. To what exactly I am dedicated? To find criminals, I’m not like that anymore. What I want to do is captivate the killer of my family. People keep telling me they died in a car crash but I have seen the crime scene and I never fail to see when a crime is done. It wasn’t just a car crash. It was a planned murder.
You must be thinking I am an insane policeman. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am insane and making up excuses for the car crash and not acknowledging the fact that it was just it. But maybe, just maybe, I am not. There’s a possibility of everything and a decent policeman should consider all possibilities. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I want to be.
Whatever, whatever...
The city’s sleeping. A few bats are flying from one place to another as if they don’t belong to anywhere. The flutter of their wings is the only thing I hear in the silence of the night. Buildings’ lights are all out but there are white lights to enlighten their walls. It’s kind of fascinating but to stay in the darkness of my balcony is better. My wife forbade me to smoke inside, which became a habit of mine to smoke on the balcony. She may be gone but my promises to her are valid.
After smoking the last cigarette I have, I decide to get in and prepare the bed. I don’t want to sleep, of course, for I fear I may have a nightmare like I did yesterday... and the day before that... and the day before that... and this goes forever. Our bedsheet used to be purple as it was her favorite color. Oh you should’ve seen the rooms we had... Everything was colored with every shade of purple. I once asked her to color me purple too and she said I was too black to be colored. She didn’t know that hurt me because I never showed her my bad and sad sides. I sometimes wish I’d had as I can never now.
I get in the bed that is no longer purple but dark blue. I wish to sleep without lying down for hours and doing nothing. But my wishes are just as resistant as ashes. I hopelessly start watching the ceiling, which also makes me remember one final memory: The day that I tried to end it all.
I remember looking at this ceiling before mounting a hook that I could tie a rope. I also remember wearing the rope as a necklace. And I remember so well pushing the chair beneath me so I could hang from the ceiling. The only thing that I don’t remember is how I survived. Did the rope separate in two? Did somebody find me and saved me? If so, why would they leave me lying on the ground and get out of there without doing or saying anything? I’ve been feeling like my story isn’t done since then; there’s an empty hole I should fill.
I can see you think that there’s a lot going on in my mind. Old Rick thinking about everything...
I decide to turn around on the bed and start looking out of
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 10.04.2020
ISBN: 978-3-7487-4032-2
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