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  “Fuck them all!” I was yelling. “Fuck whoever it is that dreamed up this world, and fuck to hell everyone that ever regarded all this flesh-eating and blood-drinking as a miracle and gave thanks!”

  I was so furious that had I had a pen and paper, I’d immediately have written a petition. Seeing as all those faiths had been penned and made into books, that was obviously the most sensible mode of communication. I’d write a letter of complaint and toss it into the air, or wherever Allah or God or this or that was! As the Quran started with “Read!” I’d start that letter with, “Why don’t you read this!”

  “Just you wait until I leave this hole, I’ll do it all!” I said, and in answer, I kept hearing the voice, “More!”

  But now more than before it seemed to be asking, “More?”

  In reply I said, “No more! That’s it, for fuck’s sake!” and wept. And also checked the time.

  I was numb. I was numb all over. My legs, my arms, every muscle, and even my tongue and lips were numb. Once again it was a quarter past three, and I’d been sitting there for exactly twelve hours. I was pretty sure that the thing pressing against my shoulder was someone’s head. In fact, whoever it was, I’d felt their ribs when I’d tried to shove them hours before now. Maybe that had been someone else’s body, I couldn’t know for sure. At my right shoulder was someone presumably folded up jaw to knees. At least I thought so. Just beyond was the face, the mouth of which I’d inserted my fingers into in the dark. Where the rest of the face was, I had absolutely no idea. I could no longer remember the scenery I’d glimpsed for a few seconds in the lighter flame.

  Really, if not for the watch in my hand, I’d have been able to remember very few things. Everything blended together. First of all, it felt like the accident was years ago. Yet when I drank the rainwater dribbling off the bodies, it was as if it had only been minutes. Apparently I was losing my mind and that terrified me. So being rescued wasn’t enough, but I had to be rescued before I lost it. I was so afraid of spending the rest of my life as a loony that I now prayed to all the divine powers I’d cursed at and knew by name a few hours ago that I would die before I could go mad. That was all I wanted: to die before I could go mad.

  But nothing helped me remember the chronological order of events. Neither incessantly following the seconds indicator, nor counting the seconds out loud at the top of my lungs, even. I always started to mess up after a while. I’d count seventeen after five or zone out staring at the seconds indicator and panic when I came back around, not being able to figure out how much time had passed.

  Then I’d hold my breath and shut my eyes, waiting for the face of a clock that read a quarter past three to appear in my mind. A clock face that read a quarter past three was, for me, the beginning of everything. It was a milestone. It was like history’s propelling clock or some such thing. If I lost it, everything would go up in the air. It would go up in the air in a jumble, and I’d never be able to add up the time I’d spent in that hole. If I couldn’t add it up, surely I’d go mad. There was no time in there. Even if there were, I wouldn’t know it. Because there were schools you needed to go to in order to know. Schools people went to who could tell, from just a glance, the time of death of a body … All I had was an onset hour and that was all. It was my past and everything I had. If I forgot it, I’d be obliterated. I’d be nothing more than a grain of sand hurtling around in empty space. And if I really were a grain of sand, I could only be one inside an hourglass.

  So I tried to ingrain the clock face showing quarter past three inside my mind as much as I could and held my breath until it loomed behind my closed eyes. Though my heart picked up speed and it was a strain, I didn’t let go of my breath until I saw that clock face. It both calmed me and helped me remember the time. Calmed me, because I felt like holding my breath severed all my ties to the world. No more transactions took place between us. My body still sat there and I still sat inside my body, but in a sense, I evaporated. I evaporated into thin air and felt myself exempt from everything. That was my solution to the panic attacks. But I still had to find a way to write down, someplace or other, the clock face showing quarter past three.

  What was more, since the clock face in my hand was to point to a quarter past three every twelve hours, I had to mark those as well. I had to put a nick in a certain spot every twelve hours. Of course, thinking about all this drove me into deeper panic. All of this preparation meant accepting that I wouldn’t be rescued on this day. So, I’d again hold my breath and wait for the panic washing over me to recede. The worst part was that I’d have to light the lighter again in order to make the marks. Besides, where and how was I supposed to write these numbers down? They might be washed away if I wrote them in the mud.

  I’d started glancing around as if I could see anything. I wasn’t able to, of course, but when I raised my head, I came up with a solution. I could write on the boulder above me with soot from the lighter flame. But then I’d use up too much of the lighter fluid. I had to make a choice. I’d either be left without light sooner than I should or there would come a time that I’d forget everything I knew in relation to time and go mad.

  It wasn’t really that hard to make a decision. After all, I was too afraid to light the lighter. I even had a spare. The lighter inside the pack my father had given me. So it seemed to be decided. The date and time would be inscribed on the rock above me in soot.

  But now I was wondering how I could avoid seeing the things that would come to light along with the flame. How could one avoid seeing hell? Was there a way? Of course there was! To think of all the autopsy specialists in the world! Who knows how many people’s utterly cold gazes, right in that moment I was fearful of seeing all those corpses piled on top of one another, were studying the bodies they tore apart with their steady hands, the bloody spectacle in front of their eyes? If they could do it, so could I. At the very least I could light the lighter and ignore the bodies as I went about my business. I could raise my head and fix my eyes on the rock. In the end we were all flesh, me included. We could very well be on sale by the pound in another planet’s butchers!

  With sudden determination I leaped into the future like a first-time skydiver. I raised my head and flicked on the lighter. Yes, I could feel the bodies, and my eyes knew they were there, but I stubbornly stared at the boulder. Yet though I held the flame to a single spot in hopes of seeing a soot stain appear, there was no change in color, or none that I could see. The rock was wet. Maybe that was why it didn’t work. As my hand started to burn, I couldn’t hold out any more and was about to put it out when I looked down and saw a pair of breasts. A woman’s breasts … then I took my thumb off the lever.

  I was in the dark again but the breasts hovered in front of my eyes. The woman’s neck and head, caught between the legs of another body, had been out of sight. The part below her waist also extended over the pair of legs of another and disappeared into the darkness. She stretched forward and up like one of those wooden female torsos on the front of pirate ships. Her back arched backward like a bow. All I could see was the part between her neck and her slightly distended belly. There was no rest of her. The buttons of her shirt had popped off, causing it to sag open to either side, and her breasts spilled out from inside a white bra.

  I was so aroused by this vision I’d glimpsed for only a second that I wanted to flick on the lighter again to gaze at it, and even find some way to touch those breasts. But they were out of my reach. To do that I’d have to lean forward. That would cause the two masses of flesh on either side of me to instantly fall and fill the space between my back and the rock behind me.

  Maybe I could remove my shoes and touch them with my toes. Or I could lunge forward with no regard to the possibility that the load on my shoulders might fall when I was out of the way. What did I have to lose anyway? If anything, a gap of thirty centimeters. I didn’t think the body on my right could move much anyhow. After all, it was folded up between the boulder and other bodies as though it had no bo
nes. But I was sure that the body on my left would fall, if only its head.

  I was so frenzied that I disregarded everything and flicked on the lighter so I could stare at those breasts, and only them. There was a face right next to them. I was trying to avoid looking at it at all costs.

  And I did! I leaned forward to slide my finger underneath the band in the middle of the bra to pull it up. Both breasts were left exposed when the bra was lifted. The bra itself slid up to rest somewhere above the breasts, near the woman’s vanishing neck. At the same time there was an earthquake behind me! The corpse on my left dropped behind me, not just the head but the entire body, filling the space between me and the boulder.

  Now my knees were near enough I could rest my elbows on them. I’d lost a space of not thirty centimeters but at least half a meter! I would never be able to stretch my legs any more than this. For a second I thought I might be able to sit on the body behind me to make room for my legs, but the boulder above me wouldn’t allow that. It wasn’t high enough. What was all this for, then? I was about to find out!

  First I put down the lighter and then unbuttoned my trousers. I was in such a hurry my hands shook, and I couldn’t open my zipper. Finally, with my feet against the body opposite me and my back against the body behind me, I was able to raise myself momentarily and unzip my trousers to pull them down.

  Then, in the dark, I began to caress the breasts, the locations of which I’d committed to memory, while with my other hand I began touching myself inside my underpants. It was all very cold. Colder than my hands. And nothing was happening. The blood inside me wasn’t pooling where it was supposed to, and I couldn’t feel the breasts I was touching to be the pieces of meat I’d been aroused by a minute ago. Nothing was real! Nothing at all! Me being there, caressing the breasts of a corpse, what I was doing to myself, none of it!

  So, eyes filling with tears, I struggled for the unachievable. All was gone. All my hopes had disappeared into such a black hole that not a single trace was left behind. There was no way I could ever get them back out. I’d found myself sitting on that ice-cold piece of earth, kneading a piece of clay that would never harden. I was wringing, releasing, and caressing a dead pair of breasts and feeling nothing.

  But I had no intention of surrendering to all the lifelessness. Everything was dead enough as it was, but I wasn’t! Despite some difficulty, I bent my head to tuck my feet underneath me and gripped the breasts to pull myself forward. I took my left hand off the chest to lean my forehead against it, and slowly coasted my face over it. My eyebrows, eyes, cheekbones, nose, and cheeks. I wanted every part of my face to touch the chest that was cold and hard as marble.

  Then I kissed the spot I imagined the veins of the marble to knit together. My lips parted and the two tips met. The tip of my tongue drifted over and around the nipple.

  I was doing all this so ponderously that it felt like every movement took hours. I started sucking. Eyes shut, I knelt on my knees. One hand clutched the breast while the other clutched at me. As I sucked on the nipple with my lips and tongue, so I touched myself with five fingers. Neither faster nor slower. My fist moved back and forth as though sharpening a knife, the heat rising inside it. As it rose it became bigger than my fist and forced my fingers apart.

  I was thinking of the world’s most beautiful girl. And of the others … I’d completely forgotten where and who I was. My eyes shut tight, I waited for that one moment. That moment would bring an end to everything, suffusing my harrowed body and mind with such pleasure that it would all cease to matter. Pain and pleasure would become so level that life would be stretched like a line between them and I, tightrope walker, would do cartwheels on it. I could feel it. I could feel the last drop roiling inside me before it made the glass overflow. A river was about to flow out of my loins, I just knew it.

  Just as I was poised to meet that instant with all my cells opening like floodgates, breath held, a bitter taste filled my mouth! A sticky, viscous, bitter fluid! At first I thought it was blood! What else could it be in the midst of all those bodies? Surely it was blood! Who knows what part of the woman it had come from all the way to her nipple? Who knows how much of it I’d sucked in, even swallowed?

  I jerked backward. Sailing like a spring toy on my knees, I knocked my head against the boulder before falling on my back onto the body stretched out behind me.

  With a scream I sat back on my heels and immediately began spitting and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. But it was too late. I’d already swallowed at least a few drops! I wasn’t about to go looking for the lighter I’d left on the ground. I took the pack out of my pocket, pulled out the other lighter, and lit it.

  First I examined my hands. There was nothing on them that resembled blood. There was only a yellow-tinged clear fluid forming fine bridges between my fingers. The fluid I was after was more or less the same color, but it was clear what I was seeing hadn’t come from me! I looked up quickly and looked at the woman’s breast. There it was! It oozed out of the nipple like a fat teardrop and dribbled onto the earth.

  The drop I’d seen must have been the last as nothing came after it, and everything dried up. I couldn’t make sense of it at all. Why, I was asking. How could it be? What is this stuff? Some kind of disease? An infection? Why would a woman’s breast leak that kind of …

  I stopped! I’d hit such a wall that I had no chance but to stop. I’d come to such an understanding that my shoulders collapsed under its weight. The breast I’d been sucking on belonged to the pregnant woman. The woman who’d have named her child Rastin if it were a boy. She’d said she was four months pregnant. Her body had long prepared itself for the baby but hadn’t been any the wiser when it died halfway. What I’d sucked on had gathered in that breast for someone who’d never be born. I’d tasted mother’s milk for the first time in my life. My own mother hadn’t done it, but in the end somebody had nursed me.

  I didn’t know what to think. Or what to feel … I wasn’t even sure I felt shame. The lighter remained in my grip, lighting up everything like a torch, but I hung my head and saw nothing. My trousers were around my ankles, and I was sitting on them. I flicked the lighter off and put it between my teeth. Then I sat up slightly to stretch my legs in front of me, despite some difficulty, and gave my back to the body behind me. Extending my legs as much as I could, I pulled up my trousers and zipped and buttoned them. Sitting up again, I folded my legs underneath me and dropped onto my heels. I took the lighter from between my teeth to put in my pocket, shut my eyes, and held my breath.

  I started to wait. I waited for the clock face to appear in my mind’s eye … but it didn’t. I was unable to conjure up the picture in my pitch-black mind. No matter how long I held my breath, the clock face appeared neither in front nor behind my eyes. That was when I descended one level lower into hell. For I realized that I was unable to remember the hour of my arrival in it. What had just transpired left my mind so ravaged that nothing was left behind but pain. The pain took up so much space that my mind had dispensed with all else to make room for it. The hour of arrival, naturally, was part of that and it had been cast out with everything else.

  Now I could go mad and I did. I started hitting myself. Slapping at myself! Then I hit the bodies. Anything that came across my fists, I punched. I hit legs, bellies, chests, and other things I could guess at but didn’t want to think about. I’d lost it. I just howled as I played the skin-covered drums surrounding me. I rose and fell on my feet, striking my legs, my bent knees, and my groin! I struck the piece of flesh I’d desperately embraced in hopes of the pleasure it would give me to abate my pain. I flailed at the entire world given to me in that tiny space. I’d no longer be sure of anything. Neither the passing of time, nor anything else!

  “You may’ve been here for days!” I started to scream. “How would you know?”

  How would anyone know, really? Who could tell me this when even I didn’t know? Maybe I’d been here for weeks. Yes, only that would explain everythi
ng! Would I have lost myself enough to consider making love to a corpse if I hadn’t been here for weeks? Of course not! But then shouldn’t everything have rotted?

  I yanked the lighter out with such force that I tore my pocket. I don’t know what I hoped to see when I lit it. Was it more preferable that they had rotted, or that I’d gone so insane that I’d wanted to fuck a corpse before they even had a chance to? Which was it? When the lighter was lit, everything would come to light. I’d either have to see the decay or accept that I was decayed on the inside!

  Taking a breath, I struck the lighter and opened my eyes. I looked at them all. At everything! Into their dulled eyes! At their discolored lips! Their bloody noses! Their shredded skin! The bones poking out of their flesh! Whatever it was life offered me, I looked at it all, one by one. There was no decay at all. So it seemed that I was the one who was decayed. My history of being buried preceded all theirs. My decay had begun the night my mother tried to bury me like a rock. I’d been rotting for fifteen years!

  I hated my mother so much then that brought the lighter flame to the nipple I’d just sucked milk out of and waited for it to burn. As I waited I hated my mother that much more and covered both breasts in burns.

  Since there was no more initial hour in my mind to write in soot, I sucked in all the smoke. As I expelled the smoke after it had traveled every possible place under my skin, I studied the reservoirful of people around me. Then I thought of the others. The other people that had come through the reservoir on Dust Street … I saw the world’s most beautiful girl in the smoke coming out of my nose. Then the other girls … though none of it had felt like rape, all the girls I really had raped …