A pre-eminent Turkish author has passed, prematurely and unexpectedly.

His two sons have returned to Istanbul for the funeral. They are both in their late twenties, and separated by only a year. They were not close with their father, and in hopes of understanding the man better, they have spent days scouring the journals he left behind. They’ve been at it for three days, and have slept very little. They don’t say much, and have only gone out to buy cigarettes; the older son went on the first trip, the younger went on the most recent. It’s after midnight. Neither man is sure what day it is anymore. The handwritten notebooks of their father are spread carelessly about the room that was, just last week, his study. If they could view themselves from above, the brothers would notice that they had scattered their father’s life into a random pattern that mirrored the elegant, lapidary mosaic on the ceiling – numinous mazes in which a man could lose his mind. The two sons - sprawled laconically and propped up on elbows; sitting Indian style – are like old maritime cartographers pouring over nautical charts. The younger son, a political satirist living in New York, finds an undated entry in one of the books and, provoked, shares it with his older brother, a finance student in London.

***

I met her at a reading – a small, poorly arranged affair. She was one of a dozen or so people in attendance. The size of the crowd disappointed me, and I felt sluggish and monotone while I read. But she watched intently, never once taking her eyes off me. She had a disconcerting gaze, incisive and carnivorous, and she approached me after the reading to tell me that my directness of language was a revelation to her, and that she’d longed to meet me for many years. The vaguely predatory nature of her excited me. I am attracted to women who are part absence, something vital always withheld.

That night, we drank raki until two in the morning in the courtyard of her apartment and made love until nearly dawn. This led to a period of my life that I can only describe as an entrancement. Over the next few months, I became so preoccupied with unraveling the mystery of this woman that I went days without writing a word, an unthinkable blasphemy. I hounded her insouciant patterns, planting myself in cafes I knew she frequented and pretending to read novels – really I just stared blankly at the same page for minutes on end, the peculiar and absurd arrangements of sentences and paragraphs entirely beyond my esurient, lustful capacities – and chain smoking cigarettes, or I wandered through the markets she liked best (how she loved strolling down Hasircilar Caddesi to buy coffee and spices! And the exotic birds near the Yeni Cami!), pretending to be preoccupied by the trinkets and goods, half-focused on appearing to be deep in search for something, half-focused on finding her in my peripheral vision.

One night we were sitting in her flat, half-clothed on the hardwood floors which were cool on my legs. We had smoked some hashish I had bought. My sense of detail was heightened. Her kisses felt lusher, more fraught with urgency. The grain of the floor’s wood was immaculate and mesmerizing; I lost myself in its labyrinths for some while, pondering the origins of life. Outside, passing voices resounded like harsh percussion, intruding on our night together. And then, as I was on the verge of lapsing into an easy, peaceful sleep, she called me back to consciousness with the details of the story I am about to share. It was the story I had spent months trying to unlock, and as she began telling it, my heart pounded with anticipation…

A lone, beautiful elm tree shimmered in the wind amidst a wimpled sea of low prairie grass. The tree contorted and flailed, opening its silvery underside like a burlesque dancer, violent in its isolated shivers. When the tornado sirens began their ominous wailing, Elizabeth Weisz thought she’d never heard a sound so coarse and so alien.

It was one of those arid days in the waning spectrum of an American summer; all the yards in town gone to dust and prairie scrub. The cicadas omniscient chanting was a primeval dirge, and rain was a tonguetip prayer, unspeakable and ancient, some private vesper the antecedent generations had passed down; an heirloom of the plain.

Elizabeth, headed for the train station and her younger sister in Chicago, watched out the passenger-side window as a cumulonimbus cloud conceived, rapid and silent, bulging like a tumor towards the stratosphere. She watched the air gain a tension, an electrical weight and texture draping the corn fields and soy fields to the west. They shone: charged emeralds under the dry, urgent wind. Her heart seized and ascended at once, re-igniting the old conflict: she saw poetry once more. It was a delicate music, suddenly struck up, emanating someplace deep and secret.

To her east, towards town, a freight train labored into the rising storm clouds; a funereal march on a parallel track. The container cars slid by, and in the gaps between them were the low slung ranch houses and strips malls of her home, and all things were swaddled in a turbid, wretched-green patina

I knew her as an early riser and a purveyor of bazaars.

Lightning fired distantly in fleet and swift staccato strikes, possessed of the same lithe asperity as a professional ballerina. Her husband was driving, completely unperturbed and unaware that Elizabeth was alight. His body didn’t even register the tumult, his fingers playing a private melody on the steering wheel. He’d spent his youth watching these storms roll over the plain from his back porch. She’d never gotten used to them. She still expected ruin to make itself clear, ineluctable as it advanced. She could watch its slow track because here nothing could hide.

On the radio, advertisements: The President wants to cut Ethanol subsidies for Iowa farmers. ‘…I think…we have to be realistic about certain limitations…of some of our new technologies…‘ Call you Congressman and tell him to fight for the future of energy dependence in America!… When you eat a Lay’s potato chip, what are you biting into? You’re eating a crisp potato grown by hard working American’s just like you… Do you want your end of life decisions to be in your own hands? Congressman Wilson wants to march lockstep with the President’s liberal agenda and make your decisions for you…This weekend, see the movie that is being called ‘…electric…’, ‘…thrilling…’ and ‘…incredibly…exciting…”

She studied her husband. He was a considerate man, and practiced the kind mannerisms of his hometown. He said hello to everyone on the street, and knew their family histories – what sports their children played, what infirmaries afflicted their parents. And at first, this had been endearing. Such hospitality was foreign to her, and appealing. But lately it had become tiresome and vapid. She ground her teeth while he talked to near strangers when they were out to dinner. She found it disingenuous, a form of avoidance. It was fake intimacy.

He, too, seemed to be bending beneath the enduring weight of such falseness. He was an attorney for an agricultural conglomerate, and he’d begun pouring himself a double of scotch every evening. He’d stand in the backyard and examine the sky as if it were very near, so near as to be collapsing. He’d step in smelling of grass clippings and manure, face wan as winter wheat, and manage a weak smile of reassurance.

***

Here, the writing compacted into barely decipherable scratch, like old cuneiform symbols carved into stone. Then, it ceased. The older son looks up at his brother. He feels their childhood compressed into this shared glance: the school years spent at boarding schools in London, holidays with their mother in whatever city she occupied - Paris, Prague, Berlin (she was, their father once joked, a one woman version of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg). And summers spent in Istanbul, mostly unsupervised, while their father wrote, or entertained young, anonymous women who arrived in the late hours and left before dawn. He remembers the disorientation of those summers, the peculiar fragrances and sounds of Istanbul - technically his home - the mornings he would be fitfully woken by the Adhan.

“Is that it?” he asks.

“Skip the next two pages.”

He obliges, stopping briefly on the proceeding page to admire excited and precise architectural diagrams of football stadiums (a habit of his father’s revealed by their ubiquitous place in almost all of his notebooks).

“Do you think?” the older son asks, trailing off.

“Keep reading.”

***

She studied him dispassionately, taking an empirical measurement. His figure was softer than when they’d married, but so was hers. He wasn’t a bad looking man. He was dimpled, and still had his hair, and his cerulean eyes had always been beautiful. Besides, it was difficult to devote much thought to physical appearance when the only audience was taking a shit while you brushed your teeth. And yet she’d become fixated on these bodily degradations of his – the unruly hair on his knuckles, the bulges of fat beneath his chin, the malodorous funk on his breath in the morning - and she wallowed in the revulsion they aroused.

When they were younger, she tried to show him her poetry, and he would hand it back to her. I wouldn’t understand, he always said. I’d be a bad reader. Then how will you ever know me? she wondered.

I knew her flat: small and sparse, strict and unadorned. She kept an ascetic space, just a sleeping mat on the floor, a small table with a candle at its center and a single, wooden chair. Books accumulated in lieu of anything else, little memories building in corners, or on the kitchen counter. I liked to watch her standing naked and solitary by the window, looking out on the small courtyard, motionless and serene. She could stand for what seemed like hours, not moving, just looking.

In the backseat, Elizabeth’s young son read quietly, absorbed. The kid, as her husband referred to him, was well-behaved, disconcertingly stoic. He had, in these early years, his father’s reserved, Middle Western constitution: patient, reverential. He was all silent perception. This genealogical rejection of her history made him foreign to Elizabeth.

Outside, the train continued unraveling toward the horizon; the clouds continued their frantic race to the stratosphere, their upper flanks ivory bright with residual sunlight. They resembled, she thought, cauliflower. Domestic clouds. She felt a poem straining against the borders she‘d spent years constructing; a poem about how nothing lasts, and of our devotions to transitory things: to towns and to people, to edifices and to ideas, to religions and languages. A poem about how we manufacture roots in places, and how we feed them with the refuse of youthful idealism - poems never written, lovers never met.

Again, she became cognizant of the tornado sirens’ screaming and the pablum on the radio. Some people willingly choose to pay more on car insurance. Why? Five dollars for a ham sandwich? I’d rather pay ten. Two dollars for a beer? I’d rather pay six. We salute you, Mister I’ll-always-pay-more…

As her life passed, she noticed for the first time its irreparable ugliness. When had things fallen into such disrepair? It was not that she had been blind for these years, but that she accepted the place’s normalcy. Our ideas of the acceptable adapt, and somehow they had settled into this: the methodically decaying offal of the corporate bull. Grain silos rusting until they fell in heaps during the night. Old farm equipment oxidizing in the fields like tombstones. Auto-plants abandoned, guarded by acres of weedy parking lot. The once picaresque downtown usurped by chains – a Starbucks and a PNC in the regal old bank building sculpted from local granite; the armory now an Applebee‘s. On the outskirts of town, placards for McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Home Depot slowly expanded, fighting the old silos for vertical supremacy of the flatlands. The older farmers who came into town wore a spooked look, their faces wind carved and beleaguered; there were no younger farmers.

The fields these men dolefully worked represented the vast demarcated zone, the neutral and shapeless space that separated her from everything that had been her life. Its language was vague and amorphous, existing only as an emptiness between the present, and the structural framework of her life: the sprawling neighborhoods along Germantown Avenue, how a Jewish block bled into a black block, how a black block bled into a Muslim block; the rituals of her grandparents: the mysterious Hebrew blessings they would whisper into her and her sister’s ears during Sabbath dinners; standing on the banks of the creek behind their house tossing pieces of bread into the flow; the interminable Yiddish hours spent in synagogue on Yom Kippur; how her grandfather would pour water over her grandmother’s hands before the Sabbath meal and delicately scrub them.

And she had lapsed into the monotonous plains, interrupted only by the indistinct towns with their strip mall sprawl! She had a son reading in the backseat, a stoic husband drumming his internal melody, and no one at all saw reason for alarm. No one at all inquired about her loneliness. Her awakened attention to lyricism enabled her to see the hideous language surrounding them - the multi-thousand dollar billboards shilling pop and hundred million dollar movies and candy bars, the empty fast food bags discarded at roadside, the incessant radio jingles, the consolidated corporate barns selling every extraneous product under the sun and all of it made in China or Vietnam, the homogenous and symmetrical chain restaurants with their sodium bomb gruel.

I knew her as frenetic flurries of motion, all taut urgency. She rapaciously smoked Turkish cigarettes and religiously drank Turkish coffee, and these two things seemed a form of communion. She was trying to finish a series of travel poems she once told me, and she wrote as if her life were ending. So fervent and feverish that sometimes she wouldn’t shave for weeks, and during these weeks I adored the juxtaposition of pale skin and dark, nettled hair. I knew the chiaroscuro of her body.

The whole ridiculous machinery served, contemporaneously, to assimilate and isolate. Assimilation into the blithe submissive consumer mass; isolation from any natural transcendence, any human grace. This very machine had become the aperture through which her life filtered. It was pervasive, and severed her from any kind of poetry. She could no longer separate beauty from sorrow, the brilliant from the mundane (it reminded her of those spring mornings after rain when low clouds blanketed the fields and the entire world existed as silhouettes and apparitions). And this had endless, horrible manifestations.

Initially, there were the hours she spent perusing the inane, junk-food stimuli on the internet seeking a reprieve from her loneliness, and how it provided a brief, sugary, luminous sense of connectivity to some larger tide: the forum for displaced Jews she posted on anonymously, the blog about Phillies baseball her father frequented, the friends back she east she emailed about literature. And then there were the sites she began visiting when her husband took the kid to church on Sundays, the depraved tunnels she let herself fall down. Married men looking for married women. Young, single men looking for a thrill with a young mother.

There were the furtive indulgences, too. The cigarettes she smoked sitting on the closed toilet seat while the kid napped. There was the time she went for a drive at night and parked on a road outside of town and fingered herself; the shameful, ecstatic wave as her restraint gave way and she stopped glancing in the rearview mirror for onrushing headlights. The moments she looked at the kid and thought about turning on the gas and walking outside, though this was a thought she barely admitted to herself; not even a shadow of a fantasy, it was something too dark to be serious. But it existed, the faintest adumbration that haunted her.

And we all have these horrid thoughts, don’t we, all of us? she told me, These dreadful slivers of malevolence and catastrophic violence. But who can we possibly tell about them?

How else could she possibly express such loneliness? The word was so inadequate for the condition. Perhaps, she thought, our entire vernacular is insufficient. Futile as it might be, not everyone ceased trying to find a decent, honest dialect. She had; everything had been a compromise: sacrificing her writing, moving a thousand miles from home, abandoning her faith.

She looked at her quiet, grotesque husband. I’m a bad reader. I wouldn’t understand.

Why had she followed him? Why does anybody follow anyone? We think that person knows us, and the world feels less lonely. We sacrifice careers and ambitions for that, to feel that some other person understands us on a very deep, humane level. And then our private hymns diverge, or go silent.

It’s scary, isn’t it, how quickly life escapes us, she said one night without prelude or context, just runs off and hides? But then, what do we expect from life?

By now they were into the peripherals of town where the fast food joints and strip malls temporarily halted their march, ceding the land to the farmers. They passed the old, dilapidated VFW post with its sign advertising the Friday night fish fry. They crossed the train tracks, the freighter a distant mirage of motion on the horizon line. This threshold stood as a transitory moraine of sorts. She knew the station was not far.

The remnants of the old drive-in movie theater rose from an overgrown field. This was the final lodestar on the road away from town. Only the corroded scaffolding remained. The screen had long ago been wasted by rain and wind and devastating prairie winters. The old speaker posts were aligned like gravestones in neat, linear rows. She wondered why no one had scrapped the lot, turned it into another Walmart, or a new, glittering multiplex. Instead, it sat admonishingly, an eerie apparition of cultural abandonment.

She noticed that her husband’s fingers went silent. He glanced past her at the old theater and smiled a slight, melancholy smile. It was a deeply personal smile, and if she asked him its etymology – even if she went so far as to break into pleading, desperate sobs – he would not relinquish whatever secret the desolate theater held. She was pierced by how little of him she knew, and how naively beautiful he looked for the few seconds he was lost in this ether of his adolescence. She pictured sultry Saturday nights spent watching the grainy picture while the fireflies were blinking like a small, ephemeral galaxy, the families huddled under blankets in their mini-van trunk, the high school couples surreptitiously groping in the dark, their speakers disconnected so the film is an old time silent film, is separate from its audio.

What happened next is a source of uncertainty in her memory. She noticed a flash of black, a sleek dark fish hurtling towards them, and for the briefest of moments she became unmoored from her body. This suspended time has transfigured into something mythical; a deceleration and a revelation. In her memory, she sees the onrushing car and she decides that if her life doesn’t end, she will leave.

I knew that she always carried a book – even into restaurants, even into mosques and synagogues. Usually it was poetry, translations of the old masters she had never before read – Rimbaud, Ovid, Rilke, that sprawling, formless American Whitman.

In actuality, this is an explanatory footnote, muscled into the story in a later draft. We manipulate our own pasts. In actuality, she glimpsed a flash of metal and all she had time for was a gasp.

The impact was an acceleration of time. She was moving and then, somehow, she was inert in the mangled carapace. They came to a stop in the overgrown underbrush behind the old drive-in screen. The momentary silence was indelible and unflinching. The low key, sibilant humming that pervades the world ceased. Her breaths were drawn in a vacuum. Then, her son burst into glottal, guttural sobs. Sound regained its dominion: the steamer-hiss of the engine, the odd and implacable crackling of distended metal, the improbable drone of the radio.

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In a moment that beckoned her to move, she sat stiller than she ever remembered. Her son sobbed in the backseat, but she couldn’t make herself turn to face him; to put her hand on his leg, or to see if his face was obscured in blood. Now that she could hear again, she listened to her own heart pound in its percussionary thrusts. How long had it been since she’d listened to her own rhythm? She felt her body - her bloated stomach, her soft breasts, her corrugated ribs - and found nothing missing or out of place. No cavities had been ripped open, no organs collapsed. The car’s chassis was ruined, but her own was sturdy.

Viva, Viagra! Viv… Her husband finally killed the car. For a protracted second, he and Elizabeth looked at each other dumbly. Then, he leapt from the car and opened the backdoor. He struggled with the seatbelt before prying their wailing son out, blithely setting him down amidst the weeds and tall grasses.

He opened Elizabeth’s door and undid her seat belt, too. He ducked his shoulder underneath her arm, and in one motion lifted her out of the smoking car. He set her down, very gently, beside their son, whose sobs had become a sibilant, primeval sucking noise. She watched her son the detached way someone watches a peculiar animal, trying to understand its grunts and signals. The boy crawled prostrate towards her. He dragged his small, sinewy body.

He collapsed his head onto her lap and quivered in silent shudders. She could barely the contain the urge to stand and run; the closeness frayed what resolve remained. She put her arm around her son and felt his voluble muscles, his frail frame. How easily our bodies break, she thought, and then the sky finally broke, too, disintegrating into a flood of rain.

The downpour unhinged things and fissured them, each thing carrying its own spasmodic action of joy. The trees bent for their courtesy, the corn took a spastic bow. The eaves of the old movie screen turned into cataracts. Cars glided past like children on a slide. The earth sang in symphonies of puddles, too drunk to swallow such abundance in one gulp.

The rain made all things prismatic, deconstructed and disoriented to each other.

Her husband materialized beside her as mysteriously as a cool breeze materialized at dusk.

“Honey, your train.”

The other driver stood dazed in the middle of the street. A police car arrived, lights ablaze in a mute whorl. Her husband loped over with a young man’s assured gait: guilty but unbowed. She was reminded in ephemera of why she’d given up her life for his vision of happiness.

As the rain accelerated, she recalled a small memory from girlhood, something she had never before remembered. She was holding her mother’s hand and approaching the home of her grandparents. She saw a small congregation of relatives through the big front window. They were lit dimly by candles, and they were singing. This vision had stirred her, ineffably, as a girl. It was one of those fleeting things that resonated in the deep internal chambers of the soul, buried and incomprehensible.

The potency of that brief image came back to her while the rain inundated her clothes. She understood: it was the thread between her and the ancient and forgotten ancestral tribes that sang their hymns in caves, sang in whispers, sang by the light of a dying fire that danced somberly on the cave walls.

She watched her husband talking with the officers. He looked like a stolid tree, dolorous, sagging beneath the rain. She wanted, right there, to undress him, to make love to him in the overgrown grass. She wanted, desperately, to erase whatever gilded memory caused his smile, and their crash. And after fucking him right there, amidst the rain and their child and the ruins of their life, she wanted to run. To run into what? Into anything, into the vast space of the world she knew nothing about. To find more things to usurp and destroy.

She kissed her son on the top of his damp, knotted head. Thought maybe she should whisper something in his ear, but then kissed him again, softly. She stood. She broke into full, rapacious strides. Her legs sloughed off the rain‘s burden, and she felt herself growing fleet. She moved easily through the warm, lugubrious water, like a fish breaching the surface. Ah, she ran, lighter and lighter, but feeling the heavy thud of her heels as they sank into the soggy, murky earth.

She climbed onto the train dripping wet and without any bags. She only had two hundred dollars. Philadelphia, she told the ticket agent. Philadelphia, she said again, for herself. She would figure the rest out when she arrived. At the only moment of her life that had mattered, she’d been a coward. She had fled. She didn’t care; the unknown summoned her with a soft, clear melody: the limns of her body, feverishly singing. Alone.

The main facts - about the drive, her feeling poetry in her body, her desperate transgressions, and the memories she had in the rain - she shared with me in her long, rambling soliloquy. Many of the other details I have extrapolated, or invented. I have never been to Iowa. Elizabeth has become part fiction in my mind; but then, isn’t all memory part fiction?

Later that night, she woke me from a deep sleep. We took a bleary eyed cab ride across the Bosphorus to Kuzguncuk, whose beautiful homes were mute with darkness, their vibrant colors stolen by the moonless night. We drove up the hill of Icadiye Caddesi, a few of the teahouses still burning bright, embers of the city’s insomniacs. We stopped at the old Jewish cemetery, and she insisted we climb the fence. We walked between the old tombstones for nearly an hour, smoking our cigarettes like two maundering widowers. She did not say one word, though occasionally she would take my hand, blithely, and hold it for a few seconds, no real pressure in her grip.

After this revelation - after we consummated the evening messily, wetly, on her bed mat, and after we walked silently in the graveyard - I found that a spigot had been un-kinked and I began to write again. I still paid visits to the cafes or the markets, but they became rituals of homage. I went, mostly, because I suspected she watched me, too, and this game seemed important. These stake outs grew shorter and shorter in duration as my mind was devoured by stories and poems. The periods between our rendezvous grew concurrently longer until one evening it occurred to me I had not seen her in two weeks. Suddenly overcome with desperation to see her, I bought a bottle of wine and sauntered over to her flat. The night was dense with the sultry, viscous blood of summer’s heart – oriental music, meat smoke stench, the remnants of lover’s howls, the automotive exhaust of weary husbands bound for home, a million fearful prayers, the lingering violet filigree of primal light. I rang her bell and waited, but she did not answer. I hopped the fence with little difficulty and peered through her window: the space was empty, abandoned, lonely as a cave. She had disappeared, gone back to Iowa as far as I knew.

It was only in those preceding weeks that I began doubting the veracity of her confession. How many stories had I concocted in my time? How many lies had I told expectant lovers? She told me so very little about herself, really; just this one story. I think it was May when she told me – I remember the violet wisteria in her courtyard blooming.

Sometimes, when I pass an American bookstore, I poke my head in hoping to find her collection of poems, thinking that maybe, then, I might know her.

***

“It’s funny,” the older son said after he finished reading, “him pretending to know about having a family.”

“So what do you think?”

“He told remarkable stories, had that remarkable imagination.”

“So certainly a work of fiction?”

“Probably. I don’t know.”

The two men read for another three hours, and then it was if a miasma lifted. The older brother drew back the curtains, and they listened as the adhan reverberated through the vessels and capillaries of the city, the forgotten music of their childhoods:

Allahu akbar, allahu akbar. Ashhadu an la ilaha illa llah. Ashhadu anna Muhammadan rasul Allah. Hayya ala l-salat. Hayya ala l-falah…