what looks like what is

by Basil Rosa

Opening a Mead writing tablet, hinged at the top with copper coils and numbering 50 crisp and lined 6-by-9-inch sheets, Pearse writes Human Sacrifice at the top in the center of the first sheet. He then draws one arrow pointing down to its left at a list he’s scrawled there: Jew, Jerusalem, Will, Hebrew, Semitic. Now, from the center of that page with an arrow pointing upwards he writes the word, Christ. Next, Pearse renders an arrow pointing down from Human Sacrifice to the right with another list: Greek, Athens, Logos, Joseph. Then, at the bottom he scribbles one word below Christ and that word is Fourfold. Below it, he writes the following: Gods(s) – mankind // Heaven – Earth.

            More scribbling. Jew Greek/Greek Jew. Another arrow pointing to the word, metaphysics. Then two sentences: I am media. I am two countries.

            So, thinks Pearse, which one do I murder?

            There are laws, physics. There is (dis)aster. He writes Jesus, sketching an image of a bearded man in a robe pointing at himself and captioned: Bread/wine is born.

            Both? Which one first? He can’t, he can’t, he can’t….

            But he must.

            Get out!

***

            Pearse draws a crucifix. Along comes the word transubstantiation which he pencils in an arc across the top of it. At its bottom, he writes in caps: MEANING. At its left-hand point he writes being. At its right-hand one, physical axis.

            He thinks: I’m erupting. Pure, this droll hunger. For lucre? He writes: $ + $ = $. The dollar sign shares the same keyboard button as the number four. As in fourfold.

            This is why he prefers his Mead notebooks over a keyboard. Tabula rasa. Fewer distractions. However, upon more consideration, a crucifix, four-fold, really might equal transcendence.

            Is this the death he wants? As if a form of profit? What money does is ream. It also pains, drains, and remains imminent, suggesting links to heavenly deliverance.

            What really matters? Intuition, perhaps.

            Pearse then considers the first act, scene five of Hamlet: “The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spright, that ever I was borne to set it right.”

            The Prince of Denmark speaking to his father’s ghost. Pearse raving at his shadow, as he’s done for the past 48 hours since learning by phone that his father is dead.

***

            His brother Niall, like him, long ago left Ireland. Niall called from the USA. State of Arkansas. City of Little Rock. Pearse has never been. Couldn’t go there if he wanted, which he doesn’t. With this pandemic and its restrictions on travel, the mandate international, nobody, for now, is going anywhere. Vaccines are allegedly on their way.

            Niall and his wife, sanguine creatures both, had taken his father in, allowing him to spend the past two years getting adequate treatment while seeing his two grandsons daily. He passed in his sleep. This small consolation should not be overlooked.

            Pearse is in Turkey. Before the pandemic, he had opportunities each day to visit with his Turkish friend, Fikret, a multi-lingual philosophy professor who lives two miles walking distance from his flat. He didn’t seize those opportunities. They’ve scheduled a visit, exchanging texts:         Fikret: Need to get sun!

            Pearse: I want to be dead.

            By using backstreets, he won’t be seen by any inzibat milling about. In their flak jackets with AK-47s, they’re based at primary intersections, stopping all cars, asking to see licenses, prohibiting non-residents from access to the long, wide avenue that centers his neighborhood.                    Freedom? Looks like what it is. Live or exist? The same, aren’t they? He hopes not.

            Fikret will do his best to provide comfort. A delay. Rhymes with café. Specifically, Dalya, one that’s been granted permission to remain open. He’ll skulk his way there. On toward choice. A crossroads. He remembers Fikret telling him in Turkey he won’t find such a concept as dört yöl, no four-fold way, no four corners, especially in Istanbul. Pearse had argued they weren’t in Istanbul; they were in Ankara. Fikret, laughing, said, “Everyone in Turkey is in Istanbul. Just as everyone in France is in Paris. Or in Ireland, Dublin. The city-state is now the world. And how you say, vice-versa.”

            So, death is life. And so on.

            Hamlet, when asked what he reads, replies: “Words, words, words”….Kelimler in Turkish. Or sözler. Yet Pearse needs them even if they deny clarity. Just as, for now, he needs Fikret.

***

            Sipping black tea from a small tulip-shaped glass, Fikret’s English is silken, casual, though he likes to insist his German is better. “To live is to separate from the plane.”

            “It’s penetration into a source of power.”

            “An enchanted return,” says Fikret.

            “Bloody hell, man, I can’t go on.”

            Fikret lights a cigarette. “Consider, Pearse, that Buddha was enlightened at the break of day. In the East, you see, everything ends at sunrise.”

            Dublin-born Pearse considers that if he’s understanding his Istanbul-born friend correctly, his first call as a young man was a fulfillment of a need to experience adventure, but he refused that call, performing the folly of any available flight from God. Once susceptible, he was visited by forms of supernatural aid. This assistance came to him, and, with time, he evolved as one who learned how to accept the provisions of his adventures. Next came his crossing of what Fikret calls “the final threshold” which led to his passage into the realm of night.

            “The belly of the whale,” says Fikret. “Where you are. Think of it that way.”

            An empty stage, darkness, could be a beginning. He’s been weeping for two nights, though he wept even more when his mother died. But he doesn’t want to just get through or get on. This is no yellow-brick road he’s on; it’s a wilderness of trials, learning the dangerous aspects of victories and unending initiation.

            “If I gave you a gun, would you shoot me?”

            “I might miss.” Aromatic, blue smoke curls from Fikret’s nostrils. “Just walk the avenue. Swing your arms. Our Turkish coppers have guns and know how to use them.”

             Pearse leans back and closes his eyes. He smells kebab being grilled in a nearby kitchen. Magna mater, a goddess, says to him, “As initiate, enter into the bliss of infancy regained.”

            Not in his flat – wise to remember where he is. Not dead yet. Not whole either. Split, miffed, off the mark.

            Fikret is still talking, telling him he must be careful, that death is a temptress. That he must endure Oedipal realizations despite their agonies. “Once this happens, there can be atonement with the father.”

            Would that also mean apotheosis? Such a word.

            A lie? Hopeless? Or an ultimate boon brought by re-integration into society. All this trauma, for lack of a better label, may be teaching him.

***

            Each of his universal heroes, whether Jesus, Gautama Buddha, or Mohammed, bring a message to the whole world. Those, such as Moses, Huang Ti of the Tang Dynasty, or the Aztec Tezcatlipoca, commit not to the world but to their tribe alone. His Da, his first hero, loved and feared God. Da was supreme leader, Pearse a mere acolyte. The man endured refusals and knew this tension Pearse now feels, this perpetual Hamlet question donging in his ears. He watched his youngest son evolve from child to man. Watched him suffer. It’s what fathers do.

            Submit, create, or destroy? What are the consequences of choosing to deny what the world offers in order to seek revenge on those who have allegedly brought indignities? Looking back, malarkey, most of it—and he—a loquacious blowhard. Unlike his father, a melancholic sort fond of the jar, nothing coming easy to him, who had taught himself humility, how to celebrate the unknown.

            He can do the same, applying Fikret’s phrases, such as “magic flight” and “the escape from fire.”

            Fikret says, “I was rescued from without, not within.”

            “I think now that my father knew this about me all along. These faults.”

            “But you didn’t.”       

            His father had witnessed each crossing Pearse made: exotic travels, study abroad, grants, scholarships, lectures, failed romances that led to delusion, soured ambitions, a distaste for common light and the public eye. Yet, his father had reveled in how he’d became “a man of quality,” one who labored toward mastery of the two worlds (spiritual and physical) and all the bilateral symmetry and chaos they provided. Da had understood that one’s primary natural impulse might be a restless seeking.

            All hunger, as Hamlet did, to comprehend a freedom that allows an option to thrive or perish. Which other creature can make such a choice?

            “He believed in me.”

            “Why would he not?” says Fikret, smiling. “He’s your baba.”

            Each of us, thinks Pearse, is a composite hero of the monomyth. Frequently disgraced and dishonored by society. Often unrecognized or disdained. I’m nothing special. He likes the idea of viewing himself as a sojourning misanthrope. His baba would agree if he told him one doesn’t live to suffer but rather suffers in order to live.

            Why Turkey?

            There’s a job for me there. I’ve the credentials, the experience. They have a need.

            His father hadn’t said he’d miss him. That he, as a widower, had needs, too. He was proud of his son’s accomplishments, but he wished, as Niall had, that he’d married, brought him and Mom grandchildren, extended the family name.

            No, the man didn’t say any of those things. Though he did remark once, “Pearse, I’ve always been best when helping another be better.”

            That was a choice, too.

            They shared many often-sullen, unexpressed understandings. He’d learned from a master how to remain silent about them. To view deficits as symbolic, temporary. Hence, as one aged, life, as ceaseless quest, might not need to make sense.

***

            Prometheus, alone, curses out of rage. Without being fearlessly (perhaps naïvely) driven, humans view themselves as fallen, collapsing into ruin. Does he want this? Is it what he feels now? Nothing but the stench of death smoldering around him.

            Yet, emanations come. A cosmogonic cycle. Forms of salvation whether Yahweh, Cú Chulainn, Joan of Arc, or fumes from sacred caves.

            I am man by nature, and God by the grace of God. This from Symeon the Younger, somewhere between 949 and 1022 A.D. Pearse writes it in large letters across one sheet, tears it off the notepad and tapes it to his bedroom wall.

            Once he sits, he begins to consider Fikret’s advice, suspecting this is a wormhole that could sway his decision. What’s left of him in me?

            He considers the Virgin Birth. Like many a Catholic, he was once so eager to believe. Six years ago, his mother died. Has it been that long? Pearse wants to weep thinking of this. Yet, his parents may be together now. Perhaps they always were. Pondering them in this way, he finds it easier to accept he was born with everything he needed. What came along were losses, transformations, dissolutions, and perils. Each a gift if viewed in a certain manner.

            With death in his throat, perhaps discovery isn’t what’s needed, but rather re-discovery and re-attainment. As one unheard of, waiting to be unknown, he must be chosen by his own hand.

            It’s all there within him, always has been. Rendered and redeemed out of manacles of despair.

***

            Another day with Fikret, older, grayer though with more hair, Pearse addressing him with respectful abi, short for ağabey, meaning “big brother.” He’ll never say it, but Pearse knows Fikret likes this.

            “We all choose,” says Fikret. “But time has come to start choosing like a detective. View each obstacle as a clue not a challenge. Remember money has the death spiral behind it.”

            “But isn’t it death to begin with? The mansion. The Ferrari. Expense accounts.”

            Fikret says no. “I suggest that as one in grief you are desperate for impossible control, and this will only create massive liabilities.”

            They stroll while talking, keeping to backstreets, masks under their chins, unhurried. They sit again at Dalya, taking one table in a garden of Cinzano umbrellas, roses, bougainvillea and hibiscus draped against the building’s rear wall. It’s a refuge, where in dilatory Turkish style, among other patrons not wearing masks, they can prognosticate and gossip.   

            “I’ve been robbed,” says Pearse.

            “You haven’t.”

            “I’ve been killed, then.”

            “But not by your father.”

            “Abi, nothing has changed.”

            “Be calm. Which dream killed you?” Fikret exhales a flume of smoke. “And why, right?”

            “Why else keep living if not to ask questions?”

            “I will call you Detective from now on. So, Detective, don’t you see that when not trying, you will end up solving another murder? And then another. And five years from now you’ll learn that the murderer you were after all that time was already dead before he killed you.”

            “So, this confusion is the journey? Is that your point?”

            “No point. Though the journey includes a return.”

            “Where to?”

            “Nowhere. To violence. Maybe unenlightened sorrow.”

            “Or not.”

            “With inevitable complications.”

            “I repeat. Or not.”

            Fikret, with a sage grin, assures him he’ll understand this better if he reads, again, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses. “I think you called it one of your desert-island books.”

            “That I did.” He smirks recalling how much he thought he used to know. “I did at that.”

            “Then let Molly’s yes undo your skin. And let yourself reach for the otherwise, and forget this bizarre pregnancy you’ve been through.”

            Later that night, weary of Zoom meetings and consultations, Pearse uncorks a bottle of kalecik karası, a red varietal bought in Nevşehir during his last visit by bus to the Cappadocia region. A lifetime, a choice, long ago. He pours a glass, thinking dead before he killed you.

            Leave it to Fikret to make no sense at all.

            He then removes from a shelf his fawned-over edition of Joyce’s masterwork. Before he opens it, he strides to his desk. He sits with his notebook and writes the word, Athens. Then he draws an arrow that points to a rendering of the word, Jerusalem. From there, he draws a third arrow and then lists the words, Palestrina, Palestine, Bethlehem. Then a fourth arrow to Christina. This is his mother’s name. Below it, he writes Aengus. This last word, his father’s name. Something like a circle now.

            Is he in Ankara? Has he chosen to create? If everything in Turkey is Istanbul, and Greek Jew is not Jew Greek, then nothing between East, West, or any other compass point has ever made sense. Except, perhaps, a return.

            Fikret, what a genius.

            Pearse opens Ulysses. Can he withstand, again, such a mad mutant opus? If he has anything, it’s time alone. Perhaps this is as it should be.

            Fikret would likely concur. So, too, his Da.

Image of Basil Rosa

BIO: Basil Rosa’s novels include Tax Free Ride On A Midnight Carousel and A Million Miles From Tehran, both published in Australia by Jaffa Books. Recent stories have appeared online in the UK at close2thebone.co.uk and retreatsfromoblivion.com,