“You freak, how dare you speak that name before God? Look at yourself, damn it! If your mother or father saw you like this they’d die of shame!”
As he dragged her down the corridor, he continued to berate her. He opened the bedroom door and threw Derdâ onto the bed.
“There’s stuff there by the bed! Do what you need to do, but just be ready when you come back,” he said before locking the door behind him and stuffing the key in his pocket. He walked back to the living room, stuffing his gun back into his pants. Then he grabbed his cell phone off the TV and dialed. He started shouting the second the boy picked up.
“You stupid mother fucker! You pick a junkie up on the street and send her to me, you dog! You flatter yourself, thinking you can find me a girl, eh? And in the end, you find me this whore psychopath! And then she turns out to be fucking Turk!”
He had exhausted himself and paused to catch his breath. Black T broke in the moment he got the chance.
“How should I know? The girl was set on seeing you …”
Regaip hurled his cell phone at the wall and scrambled out of the room. It had finally sunk in. He tripped at the entrance and frantically picked himself up.
“Derdâ!” he cried as he pounded on the bedroom door, fishing the key out of his pocket with his other hand. His hands were trembling when he unlocked the door.
Derdâ lay motionless on the bed with a syringe hanging from a dark purple bruise on her arm. Regaip ran over to her and shook her by the shoulders.
“Derdâ! Oh, Derdâ!”
Derdâ opened her eyes and whispered. Regaip leaned over her lips, and he heard something he would never forget.
“Dad, fuck me as much as you want.”
The words slipped in through his ear and coiled around his brain like a snake. Regaip took his daughter in his arms and sobbed, pressing her tightly to his chest, staring up at the ceiling. He sobbed as much as his breath would allow. The same painful pitch as the cacophony unfurled on judgment day. Regaip was sobbing so loudly he didn’t hear the SAS commandos and MI5 smash down his front door as they raided his apartment.
Regaip screamed as the officers pulled him away from Derdâ, as they pulled his gun out of his pants, as they cuffed him on the floor. He kept screaming, but his voice was cracking.
“Forgive me, oh, forgive me, please forgive me!”
The MI5 needed just one more call from his cell phone to get a fix on his location. Regaip had made that call just to bawl out Black T.
An officer checked Derdâ’s pulse and called an ambulance.
As Regaip was dragged out of the apartment, his voice echoed through the halls: “Derdâ!”
Regaip had almost fucked his own daughter, the daughter his wife Saniye had given up just four days after she was born. Even when he put his hands over his ears, he could still hear Derdâ whispering those words to him. He saw her bald head, the dark purple bruises on her arms. He saw those words in the cracks of the prison walls. When he paced his cell her ghost was there beside him. He shared his life story with her and he tried to explain why he’d left her. But he kept returning to the same refrain, “I had no other choice,” and he begged her forgiveness just as many times. But Derdâ’s ghost never forgave him. Those whispered words kept swirling in his ear: “Dad, fuck me as much as you want …”
He tried cutting off his ears on the steel edge of his bed. Regaip hanged himself the moment he had the chance, leaving behind nothing but a sentence chiseled on the wall of his cell:
GOD PROTECTED US FROM THE VERY WORST.
It was the only thing he could be thankful for in this world. He was spared at least from fucking his own daughter. That was enough. So when he left the world, his eyes closed in peace. He was thankful for that.
Derdâ woke up in the intensive care unit of St. Mary’s Hospital. She’d been in a coma for three days. She looked up at the bottle of serum on the steel hook beside her bed and watched it drip like an hourglass.
She thought that she was alone until a nurse leaned over her and quietly said her name. Derdâ looked up to see a plump redhead smiling down at her.
“So the little lady has woken up. Good morning,” she said.
Then she pointed to a button at the end of a cord dangling near Derdâ’s motionless arm and said, “If you need anything just press this button. I’m going to get the doctor now. So you don’t go anywhere.”
Derdâ looked at the hourglass again and began counting the drops, her mind completely blank. The nurse reappeared with a young man holding a clipboard.
“How are we feeling?” he asked with a smile on his face.
“Alright, I guess.”
The doctor handed the clipboard to the nurse and pulled a penlight from his shirt pocket to examine Derdâ’s eyes.
“I guess, you say, but to me you look just fine. Do you remember what happened to you?”
“I screwed up, I guess …”
“We could say that,” the doctor said, laughing. “Right, so do you remember what you took?”
“Heroin …”
“No. You injected a critical amount of cocaine, enough to put you in a coma for the last three days. You were lucky. Your heart stopped beating twice. Do you understand me?”
He looked over his file.
“Derdâ. That’s a pretty name. Where are you from?”
“Turkey.”
“Good … Now look, in a little while the police will come to ask you a few questions, alright?”
Derdâ nodded.
“Ok, then. I’ll be back a little later,” he said and turned to leave, but then he stopped and smiled.
“Yes, that’s right. Fethiye! I was there just last summer. What
