The medivac was in flight for nine hours and fifteen minutes before it landed in Bangkok. After refueling, the wheels of the plane lifted off the tarmac, scraping the breast of the earth like razor blades, and in four hours they were in Manila. Throughout the trip, Derda’s eyes and Derda’s consciousness kept opening and closing.
Derda was pulled out and loaded into an ambulance just like the one in Istanbul. First the road was asphalt, then just dirt. The ambulance pressed on through the damp and the bugs. The journey was not an easy one. It ended like a dream, the gurney left on a moss-green hill behind trees that opened like two curtains at the end of the road. At the peak of the moss-green hill there was a cloud-white house with a black hole for a door. And in front of it, on the wide slope, thousands of people were lined up like an enormous snake. Each person carried something in their hand or at their side. Something …
Passing the line of people and their things, the ambulance cut its siren and slowly climbed the slope. And it came to a stop when it arrived in front of the white building. Derda was carried out of the ambulance like he was as light as a feather and then they shot him through the building’s door like he was a projectile missile. After him, the line of people and things filed in, closing off passage from the corridor.
They stopped when they came to a closed door at the end of the corridor where the line began. Before them, at the front of the line, stood a small girl. She carried a tabby cat in her arms. Clearly, it was her turn to go through the door that would soon open to receive her. One of the people pulling Derda leaned down to the girl’s ear and whispered “emergency.”
The small girl, with a maturity unexpected for her years, stepped to the side, and Derda’s gurney went in through the open door.
Inside the room were a surgery table and two elderly men. One was a Jivaro Indian, the other was Filipino. They were changing the white sheet on the surgery table. They spread it out and smoothed it flat with the palms of their hands and then looked up. This was the signal the men bringing Derda in had been waiting for. Without any hesitation, the elderly men dumped Derda, wearing nothing but pants, onto the surgery table like he was nothing but a lump of dough.
The Indian went up to the man carrying the titanium box and waited for him to open the lid. Seeing the book, he asked, “Isn’t there a pocket edition?”
The man carrying the box shook his head. The Indian gave an exhausted sigh and took the book in his right hand and flipped through the pages. Then, holding his left hand over the book and rubbing his fingertips together, a gilding powder rained down over the book. As the book underneath took on the color of the gilding dust, it began to shrink and narrow until Tutunamayanlar was no bigger than a fist.
The Indian took the shrunken book and showed it to the Filipino man. He nodded his head and closed his eyes. Then he plunged his scalpel-like nails on his heart-like left hand into Derda’s left rib cage. Derda screamed when they pierced his flesh. But he hadn’t felt anything. And he only thought he’d screamed. As it was, he hadn’t felt enough pain to warrant a scream, nor could he even open his mouth wide enough to scream. In his terror, he looked at the puckered face of the Filipino. The others watched the elderly man spread open the cleft, holding it open with his two hands. There wasn’t a single drop of blood, and Derda’s breath continued as normal. But there was plenty of reason for blood or shortness of breath, in fact, there was even good reason for him to die right then and there. In fact, one such reason was right in front of his nose. Derda’s eyes met Derda’s heart, just a hand’s span away.
The Indian took the heart from the Filipino man’s hand and placed the book in the man’s empty palm in its place. The Filipino man raised his head and closed his eyes, looking only with the tips of his fingers. He spread the cleft in Derda’s skin open like he was pulling a curtain open, and with his free hand he buried the book into Derda’s flesh. All that had been connected to his heart before, all his veins and valves squeezed around the pages, covered over the book completely. When the man took his hands away from the cleft, Tutunamayanlar pumped blood and Derda was returned to life. The Indian watched his lungs fill with his first breath, and, pressing the pedal to open the garbage bin under the surgery table, he tossed Derda’s heart into the trash. Because the piece of flesh was of no use.
THE BUILDING
The white building situated ninety kilometers to the north of Manila was neither a temple nor some palace of miracles. It was just a white building. A big building with one narrow room and a long corridor. It looked like a skyscraper without windows. A monument the width of an apartment building with only one room inside.
It was in 1985 when the building appeared out of nowhere, when the Philippines was turned upside down by an earthquake. People from all around the world crowded together to get a look at the building, trying to understand what they were looking at. But no one, not a scientist nor anyone else, could come up with a feasible explanation for its existence. It didn’t even have a door. In time, the boredom of not knowing made interest wane and the hordes that had
