“Did it hurt?”
“It must have hurt, but like I said, I was out of my head.”
That much was obvious from the way the letters slid and curved. They got smaller as they went from his elbow to his wrist. Like it had been done by some simpleton sign painters. Just like Derda the night he’d discovered Oğuz Atay’s signature, Isa hadn’t calculated the empty spaces correctly. The space got narrower and narrower, and to be able to squeeze in all he wanted to write he’d had to make his letters smaller and smaller.
“How’d you do it?” Derda asked.
“With a needle,” said Isa. “Just a normal needle.”
“How’d you do the color?”
“You know those oil paints? For the astroturf pitch? I used them. You use black, and it becomes like this blue color. Anyway, tell me what you’ve been up to. Remzi told me some. I saw him the other day. You’re working for some pirated book thing?”
“Pirate?”
“That’s what they call it.”
“No way!”
“Derda, you ass, you haven’t changed a bit. You still don’t have a fucking clue. You don’t even know the name of what you do. Anyway, hang on.”
Isa yelled into the workshop.
“Master, I’ll be right back!”
There was nothing but a cloud of dust in the direction where he yelled. And behind that, two men with masks. They were working at a block of marble with saws. One of the men inside the cloud raised his free hand.
Isa said to Derda, “Come on, move it. Let’s go have a couple glasses of something.”
Isa slipped a leather jacket on over his shirt. Then they left the workshop, walking without talking. Whenever they looked at each other they started to laugh. A hundred steps later, Isa said, “Here.” Derda stopped and looked up.
“Isn’t this a hardware store?”
“That guy died, man,” said Isa. “His son turned it into a bar. Come on.”
And so this was the way that Derda returned to the hardware store where years before he’d stolen the ax from their spot in front of the display window to chop up his mother. But now there weren’t any drawers of nails or metal buckets to be found. In their places were four little tables, each swaying on its pedestal, with two stools set across from each other. The hardware store owner’s drunken son jumped out of nowhere.
“My, my, my, Isa, you’re an early bird today.”
“So it goes, Mahmut. Look, here’s an old friend of mine. From when we were kids.”
As it was, he was still a kid. They both were. Derda took Mahmut’s outstretched hand and gave him a nod. They sat at the stools around the fourth table. Mahmut got two beers from the rickety bar near the entrance and took two steps to their table and set them down in front of them. Then he slapped his forehead with the palm of his head.
“Ah, shit, I didn’t even ask what you wanted to drink.”
Isa smiled.
“Don’t kill yourself over it. Beer’s just the thing.”
Then he looked at Derda.
“Beer’s all right, right?”
“Sure,” Derda said.
Mahmut walked away and took up his perch on the stool behind the bar. He reached under the counter and brought out a glass of vodka. Three glasses raised high in the hardware store-cum-bar called NAIL. Mahmut called it that in memory of his father. And in memory of his father he drank. Just like he did every time. Even if he didn’t say anything about it.
“Come on, so tell me,” said Isa. “What the hell are you doing over there? You just up and left us.”
“Man, it’s not like that,” said Derda. “What do you mean I left you? My dad just showed up out of nowhere. We got into each other pretty fast. Then I just left and slammed the door behind me. Thank god Remzi had helped me get some work, otherwise I’d really be down and out right now. I’m staying there, too, now. What are you up to?”
“What can I do? I mean, shove it. I’m working like a donkey. Then I come here and drink like a donkey.”
At first, they’d had to stop themselves from talking to glug down their beers. Now they drank because they had nothing left to talk about. Which one of them could have said something, anyway? Was Derda going to talk about Oğuz Atay? Or was Isa going to pick up his story where he’d left off? That time when Derda told him to fuck it? The story about the treasure hunters he’d started when he was ten and had never been able to finish. In any event, it was because of that story that he’d started to talk to marble. And it was because of that story that he’d carved into his own skin. And he’d filled every hole he pierced into his skin with tombstone paint. All because of that story. But why did it matter now anyway? Didn’t everyone have a story like that? Something they’d started and never finished. Because no one ever listened to it. But why bother telling it when you could just flush it away. When you could just flush it down the toilet. A toilet brimming with alcohol.
The second beers came without them even asking, even before they’d finished the first ones. The third ones came that way, too. Before they’d even emptied the second ones. At one point, Isa went to the workshop to talk to the master. To say, “forgive me for today.” To bargain with a “tomorrow I’ll stay until late.” He was smiling when he came back.
“It’s okay, the master didn’t say anything.”
They smiled. And three glasses were raised once again at NAIL. During those minutes when the hours fall into night, the door swung open seven times and closed seven times. Seven more marble cutters came in. And among them, Isa’s master. He sat far from his apprentice. So he wouldn’t have to see his face anymore. He was sick of it all. Most of all he was sick of home. Of his wife at
