When my eyes struggled to pry themselves open, I saw the nurse standing right beside me. I didn't know how many times she had called out to me, but I had certainly been startled. The last thing I remembered was the sharp sting in my hip and that dream I had seen. "The sedative must have really knocked you out," the nurse said with a chuckle. She moved toward the wire-meshed window and pulled the curtain cord.
"You have an appointment. The itch medication was pushed to today because we couldn't reach the doctor. Don't forget to mention it, okay?" As she spoke, I peeled back the covers, sat up, and without stretching, swung my legs down and stood up.
"Aren't you going to make your bed?" When she asked, I shrugged without turning around, then remembered no one could see it. "No."
"I think you need to be a bit more orderly," she said, reaching my side in a few steps and escorting me to the trash can. I was staring at my slippers moving across the parquet floor.
Turning her head toward me, she muttered, "Honestly, you're going without even washing your face." When she said that, I laughed internally at my nurse, recalling how she had recently tossed a plastic bottle into the wrong recycling bin.
"You talk to me about order, but I saw you the other day—you threw a plastic bottle into the general waste."
She paused for a moment in surprise at my words, then remarked that nothing ever escaped my notice. A small sense of triumph at having outwitted her rose within me.
"Come straight to breakfast after the appointment, deal?" After warning me, she walked over to another nurse sitting at a small table in the glass-enclosed area, who was busy listening to something on the computer.
As I glanced superficially at their ordinary faces, the weight of the appointment suddenly crashed down on me. I felt as if a heavy burden had been placed upon my shoulders, leaving me unable to react much. What I feared had happened: the appointment had been moved up.
As my footsteps led me to the door of the consultation room at the right end of the corridor, I wasn't thinking of that skinny man or my illness. Perhaps the only thing on my mind was the fairy girl with grass-green eyes perched on a brush. I remembered the void she had drawn for me. The way her eyes had suddenly widened.
Those eyes seemed to say to me, "Don't you see?" and her words flowed like Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
After knocking twice, I peeked inside, and my expression shifted the moment I saw my doctor. My doctor was smiling at me, looking with a peculiar kind of interest. It was as if she were reading everything on my face, and I felt a sense of agony because of it.
"Bulut, you may come in," she said. I forced my body inside and pulled the door shut. Hearing the click of the door, I first scanned the surroundings.
In front of the radiator positioned in the corner of the room was the doctor's white swivel desk, and she was busy typing something on the keyboard. Behind her hung pictures of state officials, and on the side board were photos of some geniuses. A quote by Albert Einstein was also featured on this small board: "Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."
Since I wasn't ready to talk to my doctor, I stared at the ballpoint pens randomly stuffed into the pen holder on the desk and the prescription papers in the printer tray.
"I'm very glad to see you. Are you glad to see me too?" At the sound of the doctor's voice, I pulled my eyes away from the objects and fixed them on my hands. Then, realizing this wouldn't work, I lifted my gaze from the doctor's chest up to her face. Under her white lab coat, she wore a red fuzzy sweater and a scarf around her neck.
Her blonde hair was tied in a bun at the nape of her neck, with two strands left hanging haphazardly. She must have been in her forties, but her experience and the wrinkles on her cheeks made her look older.
"I'm not glad, because now you're going to ask me to pour everything out again," I said, leaning back.
As the leather of the black chair gave my back an extraordinary sense of pleasure, all I wanted was music. That quote came to mind: "Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." God, just like the embarrassing memories that gather in the mind at the last moment before sleep, thoughts were flooding my head as I sat here.
"Nothing happens here that you don't want, Bulut, as long as it doesn't harm you and..."
I cut the doctor off, completing the sentence I knew by heart while my eyes drifted into the void: "As long as I don't harm others."
"How well you've learned," she said, smiling and trying to maintain a gentle approach.
"I didn't learn it, I knew it," I replied. She quickly typed something on the keyboard.
I knew that what was spoken here was only valuable until it was written down. Here, everything consisted of records and appointments. Afterward, everything would be discarded like trash—just like your life.
"Do you know what the problem is, Bulut?" she asked, narrowing her eyes even more. "What do you think about it?" At this, I crossed one leg over the other, trying to find a comfortable position. "Entering the subject directly from the unknown aspects gives the impression that I know nothing, I suppose," I said. Her eyebrows knitted slightly for a moment, then immediately returned to their original state as her fingers entered more data.
"I wonder what note you made about me," I blurted out with sudden curiosity. Taking a deep breath, she looked deep into my eyes; I shifted my gaze back to that Einstein quote. When I didn't look away for a while, my doctor calmly turned her gaze to where I was looking. I knew she was looking where I looked, but she couldn't see what I saw.
"If you tell me what note you made about yourself, I'll tell you mine," she said, matching my rhythm. The thought that she was making a bet with me sent a wave of irritation through my senses.
I rubbed my hands together and suddenly stood up to move to the opposite chair. The chair I had been sitting in was black, and the current one was white; it made me feel like I was in a chess match.
"I don't make notes, because I don't forget anything; everything is within my memory. But if I were to make a small note, I would probably write: 'The ugly embodiment of mediocrity.'"
As I made this explanation about myself—as if I weren't finding it strange—she nodded slightly as if she understood. Perhaps she just wanted to encourage me. I got lost in this flea-sized bit of kindness in a giant world.
"Now tell me, what did you write about me?" I asked, maintaining my earlier determination.
"You're waiting for me to explain, aren't you? Well then, I will," she said, being careful to remain polite. "Do you know what I wrote?" she asked slowly, as if my curiosity were weighing her down.
"What did you write?" I asked, fixing my gaze back on my hands.
"I wrote," she said, and read this sentence to me: "He exists on his own level of consciousness."
Upon hearing her words, I laughed bitterly, reached for my cup on the desk, and took a sip, breathing deeply. "I'm not crazy!"
"What does 'crazy' mean to you?" she asked, pulling her eyes from the screen and folding her hands on the desk.
"So you want me to prove to you that I'm crazy," I said, breathing heavily with anger.
She responded only with silence, and I wanted to punish her with silence in return. Yet I knew as well as my own name that this would first and only harm me.
"Fine," I said, as if trying to annoy her. "Crazy, definition one: a person whose mental and spiritual balance is disturbed, whose mental and spiritual health is not intact; definition two: a person whose behavior is excessive and exuberant, who acts in an extreme manner." As I answered by visualizing the dictionary definitions in my memory, I sensed she was listening intently.
"But I asked what it meant for you," she said in response. While my mood scattered like a cloud of dust, the only emotion growing inside me toward her was anger. "I wish doctors were machines; maybe they wouldn't try to irritate me while listening to me," I said, ignoring her clarification.
"But for you..." she asked, repeating her previous sentence. It seemed she had also decided to ignore my answer. My hands and feet began to tremble again, and cramps gripped my stomach.
"So, you've decided to ignore me too," I replied fiercely.
I could read in her small eyes that she took this with naturalness and silence. The voice inside me made me think the doctor had ill intentions toward me. It was provoking me against her. And I—the one who could sometimes endure anything—shrank before this voice and just watched everything.
"Fine," I said, standing up abruptly and heading for the door. I had completely forgotten about the itch medication out of anger.
"Are you leaving?" my doctor asked, calmly and again with understanding. Our eyes met as I looked at her. While my chest heaved violently, cold sweat was trickling down my forehead. "I'm leaving," I said with a firm voice. Yet I wasn't determined at all; this was just the mask I wore. But at that moment, I remembered the symptoms I complained about and the side effects of the medications.
"If we closed this topic and opened a new one, would you still leave?" she asked. I thought that maybe she didn't want me to go, and like a well-behaved child whose mind wasn't enough for himself, I slumped onto the chair and rested my elbows on my knees. I stayed like that for a while. My decision not to leave was now obvious, so I didn't feel the need to make an explanation.
"What kind of topic are you talking about, for example?" I said, bypassing everything and looking at the windowpane behind the doctor. My eyes were searching for that girl, for Boya.
"Can't you tell me what happened yesterday, for instance? Your nurse said you met with a girl and had a seizure afterward. Oh, by the way, let's not forget to add the itch medication," she said, entering something on the screen again.
So the nurse told her everything, I thought. It wasn't surprising; if I so much as breathed, they told.
My doctor said the name of the itch medication and described in detail how to use it. When she asked, "Shall we start with yesterday?" I understood she was waiting for me to get to the point.
Was yesterday a day that needed to start all over again for me?