a novel
KARMA
Nancy Deville
Published by Heavenly Clouds at Smashwords
Copyright © 2010 Nancy Deville
Cover Design: Nancy Deville
Cover Photo Credit: ©Sunny_13/Dreamstime.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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In memory of Thaddeus and Genevieve
PROLOGUE
Medicine is a system that processes human beings. Rich and poor, stoics, pragmatists, deniers, liars, and hypochondriacs—they all get processed. I thought about this some time after I was raped. Once I had the luxury to think beyond my immediate survival, I realized that what had happened to me was no different than what doctors like me do to patients in hospitals. I was being processed through a system.
It didn’t matter that I was wealthy, educated, and American. I could have been one of the poor ignorant gypsies I’d seen at the bazaar in Istanbul. The process was rape/conditioning. Until I was abducted, I thought things like that only happened to poor Eastern women—not to women like me. But I was wrong, and my life changed the instant the rape began. I was reminded of the innocent people whose lives changed when I spoke the words “stage four cancer.” What terrified me most was how ill prepared I was to deal with the cruel hijacking of my plannedout life. I suppose my terror was no different than the fear of those who are freshly diagnosed as terminally ill.
Fear is primitive. I learned that from my father, a corporate law litigator. His militaristic training that passed for parenting enabled me to get through the stress and fear of four years of medical school and one year of internship. He hammered into me how to keep a cool head during a crisis. Do not panic. Breathe deeply. Be realistic. It was unreal, actually, the way I remembered and was able to act on the lessons my father taught me. First of all, having been told my entire life to accept, accept, accept, I did not deny what was happening to me. How could I forget my father’s credo? He would look at me eye to eye, and only when he saw the light of recognition flash in my eyes would he straighten his spine — rising to the full towering height that had intimidated legions of plaintiffs—and bellow, “Then deal with it.”
When I think about it now, I’m sure that even Dad would have given me credit for “dealing with it.” I could have easily lost it. I knew from medical training that the instant the fear signal reached my brainstem that neurons informed the amygdala lodged deeply within my brain’s temporal lobe. This primitive ganglion of my limbic system alerted my adrenal medulla to shoot epinephrine into my bloodstream, tripping my blood pressure and heart rate into high gear. I experienced tachypsychia, a neurological phenomenon of time distortion, which slowed events and heightened my perception. My heart rate ripped to its tipping point. Once over 145 BPM I would begin to disassociate. To maintain control, I started survival breathing, what my father called “ream the other guy” breathing. Four counts in. Hold for four. Exhale four.
During the rape, I was hyper-focused on staying alive, on avoiding any movement that would cause the icy cold razor switchblade pressed against my neck to slice through my pulsing carotid artery. I analyzed every possibility to gain an advantage over my attacker, including fighting back as soon as the razor was safely away from my neck. It was a nice try, as Dad would have said, though it gained me nothing but three cracked ribs. Even seriously injured, I had reached in vain for the blade when it lay in the rapist’s slack hand as he dozed, his body a dead weight on top of me, his long black hair flopping over my face as he snored, filling my nostrils with the sickening sweet smell of his oily scalp, and the rankly sweet odor of licorice on his breath.
Only those suffering from acute post-traumatic stress can understand how the mere scent of things so benign and seemingly pleasant as candy and flowers can produce hallucinatory torments so profound that reality and sanity spin out of control.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Like many stories, mine will end with conclusions, leaving some frayed ends that will likely fester into more heartbreak and even greater frustration. This again was really no different than what occurs in hospitals. Through various tests, doctors gather as much evidence as they can. They knit together as many bits and pieces of history as they can garner. They reach conclusions. A series of actions, they are the means to an end to heal the patient. Sometimes a patient has no other choice but to come to terms with an end result that is far from optimal. But I have seen with my own eyes the lengths that humans will go to accept. That’s the purpose of writing my story down. Memoir or a confession, you must decide. Regardless, this recording of events is part of an effort to heal, despite a less than optimal end result. You see, I’m damaged and feel like an outcast. All I have to cling to now is the hope that Dad was right, that if I could just accept . . . then maybe I could move on with my life.
CHAPTER ONE
A sad-eyed hotel valet snapped his fingers and a TAKSi darted out from a predatory phalanx of cabs. With a slumping gait, the valet lugged my carry-on bag over to the cab and opened the door. I handed him a couple of American dollars and scooted over the lumpy seat, settling my purse on my lap. Inside was my wallet, mobile phone, Fodor’s Istanbul, toiletries for the plane, my laptop, and a plastic freezer bag containing my father’s ashes. Even as a doctor I was still a little surprised that the ashes of a human being were so heavy. It seemed significant to me. The weight.
It was a mere two weeks since his death. The funeral director had tried to sell the idea that a mausoleum internment would be “appropriate for a man of Mr. Fitzgerald’s stature.” My father had once mentioned that he wanted to be cremated, but wasn’t sure where his ashes should go. “Meredith,” he grumbled, as his mood was always on a slow boil, “I could lie forever with my grandifloras, floribundas, my polyanthas.” But after his death when the house was on the market, I didn’t feel right about kneeling in his garden mulching his ashes around the thorny bushes between real estate showings. Besides, I had my own plan.
The TAKSi thumped as the valet hoisted my bag into the trunk, then again when he slammed it closed, rattling the car. He rapped his knuckles smartly on the top of the cab. The driver cranked his neck to look at me, a leer spread over his face. He was childsize. As part of my training in infectious diseases, anthropometric history was of interest—studies that establish the historical record of the overall nutrition of a population by tracking average adult heights. Even though the man was underdeveloped, he had the ubiquitous five o’clock shadow, black caterpillar eyebrows, and Saddam Hussein moustache of the Middle Eastern male. “Where you go, lady?”
“Can you take me around Istanbul and wait for me? I want to go to the Egyptian Spice Bazaar first.”
“No problem, lady. I can drive you anywhere, anytime. You can look at carpet too. No need to buy. Just looking.” He trained the rearview mirror on me reflecting the hungry eyes of a man who spent his days grasping for intimacy with his fleeting fares. Trying to make an extra shekel, as my fiancé Paul would say.
“How much in American dollars?”
“Not too much. Very good price for you.”
In the closed cab his body odor was inching into the back seat. “How much is not too much?”
“No meter for you. Just seventy-five American dollars, whole day.”
“I need to be at the airport by four. So okay, I guess.”
“Very cheap price,” he pushed, having to get the last haggling word in. “American?”
“Yes.”
“Beautiful girl.” When he didn’t get a rise out of me, he said, “You go back to America?”
“No. India.” I’ll see some of Istanbul, then to Varanasi, return to LA the following weekend, sleep sixteen hours, and back to the hospital to start my fellowship.
“Why you go India?” he asked, butting into my thoughts.
“Just visiting.”
“Why you not stay in Istanbul? I make lady very nice tour. Very cheap.”
I pretended not to hear him over the cacophony of honking horns and the grind of hundreds of revving engines. My Indian mother had died of preeclampsia after childbirth. She’d been my age at her death, twenty-seven. Her parents had told my father that death was her karma for marrying against their wishes. Dad had swallowed his hubris and traveled to India to scatter her ashes in the Ganges River . . . just in case.
“Why you not travel with husband?”
I smiled again at the driver’s dog eyes in a way that was intended to shut him up. Kind of a pathetic, spinsterish smile of one who spent her life cooped up behind a blubbering TV set spooning HäagenDazs down her throat. He looked away, drumming his fingers on his steering wheel, then said, “No husband?”
I was not going to open the subject of my engagement up for conversation with the little man. “I’m a doctor,” I replied, hoping to satisfy him. “I was attending a U.N. medical conference at the hotel. ‘Preventing and Treating Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries’.”
“Ahhh,” he breathed, but this information only seemed to ignite a flame of curiosity in his probing eyes. “My wife, she is dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Evil eye.”
“Excuse me?”
“My neighbor have evil eye. He angry with me. He kill my wife with very big fever.”
I sat silently looking out the window, feeling a creep of emotion for the man, for his loneliness, his superstitions, and his obsequiousness, as if it were a cluster disease that warranted pity. I opened my bag for the Fodor’s. There was the sterling Tiffany pillbox Paul had given me containing ten-milligram Valium. Paul, a movie producer, traveled a lot and knew that benzodiazepines provided the best sleep during the disruption of jet lag by slowing down the nervous system. I punched speed dial on my phone to hear his voice, but saw there was no service. Regret began like a flu that signals its onslaught with a faint musky throb of lung tissue. Paul wanted to meet me after the conference so we could travel together to India. But no. I always had to show the independent spirit that had made my father so proud. If Paul were with me, the taxi ride would be fun. We’d suppress giggles and eye rolls. Paul would have already mapped out the new section of Istanbul, built on the Asian Continent where Istanbul’s financial and business district and five star hotels flourished. When we crossed the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn inlet of the Bosphorus to the old city on the European continent, he would ignore the driver to fiddle with the GPS on his iPhone to get his bearings. At the end of our tenure in the sad little man’s cab, Paul would have tipped him heavily to cleanse us of any guilt associated with our elitism.
Indeed, we had crossed the Galata Bridge and were now in the old city of Istanbul; the black and gunmetal gray Mercedes and Jaguars disappeared, replaced by Kartol station wagons, tinny Fiat Sinhans, Opel Vectras and, surprisingly, American classics from the late fifties and early sixties, one after another. Chevys mostly. Besides the cars, there were elephantine Mercedes Benz buses filled with middle-aged German tourists peering with vague interest from their upper berths. The TAKSi slid along the ancient wall and huge towers as if spoiling for combat. Correspondingly the sky darkened, with rain only moments away. An indifferent wind, a prelude to rain, whistled against the windshield.
We passed a moss-covered fortress. “Prison,” the driver said, when I had thought we had settled into a quiet ride. “Many, many American hippie. Life,” he took his hands off the wheel and crossed his wrists in a pantomime of bondage. “Antiquity smuggling, possession of the Afghani.” He toked vociferously on an imaginary joint. “I can sell lady doctor very excellent Hindu Kush Red. I swear on my mother is very, very good shit. Not to worry. You smoke here in my car and . . . .” He smacked his palms together as if brushing off dirt. “You take carpet. Very nice carpet, make your house very proud. You no need to buy. Just looking.”
“No thanks. Really.” I smiled at him, feeling again that sense of responsibility for being a privileged American while this man had to scrape for extra income, however nefariously.
“You visit Topkapi?” he asked, hoisting his skinny body a half a foot off the driver’s seat so that he could sling his arm over the backrest, looking at me.
I had seen it with a few other residents the day before. My face must have said it all because the driver laughed, showing off blackened teeth and the inflamed gums of periodontal disease. “Ah, I know,” he said patronizingly. “Liberated American woman no like haram.” I looked away, creeped out that he’d invaded my thoughts. He took both hands off the wheel, making a circle with the fingers of one hand sticking the index finger of his other hand in and out in a sexual gesture. “No men!”
“Watch the traffic!”
The little man plopped back in front of his wheel. Rain fell. Big fat polluted drops over the cold, dank, wet tomb of antiquity. Minarets all over the city began transmitting the melancholy Arabic call to prayer over antiquated loudspeaker systems jarring in their lack of synchronization. When the TAKSi driver defiantly flicked his radio to belly dancing music, a chill crept under my skin. He continued multitasking: flicking his lighter and sucking at his cigarette till the tobacco lit, switching radio stations, jamming his foot on the brake just millimeters before slamming into the car ahead of him. My bag slid off my lap as he turned the wheel sharply, cutting off a dirty Rolls.
“No more haram.” The driver belched smoke, not wanting to leave the subject alone. “Haram mean forbidden. Atatürk, he father of modern Turkey, he say no more sultan, no more haram. Nineteen twentytwo, sultan go away. No more eunuch.” He fluffed them away with flicking fingers. “Eunuch mean, in Turkish, ‘no beard’. Eunuch guard haram, like the peacock, only mean, like mad dog.”
“Uh-huh,” I said under my breath, wondering if there was a way that I could switch cabs at this point, but probably not.
The TAKSi nudged its way through the rubblestrewn street, pausing impatiently for a donkey, scattering chickens lured into traffic by mounds of garbage. The driver maneuvered the car through the bustling street, going from a dead stop to flooring the accelerator and miraculously slipping into spaces between cars, a terrifying fraction of space on either side. He hit the brakes to avoid a bus that careened into the next lane—such as it was—narrowly avoiding a collision with a truck hauling two milk cows in its bed—throwing me forward; fortunately I managed to brace myself before my nose met the heavy plastic liner on the back seat. The Song of God Bhagavad Gita flew out of my bag onto the floor. I had planned to read it on the plane to India. It seemed about time to learn something about my mother’s faith. I opened the book. Inside I’d slipped a photo of my parents. Dad, young and blond, dressed in a suit, my mother at his side, wearing a sunsetorange sari with a pink blouse. Ray Bans hid her eyes. Her hair, like long strands of black silk, flickered around her smiling mouth, her lips painted cherry red like the bindi placed over her third eye.
I’d gotten over any girlish fantasies about my parents shortly after reaching the age of reason. At least for my father, it wasn’t the kind of soul-mate love little girls romanticize. He’d simply been in lust over the intrigue and drama of a woman who had to break with thousands of years of tradition to marry him. He wasn’t the type of man to stay faithful to one woman. His “little black book” had been more like the Los Angeles telephone directory. My mother’s death was a bitter victory that had saved her from heartbreak. But still, his making the trip to India inspired in me a romantic notion that urged me back to that same holy river to unite them.
The TAKSi fishtailed to a stop. “Okay lady, Egyptian Bazaar. I wait for you.”
I shuffled the book back in my bag and then glanced up at the sound of voices arguing so loudly they penetrated the window. It was a peasant couple with a little girl. The family was grimy, sunbaked, their features blurred by desperation. The woman, hunched and cringing, wore ballooning pantaloons of flowered cotton fabric, a dingy shawl, and a voluminous fringed scarf over her head. The man was lean and tall. Baggy pants flapped against his calves, in the wind. The girl seemed about six years old. She was blonde, a throwback from some ancient migration. Her cheeks were raw, her mouth blistered. Her hair was gummy and tangled, a few dreadlocks having volunteered. She was barefoot, her face streaked with grime. A sackcloth dress sagged over her fragile frame. She hid behind her mother’s legs as the man’s balled fist punched the air in front of their faces. This exhibition of hostility regularly occurred in the hospital parking lot, followed inevitably with an E.R. admission and a swarm of cops making an arrest.
But the TAKSi driver was unfazed. He reached over the seat for my bag. “You leave here. No problem.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep it with me.”
Avoiding the potholes, I tiptoed cautiously across the garbage-strewn cobblestones toward the bazaar. Young men hawked knocked-off Gucci purses, key chains and Playboy socks. I mounted a flight of broken concrete stairs following the garish music that squawked from overhead speakers. Heavy drops fell again, racing down the neck of my leather jacket to settle around the waistband of my jeans as clammy reminders that I could have whiled away the afternoon in the hotel tearoom chatting with the other docs.
The hall was gloomy and glitzy. Merchandise crushed down upon the shoppers: frivolous tourist junk, foods, gaudy jewelry, leather goods, carpets and more carpets, and every conceivable souvenir capitalizing on Turkey’s history. Thunder reverberated through the maze-like structure off the tall ceilings and stone walls like phony sounds from an old black and white Sheik of Araby movie. Vendors flipped around long-handled squeegees, a kind of show, deftly directing pools of water on the muddy pavement away from their stalls and rushing to place rain buckets. All business as usual, this controlled pandemonium, along with the cacophony of innumerable radios.
One minute everyone is scurrying around making sure the rain didn’t do any damage; the next it’s all one big tea party, the little boys dashing to and fro wielding delivery trays of hourglass tea glasses and cubes of sugar to placate the soggy tourists.
I got out my mobile phone again, punching in Paul’s number, but received only one of those frustrating robotic messages about entering my mail box number. I clicked off and pocketed the phone. A touch of cool flesh brushed against my palm. I jerked my hand away in an involuntary response and was taken aback to see the peasant woman who had been arguing outside. She offered me her little girl’s hand. I dug out some coins from my jeans. I was only going to be in Turkey for the weekend and the other docs had advised me to avoid the hassle and stick with dollars. So all I could give the woman was a handful of pennies, quarters, nickels, and dimes. But she refused my money, a look of frustration twisting her drawn features, a hint of a curse on her quivering lips. She wasn’t more than eighteen or twenty. Just a girl herself, with tufts of blonde hair escaping her scarf, and gray eyes clouded with emotion. She picked up her daughter and shook her, roughly, like she was offering me a sheaf of wheat at the market. The girl’s head flopped on her neck as her mother spat at me in Turkish.
“Calm down,” I said, using my gentle-but-firm doctor tone.
Just then a shopkeeper from a nearby stall caught my eye and gestured to me. “Come, come, just sit here.” He offered a chair. “I have rose oil, very nice from Isparta.”
“Roses?” It seemed so convenient as I’d been thinking of some kind of ritual at the river, something to do with roses since the garden is where my father went to tamp down the intensity of his life. Ironically, he’d died there of a massive stroke.
“Yes, yes, roses,” the man said, beaming.
I flashed a weak semblance of a smile at the peasant woman, feeling apologetically like the ugly, selfish American. But what could I do? If she didn’t want money then I didn’t know what else she wanted from me. I ducked away from my guilt and her accusing eyes and entered the man’s shop, bracing for the overkill sell. The man had a delta of wrinkles on sun-hardened cheeks, his white whiskers defiantly growing in patches like brittle bushes which manage to emerge from blistered earth. He wore a black woolen cap. “This is gulab.” The man with the goatee launched immediately into his pitch. “Rose water from hundred petal roses. Oldfashioned roses, gallica, Damascus, moss, centifolia.” His heavy horned-rimmed glasses fell down his nose as he peered above them at me. Progressive ptergygiums, I diagnosed, examining the thickening of tissue, like blobs of yellowed wax, creeping from the sclera of both eyes onto his irises; if he didn’t have the masses surgically removed, he’d be blind soon.
The man produced four chemist beakers filled with oil. One was the color of burned caramel. “Opium oil from poppy.” The next, a curry color. “Isparta rose.” The next, sunflower yellow. “Mixed roses. “ The last, the color of lemonade. “Wild roses.” With a syringelike instrument he extracted drops from each beaker and massaged the oil into my hands. The attar of roses exploded pleasantly. The old man grinned, knowing he’d gotten his hook into me. “In Turkish, Attar-t Cihangir. Essence of Jahangir. Attar is Arabic. It means scent. Rosa damascena the essential oil used to making all fine scents. Its scent is at surface. Just the slightest touch releases fragrance.”
He scurried to gather up a bouquet of pink roses. “Isparta rose,” he announced.
“I don’t know,” I mused out loud. “I’m going to the Ganges River with my father’s ashes. I wanted to take something sentimental.” I realized I’d said too much.
“In Asia, white is the color of mourning,” he replied with feigned sympathy, proffering a white rose to finish me off.
“I can’t take fresh roses with me all the way to India.”
“Not roses; just petals, you see.” He produced a clear plastic container, like a take-out box, and began plucking off white rose petals from a bouquet, filling the container. “I put underneath plastic bag. You go through security at airport then you fill with ice. Keep rose petals fresh.”
I don’t know why I stood there while he went on about roses and perfume, all the while stuffing the box with petals, because normally that kind of presumptuous behavior on the part of a salesperson would have launched me out of the door. But I kind of liked the idea. Who knew if I could find white rose petals in India? This way I’d have them with me. I envisioned myself floating on a boat, the Ganges River water the color of parrots, the white petals undulating, finessed by a tender current as my father’s ashes filtered down to join with my mother’s.
“I’ll take them.”
The man chortled, “Of course.”
Outside, the rain showed no signs of letting up. Finished with the bazaar, I was happy to head to the airport to wait for my flight. An old man hobbled toward me, tugging up his coat. His lower spine had caved in toward his abdomen from the weight of the upper deformity. Kyphosis. Probably a congenital anomaly, or caused by tuberculosis, or maybe syphilis. It was kind of cool to see a case of it. He held out a knotty hand. “Baksheesh,” he spit. I gave him the handful of American coins the peasant woman refused. He limped away from me.
I peered through the drape of water falling from the eaves. Several other beggars were making their way slowly toward me and so I chose to run, landing immediately into a pothole, my toes squishing in my hiking boots. Then to my utter amazement I noticed that the peasant woman, with Herculean strength, was trotting beside me, holding up her girl. I stopped, out of breath, blinking raindrops from my lashes, hiccupping a little incredulous laugh. “What in the world?”
The woman set the girl down. I bent to her, and took her little pointy chin in my hand, tilting her face upward. “Are you hurt?” She smiled halfheartedly, with her mouth shut, like kids do when their parents yell smile for photographs. There was nothing wrong with her that a good meal wouldn’t cure. I’d take them over to a food vendor in the bazaar. But when I rose to standing, the girl’s mother was gone.
The rain, which at first seemed to carry a hint of summer, now seemed more like the temperature of dead winter.
I urged the girl back to the bazaar, out of the downpour, watching her blonde head as it bobbed along in the rain, the way that little girls prance. She burped little squeals and grunts with each step, patrolling my face with traumatized curiosity. Once inside she attempted to bolt, but I followed her into a darkened nook where she crouched into a ball. I snatched up a handful of her dress, and yanked her out. The girl’s eyes, caked with dried rheum, filled with tears. She opened her mouth and slipped her thumb in the empty space where her two front baby teeth had once been, sucking with grave intensity.
“Oh, I’m so glad to see you again,” I called out, when the rose man walked by. “This woman came up to me and left her little girl, just like that.”
“Gypsies,” he sniffed. “I will call the police. Don’t worry. I bring you tea.”
“Oh, thank you. Thank you so much,” I said, watching him shuffle nonchalantly in the direction of his stall on loafers with crushed out backs, like slippers.
In just a minute or two, a woman appeared, heavily veiled in a black chador, with only a tiny triangular opening exposing her nose and downcast eyes. She modestly proffered a small gilded china saucer, which held two hourglassshaped glasses of tea, each on a saucer with two rough cubes of white sugar and tiny long-handled spoons. The shrouded woman motioned to the shopkeeper’s stall. The tea was from him.
My teeth were chattering. “Oh, thanks.”
I stirred in the two sugar cubes. I’d have the tea, get the girl situated, then get to the airport where I would change into some dry clothes before the flight. I’d talk to Paul for an hour on the phone, and worry about my phone bill later. The woman handed a sugar cube to the girl, who lodged it where her baby teeth used to be. She held a glass of tea so the girl could slurp it through the cubes. It was a nice moment, the way that happens sometimes, with the three of us, complete strangers, sharing a window of time that was simply about hot tea and sugar, and nothing else.
“I don’t want to be rude, but I have a flight to catch so I’ve got to get this girl to the police as soon as possible.” The woman nodded, eyes downcast, then walked away.
Flaxen eyebrows. Lashes fluttering over downcast eyes. She was way too delicious for that old rose man. The taxi driver said that Turkey outlawed harems. I gulped the rest of the tea, not eager for any images of the repulsive ancient polygamist and his sexy young bride sticking in my head. My core warmed with the tea in my stomach, the heat permeating into my wet extremities. It was the first time since I’d received the call at the hospital that I hadn’t had my father in the back of my mind. It was good. I was turning a corner in my grief. I rummaged in my bag for a handful of hotel bedtime chocolates and poured them into the girl’s cupped palms. She plopped onto the dirt floor of the bazaar and began to methodically unwrap the candy, gumming one as she unwrapped the next.
The shopkeeper was taking a long time and I checked my watch, feeling pressed to get going. “Come on.” I reached my hand down to the girl and she clamored to her feet, clutching my hand with a chocolaty grip.
In that instant—too late for me to scream or form the words that could save myself—I knew that the tea I had just consumed contained choral hydrate, the drug used in a Mickey. Having an empty stomach, the wellabsorbed sedative was taking hold of my consciousness and dragging me down into its dark web. The voices in the bazaar echoed large and small at the same time, as if packaged somewhere in my brain where I couldn’t sort them out. My vision blurred as the bazaar music turned into a high pitchedwhine. The girl’s hand slipped out of mine. I staggered. A firm hand gripped my arm as I looked into the eyes of the black shrouded woman who had brought us the tea. Her eyes were green. I stumbled into a delicious free fall as a billow of black fabric enveloped me.
A honeyed voice filtered through the material, “Just let go, darlin’. I got you.”
CHAPTER TWO
I worked feverishly at loosening the plywood boards that sealed the windows of the prison room to the outside world. After the rapist was finished with me, he had taken my clothes and locked me inside the small room. My adrenals were still pumping adrenaline and cortisol, triggering a flood of opiate-like neurotransmitters in my brain. The natural analgesics served to blunt the pain of my bleeding fingers, as I tore several fingernails to the quick. I stumbled back as the board peeled a few inches away from the windowsill. An incongruous ray of moteswarming sunshine streamed in through a broken windowpane. Birds tittered and whistled, kids laughed and shrieked, singing songs that drifted up from a hollow courtyard below, sounds that flooded my entire being with the kind of lightheaded joy that can only be experienced when hope chases terror.
“Up here, help me!” I yelled. Somewhere close by was a heavily traveled highway and the kids couldn’t hear my voice above the traffic. They ran off.
I stretched my fingers through the crack and brushed a film of spider webbing away from the window. I was in a room on the second floor. The garden was in new bloom, with clusters of grapes sprouting along vines which roped the building, little black beads dusted with white. In haphazard rows, a cutting garden developed where shoots had broken through the ground, their blossoms open in the afternoon sun. Papery fuchsia flowers exploded prolifically on woody bougainvillea vines, which had been cut back, leaving tracks of untarnished paint. The building I was in abutted several other ramshackle pre-nineteenth century structures, virtually identical, topped with clay roofs and mottled by weather and adorned with carpets and laundry hanging from windows. Minarets, telephone poles, and power lines crisscrossed the skyline.
I put my fingers into my mouth, sucking on my wounds. The taste of my blood renewed my fear. The rays of the sun that had so dazzled me with hope now shone on the blotches of dried blood on the plywood. The leaden realization that other women had been there before me fell over me like an executioner’s hood. The dregs of my strength drained from me forcefully, like life’s blood sucked into a Vacutainer.
Next to the door stood a chrome table with a cheery yellow Formica top, and one chair, its yellow marbled vinyl torn, regurgitating tufts of cotton batting. I stumbled over to the chair and rested there. Borrowed light oozed in from the fissure at the window. The room had once been a luxurious bedroom, with green and silver flocked wallpaper peeling here and there like the drooping leaves of a neglected houseplant. The ceiling was made of ornately handcarved wood. A frayed electrical cord swayed from a chipped, oldfashioned plaster ceiling medallion where a chandelier must have once hung. It seemed like a slum. The panic started to well up again. Who had seen me leave the hotel? The valet? I had not paid the TAKSi driver his seventy-five American dollars. He would go to the police with my bag and report my disappearance. The police would call the American Consulate. They would call Paul, as his number was on my bag. He would come to Istanbul and track me. Paul was enterprising, resourceful, and wellconnected. He would find me.
“Paul!” I cried out in despair.
I’ll be right back, I’d said, leaning into the open passenger window to blow him a kiss. I’d walked toward the thick glass doors of the Bradley International terminal at LAX, turning around just in time to detect a trace of anxiety on Paul’s face as he jumped out of the car to yell over the pre-recorded whitezone announcement, You be safe!
His words had been a portent. I’d been raped!
Raped women in the E.R. were given a rape kit exam. Offer the patient levonorgestrel to prevent ovulation or fertilization. Order baseline tests for STDs. Advise a follow-up exam for HIV in three to six months. Collect physical evidence for a criminal investigation. Call a psychiatrist. I drew a hitching breath. The loneliness was alive as if it were something tangible with a slithering tongue and dank breath. I closed my eyes for a moment, psyching myself into being strong, reminding myself that I had to be strong—because there was no other choice. “I will find a way out,” I said aloud.
Tasks had to be compartmentalized. Each situation had to be dealt with systematically. It was the only way to maintain psychological equilibrium and survive. I evaluated my injuries by palpitating my ribs, gasping out loud as the white pain shot through my core. I was moving air. That was good. It meant that the breaks in my ribs were clean and that the bones had not pierced my lung. I scooted to the edge of the chair to examine my genitals. My labia majora were swollen and tender. My labia minora were swollen and abraded. I slipped my index finger into my vagina, probing for any signs of traumatic genital fistula—a tear between my vagina and bladder or rectum. The tissue was inflamed but didn’t appear to have sustained any serious damage. What was so strange was that the rapist had not sodomized me, which was typical of most rapes.
Just then the strains of an opera came from somewhere in the house. It was the Marriage of Figaro. Mozart. My father was an opera fan and had taken me with him to the opera on occasion when he didn’t have a more interesting date. Opera was a thinking person’s music. Now I knew that my rapist was a thinker. I didn’t have time to dwell on it, as the heavy scrape of shoes on wooden treads outside the room became louder, and then the footsteps approached on planked flooring. “Hail Mary full of grace . . . ” My palms were slick with oil and sweat, the attar of roses stimulated by panic. “The Lord is with thee . . . ” What was he going to do to me? “Blessed art thou among women . . . ” I felt faint with terror. “And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. ” I hadn’t attended church since grade school when my father stopped taking me to catechism classes. The scowling nuns and their fear of God came to me, and my prayer caught in my sternum like a malignant tumor.
The deadbolt turned and the door opened. There he stood at the door, backlit so that he appeared like a huge black cut out. Adrenaline licked up my spine as I rose from the chair and backed to the wall. “Holy Mary Mother of God.”
“Deva,” the man said from the doorway. His voice was deep and hoarse.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“Deva, viens ici.”
I had studied Spanish and didn’t understand what he was saying.
The man walked with determination across the expanse of the small room, his heels hammering the wood planks. He struck me across the face with a balled fist. My body thumped against the wall, unhinging the injuries that all the systems of my body had worked so hard to put into a healing sync. A throbbing hematoma gathered in the connective tissue under my cheekbone. I touched the new injury in disbelief. For a few moments there was silence except for my erratic breathing and the music. My heart palpitated wildly. I was aware of my blood pressure spiking and adrenaline flowing as his hand tangled in my hair, yanking my head back. Looking up, I saw the first stars of the night appear through the cracks of the window. Then I began to breathe.
The man dragged me across the floor and threw me down onto the mattress. I screamed, the pain torch-like in my ribs. I began to experience time distortion again, with time seeming to run slower so that I detected each detail with great clarity. I went limp to signal that he had won the fight. He reeled away, panting like a feral underworld animal, straightening his tie and pulling down on the edges of his jacket as much to smooth the fabric as to sooth and gather his composure.
When he bent to look at me, I stared directly into his eyes to personalize myself to him, in hopes that if he were to see me as a fellow human being he would not lash out again—or kill me. He was dressed like a businessman in a white shirt under a black sports jacket, and gray gabardine trousers. He looked about forty-five; he was cleanshaven, squaredjawed handsome in an aging playboy kind of way, with brown eyes fringed in black lashes, an equine nose of nobility. He reminded me of the French venture capitalists who sit in cafés in Beverly Hills, legs crossed like women, sipping espresso, and making deals to buy shopping centers. His long, straight black hair fell over his eyes, but even so, it was receding severely at the temples. He had had a blepharoplasty to minimize the bags under his eyes, and that said a lot about his psychology. He was vain.
“No screaming,” he said with a thick French accent as he held up his switchblade again, “Or I cut off zee nose.”
“I’m an American doctor.” I forced the words into coherent shapes. “You have to let me go.”
The man smirked.
“I’m with a U.N. delegation. They’ll be missing me.”
“I am also wis zee U.N. délégation.” He chuckled.
“Please don’t hurt me again. I’ll do whatever it is you want. I can get you any amount of money. Just let me go.”
He planted his boney knee on my sternum above my cracked ribs. A fiery pain encompassed my rib cage. He fumbled in his coat pocket and expertly wrapped a rubber cord around my upper arm, as if he had done it a thousand times before.
“What are you doing?”
“I make you mine, stupid girl.” He extracted a hypodermic from his coat pocket.
“You have the wrong person! My name is Meredith Fitzgerald. Doctor Meredith Fitzgerald,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. “I’m an American. A medical doctor. This is all some kind of a mistake.”
“You are Deva,” he said matter-of-factly.
With the prick of the needle into my vein, I slumped onto the mattress gliding on shallow breath along a narrow corridor of ecstasy. The experience was solitary and I felt the aloneness of it as if standing apart, observing. There was no emotion, no awareness of my senses other than pleasure. It wasn’t an earthly voyage, but a space within my mind that was vividly alive with thoughts, imaginations, visions and dreams flowing, intermingling.
The rush ended, leaving an immediate longing to experience it again. My eyes fluttered open. My nose ran and I felt drained with no awareness of how much time had elapsed. The reality of my situation carved its way into my consciousness. I felt myself being hurled into the darkness of overwhelming shame that sucked me down, obliterating the pleasurable sensations. I immediately understood the secret of the drug, a scrambled formula of desire and remorse. My innocence had ended. I now saw the rapist vaguely, as if through the amniotic fluid of my rebirth into hell. “What do you want?” My voice sounded strangely unfamiliar.
He ignored my question and went about sealing with duct tape the crack I’d made at the windows. The door slammed and the heavy bolt thundered. His footsteps faded down the stairs. Unable to move, I vomited onto the mattress. The odor mingled with the smell of the rapist’s semen and the sweet scent of roses as the sound of opera started again.
CHAPTER THREE
Into the euphoric bubble of oblivion, the cloying scent of roses filled my nostrils with the shocking memory of the rape. I opened my eyes and recoiled at the sight of another face. A eunuch? A thirty-year old man with feminine characteristics, soft, beardless skin, blue eyes, thick, tousled blond hair, his full lips twitched in a smile. I’d seen men like this at the hospital. Castration was a perverted homosexual subcult, sometimes occurring as a result of “ball and cock torture,” sexual play involving inflicting testicular pain. Fetishist practitioners—or “cutters”—non-medically trained perverts who indulged S&M fantasies for profit, also performed castrations.
This eunuch’s head was disproportionately wide, a condition called brachycephaly. Most likely he had been left lying on his back for prolonged periods of time as an infant, causing his skull to flatten. Otherwise he had Mongolian facial characteristics with a protruding forehead and a nose that was narrow at the top, and broad at the nostrils. His eyes were hooded, yet not quite Asian. Crude tattoos in Russian cursive curlicued around his neck, disappearing into the front of his soiled white dress shirt. It was so odd that he wore a suit. He would have been less scary, more in character had he worn jeans and a teeshirt like the goons in the movies. But he looked like a junior executive with a sociopathic glint in his eyes. Castrated men were said to possess “eunuch calm,” but I remembered what the taxi driver said, Eunuch guard haram, like peacock, only mean, like mad dog. The deadness in the eunuch’s eyes told me that he was like the T-Rex that possessed a human sized brain, but no cerebellum; like the TRex, living purely in the moment with no emotional response, even to his own pain.
“Something for blue-eyed bitch,” he said atonally, with a syringe clamped between his teeth.
“I can pay you any amount of money . . . . ” Before I could finish my plea he plunged the needle into my vein and I escaped into the dark joy of the rush. The process of separating water from oil was discovered accidentally in Mogul India in the sixteenth century, at a feast for the Emperor Jahangir. Pools filled with rose water in his garden. The hot sun evaporates water, and oil comes to the surface. That is perfume! I came out of the nod. The eunuch was gone but the loathsome smell of roses remained.
Each visit from the rapist was a recurring nightmare. But the heroin injections were even more worrying. Being highly soluble in lipids, heroin crossed the blood-brain barrier in seven seconds, a hundred times faster than morphine. Pharmacologically, the drug relieved my pain. Hypnotically, it lulled me into a fairy tale sleep. I could recover psychologically from the rapes, but I feared that the substance of my identity was dissipating with each heroin rush that was delivering me inexorably into heroin addiction. I prayed they would stop forcing the drug on me before that happened.
The blur of the drug made it impossible to tell how many days had gone by. I tried to tell time by the prayer calls, which invaded the prison room like clockwork. But eventually I lost track of the hours, and then the days. Ten days? I wasn’t sure. I searched my memory for any detail of what had taken place, for clues that might be the germ of an escape plan. There had to be a way. I struggled off the mattress and went to the window. I’d seen the hacked up prostitutes being wheeled into the O.R. and was certain that the rapist would deliver on his promise to mutilate me. Nevertheless, I stripped the tape with trembling hands and tried again to peel back the plywood in hopes of attracting someone’s attention in one of the nearby apartments.
Sparrows flapped into the sky, scared off by a stringy looking cat that cruised into the garden. Several blackbirds vaulted away, too, circling, waiting for the ruckus to end. My heart raced when a band of shepherds sauntered down the pathway, casually corralling their sheep with gentle switches of reeds. Their shoes were caked with mud, and over their shoulders a few of them carried newborn lambs. Mutts trotted alongside and helped with the herding. I had nothing to toss down to get their attention. I tore off a piece of dangling duct tape with my teeth. For the next half an hour I scratched HELP KIDNAPPED MEREDITH FITZGERALD into the tape with my fingernail. I shoved it through the cracked window and watched it fall to the earth. I said out loud, “The door is locked, but I will find a way out. I will escape. I will be OK.” I repeated my mantra, “I will find a way out.”
They’d left me a small bottle of water on the table! I lunged for it, drinking it, gulping air, panting. A quarter of a liter—eight ounces. They were giving me enough for my body to flush enough toxins through urination so that I would not die. I needed much more water. A female body my size is made up of about fiftyfive percent water. Dehydration becomes uncomfortable when the body’s water volume falls only two percent. My water volume had declined more severely than that. The thirst was unbearable. I’d already stopped urinating.
The drug and dehydration robbed my appetite, too, though it didn’t matter as I was not given any food. I had not eaten since the breakfast at the hotel. That innocent, innocent breakfast! I was wasting away despite the systems of my body that struggled to keep me alive. My thyroid slowed as my endocrine system raced to protect the infrastructure of my body. My immune system leached every last resource of my former robust body to ward off infections. But nothing could stop the cannibalization of my lean body mass that was taking place to keep me alive.
The rape, the unpredictability of the drugs, the thirst, starvation, and isolation had to be a method to break me. I tried to remain strong emotionally, and tried to encourage myself. I tried to adhere to the main objective of staying alive. I replaced the tape on the window, and then dealt with the darkness.
More time passed. I couldn’t tell how many days. One day the rapist and the eunuch didn’t come to my room. That night I lay awake all night, slapping at the repulsive tickle of the feathery cockroach legs scampering over my body. The effects of the last fix began to wear off. It must have been the middle of the night when I heard a voice singing Con onor muore. It was the aria in Madama Butterfly when Cio-Cio San reads the inscription on her father’s knife that says, “Who cannot live with honor must die with honor.” I tried to occupy myself by trying to figure out the singer playing the part of Madama Butterfly. But an hour went by and the same aria repeated over and over. An hour later, the repetitious music was driving me insane. I covered my ears and rocked on the mattress.
Incapacitating cramps seized the largest muscles of my body, the latissimus dorsi, trapezius, quadriceps and gluteus, and then slowly moved to the smaller muscles deep inside my tissues until I felt as if my bones were cramping. I couldn’t stop yawning. My nose ran, my stomach knotted, and I sweated profusely. The nerve discharge of my sympathetic nervous system caused the contraction of the little muscles called the arrectores pilorum, elevating the hair follicles above my skin. Gooseflesh. My body, slick with perspiration, shivered uncontrollably. The itchy nose I’d experienced during heroin highs turned into whole body torment and I raked my face and arms with jagged fingernails. My intestines began the slow turn that starts when the narcotic constipation ends, intensifying into wrenching diarrhea. I scrambled off the mattress and felt around frantically in the dark for the bucket the eunuch had tossed into the corner. Then the stench hung inescapably in the air.
I couldn’t afford to lose more fluids, and began to fear the very real possibility of death. But worse than the fear of death was what was happening to the essence of myself. The systematic injections that the rapist and eunuch had forced on me had instigated the viscous spiral of tolerance and physical dependence of heroin addiction. The physiological effect of withdrawal created a longing so extreme that I strained to listen for the Russian’s heavy clomp on the stair treads, feeling a thrill of anticipation at any creak that might signal his approach. Once I began to desire the drug, I became fatalistically resigned. Dependency was like a fortress blocking my way back to my old self.
It happened so quickly.
CHAPTER FOUR
After the first hellish night of withdrawals, the sweet sound of a woman singing wove its way into my consciousness like an innocuous atmospheric disturbance. It took me some time to understand that I wasn’t hallucinating, that the voice was American . . . and that it was right outside my prison door. The voice crooned a children’s song. I rose from the despicable mattress, propelled through inertia by a storm of adrenaline and the innocent turbulence of hope. The fear of my abductors seemed like some kind of dirty trick on my mind that I no longer needed to heed. I limped to the door and banged on it. “In here, in here! Help me! Help me!” I shouted, surprised at the force of my voice. The singing saturated the door, having transformed from sound into matter. The voice of a little girl accompanied the woman’s. “In here. Help me. Help!” I screamed, hammering harder.
The singing stopped. The deadbolt turned. The door opened. A hallway light shed a sickly yellow glow into the room. Just a few hours earlier, my pupils would have been pinned from the heroin. But now that the heroin was out of my system, and having been kept in the dark, my pupils were dilated and the light was painful. The relief was so profound, I crumpled onto the dirty floor, shading my eyes with shaking hands. “Thank God, you’ve come. You’ve found me!”
This woman would call the authorities. Officials from the American embassy would arrive with American military medical personnel. I’d receive medical attention, a hot bath, food, and water. I’d be transported by air ambulance to a hospital in the U.S. Paul would be at my side to hold my hand as I fell into a druginduced coma where I’d remain for the first seven to ten days of my withdrawal. I would be brought out of the coma, heavily sedated until I made a full recovery.
My eyes adjusted and I recognized the little gypsy girl from the bazaar, hesitating at the woman’s side. She’d been cleaned up, and her tattered sackcloth frock replaced with a blue flowered garden party dress with a smocked bodice, white socks trimmed in lace, and yellow leather dress shoes. The mats and dreadlocks in her hair had been carefully clipped away, and her hair was washed and plaited with little blue satin bows tying the ends. She slipped her thumb between rosy lips and sucked as her eyes took in the spectacle that I had become.
The woman sashayed over to the window where she stripped the tape away with bold strokes. Sunlight darted into the room in long sharp shards. When she turned, her eyes were green rays of another kind, a light that pierced into me with the painful truth. These were the eyes I had seen the instant before I lost consciousness at the Egyptian bazaar. This woman had been complicit in my abduction. I crawled toward the door, but she grasped me by the shoulders and pulled me back. I sprawled naked on the floor, trembling, sobs rising out of me like spasms.
The woman went about her business as if I didn’t matter. She dragged the shit bucket into the hall. “Wait on me, hear? Sen burada bekle,” she said to the girl who gripped the handrail of the stairs and stepped backwards down the staircase, her suspicious eyes never leaving me.
The woman shut the door. Without ventilation the room remained close, the smell of the bucket lingered in the air. She was about twenty and wore a red sheath dress. Seeing her glammed up as if she were going to a cocktail party added weight to my sensation of delirium. Since I’d been dating Paul I’d seen some of the most beautiful women in the world; actresses and models processed through hair and makeup and who had their own stylists to dress them. This woman, more stunning than anyone I’d seen at the studio, was naturally beautiful with lips and breasts that were full and real. She had a perfect, straight nose and firm, creampuff skin. Her lips bowed into a nubile pout. Her smile, when she’d flashed it encouragingly at the girl, was one of those larger-than-life toothy grins that leave men’s hearts scattered by the wayside.
She squatted on her spike heels to stroke my forehead with a cool hand. “Yer burnin’ up girl,” she said, tarnishing the gestalt of her beauty with her painful Southern twang. “Gotta git you back in bed.”
“Bed?” I whimpered feebly. She helped me limp back to the sweaty mattress, where I flopped down. She pulled a clean blanket from a bulky tapestry bag to cover me. This small gesture of kindness overwhelmed me and I began to sob.
“Hush,” she purred. “Can’t even cry tears now. Yer all dried up. I brung you some water.” She helped me up so that I could gulp from a water bottle. “You best be careful,” she said, pulling the bottle away. “Otherwise you just upchuck and it won’t do no good.”
Psychotic homeless men regularly sprawled around on the grass in front of the E.R. entrance to the hospital. Many of the interns, residents, and nurses avoided having to treat these men, finding something else more urgent to do. Now I was like those derelicts, and this strange woman with lotion soft hands and a décolletage bathed in cologne was helping me. “Why are you doing this?” I whispered.
“Got no choice in the matter.”
“But of course we have a choice. We’re American.”
She laughed merrily, though there was a somber timbre to her giggle. “And the rockets red blare,” she sang wistfully as she pressed those cool fingertips to my feverish thorax, urging my body back down onto the mattress. “The bulbs bursting with air . . . . ” She rummaged in her bag as she continued to hum the Star Spangled Banner.
“Who are you?” I asked, interrupting the inane humming.
“I’m called Nasreen.”
“That’s not your real name. That’s not an American name. That rapist, the man who did this to me, he called me another name.”
“That’s Belhaj. He’s the boss here.”
The boss! What net I had fallen into? I had to find out. First I had to befriend this woman. “What’s your real name?”
“Real name’s Camille. But you best not go callin’ me that.”
I sat up, hugging my arms around my knees to try to quell the twitching of my limbs. “You’ve got to contact the police.”
“Ain’t gonna do that.” She handed me the water bottle and I began to nurse it.
“I need medical attention. That rapist and that eunuch have hurt me!”