COOL GUY

Still, I wait for her in a rented room. I say room, I actually mean apartment. It's an apartment in Manhattan that I really can't afford but I've gotten it as a sublet. There goes the advance—spend money to make money. As one would think, plenty of characters here. One, but not me: I'd have thought they'd all have been priced out by now. Go figure. The two guys upstairs are the worst, each stupider than the other. What they're growing up there (the roof is right above them) makes no sense. They've essentially stopped talking to me, which is funny. The apartment is very long and very narrow. I set up my little writing table in the front. From there I can see across the street which is very narrow by American standards. So the man in the apartment directly across from me is entirely visible even though he has never once turned to look at me, never once. Whatever the weather is he always wears the same thing, a loose pair of green pants with a drawstring and what in my country is referred to as an atlet. I only ever see him when he is in his kitchen, which is at the front of the apartment facing the street, and he only ever does one thing in there: take a can of beans from the cupboard, open it, empty the contents into a saucepan, turn on the element, stir the beans, and eat them directly from the pan with a large spoon. Then he washes the saucepan and spoon, sets them on the counter to dry, and leaves: later he'll repeat the whole thing. I've never seen him open the fridge or take a glass of water. Then again I'm not always there. Sometimes I go to the library of the Yunus Emre Enstitüsü to read. I spend the entire afternoon there in silence. Lately, though, I haven't been going there at all. The days I spend sleeping or sitting in the front room, and the nights I go walking. I walk for hours and hours, getting home just as the sun is beginning to rise. Then I sleep. Then I sit in the front room. It's the path from the bedroom to the front room. The room is bathed in light, which is strange as it faces north. The chair is bathed in light, the little table is bathed in light, light flows through the translucent white curtain, it's the perfect setup really. It's when I see it from the kitchen that it seems impossible, it seems impossible to get there, to get from there to there. The light is just too perfect and I know that if I go stand in it or sit in it it will cease to be so. So I stand in the threshold of the kitchen where I eat an apple and watch for any possible movement in the scene, watch and wait for any possible movement, but there is nothing, nothing but the occasional flutter of the curtain in the wind from the window that is open just a crack.