A Joyful Cigarette
I struck the match and brought it toward my cigarette. By the time my arm wouldn’t obey and the flame caught my eyebrows, it was already too late. For a moment I was confused, the way you are when a name you know won’t come, and then I remembered: the gasoline, the careful soaking of my clothes, the whole reason I had sat down here. Oh. Yes. That. In one motion I set my face alight. It hurt, but it felt good. When it reached my arm I struggled a little, because the pain, though bearable, was still pain.
As the fire spread across my body I understood there was no going back from this…
It had been a good year for losing things. First the job, on a Tuesday, in a meeting that lasted four minutes. Then the wife, who took the apartment because her name was on it and mine was only on the marriage. Then the children, by order of a judge who explained that a man with no address is not a place a child can visit. So I had no job, which meant no money, which meant no address, which meant no children, which meant no reason to look for a job. The logic of it was very clean. I admired it the way you admire a machine built to crush you.
And the prices. My God, the prices. A loaf of bread now costs what a small car once cost, and a small car costs what a house once cost, and a house costs what a country once cost, so by my calculation if I simply waited long enough I would be priced into owning a nation. The Turkish Lira fell so fast that by the time you finished counting your money it was worth less than the counting had cost you in calories. I worked this out one night under a bridge and laughed until a dog came to see what was wrong with me. The world had done this. Not me. The world, with its meetings and its judges and its bread, had arranged all of this very carefully so that I would stand exactly where I was standing, which was nowhere, holding nothing.
So I had decided to leave it. That much was settled, had been settled for days, and the only question left was the manner. A man owes himself a manner. To slip away quietly in the night would be to agree with the world that I was nothing, and I would not give it that. No. If I was going to go, I would go as a scene, a bright public fact the street could not pretend not to see. They would smell it for a week. Fire seemed right. Fire is the one thing the prices cannot reach.
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There was a car on the corner, a gray Renault, the kind nobody loves. I knelt by its tank with a length of hose I had found and a plastic carrier that once held yogurt. Now, siphoning gasoline is not a simple thing. You must understand the physics of it. The hose must descend to the correct depth, neither too shallow nor too deep, and you must draw the air out with your own lungs at precisely the right pressure, and there is a moment, a critical moment, when the fluid commits to rising and you must withdraw your mouth before it arrives or you will taste the inside of an engine for a week. I performed this operation like a surgeon. It took everything I had. By the end my hands were shaking and my carrier was full and I was, frankly, a little proud.
I found a quiet corner of the street, away from the windows, and sat down. I poured the gasoline over myself, slowly, the way you’d pour a careful drink, and the cold of it ran down my collar and into my shoes. Then I needed to catch my breath. The work had tired me more than I expected.
And sitting there, breathing, soaked, I had a strange and gentle thought. I had choices. I was a man with two hands and two lungs, sitting on a curb in a city of millions, and nothing about tomorrow was decided yet. I could move to Konya, my hometown. I could find work that did not require an address. I could write to the children and tell them their father was alive and thinking of them. The morning was coming and the morning belonged to no one, which meant it could belong to me. I felt the whole bright weight of it settle over me. A man could begin again from anywhere. A man could begin again from here.
To mark the occasion I decided to smoke a cigarette. A small celebration. A joyful one.
I struck the match and brought it toward my cigarette.
Inspired by the story of Sıtkı Aydın, a construction worker who set himself on fire in front of the Turkish parliament in 2018 after years of being denied justice for a workplace injury. He survived the fire. This story is fiction and invents its narrator, but it is written in his shadow.
This piece was originally written in Turkish in 2019. The English version was rendered with Claude (Anthropic), working from the original text to preserve its tone and rhythm rather than to translate it literally.
