Chapter 29
It was the following morning, and Hozan was back to reading in the front seat of his car, when she finally plucked up the courage to speak to him. There had been a huge downpour the previous evening, cleaning the air of its grittiness after the dry spell, and the petrichor was strong in her nostrils. Somehow the car remained as dirty as it had been before.
‘I wondered when you would make yourself known to me,’ he said without looking up.
‘I brought you a coffee.’
He reached out and took it, his gaze still fixed on the pages. Was there a third eye concealed beneath all that hair?
‘So you like reading?’
She was off with the awkward first date questions again.
He placed the cup in the instrument’s nook behind the steering wheel. ‘I always preferred the flow of ink to the flow of blood.’
‘Who doesn’t, amirite?’
Eww. Thank god no one was around to see how cringy she was being. This was a mistake. There was no way she could have an actual conversation with this man.
Hozan fixed her in his piercing amber gaze. ‘I have biscuits.’
She hesitated. ‘What kind?’
‘Many kinds.’
She hadn’t had breakfast yet. Sod it. In for a penny. She ventured around to the passenger side.
The car was full of stuff. Like really full. The back seat was piled with an assortment of clear plastic boxes crammed with shoes and clothing. The rear footwells were so full of bits of electrical equipment it was like he’d dismembered a cyborg but hadn’t got round to disposing of the body. The parcel shelf sagged with books, and there was a selection of bric-a-brac on the dashboard that had grown fluffy with dust. She reached for the vintage Troll doll with its shock of gravity-defying hair.
‘Don’t touch that!’ he barked.
She pulled her hand back as if she’d been scalded again.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
She should probably go. The door wasn’t closed, and every ounce of her lizard brain was telling her she might be in danger – her body was physiologically gearing up for some. But there was no way sat in his passenger seat for a few seconds then ran away was sufficient to rub Jasper’s nose in. She inhaled deeply. Hozan did the same.
‘No, I’m sorry. I must remind myself you’re one of us. Please, go ahead.’
She hesitated.
‘I insist.’
She took the figure. It left two perfect feet marks in the surface’s grime. She glided her thumb across the nicks on its nose. Her heartbeat settled a little.
Hozan reached under his chair to retrieve a squat round tin. He prised the lid off and thrust it at her, unveiling a choice of animal shapes, fig rolls or pink wafers, all options she’d not seen since she was a kid. She’d been hoping for Hobnobs.
‘I’m okay, thanks.’
He grunted and thrust the biscuits at her again. She was clearly having one. She took a pink wafer and, as she gingerly bit into it, a flood of memories came to her of sitting in her dad’s shed, watching him fixing a radio or some other malfunctioning appliance. It drove her mum mad that they couldn’t afford replacements. What would he think of all the stuff she’d amassed in the years he’d been gone?
She finished the wafer and was disappointed not to be offered another. She glanced across at Hozan. If she wanted to know what he meant, she was going to have to ask.
‘What do you mean, one of us?’
‘Huh?’ Traces of pink crumbs remained in his beard.
‘You said you keep forgetting I’m one of you. What do you mean by that?’
‘A recipient.’
‘A recipient?’ She twirled the troll’s hair round in her fingers. ‘A recipient of what exactly?’
‘A nanochip.’ He slurped on his coffee.
‘And that is…?’
‘That thing you’ve got inside your head.’
This was what Gayle had mentioned the day of their first run-in.
‘And what does this nanochip do?’
‘That all depends.’ He glanced over his shoulder to ensure no one else was in earshot. ‘You think your exceptional memory is an accident?’ he said quietly.
She wouldn’t describe it as exceptional. It broke completely when she drank alcohol.
‘Yes. I have a knack for remembering things. Lots of people do.’
He looked heavenward. ‘No, no, no! You ever had a general anaesthetic?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘That is when they inserted it.’
‘This nanochip?’
‘Correct.’
‘But why would they do that?’
‘The government wishes to control our minds. I am a Turkish Kurd. Do you know anything about our plight?’
She did not.
‘There is a long history of unrest and separatist conflict. Much blood has been spilt. Brothers, sisters, children, all dead. When I was in my twenties, I was asked to become a Ranger, which means to fight for a country that didn’t recognise us as humans. For the love of my people, I could not do this, and for my treachery I was tortured.’
He described the brutality with which he and others had been treated, a terrible litany of barbarism that included beatings and electric shock treatments.
‘Long nights in pitch black cells, no food, no water, the screams of others becoming one with my own, praying to Allah to release me from the pain.’ He gripped the sides of the biscuit tin, knuckles white. ‘When I fell unconscious, they took their chance. This is when they implanted me. They wished to subdue me, to bend me to their will, but I resisted.’
He told her how, at first, he had fuelled his brain with whatever he could to stop them controlling his mind. He had studied philosophy and poetry, feasting on the works of Rumi and Saadi, then the theologians like Fakhruddin Razi. Over time he came to realise that the neuroprosthetic (as he called it) had given him special abilities – an incredible power of recall, the ability to retain information, the capacity to put together seemingly unrelated things and draw conclusions from them. He had always been a gifted pupil, but afterwards, he could understand hard-to-grasp scientific principles, and he became fluent in several languages. He also discovered the experiments weren’t limited to his country or that era; they dated as far back as the fifties, perpetrated by the CIA. Trials were happening all over, on different races, ages and sexes, from old men to young women, just like her.
At first, she’d interjected. There were moments that seemed so credible, so rooted in reality, that they could almost be plausible, and she’d wanted to probe further. But after a while, she realised that Hozan didn’t want to be grilled, he wanted to unburden himself, to get his thoughts out like a stream of consciousness that might not bear close scrutiny, but needed to be born witness to. And so she just let it wash over her. There was no ranting or raving as she’d originally anticipated. He spoke very softly and gently, like a kindly uncle who had decided to take her into his confidence. There was something indescribable that radiated from him, a core of innocence and wonder that had somehow stayed anchored in his soul, despite the agonies to which he had been subjected.
It was getting on to an hour later when he told her his reason for the recordings. He was building a dossier of evidence, a precaution in case anything was to happen to him, just as it had to Frank Olson, a scientist murdered after the CIA mind-control program MKUltra went horribly wrong.
‘It’s not an accident you are here,’ he said. ‘Unseen forces are shaping your fate.’
She was reminded of the mix-up that had landed her here. You could say that again. But that had been a freak occurrence, a silly misunderstanding she’d been too cocky to take seriously. What must it be like to have experienced genuine persecution, and to now live your life under its constant shadow to the point of delusion?
‘Don’t make it easier for them,’ he said. ‘Don’t share yourself for all to see. If they know that they gave you this power, they will want it back.’
An immense sadness swept over her that this clearly intelligent man had been reduced to sleeping in a car, conjuring up conspiracies to try and make sense of how his life had turned out.
‘Would you not give it back, Hozan?’ she said. ‘Be rid of it if you could?’
He shook his head and said something she didn’t understand. The words sounded mellifluous. Something from the Qur’an perhaps?
‘It is Rumi,’ he said. ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you. It is a curse, but also a blessing. People who need help, I can translate for them. People seeking asylum, I offer advice. This thing is going to save us all, Simone. I won’t have left my homeland in vain.’
He closed his eyes and hung his head. Simone waited a minute or so for him to continue. When he didn’t, she waited a minute more. After a third, he began to softly snore. She could easily have left then, made the escape she’d been so eager for previously, but she sat for a while longer. She didn’t doubt he had the capabilities he had described. But what a woeful waste of talent. The things he could do with that brain! He had been failed by the system; a once brilliant man reduced to this. Anger bubbled up like a spring. The dismay at what he’d recounted lodged like a burr in her skin. What was Gayle thinking, letting him live out his existence in a cramped car when surely, by now, he could have received housing? And what exactly was Jasper doing to help? Wasn’t there some programme he could go on, some medication he could take to make him more capable of integrating with the world? Did he have a case worker looking out for him? What about his family? Where were they in all of this? She got out the car and gently closed the door. She was going to give Jasper a piece of her mind.