Room 105
Pain permeated my body. A mysterious, bitter presence, it swelled in my chest like a sandstorm in a volcanic city that knows rain only from ancient tales, where dust accumulates and the sun remains somber. I cast my heavy body onto my bed's rug, the pain accompanying every inhale and exhale.
At thirty, a lazy pharmacist, I count endless days. I don't know the year of my birth. When I once asked my mother about it, she drowned me in stories of wars and conflicts that tore apart this country I never felt I belonged to. Perhaps, in another life, I was never born at all. Maybe my mother, or the one who pretended to be, cast me out of her heart on a dark, rainy night, as she gathered bay leaves in that rare city.
I have no siblings. One night, I suddenly found a doppelganger in my dream, a face I didn't know yet bearing the features of my soul. I wept to him of the oppression and pain that wrung me for remaining in this city I don't love. And every morning, I wake alone, my eyes probing the room's darkness, while the echoes of the dream fade like ash in the wind.
Not long ago, I recalled another life. I lived in the country's capital, where nights glowed with a special beauty, uniting me with friends as defeated as myself, and girlfriends from my university department. One of them would hum, her voice flowing into my ears like captivating 80s pop music. I don't know how many women I loved, but all I know is that I now live with a girl who says she's my wife. We work in the same pharmacy, and in the evening, we return to an empty house abandoned by its owners who believed it haunted, for the men of this house suffered from impotence and constant suspicion. No one has lived in it since us. We have no friends, no neighbors, no acquaintances. Only the old woman who brings me medicine every morning like an angel from an old evangelical and religious film, without uttering a word to my wife. I believe she's the one who cast me from her heart in the year of wars and conflicts in my gloomy country.
One dim morning, I suddenly remembered an old friend, a software engineer who had just returned from a distant country after his scholarship ended halfway through due to one of this world's wars. I thought he was sixty, still unmarried, yet he knew more about women than I, who fancied myself a friendly ladies' man among my friends.
"Hayyat, why haven't you married? Don't you fear that everything you've gathered, legitimately and illegitimately, will go to waste?" I asked him once in a moment of clarity.
He smiled broadly, like a crack in the wall of time. "Hayyat": "Let it go to waste, my friend, we will all go to waste. And they too will go to waste." Then he looked at me with piercing eyes. "Why do you see yourself as special because you have a wife?"
"A wife? I have a wife?" I asked, without moving my lips, yet this madman heard my reply somehow.
"Hayyat": "Yes, you have a wife and a child hidden inside you." He nodded towards my chest. "So he doesn't see the dirty city's sun and its streets." Then he gestured towards a list of six bald men, of random ages, and colors resembling the smell of a morgue refrigerator. "They also have wives."
"Who are 'they' you mean?" I asked, as I began to glimpse a thin thread connecting my fluctuating reality and my usual delusions.
"Hayyat": "Come on, tell me what's new, residents of Room 105?" He smiled deeper.
"A room?" I mumbled, as many thoughts crowded my head. One was about female bodies, how I impudently slipped my hand between one's breasts while handing her a box of diabetes medication. I thought I was sitting in a bubble, not a room, a bubble of witches' skins from the Middle Ages.
He approached the white bald man, whose name was Zamim, a featureless middle-aged man who worked as a criminal judge. "It is said he issues death sentences for men with elderly wives because he reveres this type of woman. Some say it's due to his early orphanhood, as his mother died giving birth to him, and his father fought for communism in distant mountains, sleeping with the wives of his comrades who protected his back in battle."
"Hayyat, cool it!" I interrupted playfully, my eyes darting between the ghosts filling the room. "You sleep with a woman every day, steal her gold, and leak her photos to her husband, leading him to become a killer or suffer a stroke! Then you sleep with her fourteen-year-old daughter!"
Hayyat fell silent, then continued in a whisper: "Hayyat": "Her daughter who committed suicide from the school roof. Actually, I was talking to that shadow of the tenth body I hanged yesterday, and I peed on his corpse, then put a black bag over him, and played revolutionary music he used to love listening to in our youth. We were revolutionaries, dreamers, and friendly, spending most of our time in camps for marginalized black people whose tents reeked of sex that intoxicated us more than our noble goals of justice, and here he ended up hanged in my bedroom. Mercy on him, because he confided in me that he suffered due to his cowardly stance with my relatives who took my father's inheritance, who died at sea while crossing to a distant country. Also, he felt harsh regret because he once deprived me of a lucrative job, and once he literally tried to assassinate me through a suspicious children's game he kept in Room 105."
It doesn't matter. The other person next to me is named Muray, he works in medicine. His wife left him due to his addiction to politics and Pepsi, and his failure to lick her penis during mating. "Hayyat": "Mating! You don't know why I think I'm sitting with strange creatures unlike humans, yet certainly not animals."
Muray, in his sixties, swears he licks her womb, but she closes her eyes and calls out another man's name.
"If only he'd calm down!" Much commotion, dry winds outside, I heard the voice of my dead mother, my mother who pierced her heart to bring me into existence, and it groaned with a moan resembling funeral dirges… "Ummmmm ahhhhhh ooooooooh yaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh rabbiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii ummmmmmmmmm."
I look at the six corpses hanging in my room in their black bags.
A collective voice from among the corpses chants:
"We are but stories that lost their way
In cities that know no rain
Save for a moan echoing in the depth of darkness
And whispers of ghosts that find no rest in death
Take our souls for your days to flourish, oh descendant of the wind"
I don't listen well, for any melody or chant makes me feel repeated stings in my right ankle, but wait:
Where is my wife? I think she went to another city where it rains. She's a daughter of rain, and she always got depressed by this dusty, dry weather.
"Wait, I think she's the one they say is my beloved, and for her departure, I was going to drink corrupted wine that would kill me." I mumbled. Suddenly, I felt cold drops on my face. "Wait, it's raining now! But where is the room? Where are the six bald men who were mentioned? I go directly to an empty street, pull down my pants and defecate in defiance of passersby... Wait, I'm not a serial killer. I just wanted to free them from their sins. They have a feeling of blamelessness, and that's the greatest sin a human can commit."
I kicked their hanging corpses violently, feeling the sky raining, and that I had children and a beautiful family, and that my mother was feeding the sheep outside. While it rains, yes, it rains. This is another day I wake up, no one in the ghost house. Wait, this isn't a ghost house, this is a small house on a green hill. Wait, are the corpses of the residents of Room 105 real? Did I hang them in a way that resembles contemporary art in the alleys of Paris?
I hurried into the room, no one was there. My wife was knitting wool clothes, while the rain outside had stopped. My mother had disappeared. And from afar, I saw my beloved, whom I don't know how I abandoned, carrying a basket of blossoms and running away.
Where is my wife? Where is my child? Where is my mother who brought me into existence from her heart? The corpses must be brought back, they must be found, they must be hanged and hung in Room 105. "Oh you, you will not know rain, you will not know your families, you will not be cured of your pains if I let these corpses return to their daily tasks."
I run quickly and fall into a river that happened to pass by the house's door. And as I drown, I gazed at many faces, but it wasn't raining at all, because I hadn't hung the six corpses of the residents of Room 105. Where then do I escape? There must be a sin for it to rain, for me to return to songs and my childhood. I don't know, but whenever I lose the six corpses of the despised Room 105, I feel the end of the world and the rain disappears. They must be hung again.
Wait, I remember. I have a beloved now in a distant country. She's started telling me it doesn't rain there either, and I told her yesterday that we must prepare a plan to bring the six corpses I keep in my room to all cities and villages in the world suffering from the absence of rain.
It was a dark day as usual, and I barely opened my eyes and looked down. Drops of heavy rain were passing over my body, and below, those six corpses were carrying me on a medieval chair to beneath the balcony of my distant beloved who carried no blossoms and never left her room, Room 0.