Walking through Istanbul, listening to a half-dozen languages, and seeing dozens more, the call to prayer sounds. I am stuck to the sidewalk, hearing an eerie, sad, and distant melody commanding those applicable to stop their day and bow their heads down to their god.
The cries of the Muezzin stop thoughts from flowing. The realization that I am in an entirely different land creeps through my core, and I look at the end of the sleeve of my leather jacket. I am holding a coca-cola. I finish drinking it, and light a cigarette. I sit down beneath an unnamed phallus that rises out of a square, and smoke. A testament to conquer, a testament to a fuck of the land. A man tries to sell me a banana.
We find the bath house we were looking for and walk in. The men are separated from the women, and we are taken to a small room to disrobe. Protected by miniscule towers, we head downstairs to enter the bath. As the door opens, a blast of heat and sweat emanate from the heated marble, coating my face and the inside of my lungs with hundreds of years of purification.
The domed ceiling of the bath house let in light, and air. It allowed the temperature to moderate, the hot air rising through the holes and allowing our breath to escape along with it. Shallow breaths, obscured by the intensity of the heated marble. I lay with my back against the hottest wall I have ever touched, and waited.
Quite patiently, and quite contentedly, breathing in the steam that rose from the ground. Listening to the water trickling quietly, roaring through marble amplification in the diminished aqua-ducts surrounding the massive marble slab in the center of the room.
We have payed a man for his body, so he could use his to clean ours. His name was Adem.
He entered the room and asked us to lay down on the slab, facing the holes in the roof of the dome.
He took out a pad and slowly started to work the dead away from my skin, ripping off pieces of old flesh to reveal a shining, new exterior that hadn't been exposed to the steam for years. With each pull, he stripped away parts of the past. He then asked that I lay face down, massaging my back, stripping it of more dead flesh. Tearing away pieces of tension that I buried deep inside my muscles.
Then he covered me in soap. Allowed the froth to work as oil, working more tension out of every inch of my body. As I sat up, he filled a bucket with water. I could hardly breathe, the heat working its way into my lungs, and the soap obscuring my nostrils such that I couldn't inhale.
I thought I would collapse.
Adem took a bucket, and started splashing tepid water all over my body. Tepid water that felt chilled, such that in comparison with the viscous heat rising from the floor, that offered such reprieve to my lungs and to my soul. For a brief moment in time, I felt the hatred that I carry so deep within my body turn frail, and seep out of my pores. Just a little. Each splash lifted the dead from my exterior,
We paid Adem for his body, and he cleansed ours. What he doesn't know is he stripped bits of my soul away, allowing a newer, cleaner soul to take its place, one with less tension, physical and unreal.
I walked out of the bath house, lit a cigarette, and bought another cola, and waited for the Muezzin's sounds to float through the air again.
