King Louis - TLC 42

In Bursa the wireless signal from the Achebadem hospital emergency room was weaker than a heart monitor in Room 101 where you confront your deepest fear.

It’s the last room you want to enter next to the Genocide Museum in Nom de’ plume, Cambodia filled with 2,000,000 skulls. Ghosts inhabit The Killing Fields.

In the 1527 hammam near Culture Park hairy muscular men using eucalyptus tree bark scrubbed soapy clients and pummeled epidermis into oblivion. Pinpoint light filtered through stain glass. Illuminated businessmen relaxed in arched cubicles. An octagon hot pool rippled reflections of mosaic light.

Across town King Louis, a native barbarian, moved into the teachers’ apartment in a 10,000 year-old neighborhood. He was green, neurotic and angry. A tall invincible insatiable invisibility corrected his mean variation.

He’d escaped to Turkey after selling Chinese appliances and silicone breast of chicken implants in Berkeley-by-the-sea. He hated women. He loved Roman history. His perpetual fantasy was to be a Roman general leading warriors from Troy to Crete to Bursa.

“Take care of my horse,” he ordered the male TLC receptionist.

“Serve my food,” he commanded the female receptionist after a day expanding his imaginary empire.

They despised his attitude and character.

He sat around the apartment watching The History Channel. He loved German U-boats, planes, bombs, destruction, concentration camps, gas chambers, the Holocaust and death. He kept the volume LOUD while eating dill pickles from a jar. He was a big, loud, sad, passive-aggressive lonely jarhead. 

He’d last a month. He made everyone’s life miserable. He expended zero effort to understand the culture because he felt like he was entitled to be stupid and paranoid.

“I’m afraid they put something in my food,” he said one day referring to a restaurant below walls covered with graffiti screaming, “Romans OUT!”

“They’d have a good reason,” said a receptionist.

He washed his plastic clothes every day. He wasted hours, days and his pitiful life in the bathroom coloring his hair, trimming nose debris and afraid of germs, washing his hands until they disappeared.