“You know,” she shouts, “I can see you hiding out there in the bushes. Why don’t you come in and tell me what you want?”

“Maddy,” I say, standing in her doorway. “Madeline.” Maybe the extra syllables will help my case. “Can I have a taste?”

“I’m sorry, sugar,” she says, “but I’m all drained dry.”

At noon, Reginald and the Professor stand guard over the samovar, waiting for it to boil, while Maddy offers Liam his usual midday snack. It was Liam who started this whole mess. A few days after Maddy’s arrival, he began bawling as he related to her that he was traveling the world on the last of his dead mother’s savings. She laid his head against her nightgown and told him to hush. He dropped crocodile tears into her lacy décolletage, and she urged him to nurse. Pretty soon, all the backpackers had sob stories or problems of some sort for which Maddy’s milk was the sweet elixir of relief. That was weeks ago.

Liam is a teenager from Quebec and he has disgusting ginger dreads and he doesn’t yet know what it means to be alive. Like clockwork, when Maddy’s milk runs out now, he buries his face between her cleavage and cries. He also gets the hiccups. He cries and hiccups at the same time. Reginald watches them with longing. Reginald is a speech pathologist from London who struggles with his own stutter, and he might even be more in love with Madeline than I am. The Professor, whose real name I have forgotten, has no family or friends or connection to any living person from what we can determine, as if he simply manifested here spontaneously as the archetype of lonely gentleman scholar. He’s an elderly fellow from South Africa with a cane and a limp and a wizard beard and he’s got a fancy Oxbridge doctorate and he teaches English literature at some university in Ankara. Madeline burps Liam and rubs his back. “There, there, sweet pea,” she says. She begins to sing a lullaby. The melody soothes him. “That’s better,” Maddy whispers. “Why don’t you go play with the other boys?”

Liam skips out the door in search of Seung Hun, whom he adores, though Seung Hun can only be bothered to toss him the occasional sardonic scrap. I close my leather journal and am hot in pursuit. I know they’re probably off to smoke more of Liam’s dead mom’s stash of medicinal marijuana in the ruins. As I walk toward the amphitheater, I tear at the words I’ve written and scatter them along the path. I’ve been shedding language since my arrival in Çirali—a sentence here, the inchoate jangle of a phrase there, though sometimes only the indiscriminate coughing up of solitary nouns and verbs is all I can manage.

“The big bunk room smells like lactic farts and low self-esteem.”

I hid that sentence beneath Carl’s pillow some months ago. He never found it, for all I know.