“23” by Seyfettin Steele

A young man wakes up to find himself on a train. He doesn’t know how he got there; perhaps he had too much to drink and stumbled aboard. He doesn’t know where he’s going. All his knows is that it’s a train of 23 cars. When the conductor asks his for his ticket, the young man discovers he miraculously has one in his pocket, simply marked “One Ticket.”  The conductor tells him that the driver of the train would like to greet him and thank him personally for taking the ride.  

The driver of the train, of course, is in the front car or engine. The young man begins a journey through the train cars, which are unlike anything anyone has ever experienced on a journey by rail. Each car is a scene, an event, and an emotion, and like life, it can be utterly nonsensical and confusing. 

 

Seyfettin Steele

23 by Seyfettin Steele is the story of that train journey. As he travels forward, the young man finds a car empty except for the presence of a maintenance man, a car with a white cat, a dining car where he discovers he’s now wearing a white tuxedo, a fleeting bit of romance, a car of pain and depression, a Wild West shootout, and several others. Gradually, the reader, now used to an constant reorientation, comes to see the 23 cars as both the unfolding and remembering of a life. 

 

Seyfettin Steele is the pen name of Aaron Omeroglu, a young lawyer and writer who received his law degree from the University of Sussex Law School. He lives in Brighton in England.

 

23 is not Kafakesque; no one wakes up in the body of another creature. But it is a disorienting ride, to wake up in a place and you don't know how you got there. And that is perhaps the point, and the theme, of the story.