Chapter 1

Because of his jutting cheekbones, the nicks the church priest had left while shaving him harmonized with his long, white, upturned eyebrows and stirred up a separate kind of irritation in his grandfather’s stern face, which already looked uneasy. For the first time he saw the short white hair his grandfather always laid back combed to the right. Even the dullness of death had failed to change his grandfather, yet it made him look like a man X had never seen before. The change in the shape of his hair had unsettled him.

The priest looked at the old man in the walnut coffin with tulip carvings and, as if seeking God’s approval more than anyone’s, asked, “Do you like it, sir?”

The priest could have taken the failure to appreciate his effort not as his own incompetence but as contempt for his faith. At every funeral he heard the admiration and praise of hypocritical cowards, people who, wherever there were eyes to see, would call this slapdash job flawless, a job that should have made anyone uneasy, simply because a stain of holiness had splashed onto it. He had heard it so often that he had started to get used to ugliness, to love what he was used to, and to sanctify what he loved. He believed his talent was a gift from God. His soul, admired by everyone, must have risen above many souls and gained seniority before God, for he could feel it throughout his whole body. The priest was dead certain of his own holiness. He was very close to discovering his first miracle.

After ten minutes of waiting for an answer, the priest’s hope seemed to have run out. Turning to X, he said, “Just before his presence left this church, he must have looked at himself one last time and seen that I had chosen the right suit for him. Do not grieve. His journey is only beginning.” For a brief moment he had become a conqueror who freed the church from the occupation of silence.

X looked at his grandfather again, stopped for a short while, and said, “His journey seems to have ended long ago...”

The priest raised both hands at the same speed and slowly took hold of X’s shoulders. In the darkness of his own eyes he waited, eye to eye, until he had gained the time to take X’s gaze captive. Whatever he said afterward was, for X, nothing but background noise.

The thousands-of-years-old lie that came out of the priest’s mouth in a divine tone and filled X from within carried the smell of Sufism. It stung the back of his nose and brought the taste of his anger into his mouth. With every passing minute, the priest’s effort to keep talking made the allure of silence more inviting.

To shut him up, X blurted out something absurd.

“Could I borrow your comb?”

The priest, bewildered, gestured at his hair, which had fallen out completely.

X smoothed his grandfather’s stiffened hair back with his hands. Then he turned to the priest. “Now I like it. Would you leave me alone with my grandfather?”

When he heard the wooden door close behind the priest, who walked away with heavy steps, he looked at his grandfather once more.

Death was cold.

The face was blank, and that blankness said the body had stopped being his a long time ago. In a few days it would begin to rot under the earth, and even the last blood that had moved in his veins would be gone. The flesh would let go of the bone. The man who had once thought, flared up, and laughed would come apart quietly in the dark. What would be left was a face the people who knew him remembered less and less clearly, and underground a body nobody would have the nerve to look at to see what had become of it.

Perhaps this was why people had convinced themselves that they felt no pain after death. A lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed she had felt pain during surgery although she was under anesthesia had been talked about for some time, even at the churches’ Sunday services. To some, what she told was a lie; to others, a sign of a dark truth reaching beyond the body.

A single question appeared in X’s mind:

_“What if the pain doesn’t end when we die?”_

He stared at the blankness of his grandfather’s face. There might be a scream behind it that nobody could hear. Maybe death silenced the body and left the mind awake. Lying awake under the ground, unable to move, unable to open your eyes, feeling yourself rot, in a place where you couldn’t even call for help, with no idea when the dark would end, and finding out that way what eternity meant.

X felt himself flinch.

He remembered that his grandfather had not wanted to be cremated. Was there a reason for it, or was X loading his own fears onto the old man’s last wishes? Perhaps the answer lay inside that motionless body, somewhere no one could reach anymore. These ten minutes of silence he had spent with his grandfather were a record for the old man. After a lifetime of talking, this genius had listened for so long for the first time. Known as the most brilliant mind of the last hundred years, in his final days he could not stand to listen to anyone for more than five minutes.

That he had been born into a community where geniuses were recognized and appreciated would, when the time came, be remembered as humanity’s good fortune. That fortune had let him direct his talents to the right places, develop them, and have more opportunities to use them.

The discovery he had dug up from a time far beyond his own was loosening the laws of classical, modern, and quantum physics. It was breaking the rules of physics that would not conform and casting them out of the universe, never to work again. It was forcing the laws of physics to evolve, in the truest sense of the word. The old man knew he had brought the greatest discovery in human history to light. This discovery, which shaped the universal laws of the cosmos, was opening the doors of every impossibility those laws had forbidden, and breaking down the doors that resisted opening.