Chapter 1

The cuts the priest had left behind while shaving his grandfather caught the light along his prominent cheekbones, their marks in keeping with his long, white, upturned eyebrows. Together, they lent an added air of irritability to the old man’s already stern, uneasy-looking face. For the first time, X saw his grandfather’s short white hair combed to the right instead of swept back. Even the stillness of death had failed to alter the old man, yet somehow he looked like someone X had never seen before. The change in his hairstyle unsettled him.

The priest glanced at the old man lying in the walnut coffin, its surface adorned with tulip carvings, and asked, “Do you approve, sir?” His tone suggested that he was seeking the approval of God more than that of the living.

The priest might have taken any failure to appreciate his efforts not as a reflection of his own ineptitude, but as an insult to his faith. At every funeral, he had heard so much praise and admiration from hypocrites too cowardly to admit what they saw, men who would declare this shoddy work flawless simply because a stain of holiness had touched it, that he had begun to grow accustomed to ugliness, to love what he had grown accustomed to, and to sanctify what he loved. He believed his talent was a gift from God. His soul, so widely admired, must have risen above countless others and earned seniority in the presence of the Almighty; he could feel it throughout his entire body. The priest was absolutely certain of his own holiness. He was on the verge of discovering his first miracle.

Perhaps the priest’s hope had finally run out after ten minutes of waiting for an answer. Turning to X, he said, “Just before his presence departed this church, he must have looked at himself one last time and seen that I had chosen the most suitable suit for him. Do not grieve. His journey is only beginning.”

For a brief moment, he became a conqueror, rescuing the church from the silence that had occupied it.

X looked at his grandfather again and paused.

“Looks as though the journey’s already over,” he said.

The priest raised both hands at the same speed and slowly placed them on X’s shoulders. He held X’s gaze, waiting in the darkness of his own eyes, buying time until he could ensnare the young man’s attention. After that, the priest’s words became little more than background noise to X.

The millennia-old lie pouring from the priest’s mouth in a divine tone carried the scent of Sufism, and as it filled X from within, it burned the back of his throat and brought the taste of anger to his mouth. With every passing minute, the priest’s efforts to keep talking made the allure of silence more inviting.

In an attempt to make him stop, X blurted out the first absurdity that came to mind.

“Could I borrow your comb?”

The priest looked bewildered and gestured toward his completely bald head.

X used his hands to smooth his grandfather’s closely cropped hair back. Then he turned to the priest.

“Now I like it. Would you leave me alone with my grandfather?”

He listened to the sound of the wooden door closing behind the priest as he walked away with heavy steps, then looked at his grandfather once more.

Death was cold.

The blankness of his face announced that his body had long since ceased to belong to him. In a few days, it would begin to rot beneath the earth, and even the last traces of blood that had circulated through his veins would disappear. Flesh would separate from bone; the man who had once thought, grown angry, and laughed would quietly come apart in the darkness. What remained would be a face gradually fading from the memories of those who had known him, and beneath the soil, a body no one would dare look upon to see what it had become.

Perhaps this was why people convinced themselves that they could feel no pain after death. A lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed to have felt pain during surgery despite being under anesthesia had, for some time, become a topic of conversation even during Sunday services in churches. To some, her account was nothing more than a lie. To others, it was a sign of a dark truth reaching beyond the body.

A single question surfaced in X’s mind:

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

He studied the blankness of his grandfather’s face. What if a scream lay hidden behind that expressionless face, a scream no one could hear? What if death silenced the human body but could not silence consciousness? To remain awake beneath the earth, unable to move or open one’s eyes, feeling one’s own body decay… To learn the meaning of eternity in a place where even asking for help was impossible, without knowing when the darkness would end…

X felt a shudder of fear.

He remembered that his grandfather had not wanted to be cremated. Was there a reason for that, or was X projecting his own fears onto the old man’s final wishes? Perhaps the answer lay hidden inside that motionless body, in a place no one could reach anymore.

Those ten minutes of silence spent with his grandfather were a record for the old man. Even this formidable intellect, after a lifetime of talking, had listened for the first time in his life for so long. In his final years, the old man, regarded as the most brilliant mind of the past century, could barely tolerate listening to anyone for more than five minutes.

He had been born into a society where geniuses were recognized and appreciated. In time, this would be remembered as humanity’s good fortune. It had allowed him to direct his talents toward the right pursuits, develop them, and find greater opportunities to put them to use.

The discovery he had excavated from a time far ahead of his own loosened the laws of classical, modern, and quantum physics. It broke the physical laws that refused to conform, casting them out of the universe, never to function again. In the truest sense of the word, it was forcing the laws of physics to evolve.