Code of Disjointed Letters: ( Doomsday Will Arise From the Past (15 page)

The coffin—decorated with a few silver ornaments and a dark-green cover with golden-yellow Arabic texts—was placed in the hearse. The roof prevented the raind from reaching the coffin, but could not prevent the wind from waving the thin yellow tufts at the edges of the coffin cover.

A few cars were lined up behind the hearse. The young woman sitting in the backseat of the first car leaned her head on the glass and, with red eyes, stared at the pavement near the hospital entrance.

As a lumbering garbage truck slowly wedged itself between the convoy, cabs, and hospital gate, and as the taxi driver watched the traffic jam through his windshield, the door of the backseat opened and a young customer entered. He had a lot of files in his hand and a laptop bag. “Good morning,” he said. “Istanbul University. I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“
Don’t worry,” the driver said. “Soon, the road will be free, and I can take you.” He had already started the meter. On the radio, the DJ spoke:

“Dear listeners, nonsense about the end of the world has been occupying the media for a long time now. Otherwise intelligent people have increased their ratings by influencing and frightening people who already had irrational tendencies. They out-talked even us. According to them, the Mayans foresaw the end of the world thousands of years ago and marked the end of their calendar. These big men told us that there was an area in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy from which energy was spreading. Ordinarily, they said, it couldn’t reach us because of our position, but on December 21, this energy would arrive at the correct angle, and when it reached us, we would gain understanding of all there was to know, thus experiencing a dimensional change. But the truth is, on this morning, on December 22, we have only achieved the awareness that those people have been making fools of us.”

Listening indifferently, the man in the backseat concentrated on his thoughts, trying to slow himself from the rush he’d been in. He had spent months investigating the topic of “social structures affected by a single person.” Finally, he was done with his thesis, and, if it was approved—if the teachers didn’t ask for too many changes—he would submit it.

The main idea of his thesis related to an opinion before articulated in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Asimov stated that communities could be predictable enough to formulate what they would do and when they would do it. The science that examined this phenomenon was called “sociomathematics.”

This branch of science was so precise that the behavior of a society could be predicted, hour by hour, with as much accuracy as the behavior of gas molecules at a certain volume and pressure. However, as the past demonstrated, one couldn’t predict what a single person might do. Thus, the influence of an individual on a society couldn’t be known for sure.

However, knowledge gained through history had often increased by sudden leaps of social improvement, and these leaps usually came from the work of one exceptional person. In other words, there was no need for the seven million people currently alive to discover relativity and formulate its theory. It was enough for Albert Einstein to discover it, articulate its theory, and present it to the public in a way people could understand and use.

The ability to explain the perceptions of the occasional, extraordinary discoveries of individuals in this massive community evaded most people. As such, the radio host was mistaken in his opinion. For everyone to gain a new social consciousness, there was no need for everyone to believe the world would end on December 21, 2012. If it was true that there was an energy that could reach out to us, then the shift of consciousness that such knowledge created would be enough, even if it affected only one person. The only sufficient and necessary obligation of this person was to clearly convey what he had discovered to the rest of society.

The garbage truck was now trying to pass using subtle maneuvers. There were a few frustrated shouts and the blare of the horn as the voice of the radio host filled in the background.

“People, get it now! There
is
no doomsday. You still have to go to work; you’ll still be stuck in the same traffic jam. When the boss gives you a roasting today, you’ll forget all this nonsense. Focus on what’s in front of you; that’s my message. Anyway, enough talk—I would like to read you some lines by Cahit Sıtkı:

And the heart says to its God:

I have no fear of the suffering you give

I willingly give my consent to every trouble, as long as

The day doesn’t fall away from my window.

“On this gloomy, cold December morning, we have a song that will remind you of your emotions and scatter the clouds in the sky—I know you’ve all missed
Bulutsuzluk Özlemi
singing ‘I Can’t Take My Words Back.’”

The garbage truck had almost dislodged itself, and it was about to go furiously on its way. The funeral convoy began to pull away. As the taxi waited to depart with its engine idling, the melody of the song filled the car.

I can’t take my words back,

I can’t rewrite what I have written,

I can’t replay what I’ve played,

I can’t turn back again…

If I get tears, don’t let them dry up.

“I can’t take my words back.”

The notes of the song slipped through the half-open driver’s window like a strand of thin lace. The notes mingled with the wind and became a caress on the green cover of the coffin where Oktay lay.

“I can’t rewrite what I’ve written.”

The melody of the song, spread into the wind, reached the hospital walls, and shook the branches of the pine trees, as it slipped through the open window on the upper floor of the hospital. Sitting in front of his computer under raw fluorescent light, the psychiatrist stared at a half-written sentence on an otherwise empty screen: “Everything began with a question...”

He had been sitting there for a long time, and although he knew what his proposed book would say, he was hopelessly unable to put it down on paper.

“I can’t replay what I’ve played.”

The lines of the song rose and rose, and with a swirl, slipped across the gray silhouette of the city of sorrows, Istanbul. The notes entered the half-open window of an ordinary flat in an ordinary building. A programmer sat in front of his own computer with a fresh cup of coffee beside him, clicking away furiously with his mouse as Oktay’s camera recordings from his last night played on the screen. The programmer had been in the same position since the psychiatrist e-mailed the footage to him. Instead of feeling that he was sharing the last moments of a human being’s life, he felt like he was stealing something that didn’t belong to him.

The patient on the monitor had sunken cheeks and half-closed eyes. The white sheets of his bed stood in contrast to the gloomy shadows of the darkened room; his feet were fastened to the edges of the bed with leather straps. Meanwhile, his thin body trembled with involuntary movements that vibrated along the leather straps like waves hitting the shore. The only thing that looked human were his continuously mumbling lips, now thin with purple lines.

A grinding sound came from the computer: the program was working. Using a motion sensor, it converted the movements of Oktay’s lips into text. All the words the patient had mouthed or mumbled that night were now being put to paper. But it was obvious that there were a few different styles of speech and expression on display–voices that might have belonged to other people:

The sun is about to set. Dense smoke conceals its last rays and a smell of blood and a metallic taste is in the air as you stand on a giant battlefield full of the half-buried corpses of your friends and your defeated army. The war is over; your enemies are sharing the spoils and digging up the bodies, but they ignore you. You stand in the middle of the battlefield with a broken sword, screaming and begging to the sky. No one hears you; they don’t care about you. Neither do your enemies—even the opportunity to fight and die with honor is denied you. “I killed all my friends in war, all the people by my side, with my own hands. I destroyed them, and now I’m trying to find my voice, rising from their corpses—Im begging for war. I’m begging for one more chance. Don’t you hear me, still?”

The programmer read the printout and threw the paper aside. “I guess he was just reading an epic poem,” he said.

He was already tired and exhausted. He had hardly completed his previous work, having finished it at exactly 03:14:15 the night before. It wasn’t like he didn’t feel shocked; he still had goose bumps from the fear and anxiety he felt. He had been sleepless for a long time, and he probably would go on like that.

He had been working on the project for weeks: converting all the Arabic suras into digital language and formatting the unexpected golden rectangles that the suras’ information created. Even the so-called disjointed letters, had filled in the missing parts of the rectangles with a magical touch: 114 planes, with information on them, organized one after another in a three-dimensional form.

Just as Oktay had described, there were three dots, formed by clusters of disjointed letters that were organized on both the front and back of the plane, one of which was at the beginning of the sura. A little geometry knowledge—the rule that one plane passes through three dots—enabled the programmer to process, by using the Cauchy integral formula, the letters and data that intersected with that new plane. Later, he had transferred the data into visual templates.

His findings could only be defined by an analogy of stopped time and it appeared as if drops of water hung in the air in a room during a heavy rain. Each water drop was a letter, a digit of information, and it was so dense that you couldn’t see further because of the concealing property of the transparent water. Then,
bam
! A thin, oblique plane crossed the room like a guillotine blade, and the page created by the plane appeared.

As the massive plane swung like a sword across the room full of water drops, it was dry. It touched almost nothing. The only thing that appeared was an empty planar page and a tiny single dot near the top right of an asymmetrical corner—a
nun
(the one and only disjoint letter in the first revelation with disjoint letters,
Kalem
) in the sura
The Prostration
.

The tiny, pitch-black dot was now shining on the Arabic letter on the monitor. The programmer thought how it was like tossing a coin a thousand times and always having the coin land on its side.

The patient’s striking insights had impressed the programmer so much that he’d studied this third dimensional plane of the Qur’an by educating himself for weeks on the Arabic letters that made up the plane. But he had never thought he would be so shocked. If it weren’t so late, he would call the psychiatrist immediately.

Instead, he stayed calm and rechecked all of his calculations. He tried to define another approach to the angle through other letter orders and combinations. If he weren’t tired and hadn’t needed to check the data, he would have set to work on that, too. He made sure to document his findings and thoughts and e-mail them to the psychiatrist. If the patient hadn’t died, the doctor might have tried to apply the findings and improve the treatment. Even now, the programmer felt compelled to ask whether they would find anything else if they further examined the recordings by playing them backward.

“I can’t turn back.”

The hearse and its convoy were about to disappear as the taxi turned a different direction. The last discernable line of the song
—
“
If I get tears, don’t let them dry up”
—departed the window as if to chase after the convoy. With difficulty, it reached Elif as she leaned her head on the window. She looked around as the lyric disappeared into the tiny shimmer of the teardrop slipping down her face.

At Oktay’s request, he was to be buried next to his mother in the family cemetery in Silivri. As they made their way to the burial site, everything around Elif screamed of meaninglessness. The words “Everyone lives his own doomsday” were ringing in her ears, and Elif felt that she was at the edge of a cliff. She was falling down and being swallowed by her grief.

Trying to slow her thoughts, she looked at her mobile phone, first checking the calendar, then the missed calls and messages. She felt it was probably best to delete the messages one by one. As she did, an old, unread message caught her attention. It came from a time when Oktay was alive and didn’t have his obsession with writing a book. She wished she could go back to those days and change things. One more chance was all she asked for—only one. In an infinite universe, there was no such thing as “impossible.”