Save the Last Bullet for God (24 page)

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.”

She opened the message:

I wish there was another way to write this
book without upsetting you.

Wilhelm Reich

Part 3

HOMO AVATARIUS

Son of man, direct your
face against Gog, of the land of Magog…

(Book of Ezekiel, Chapter: 38)

Limbo

I suppose I regained my consciousness first.
My first perceptions were a feeling of lightness, a sweet sense of
happiness, and a combined sense of ease and serenity. I scanned my
surroundings and saw only a dark sky full of stars. The stars were
so bright, so close, so clear, and so numerous. Their colors ranged
from yellow to red to blue. I had never seen such vibrance
before.

I wanted to lift my head and look around,
but it was as if I didn’t have a body or couldn’t move it if I did.
I wanted to close my eyes, open them again, and start from the
beginning, but, no matter how much I tried to blink, my eyes
remained open. The happiness and serenity gave way to desperate
fear. In despair, I tried to lift my hands to see them, to stand
up, to move and turn around, but nothing made a difference.
Suddenly I felt the absence of something that had always been
present but now was missing. I had lost my sense of touch. There
was no feeling and no gravity. Knowing the reality of such things
and being unable to describe their absence caused my brain to
wander in wild directions.

I began noticing other things were absent.
My sense of hot or cold. My sense of taste. I didn’t even know
where my mouth was. My sense of direction was lost. I wanted to
scream, but, of course, there was no sound. Waves of panic consumed
me and I felt the need to run and escape. Everything was crashing
in upon me.

After some time (a concept I now greatly
questioned), I felt a wave of something akin to sound: a whine, or
something like it. Then I heard, “Welcome, sir!” Even in my
helpless state, I perceived those words, and I sensed where they
were coming from: from inside. It was an inner voice.

“Who are you?” I asked, trying to command
the mouth I didn’t feel. No sound came out, but it must have been
enough to think about speaking because my question was
answered.

“I am the Wake-up Support Protocol.”

“What? What are you talking about? In a
daze, I mumbled through the rapid ideas flooding my mind.

“Sir, you came here through a difficult
process. I am here to re-create your consciousness, answer your
questions and to direct you. In fact, you have created me precisely
for this purpose. I exist to help you through the difficult process
of awakening and transforming into a new form by helping you
integrate your newly gained knowledge and experience into your
existing—”

“Wait, wait a minute,” I interrupted. “You
said, ‘Welcome.’ Where have I come from?”

“From Earth.”

My confusion brought silence. I wasn’t ready
for such things. This was just too much. “Where am I now?” I
asked.

“You’re in Limbo, sir.”

“What? Who gave this place such a name?”

“You did, sir.”

The answer only confused me more and brought
more questions.

I tried to remember who I was. Though
fuzzy, I thought I remembered everything. Yes. Oktay. My name was
Oktay. I was a doctor, yes. My wife, Elif, and then...a TV show.
There was a contest, and I had written a book,
The Disjointed Letters
or
The Code of the Disjointed Letters
or something
like that. The memories attacked my mind like river rapids
barraging the walls of a dam.

There had been a contest, something
like
Big Brother
, and
somebody had been eliminated each week. I had stayed with the other
contestants for weeks. Fatin, with the furious red eyes; Ender,
innocent, intelligent, and self-sacrificing. But how had it ended?
The last scene was hidden behind a curtain of mystery. Three of us
had been left at the end. There had been a miraculous vision of
water droplets and an incredible discovery. And they died, yes, I
think they died, but I…I passed through a bright tunnel. I… I
…

I died… I’m dead.

I began to repeat it to make myself accept
it. It was the thing that everybody knew would happen to them but
never experienced. Now, it had happened to me. I had died.

What is limbo? Is it the place where people
wait to go to heaven or hell? Yes, it must be. And if there is a
limbo, then those other places must also exist.

“
What is happening? What are you
talking about? What do you mean I named this place “Limbo”? Did I
create it like I created you? Am I God? Did I live on Earth in the
image of a human and come here to recover? What are you talking
about? What am I talking about?”

I emitted a silent scream as a flood of
runaway thoughts overwhelmed me and I was seized by an incredible
fear.

“Sir, please calm down. You have just
returned from a very difficult life, and this was only one of the
countless iterations of a process which is more difficult and more
dangerous each time. Each time you wake up here and re-attain the
knowledge of your old talents, the process gets harder. However,
you have the strength to get over this, just like you did at other
times, and that’s why I’m here. As you have many times before, you
will regain your abilities by remembering step by step. But first,
calm down and don’t torture yourself. Just give yourself some
time.”

I tried to count to ten, and then back to
zero. When I was done, I said, “Okay.”

“You are not God, sir.”

This answer made me feel an awkward
relief.

“This is an interim station between the
Earth and the Moon. You called this place Limbo when you first
arrived here.”

“What do you mean my former self? Am I not
Oktay? Or have I had many lives? Is this place like a reincarnation
center or a waiting room?”

“Sir, you are not ready yet, and I cannot
give you any information that might affect the re-construction
process. But I can tell you that this is not a reincarnation
center.”

“What is it then? What’s process are you
talking about? How long does it take? When will I be able to feel
my body? When will I get to eat something?”

“Sir, please calm down. We will gradually
restore knowledge according to the protocol, and then, you will
re-learn everything. We have done this many times, although it has
been more difficult each time. However, the process must be the
same.”