Shiraz. Prologue

Winter 1403/2024

Sometimes, when the insomnia became unbearable, Zahra would read—not physics, not reports—she would read the strange, marginal blogs of Western intellectuals; it was like looking at another planet, a planet that Uncle Javad had invented in the living room of their old house in Shiraz, only he didn’t know he was inventing someone else’s future, and they don’t know they are living in someone else’s past. That night she stumbled upon an article about some newfangled philosophy, the «Neoreactionary movement,» the «Dark Enlightenment»; she read about calls to replace democracy with corporate governance, about techno-monarchy, about traditional values purged of religion, she read the names: Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel, and she felt nothing, no surprise, no fear, only a cold, cosmic weariness, because she had already seen it all before, seen it on the dusty carpet in the living room, in the yellowed newspaper clippings that Uncle Javad would bring—not Hossein, Javad, or was it Hossein? Memory confuses names like a centrifuge confuses isotopes, separating and mixing them at the same time. No. It was Javad after all.

Peter Thiel talks about the failure of democracy, almost word for word what Papa wrote in 1997, wrote in the margins of the Quran, which was blasphemy, but he would say that the Quran was also a code that needed to be cracked to understand the enemy’s design, and the enemy uses our sacred texts against us. Nick Land quotes ideas about an «exit from the system,» which is straight from my uncle’s notes on a «hijra from modernity,» an exodus from time, like Moses from Egypt, only Moses knew where he was going, and we are fleeing into nowhere, into the void that we ourselves create. Curtis Yarvin and his «neoreaction»—it’s a carbon copy of my uncle’s theory of a «return to the sacred vertical of power,» only for my uncle the vertical led to Allah, and for Yarvin, it leads to a CEO, to the chief executive officer of the universe, who doesn’t exist, just as the conspiracy my uncle was searching for didn’t exist.

They don’t even know, these smart people from Silicon Valley, they don’t know that their «revolutionary» ideas were conceived by a half-mad colonel and a theologian from Shiraz who were looking for a conspiracy where there was none, and in the process created a philosophy that was later appropriated by the very people they considered their enemies, or maybe I invented that they invented it, maybe in that childhood room where I drew diagrams, connecting names and dates, I wasn’t creating a conspiracy map, but a blueprint for the future, and now the world is being built according to my childhood scribbles, as if from a blueprint, like the schematic of a centrifuge that separates uranium into isotopes, and life into truth and lies, only where is the truth and where is the lie when a lie becomes the truth twenty years later?

Yesterday Nasrin asked me about her grandfather. I told her he died in a car crash when I was fifteen, a simple accident, a truck driver fell asleep at the wheel, but even as I said the words, I could hear my uncle’s voice: «There are no accidents, Zahra-jan, only patterns we haven’t yet learned to read,» and I have been reading these patterns my whole life, like reading the ECG of a dying heart, searching for rhythm in the chaos, and finding only the echo of my own pulse.

It all began not in Fordow, and not in Sarov, where I played World of Tanks for the first time, choosing the German Jagdpanther, the tank hunter, the ghost hunter, the self hunter. It all began in Shiraz, in the year the spring smelled of roses and betrayal, although what betrayal is there if no one betrayed anyone, it’s just that my father died and my uncle went mad, or the other way around, my father went mad and my uncle died, or they are both alive in a parallel universe where Khatami lost the election and history took a different path, the path they were drawing on the dusty carpet.

I was a teenager, I was fourteen, or fifteen, an age when time flows not like a river but like honey, getting stuck in your throat with the sweet nausea of first love and first death. My uncle had just returned from Tehran, where the conservatives had lost the election, May 23, 1997, 2 Khordad 1376, dates like coordinates in spacetime, points where reality fractures. Uncle Javad, yes, definitely Javad, sat in our living room and laid out newspaper clippings on the carpet like a game of solitaire in which every card meant catastrophe, or like a periodic table of elements in which every element was a way to destroy the world.

«They won, Ali,» he would say to my father. «But this is only the beginning. The real game is yet to come.»

I remember thinking then: what game? Who is playing? And why do adults speak in riddles, like Hafez in his ghazals, like the physics teacher explaining Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: you can’t know a particle’s position and its velocity at the same time, you can’t know the truth and live with it at the same time. No. But what I really remember are not the words, but the smell: the roses of Shiraz, mixed with the smell of smoke from the burnt newspaper clippings that Uncle Javad would set on fire, saying that truth burns brighter in the flames. And I remember how the ash settled on the carpet, creating patterns that I would later learn to read as maps of the future.

Now I know the answer, or I think I know, which is almost the same thing in a world where JagdpanFer_83 turned out to be me, writing letters to myself from the past into the future. We are all playing. Each of us with ourselves. And we only learn the rules of this game after we have already lost.

But maybe that is the victory—to lose so beautifully that the defeat becomes an art, like the ghazals of Hafez, like the roses of Shiraz, like the atomic decay that transforms matter into the pure energy of light.

Fourteen years old. Twenty-seven years ago.