“You must be joking! He's gotta be joking. Don’t overthink; go and sleep, dear.”
Nothing good happens after two; I should have remembered this from my favorite American TV show. If only I had slept earlier, this message would have slipped away, and I would have turned to debris in the morning, to be precise, American time Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at 8:00 P.M. I would never have known what happened and why. I see my beautiful wife, Mehry, sleeping peacefully again, fading away into the world of dreams. A bit later, I wake up and look out the window of my 1,600-sq-ft apartment and gaze at my beautiful town, Fereshteh, in the heart of Tehran. Wonder how we call a place home. When I first came here with Mehry, all I could think of was: how could I ever settle into this bustling, messy, crowded city! Now my fears are how, in the early morning, my crowded city will sleep forever, skulls and bricks flying over, crushing each other. Am I overthinking?
I checked the clock hanging on the wall again, maybe I have checked it thrice in the last two minutes, it’s 0237 – that’s how they call it, the military. Interestingly, I am noticing things now: have you ever seen the hand of the clock move backward for a minuscule amount of time every time a second passes? I think that would be inertia of motion – classical mechanics. I kept noticing absurd, random, and stupid things. Did you notice there has never been complete silence ever? We are born mostly crying on top of our voice, then there would be birds chirping, clock ticking, wind blowing, if nothing is happening, something is happening. Where will these thoughts take me?
Maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago, someone was standing under the same full glowing moon and had nearly the same thought. Maybe they saw, they wondered about silence, about light, about presence, absence, language, fire, food, forest, ghost, death, and (most importantly) life. This is the thought that carried us all the way here, 0239 April 7, a red-button distance away to blow our existence. Call me an overthinker like Mehry, but I want you to know thoughts never unite us or divide us; it is never good, never bad, never right, never wrong. Hear me out loud, this thought that makes me fall for Mehry, cry for Ammu, think about love, lust, existence, destruction, this thought is the only evil. Humans are not to be blamed for being born with the WMD within themselves. You also think I am mad? As long as you think you are as mad as I am.
Nothing exists, nothing ever existed, it is all in our heads – all in our thoughts. Mind you, repeat the question, “What about Ghormeh Sabzi that I am eating, hands I am holding, buildings I am building?” May I ask again – “what about that?” If you have not been blessed with the thought, you would never know the essence of it all. You would see, feel, smell, touch, even maybe love, and cease to exist – like the nightingale up in the sky, or the ant on my table finding its way out through the corner. “Wait! Are you somehow interpreting everything as meaningless – you sound like a nihilist?” “You are halfway there – I am saying meaning is meaningless and meaningful, I am saying everything and nothing.” I have never been fond of riddles, nor have I ever liked allegory. You must know Tithonus – the eternity perished his very idea of life, well, I say your thoughts are doing the same. “You don’t believe me?”
You have no way of believing me as of now. While everyone anticipated that DJT would do something crazy, no one predicted: "what that might be?" I could see the whole city light up and prepare as the clock ticks 0300. I logged into my iPad and found the whole world is also keeping an eye – some even throwing watchparty (with guilt) though. I looked around once again and found Hiroshima Diary lying on – what a perfect time to come across the book. The book flashed before my eyes. It is only a matter of a few minutes, then the mushroom cloud that took over Hiroshima will take over us. I am still unsure what thoughts were playing inside: I wanted to write a diary, taking into account what happens to Tehran in thirty minutes and beyond. If anyone ever is reading this piece of paper, let me take you to the night when it all happened.
Before we all get lost – like everyone – let me tell you what happened in the next thirty minutes. Everyone suddenly started following the news, the Pentagon Pizza Index skyrocketed, and deep inside, maybe everyone thought this was another joke by DJT. And at exactly 0330, my pen is running faster than ever – 3…2…1…
I heard a loud sound over the city, as if the sky fell over us, and a few lightning strikes afterwards – all in less than thirty seconds – then complete silence.
I looked at Mehry. Still in bed, still breathing, as far as I could tell. I shook her shoulder once, twice. "Mehry," I said. "Mehry, wake up, wake up, wake up." The shaking opened her eyes, and she saw me, and she smiled – one smile, the very one she gave me when I first held her hands in the premises of Tehran University – and then nothing. No words. No blinking. No turning over. Nothing. She looked right through me as if I were a mirror that reflected the whole world to her. I knew something was dropped in my beloved city, but it did not blow everything up under the mushroom cloud. We are all alive – nothing has happened. Except that Mehry is not waking up, but she is breathing, so she is alive. But why is she not waking up? “Mehry, Mehry!” Nothing, I hear back no response from her end.
It took me half an hour to realize what just happened.
I switched on the television. What I saw still shocks me to my bones: reporters banging their microphones on their heads, a few jumping, some running, and never to be seen again. I switched through channels from Paris to Delhi, to Cape Town, to Ankara, and everywhere I found people doing the same – moving, but not moving toward anything. Breathing, but not living toward anything. It feels as though the whole world had become a body whose processor has stopped functioning and has been cut. Am I dreaming? Maybe I slept when I saw the news, and it’s all in my dream. Even if I am dreaming, what a deadly dream it is! I picked up my pen. I did not know why. I just picked it up and kept writing – everything that I was feeling, I kept writing word by word.
I walked outside into the streets of Fereshteh at around 0430. The city was in one piece – no rubble, no debris, no Hiroshima, as if nothing had happened. All the buildings were standing, but most of the shops were closed. Everything was the way it was supposed to be – except no prayers were heard in the morning. The sun came, and I could see a few cars drifting into each other at low speeds. I think it is because drivers had simply stopped steering, bicycles lying in the middle of the road where their riders had calmly stepped off, and maybe walked away.
People were everywhere, and I was completely alone.
The men and women of my city were acting as the people I saw on television. They were walking, sitting, staring, some eating whatever was in their hands, some not eating at all, even as food sat right in front of them. I tried to speak to a woman standing outside my favorite bakery. She did not even look at me – she acted as if she did not even hear me. I tried speaking to a few others. No one spoke to me – the language is gone. Everyone either turned away or stared at me. My mere words would not suffice in explaining the feelings when I looked into their eyes. There was no fear – they turned away just the way you would turn away from a tree you had noticed and not care about. I tried again, I tried a man on the corner. Same. A child sitting on a step. Same.
I sat on the corner near the mosque. I remembered reading about the Black Death in my history class – a Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani, wrote how fathers abandoned children and neighbors refused to take care of neighbors, friends left the hands and fled, letting their near ones die in agony and hunger. Back then, I thought: how cruel of them! Now I think the environment is so inhumane that they have lost the thought of caring for another. Was that really a breakdown of human decency? What fell on Tehran last night did the same thing. In this faster. Far faster, and painlessly.
I went back to my apartment again, failing to understand what was going on. I tried calling Mehry a few times – she did not respond. I heard a loud banging – someone on the upper floor is throwing a heavy object at the wall. This is the very first time I started feeling uncomfortable, unsafe, maybe. I had to leave the city – everyone has gone mad. But a ripple of hope was still there: maybe I am dreaming. And Mehry would wake up and shout at me, “YOU ARE LATE FOR YOUR WORK.” I carried Mehry to the parking lot and got into my car. I also took a bag with dresses, carried a few thousand bucks – I converted all my Rials to dollars.
As I drove across the city, I found a few people walking, a few crawling, a few jumping, a few rolling in the street, and even with all these, nobody seemed to be suffering. The sound, the chaos in the city, is still there. But the music is gone.
Over the next two weeks, I discovered hunger, death, and complete madness. People were dying of hunger; they were dying slowly. A few were still eating, but not out of hunger; hunger seems not to exist. I think their thought to reach for food – the real thought, not the reflex – had been extinguished. I know it is hard to explain in words, and harder to witness. They would walk past a market full of food and not stop, steal, or take food. A man died three streets over from where I am writing this, next to a shop that still had bread on the counter. We all grow numb to suffering. For a few days, I fed people when I could. I also tried feeding Mehry; she came to consciousness last week, but she is reluctant to eat, and she wants to leave my car and run away, so I have chained her in the car. I cry often times staring at her eyes – she is asking something, I can sense it. But we have no way to communicate. I think the explosion destroyed all forms of communication among us.
I knew I could not withstand what was to come in Tehran. I had to escape and go somewhere. I had to find someone, someone like me, who still thought. I drove north out of Tehran, through the Alborz mountains. I saw military checkpoints and toll booths, all abandoned. The highway inns are standing in the middle of nowhere. I decided to drive forward. I looked at Mehry sitting in my “passenger princess” seat, and I knew where I wanted to go. Before marriage, I told Mehry about Constantinople – Istanbul; how it was the city that held for a millennium. It sat at the edge of two continents. It literally is the crossroads of civilization, the city where soldiers, traders, mercenaries, and refugees had passed through curving stories for a thousand years. I had a feeling: if any city on earth had learned how to survive, I thought it was that one. I drove through northwestern Iran as the land flattened, greenery faded to a yellowish hue of desert, and the sky beyond opened. I stopped at open shops and took food, leaving folded dollar bills on the counters that no one would ever pick up. I passed through the border at Gurbulak without stopping – ironically, I said to myself, “Passing through an imaginary border is free only when you can’t imagine.” The Turkish countryside was the same as that of Iran.
I reached Istanbul after three days of driving, sleeping in the car, and trying to feed Mehry – she barely ate anything after the day. On the morning of 10th April, the city rose before me across the sea. I crossed the Bosphorus Bridge, and guess what, Istanbul was the same.
I should tell you now what I believe happened. Let me give it to you, the same way I gave myself – in two halves, because I still cannot decide between them, and I am not sure deciding matters, and any conclusion exists.
During the Manhattan Project, scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, feared the first atomic test might ignite the atmosphere, causing a chain reaction that could incinerate the world. But their speculation was wrong, and nothing happened to the whole world. But this time their fear turned to something, and the bomb they dropped this time is far worse than any atomic bomb. I would call this thing "the thought bomb." It did one thing: destroyed all rational thought of any person who, at the time of impact, was not engaged in any cognitive and creative action.
This is my first hypothesis.
The MSS algorithm – whatever team DJT actually built and never tested – releases its impact fastest within a similar medium. In this case, probably oxygen. The primary fission triggered an intoxicating foam with two characteristics: it kills your thoughts forever, and it works only if you were not actively thinking your own thoughts at the moment of impact. This probably was the best weapon to destroy a civilization overnight. What they got wrong is that they never bothered about the speed, and guess what – the thought bomb spread at the speed of light. One blink, and it was all gone. Orwell wrote that, “... the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes.” When words are taken from people, their freedom of expression is hindered, and the thinking behind them collapses too. I always read that as a warning about political propaganda, about politicians spinning lies. I did not anticipate it could be a prophecy about the literal erasure of thought itself. But how could I be an expectation? Why are my thoughts still alive?
I survived because I was writing. That is my first hypothesis, and I believe most of it.
My second hypothesis, I believe less, but I cannot let go of it, because of Mehry's first smile when I called her.
What if every individual is normal? But they see everyone else is showing an anomaly in their behavior, as if the thoughts are altered. What if the bomb's mechanism manipulates thought in such a way that we cannot perceive each other as normal, nor communicate? What if I walk through a city of full, dreaming, interior people who simply cannot see me, or see a different version of me, and I cannot see them, the same way they can not see me? What if Mehry, behind those open, unblinking eyes, is having the longest thought of her life – a thought so interior and vast that no outward signal can escape it? What if Mehry had tied me with the ropes in our car and was crying for me? What if the weapon did not kill thought, but turned it entirely inward, forever? I know it is far too complex, but it might so happen.
I do not know which is worse.
I took my car from Istanbul. I drove it until the roads made driving impossible, then I walked. I am heading towards Çamlıca Hill. I read that Çamlıca Hill has a wide view of the city of Constantinople. The edge of two continents. The city that took a millennium to conquer – for centuries, people walked by, soldiers came and fought, traders bought and sold.
The journey took longer than it should have. The roads were mostly empty, with a few people walking by, who do not look where they are going, but never seemed to walk into me either. I passed through the mountains. When I felt hungry, I stopped by any open shops, but there were no shopkeepers. I left notes and dropped a few bucks, which I immediately understood no one would read or take. I kept writing in this diary the events in my life and kept driving.
I reached the hill as the sun was low. I walked until I found myself at the cliffs above the Bosphorus, where the deep blue water of the sea pulls toward two horizons at once, and you can see where one world ends – the eastern, and another was supposed to begin – the western.
And here, standing at the edge, the whole of our hundred thousand years of journey came to me at once. I felt so happy. Last few days – do not get me selfish, time and again, I pause – and picture how blessed I am. I enjoy the beauty of words. I stare at Mehry: she is so beautiful; her eyes sparkle with pearls; her nose swirls with droplets of flower buds; her hair swings swiftly, shading the fierce sun; she breathes in a harmony that shackles all the pain in heaven and earth.
Then the reality disrupts all the beauty of words. I forget her, I call it all a hallucination. Just a memory. That day, standing on the cliff, I saw the person hundreds of thousands of years ago under the same full glowing moon I was staring at the howling sea. I saw Hiroshima. I saw Chornobyl. I saw people setting foot on the moon. I saw the beauty of truth. I saw my mother. I saw every thought that ever carried a human being from one moment to the next, and I understood, maybe for the first time, that thought was the most beautiful thing ever. Our thoughts are always good till we lose control of ourselves, but we are all born sinless. It was always about this: the wanting to tell someone else what you had seen. Maybe it all came from our ancestors trying to share the elephant that they had seen in the forest, or how the rain droplets fell after the lightning, the unbearable need to share the view.
And now there is no one left to tell.
So I ask you – you, the person who is somehow reading this piece of paper, which means either I survived long enough to leave it somewhere or something far stranger has happened – I ask you this one question, and I want you to sit with it:
If the whole of humanity's thought is gone, and I am the last person to carry it all – all the progression, advancement, evolution of it – do I have an obligation to stay?
Is being the last thinker a reason to live, or is it the loneliest possible reason to let go and lose everything?
I am standing at the edge. The water is very far down, very far down. The sun is going into the Bosphorus. Mehry did smile at me, the warmest thing in this cold, dead, thoughtless world.
I am going near, or maybe, I am going far. Do I hold back, or do I lose myself?
The rest is yours to decide.