Untitled — “Based on a True Story”

Spring 1395 · 2016

Translated from the Persian original.

Based on a true story.

Have you ever quit something?

Cigarettes, say, or alcohol, or a person, or even a belief.

For some kinds of quitting there are patches, for some there are pills, for some there are specialized clinics, and they bring you back to normal life.

For some of them they operate on you and cut something out; for instance, they remove part of your stomach and you have no choice but to quit food. Like you, I had things to quit too. I asked friends and acquaintances, and they sent me to a charm-writer, a fortune-teller and a psychiatrist.

In the part of town where the fortune-tellers are, you can hardly take your own car. I went by taxi, and after a lot of standing in line I said, Haj Agha, I feel sick, and right away he asked my name and my mother's name, and told me to do certain things, and hung a prayer charm around my neck, and wrote a talisman to put under the tree in the garden of my mother's house, and he also told me some things about my past. They were accurate, but they weren't true. He said, you have been possessed. He was a Muslim, but he had put a picture of the Virgin Mary on his shelf. He took some money from me and I left. At the time I thought Satan had possessed me, and that this old man, with what he did, had driven Satan out or protected me.

I had rarely told anyone this story, because I was ashamed for people to think I was that superstitious. After that I never found out what became of those devils, except that I had this delusion that the man had somehow gotten me off his hands, had, as they say, written me off. One night I was at a woman's place and she had just come back from seeing a fortune-teller, and she kept repeating that the fortune-teller had told her everything, and she insisted on telling me how a fortune-teller had read her whole past, present and future without even a cup. Since I'd gotten nothing from the previous soothsayer for a while, I said to her, could you get me an appointment, whatever it costs? She said yes, and over a phone call it was arranged that, since that lady doesn't take male clients, she would read my fortune over the phone late at night. Of course, what would come of it didn't matter to me. I wanted someone to certify that something, somewhere in my being, was wrong. In my fortune, or in a soothsayer's words, I wasn't looking for good news or a new name; just a few pieces to complete my puzzle would have been enough. The lady didn't call that night and didn't answer my calls. I fell into the delusion that maybe someone had told her to stay out of my business, and once again I couldn't bring myself to believe that there is a dark part in me. I remembered reading somewhere that Buddhists used smoke-producing substances, probably opium, to go into trance, and now I had started thinking of putting a little distance between myself and the ground and seeing myself from above. Could the darkness in me be seen from up there? I spent a night alone, by means of an opiate, in a strange sleep, not a deep one. Everything was sweet, as if there were no sleep involved, you have no body, and yet there was no being there but me, no one to whisper anything good or bad. I didn't even see my soul separate from my body. It was as if I were lonelier than ever. Maybe my soul, too, had gone off until I got better, to pay a visit to their homeland.

You know, when kids at school show off to each other, they mostly talk about the bad things they did behind their parents' backs. Who's going to come and say that last night he studied two extra lines to make his father happy? My dark half got to work right here: little by little I noticed that I was better at bad things, that I enjoyed them more, and most important of all, that I got better results from them. Later I arrived at the theory that if I could understand that half, maybe I'd be a successful, or a more successful, person overall, and it was as if, from the moment of that decision, everything stopped. No half works in me anymore. Believe me. I went and read whatever I could get my hands on, from anywhere, about the occult sciences and pseudoscience and the distribution of forces in the universe and religious and doctrinal beliefs and so on, so much that I became sure they had all taken on the shape of legend, as if at some point something had happened on Earth and all the sorcerers and evil forces, and even the forces of light, had lost their power. I got scared. For a moment I thought some urgency or a better opportunity had come up and they had all left the Earth and gone. And well, like us, they have villas outside the city too; maybe they come back now and then for a change of air. That doesn't make you alone.

My next experience: when I had lost hope in every experience, and after watching several documentaries about people who had come close to death, I decided to do something that would put me on the path of death, in such a way that I wouldn't even know, and would have the choice to come back. This kind of death, if deliberate, is also called self-murder; they say that before the ambulance gets there, a policeman is standing over you, so that if you survive they can arrest you for murder. So I'll skip explaining how, and confessing to this part. But there is something amazing in us human beings, and that's the survival instinct, which somehow, like a robot from the year 2200, knows how to keep you alive, and you can't get it to understand that this is a simple experiment and it should hold off for a few hours. Anyway, I got rid of it, and by the method I mentioned I went close to death itself. The first thing you don't experience in death is a tunnel. Rather, it's the same place you're in, with crooked, misshapen doors and walls, and everything blurred or more numerous than it really is, and you know very well that you don't feel your own weight, your arms and legs are limp, and you keep feeling like you're falling and sliding, and this becomes like a slide in childhood, and whatever you went through in childhood stands out in your memories, and well, a slide is something like a tunnel. The second thing that doesn't happen, which you've only heard about on TV shows, is the sound of a buzzing or a whistle, the idea that people hear sounds even for moments after death. The sounds are all heard, but in the midst of them I was searching for a voice from that particular force, so in the middle of this fear I tried to analyze the words. But I promise you, these sounds, whether they come from people or from the surroundings, are just edited and pieced together by your own brain's talent, and you build sentences of a repetitive kind, but under your own direction. No one is talking to you. Out there is the same out there where you were before. The next thing that never happens is fear of death, because at this stage you've lost the command center of your decisions and you think you're wherever your delusion tells you, and now you walk into a room, and I still haven't figured out how much of it was inside me, or how much was outside me or real, and how much I was really in it. This room had an old rotary phone, and it seemed you were supposed to talk to someone. You never experience years in a coma, or in this state of waiting, asleep or dying. It seems I had no call, and very quickly I found myself somewhere else, but I still wonder why I was there. On this journey, creatures like cockroaches and mice and snakes and carnivorous trees kept frightening me in forests, but none of them harmed me. It's as if, ordinarily, on this border between death and life, no one bothers you. That's why I felt that if I died I would become invulnerable, and now I'm telling you, there was no one there. Maybe I didn't go far enough, but as far as I went, there was no two involved. I'm sure the world after death is something about the size of that very room; I just still don't know who I was supposed to call and what I was supposed to say. Whenever anyone in the world talks about darkness and light, God and Satan, right and wrong, sin and punishment and so on, they should know well that the first thing they're blind to is assuming everything has two poles. Who knows, maybe, like everything in the world, everything has more metaphysical characters; maybe we should think beyond two (2), maybe as many as the numbers on a telephone. Without a doubt, only one thing set death apart from life: when you're in that limbo you're only busy watching, and you can't do anything, and you have no purpose. You can't even sleep.

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