The cuts the priest had left on his face while shaving him seemed to follow the lines of his prominent cheekbones, matching his long, white, upturned eyebrows and lending an added air of irritation to his already stern, uneasy-looking face. For the first time, X saw his grandfather’s short white hair combed to the right rather than swept back. Even the stillness of death had failed to change his grandfather, yet somehow he resembled a man X had never seen before. The change in his hairstyle unsettled him.

The priest looked at the old man lying in the walnut coffin adorned with tulip carvings. As though seeking God’s approval more than anyone else’s, he asked, “Do you like it, sir?”

The priest might have taken a failure to appreciate his efforts not as a reflection of his own incompetence, but as an insult to his faith. At every funeral, he had heard so much praise from hypocrites too cowardly to acknowledge what was right before their eyes, people who would pronounce this shoddy work flawless simply because a stain of holiness had touched it. He had heard their admiration so often that he had begun to grow accustomed to ugliness, to love what he had grown accustomed to, and to sanctify what he loved. He believed his talent was a gift from God. His soul, so widely admired, must have risen above countless others and attained seniority in the presence of the Almighty; he could feel it throughout his entire body. The priest was absolutely certain of his own holiness. He was on the verge of discovering his first miracle.

Perhaps, after waiting ten minutes for an answer, the priest’s patience had finally run out. Turning to X, he said, “Just before he left this church for the last time, he must have looked at himself one last time and seen that I had chosen the right suit for him. Do not grieve. His journey is only beginning.”

For a brief moment, he became a conqueror, liberating the church from the silence that had occupied it.

X looked at his grandfather again and paused.

“Looks as though his journey ended long ago,” he said.

The priest raised both hands at the same pace and slowly placed them on X’s shoulders. He held X’s gaze, waiting in the darkness of his own eyes until he had bought enough time to ensnare the young man’s attention. After that, his words became little more than background noise to X.

The millennia-old lie pouring from the priest’s mouth in a divine tone carried the scent of Sufism. As it filled X from within, it burned the back of his throat and brought the taste of anger to his mouth. With every passing minute, the priest’s efforts to keep talking made the allure of silence more inviting.

Desperate to silence him, X blurted out something absurd.

“Could I borrow your comb?”

The priest looked bewildered and gestured toward his completely bald head.

X used his hands to smooth his grandfather’s closely cropped hair back. Then he turned to the priest.

“Now I like it. Would you leave me alone with my grandfather?”

As the priest walked away with heavy steps, X heard the wooden door close behind him. He looked at his grandfather once more.

Death was cold.

The blankness of his face announced that his body had long since ceased to belong to him. In a few days, it would begin to rot beneath the earth, and even the last traces of blood that had circulated through his veins would disappear. Flesh would separate from bone; the man who had once thought, grown angry, and laughed would quietly disintegrate in the darkness. All that would remain was a face gradually fading from the memories of those who had known him, and beneath the soil, a body no one would dare look upon to see what it had become.

Perhaps this was why people convinced themselves that they could feel no pain after death. A lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed to have felt pain during surgery despite being under anesthesia had, for some time, become a topic of conversation even during Sunday services in churches. To some, her account was nothing more than a lie. To others, it was a sign of a dark truth reaching beyond the body.

A single question surfaced in X’s mind:

*What if the pain doesn’t end when we die?*

He stared at the blankness of his grandfather’s face. What if a scream lay hidden behind that expressionless face, a scream no one could hear? What if death silenced the human body but could not silence consciousness? To remain awake beneath the earth, unable to move or open one’s eyes, feeling one’s own body decay… To learn the meaning of eternity in a place where even asking for help was impossible, without knowing when the darkness would end…

X felt a shudder of fear.

He remembered that his grandfather had not wanted to be cremated. Was there a reason for that, or was X projecting his own fears onto the old man’s final wishes? Perhaps the answer lay hidden inside that motionless body, somewhere no one could reach anymore.

Those ten minutes of silence spent with his grandfather were a record for the old man. After a lifetime of talking, even this formidable intellect had, for the first time, listened for so long. In his final years, the old man, regarded as the most brilliant mind of the past century, could barely tolerate listening to anyone for more than five minutes.

He had been born into a society where geniuses were recognized and appreciated. In time, this would be remembered as humanity’s good fortune. It had allowed him to direct his talents toward the right pursuits, develop them, and find greater opportunities to put them to use.

The discovery he had unearthed from a time far beyond his own loosened the laws of classical, modern, and quantum physics. It broke the laws that refused to conform and cast them out of the universe, never to function again. It was forcing the laws of physics to evolve in the truest sense of the word.

The old man knew he had brought humanity’s greatest discovery to light. This discovery, which shaped the universal laws of physics, opened the doors to every impossibility those laws had forbidden, smashing down the doors that refused to open.

After losing control of his discovery, the old man had succumbed to helplessness and withdrawn from the world to face its consequences alone. Yesterday morning, he had eaten breakfast, read while drinking his coffee, and written as he listened to compositions hundreds of years old. After finishing feeding his only companion, he had decided not to begin another day.

In that mysterious moment when the day ended and the next never began, he had taken his own life, choosing never to have existed in the thirteen-billion-year history of the world.

For X, it was just another day. At some point, the sound of the wooden door was heard again. By the time X got home, it was already two in the morning, and only one question occupied his mind:

Why was man afraid of death? Was it because he would lose his existence, or because one day he would no longer even know that he had ceased to exist?

* * *

He filled his pipe and lit it. He drew a deep breath, held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, then slowly exhaled. As the smoke rose languidly through the darkness of the room, the thought in his mind began to change shape along with it.

If the laws of physics held even at the beginning of the universe, then God would have had no freedom to choose the initial conditions. The idea drifted into the air with the suspended smoke. When the air cleared, X found himself staring into his own reflection in the mirror. He watched himself for a while. Then, as though someone else were sitting across from him, he asked:

“How much freedom did God have when creating the universe? Before God determined the laws of the universe and pressed the start button, what laws was He Himself subject to?”

There was no answer. Worse still, the question itself rested on uncertain ground. In a model where time, space, and the laws of physics came into existence with the universe, what did it mean to ask what had existed before the universe? If time did not yet exist, what could the word *before* refer to? The very concepts X invoked to explain God’s existence lost their meaning the moment he began to question that existence.

Did the universal laws that allowed complex structures such as human beings—capable of investigating the universe, questioning their own existence, and questioning the nature of God—to exist have no effect on God?

But what truly troubled X was not whether God was subject to gravity. The real question was whether any being could be exempt from the rules it had established for itself. The existence of a lawgiver did not prove that it could stand outside its own laws.

X drew one last breath from his pipe. The ember he left in the ashtray flared for a moment in the darkness, then went out.

As he lay down, one final question slipped between his lips:

Was the human mind condemned, in its search for the beginning of everything, to chase its own tail forever within an endless chain of causes?

When X closed his eyes, the clock on the wall continued to divide the seconds. Somewhere in a corner of the universe, a star was dying; life persisted on worlds its light had yet to reach; distant galaxies sank into their own darkness, needing no witness. Nothing diminished because a human being was falling asleep. Nothing paused to ensure that he continued to exist.

Amid this indifference, X’s consciousness quietly faded. It left no trace behind, no void to announce its absence. The mind that, only moments earlier, had believed it could unravel the secrets of the universe was now unaware of its own existence.

Humanity’s greatest delusion was to mistake having a place within the universe for having meaning to it.

The universe’s delusion, meanwhile, was that it had yet to realize that one of the most consequential events in its own history had already begun.