Save the Last Bullet for God (10 page)

With that, the bubble was burst. For some
inexplicable reason, I felt a bitter sadness when I heard this.
This awkward man might have been trying to accomplish something. He
clearly wanted to have an impact on the future but couldn't figure
out how to do it. He put a carefully designed plan into practice,
but it ended up being ridiculed by everyone. I remember saying to
my friend, “I wish he would have been successful and shocked
everyone.” My friend just looked at me and shrugged.

Who am I?

I’m Oktay, and I have recently been knocked
into middle age. I work in an ordinary private hospital and live an
ordinary, unsurprising life. I have only a few crumbs of life
experience, having been stuck in a busy professional life during
years that have passed by too quickly.

I spend most of my days in a hospital under
raw, fluorescent lights, writing MRI (magnetic resonance image)
reports. Like many people, I enjoy watching football (soccer for
the Americans), and I never get tired of watching sports or sports
news on TV. I can talk for hours about the current state of
Fenerbahçe, one of Istanbul’s premiere football teams. Much of my
remaining time consists of having dinner with relatives and going
to the cinema with Elif (whose name means “alpha”). Those are my
most exciting moments. Besides that, I either write MRI reports
online, read books, or browse comics and make Elif read the jokes
that I think are good.

Lately, I’ve become more interested in such
issues and subjects as evolution, time travel, the mysterious
symmetry of the universe, the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis,
astrological divinations, ancient civilizations, the research of
the stone-alchemist philosophers, theories about life in outer
space, and particularly the secret code in the Holy Qur’an. If I
find a book on any of those topics, I get completely absorbed in
it. If I see one of them covered in a documentary, I’m glued to the
screen.

Obsession is a voice that harasses you until
you are forced to obey its commands, regardless of how ridiculous
they are. What's even worse than obsession is when you’re aware of
its hold but can’t seem to control it. It’s like having someone
inside you who is constantly demanding your attention.

Here’s how my obsession began:

I was surfing the internet during my time
off of work, checking my e-mail, and scanning news sites, when I
randomly came across a news article about Wilhelm Reich.

Suddenly, memories from my youth and
years at university flooded my brain. I found myself once again
wondering about his will. So I searched it, but only found a few
comments about the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund on Google.
Frustration! I came across some photos of his will and decided to
download the document in case I might find something interesting
(It was only five pages). I read the will, but soon found that
there was nothing worth waiting 50 years for. There weren’t any
word games nor any mysterious hints.
Maybe
his will has changed
, I thought.
There might have been something else in the safe, and someone
decided to hide it
. Still, I struggled to understand
the purpose of keeping the will under lock and key for 50
years.

In my search, I also found the photos of the
moment when the will was declared, but nothing jumped out. Having
time on my hands, I enlarged them and looked at them more
carefully. Nothing. I got annoyed and closed all the browser
windows and went back to writing my MRI reports.

In the evening, Elif came home and we ate
dinner together, talked for a bit, and watched TV. Tired, she said
she wanted to go to bed, so I followed, but I couldn’t get to
sleep. As I lay next to her, the photos of the reading of Dr.
Reich’s will appeared in my mind’s eye. Something was nagging at my
thoughts as I too slowly nodded off to sleep.

Suddenly I jolted awake.
The pin!
I remembered that in the
picture; there was a pin that passed through the five pages of the
will. I immediately got out of bed, turned on the computer, and
opened the photo. There was the pin, curved on both edges. It went
through the first page, passed through the text, and came out
through the last page. I found the PDF images of the will and
downloaded them again. I examined each page, one by one. The pin
had made a hole on a certain letter on each of the last four pages.
I wrote down the letters in order: J-U-N-G.

I was so surprised and excited that I
checked it again and again. Sure enough, J-U-N-G.

I remembered Jung from university and what I
heard about his interest in metaphysics and his career as a
psychiatrist. Then I remembered a story about Jung that I had heard
a long time ago:

Jung once saw a rare, dead bird in a dream.
After waking up, he took a walk in the woods and came across the
same dead bird. He made a very interesting conclusion: “So the
future affects our dreams!”

The idea of a future incident affecting the
present, and even the past, suddenly occupied my mind. I then
remembered Jung’s work on the nature of obsessions. He said an
obsession prevents the person over whom it is exercising influence
from evaluating incidents and options in a realistic way; it only
presents certain options to the person and uses these options to
control the person’s behavior.

I found myself surprised and excited by the
presence of a message in the will and, more precisely, by the way
this message was encrypted. This was more interesting to me than
word itself—or its meaning. The idea of a pin making holes through
letters on pages reminded me of a bookworm. Not that kind of
bookworm. An actual bookworm, who might reach a letter, a small
piece of information, while eating its way through a book.

I began postulating:
if the worm eats through pages one by one and
makes tiny holes on each page, I wonder what it sees.
Or, more precisely,
what it
reads.
This, then, raised another question: Is it
possible to write a book in such a way that it can be read on both
the fronts and backs of its pages? Would it be possible to use such
an encryption? In other words, can the text have another message
that, though it is written on a two-dimensional page, can be read
only in the third dimension? The bookworm can neither see the text
nor the signs written on the front and back planes, but it can
encrypt a third-dimensional code.

I challenged my hypothesis by noting that
the worm question can’t be applied to every case; it might be
questionable to apply it to books written in reverse, for example,
(that is, those read from right to left), such as those printed in
Arabic.

Pondering that new question, I reached for
an Arabic book to examine its layout and validate my answer. At
that moment, a new idea flashed in my mind. The thought of a
bookworm eating an Arabic book naturally made me think of the Holy
Qur’an. I imagined our bookworm moving on the front-and-back plane,
through the pages. Then I tried to visualize what letters it would
encounter.

That led me to an even more compelling
question: Is it possible that the Holy Qur’an has a text or a code
encrypted in the third dimension?

After that last question came to me, I began
to lose track of time.

Over the next weeks, I focused on this
subject with increasing intensity and, I must confess, my work and
relationship suffered.

I spent hours wandering through the
internet, collecting as many relevant pages and links as I could
find. I downloaded countless documents and took copious notes. The
house started to overflow with books related to my questions. I
even made friends with the deliverymen who dropped off my endless
book orders. Unfortunately, I found that most of the sources on the
market were superficial at best.

Perhaps the main problem was that
nobody in fourteen hundred years had looked at the Qur’an in this
way. There had always been some references and studies on the
possibility of the book containing one or more codes, and there had
even been some advancement in those investigations, but fourteen
hundred years is a very long time. In the course of history, all
the verses of the Qur’an have been on the tongues and in the hearts
of countless people. They have been recited over and over again and
translated from language to language, and country to country.
Still, the Qur’an has never changed; the first revelation is read
now in the same way that it was first read: “Read!” (19:1)
Not
write
,
see, look, touch, taste, think, do, fight,
breed
, and not
defeat others
—no, no. “Read!” is the first
order.

People have always read the Qur’an: it is
read by the army before going to war, by parents to their newborn
babies, by newly married couples, and by descendants to the spirits
of their ancestors. Family names were written inside the covers,
and individuals who read the Qur’an were put in the highest regard
in their house. For centuries, the Qur’an bore witness to history.
It sometimes functioned as a piece of history and sometimes as the
whole of history itself. When I asked the Qur’an its nature, it
told me, “I’ve got a secret. I’m the greatest miracle. I don’t have
a look-alike or a replica. I’m multilayered.”

As it has existed for fourteen hundred
years—always in front of our eyes, always on our tongue, always in
our ears, unchanged—we have studied its miracles. The miracle of
the number nineteen, the disjointed or unconnected letters in its
early suras or chapters, the numerical values of the letters in
abjad or the numerological calculations and their infinite
algorithms, and its repeated words pointing to certain magical
numbers. We have tried to uncover its mysteries, but so far, no one
has voiced the idea that the answers to its mysteries could be in
the book’s third dimension.

I decided it was necessary to print a
version of the Holy Qur’an with transparent pages. I wanted to take
the book in my hands, touch it, and look at the order of its
transparent pages, one on top of another, hoping to see the code
that was written in its depths. I knew it would also be necessary
to record its godly voice and acoustically layer the recorded
digital pages, and try to listen to the voice also (if possible)
encrypted in the third dimension. My only hope was that I had
enough knowledge, intelligence, courage, technology, and
understanding of mathematics to do so.

Potentially, the fourth-dimensional
implications of the data would have to be examined to decipher
whatever codes they contained.

According to my research, scientists had
discovered as much as eleven dimensions— the eleventh referring to
supergravity, a field theory that combines the principles of
supersymmetry and general relativity. If the eleventh dimension
really existed and we could find it, then, when our hearts were
open, we would also have to determine whether it contained a
reflection of the Qur’anic data.

But I knew that humans at that time had a
gene for skepticism.

I decided to shorten the road rather than
accelerate the engine.

My passion for the subject drove me to
pursue the Qur’an’s mysteries. The excitement and the possibility
of achieving a thing that no one had ever seen or known soon
influenced my entire life. I spent my days aligning the transparent
Arabic pages one after another, focusing on the possible messages
occurring in between. The rest of the time, I lost myself in
thought, staring blankly at the scenery through the window.

Elif grew agitated. I was not affected by
her attempts to pull me into a social life or agitated at her
ignorance of what I told her. I believed at any minute, the answers
I sought would become clear in my mind, and I tried with all my
might to crush my despair when it failed to happen.

To calm myself, I developed the following
systematic method of thinking and evaluating the available
data:

One: After the holy book began to reveal
itself, it wasn’t put down on paper for twenty-three years. At that
time, it was read with a traditional style in a divine language,
(not Arabic) but always with a human voice.

Two: The order of the currently written
suras in the Qur’an complies with Mushaf. It would be necessary not
to spoil the order; therefore, suras would need to be arranged
according to their arrival time.

Three: In regard to the verses and the
number of words, or more precisely the data they contain, all of
the Qur’an’s 114 suras vary from one to the other. For example, the
size of the verses written on the transparent pages that I would
align might vary. Therefore, uniformity would need to be
established in the distance between the letters, texts, and
characters, the typographical style and font, the spaces between
the lines, and even the front and back pages. All would have to be
fixed and standardized or it would destroy the individual suras’
variations and, ultimately, the stability of the whole. This would
eliminate the possibility of achieving the same conclusion
everywhere and in all circumstances.

This is how I began my experiment. With some
diligence and a lot of luck, I was finally able to calculate these
standards. I represented each character of information (including
spaces—every letter, every mark) with small cubes. I then placed
all these little information cubes, and thus everything contained
within the sura, on a plane. I created a planar image of each sura
in the shape of a golden rectangle, whose ratio of length to the
sum of its length and width provided the golden ratio (1.618).
Then, I lined up these cubes side by side.

That’s when something strange happened. All
of the suras, as if they were magical, completed this golden ratio
perfectly. Not even one cube protruded. What is more, I realized an
even more incredible thing that made me extremely happy: the
disjointed letters at the beginning of some suras completed the
missing parts of those suras like lost pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle.