Blank Circle
The friendship between Vahid and me began when the children in our neighborhood boycotted us because we were both terrible at playing soccer and lasted until our early twenties in 2009. That year, we were among the young, ambitious students who wore green wristbands and took to the streets to joyfully support our favorite candidate. We were all fed up with the populist president and hopeful that our candidate would be elected, but we had no idea how it would end a few months later.
After the re-election of the corrupt president, Vahid and I joined the large crowd to protest the rigged election. What happened that day was unprecedented in Iran’s history—three million silent people marched along Tehran’s Liberty Street. This prompted a serious warning from the regime regarding any further actions by our candidate’s supporters. The number of people who attended the next protest was much smaller than the first one. The crowd mainly consisted of angry young people who had no idea about the consequences of confronting the government. At the end of each demonstration, Vahid and I felt like brave heroes, proudly displaying our war wounds on our arms and legs to each other.
The last time, we filled our backpacks with bottles of water, pieces of cloth and some cigarettes, as we had heard that their smoke could neutralize the effects of tear gas on the eyes. As we were in the street hurling stones, some soldiers appeared in front of the anti-riot police. When I heard the gunshots, I froze in place for a moment, watching a person standing a few meters away from me collapse. As the gunshots continued, Vahid and I held each other's hands tightly and ran through the thick smoke, past the burning tires. We reached a narrow alley, where he complained about his sore eyes. I urged him to stop, then lit a cigarette and brought it close to his eyes. But before I could hear his response, I suddenly felt a sharp yank on my hand. He collapsed to the ground, his eyes widening in great surprise as he looked at me, his eyebrows raised as if he were trying to convey something. Something like, ‘It shouldn't end like this.’ But instead of words, blood gushed from his mouth until his eyes ceased rolling.
When it came to the stages of grief, I found myself stuck in the ‘anger’ stage for a long time. Whether awake or asleep, I couldn’t help but replay the scene of Vahid’s death in my mind. Each time, I imagined finding the shooter and hitting him in the head with a long rod. Overwhelmed by the image, I yelled uncontrollably. It was only when my parents shook me vigorously, as though trying to shake me out of a waking nightmare, that I snapped back to reality.
It was my therapist who finally convinced me that the only solution for me was to move to another country, where I wouldn’t be haunted by memories of its people and streets. This motivated me to begin the process of applying for graduate studies, which I had put off in the hope of a brighter future in my own country.
Three months after arriving in Canada, I established a small political group that held biweekly events to support the people of Iran. We invited well-known opposition leaders and authors with a long history of political activism against the Iranian regime to give lectures. I organized several gatherings in different locations across the city and in front of the parliament, where we chanted slogans and sought assistance from Western governments. However, as I became increasingly immersed in my courses, I had less time to keep up with the news. Like many other immigrants, I gradually began to enjoy a calm and drama-free life, something that was missing in my country, where you always had to expect the unexpected, ready to derail your plans at any moment. This brought a sense of pleasurable boredom into my life, manifesting itself as happy, repetitive weeks of routine. I could see how my anger deteriorated every day, replaced with a sense of indifference towards everything going on in Iran. Until I met Abdel, I completely withdrew from political news.
The first time I saw him sitting at the end of the class, I was excited to see another Iranian face. However, after greeting him in Farsi, he simply shook his head and a smile appeared on his round face, so I continued in English. He was Syrian, and like me, he pursued a PhD to escape the chaos associated with the Arab Spring in his country. What brought us so close to each other was the familiar feeling of suffocation we experienced under the rule of our respective totalitarian governments, which had a good relationship with each other.
We began seeing each other every morning to drink coffee at the cafés around the university. Perhaps the reason I could relate to him more than to my Iranian friends was our shared pain. His 12-year-old nephew went missing two years ago, and after seven days, his naked body was found in a landfill.
“His manhood had been chopped off,” His breathing rhythm picked up as he spoke. “He was among the boys who wrote on a school wall, ‘the people want the fall of the regime.’ They were all abducted and tortured.” Then, he took a deep breath. “We were lucky to find his body. Other parents couldn’t find theirs.”
His facial expression remained neutral during narrating what had happened. Then, he fell silent and stared off into the distance.
“How do you feel about it now?” I asked.
He quickly looked up at me, his eyes scrutinizing my face, as if trying to understand what I meant. I continued, “Since I came here, I haven’t been able to feel any intense emotions anymore—neither happiness nor sadness. I have a bad feeling about it. Do you have the same feeling?”
“Yes, because we are not here to continue suffering. What can we do about the past? Should we grieve forever? Or do we gain anything from holding onto anger and sorrow?” He asked, his voice becoming hoarse with exasperation. We agreed that the only time we were allowed to discuss our countries was on Tuesdays when we went to the Irish Pub near the university for half-price wings and beer. We reserved political discussions for after our third pint when our minds were sufficiently numb to shield us from our words and thoughts.
“Asad is ready to kill everyone in Syria. A secular government can do anything to survive. I mean, at least having some religious flavor in power might bring some morality,” Abdel said one evening, scratching his forehead. His eyes were glassy from too many pints.
“You have no idea what religious power can do. They can justify anything by claiming it’s in the best interest of Muslim society and, therefore, the country. Is your family religious?”
“No, none of us are. My father was extremely religious when he was young, but then he went to university and befriended some Marxists, becoming an atheist. As far as I remember, he always warned us about Islam and the potential for associated violence. Before these events, he liked Assad. Even now, he may still do, but he doesn’t say anything about it. Sometimes I get tempted to start practicing Islam just to give him a hard time.” A grin appeared on his worn-out face. “How about you? Is your family religious?” Abdel asked.
“We are… and I used to be. But I quit. I am done with religion. Your father is right about it.” I raised my pint and smiled.
We saw the assignment the first time on a snowy Wednesday. Abdel and I, both teaching assistants for an undergraduate course, had decided to meet at the Second Cup café near the university to grade the first assignments. The assignment was among my pile. The student had inscribed his name, Rob Knight, in thick Latin font on the first page with a pen. When I thumbed through it, I noticed that all the questions were left blank except for the last one, where he had written, ‘Please see the answer in the circle on the back!’ When I flipped to the back of the booklet, I found a blank circle drawn with a thick black marker. As I stared into it, I slowly felt paralyzed. Dissociated from my surroundings, I found myself in the middle of the street where we had protested in Tehran. It was empty, the sky orange and I was alone. Suddenly, I heard a gunshot and saw Vahid’s body on the ground, blood coming from his eyes, nose and mouth. The blood quickly filled my vision, turning everything red. I yelled and couldn’t remember anything afterwards.
Through my blurry vision, I recognized the familiar faces of the baristas and the girls who had sat behind our table.
“What happened? Hey, Mobin, what happened?” Abdel asked, handing me a cup of water.
I grabbed my cup with a numb hand and gulped down the water in one go before immediately rushing out of the café. As I hurried along the street, enjoying the snow flecks being hurled and melted on my hot skin, I heard Abdel from behind: “What was it about, Mobin? I'm talking to you.”
I had a feeling about what might happen, which is why I suggested we go to the rear side of the Chinese restaurant's kitchen across the street. “Here, take a look,” I said. He grabbed the assignment booklet with a confused expression and flipped through it until he reached the back, where the circle was drawn. It all happened so fast. His eyebrows lifted, his lips contorted as if trying to form a word. Suddenly, he exclaimed an Arabic word whose meaning I didn’t know. He murmured a few words while staring at the page before finally collapsing onto the thick, muddy frost on the ground.
The next morning, we met at the same café and drank our coffee. We were both quiet, waiting for the other one to speak. Finally, I who broke the silence. After finishing my account of what I had seen, I said, “Your turn.”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” his voice changed slightly. He put his fist over his mouth as though it helped suppress his urge to cry. “When I saw it, I could have sworn it was real. It was as if my cousin’s body was pushed up onto the surface of the landfill we were searching. I didn’t have any control over where my gaze fell. It seemed like an invisible force made me look at the tortured spots, the remnants of his chopped-off penis.” He could no longer control himself and burst into tears. The usual confidence was nowhere to be found in his eyes – their redness and wetness betrayed extreme desperation on his face.
We stayed quiet for fifteen minutes, avoiding each other’s gaze. “Is it only us seeing things in this damn circle?” Abdel asked with his muffled voice shaking with a tinge of anger.
“Hey, Miss., would you please come here.” He addressed the young barista cleaning the table behind ours with a rag.
“It may sound odd, but we are trying to design a psychological test here. Would you please go over this booklet and tell us what you see on the last page?”
The barista, a beautiful blonde likely in her early twenties, glanced at Abdel and then at me, trying to comprehend what she had heard. She took the booklet looked at the last page, “A circle, I guess… Perhaps a thick, blank circle?” she asked, her tone tinged with doubt. “Only a circle?” Abdel asked.
“I believe so. I hope it doesn’t mean I’m a psycho,” the barista chuckled.
“No, I think it means you are normal, and whoever sees otherwise has an issue,” Abdel said, while giving me a concerned look.
Having spent quite a long time in academia, we would be ashamed to consider any illogical explanation for our experience. We decided to call it a silly prank by a student, which somehow triggered the old trauma inside us. I strictly forbade myself from seeing anything related to Iran, including movies and TV series. I also began taking strong antidepressants. These measures helped reduce the frequency of my nightmares and memory attacks. As long as there was no suffering in my life, I was content with the routine of a cyclic sequence of work, gym and Canadian weekend activities that could include hiking, camping or beer and barbecue. That was show I began to get used to the numbness of indifference within me again.
Abdel and I still had our midweek ritual at Irish Pubs; however, we stopped discussing politics even after getting drunk. One night, I got wasted and passed out as soon as I arrived home. I dreamed I was running in absolute darkness. No sight, no sound, nothing to hear or feel but increasing panic. At some point, I heard chords of an electric guitar with heavy distortion, each strum separated by a few seconds with no harmony between them. The sound intensified, and then I heard someone moaning. The moaning turned into high-pitched shrieks, as if someone was being tortured. Then, the voice began talking.
“Hey... Mobin...”
“Who are you?” I replied.
“Did you really think it was just a prank?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I am your misery...” The voice was now louder and clearer. It paused for a moment and then broke like a thunderstorm, “I am your pain... I am your rage... I am your hatred... I am your hypocrisy... I am your lunacy... I am your prejudice. I am the entity residing within your soul, your father’s soul and the souls of all your ancestors–anyone who has inhabited that small circle on the earth, somewhere in its middle, close to the east...”
“I’m dreaming...”
“You thought moving to another country would free you? You may be able to escape the pain, but you can never ignore the trace it has left in your soul... I was the pain in you, turning into a void in your soul—a feeling you call indifference.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I don’t want much. Kneel to me and acknowledge my existence.”
“You don’t exist.”
“You can’t keep denying it. Need proof? I was the disease, secretly lurking in your father’s body for a long time, and I killed him some time ago.”
I abruptly awoke to the sound of an electric guitar playing from my neighbor’s apartment and immediately dialed home. When my sister answered the phone, I asked to speak with my father. Learning that he was not at home, I urged her to reveal the truth about his sickness. She paused for a few moments and then burst into tears. It was testicular cancer, a condition that could have been easily treated if had been diagnosed earlier. In his final days, my father requested other family members not to inform me of his passing, fearing that my involvement in political activities in Iran might jeopardize my safety, leading to a potential arrest upon my return.
My doctor’s response to the new situation was to double my current medication and add a new one. Fortunately, he advocated for me, allowing me to take two months off. I managed to persuade him that hospitalization wasn’t necessary. Instead, I was instructed to call a center every other day to reassure them that I was not suicidal.
After that night, I hesitated to call Abdel, fearing he might confirm he had the same dream. Perhaps he refrained from calling me for the same reason. It was as if discussing the dream would somehow make it real. Three weeks later, out of the blue, he appeared at my apartment.
“My sincere condolences,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t come sooner. I had a lot going on.”
His brother had recently been abducted by government forces, having become one of the high-level members of the Free Syrian Army. Now, Abdel needed to return to Syria to look after his distressed parents.
“So, can we go for one last drink?” I asked.
“I don’t drink anymore,” Abdel replied, his eyes cast down.
Before he left, we locked eyes, sharing an unspoken understanding that this might be our final goodbye. Seeing his contemplative expression and reluctance to drink, I speculated that he might have been drawn to religion, particularly because I recalled his sympathy toward Islam and his regard for it as a tool to fight a secular tyrannical government. Still, I never imagined he would become such a hardcore Muslim that he would join ISIS. Two years later, I heard through a mutual friend that he was killed in an Assad airstrike.
Over the next six months after my father’s death, my depression worsened to the point where I couldn’t make any meaningful progress in my PhD. When my supervisor threatened to cut my funding, I gladly quit and started working at a liquor store. Being a cashier and standing for eight hours straight provided the only distraction from the overwhelming pain that engulfed me when I was alone and idle.
The most rewarding part of my shift was the end of it when I took a six-pack of beer home and drank myself into numbness. Gradually, I found myself needing that numbness during the day, so I began drinking while at work. To avoid getting caught on the store’s security cameras, I would sneak to the washroom every two hours for a sip.
One day, the store owner came over and informed me that it was my last day at the store. When I asked about the reason, he showed me clips of myself napping and staggering around the shop. That night, I invited all the homeless people who were always standing outside, asking for help, to come in for a drink.
“Let's have a party! Take whatever you want, and then we’ll go out dancing,” I yelled, feeling tipsy.
This offer made them walk faster with a determination they may have never felt in their lives. They pushed each other to grab the bottles from the highest rack, likely believing they were the most precious ones. We created a big carnival at minus forty Celsius in the street. Walking among them, I inhaled the frozen odor of piss and alcohol. One of them caught up with me and handed me a glass pipe:
“As soon as you see the flame, take a deep breath,” he said with a smile, revealing his two missing front teeth. After taking a big drag, I looked at the icy opaque cloud expanding out of my mouth. A few moments later, I gradually felt my head getting lighter.
The next thing I remember was finding myself in an empty street. I wasn’t as upset about having my wallet and cell phone stolen as I was about my boots. The thief was kind enough to leave his tattered sneakers on my feet though. As I walked, the cold penetrated through my flimsy shoes, freezing my toes and making them numb. My head, however, felt hot. I made my way down the street to the bus station to wait for the last number four. No one was around, but a homeless person carrying his cart crossed the street. I thought he belonged to our group, but when he got close enough, I noticed his unusually tall height. He didn’t have a stooped back, and his firm steps and agility made him completely different from those drug-addicted people wandering around.
He uncovered the cart and quickly placed down two boxes, which turned out to be amplifiers. Then, he hung the guitar around his neck, removed his pilot hat to reveal his bald head and long face and kept his sunglasses on. He stood motionless for a few seconds, staring at me. The sudden strumming of the guitar sounded like thunder reverberating in my head. He continued strumming until, at some point, I heard the chords turn into words:
“Come forward and kneel down… come forward and kneel down… come forward and kneel down…”
Hearing those chaotic notes, my body seized with paralysis. I collapsed onto the snow, and through my blurry vision, I could see him there—motionless, merely observing me. A dim light approached from up the street. As the bus drew nearer, a slight sensation returned to my fingers, then my hands and feet. I began crawling along the sidewalk, but as soon as I did, he resumed playing, faster and more chaotically. It was futile; I couldn’t reach the station at this pace. I stopped moving and turned on my back to see the snowy black sky with a hint of red.
When I heard the bus brakes, I lifted my head and found myself enveloped by the bus headlights. The light washed over me, and I knew the bus had come to a stop for me.
~