I. THE GEOPOLITICAL FACTS ON THE GROUND
The situation is more acute than most realize. Trump has told reporters that Iran has “10 to 15 days at most” to strike a deal, warning it would be “unfortunate for them” if talks fail. Bloomberg The White House has been briefed that the US military could be ready for an attack by the weekend, after the massive buildup of air and naval assets. NBC News
Two of America’s most powerful carriers — the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R. Ford — are converging on the region, while F-35s, F-22s, F-16s, THAAD and Patriot systems, and nuclear submarines are all being repositioned. The American Legion Analysts are describing this as the greatest US airpower buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Council on Foreign Relations
On the Iranian side, Iran has been fortifying tunnel entrances at the underground nuclear complex near Natanz, and at a facility known as “Taleghan 2,” satellite images show Iran completing a concrete sarcophagus around the site and covering it with soil, potentially making it a fully unrecognizable bunker to protect it from aerial strikes. CNN On February 17, Iran announced a partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz during live-fire military drills, conducted simultaneously with nuclear talks. Wikipedia
This is coercive diplomacy at its most dangerous — both sides are signaling kinetic readiness while nominally still talking.
II. THE LENS OF EZEKIEL
Ezekiel is perhaps the most geopolitically resonant prophetic book for this moment. Three themes stand out:
Ezekiel 38–39 (Gog and Magog): Scholars debate the precise identification of Gog, but the coalition described — involving Persia (explicitly named in 38:5), forces from the north, and a great military convergence against a restored Israel — has been associated with this region for centuries. What is striking is not a claim that prophecy is being mechanically fulfilled, but that the structural dynamics are remarkably analogous: a great power assembling overwhelming force against Persia and its alliances, with Israel at the strategic center. Ezekiel 38:21 describes God summoning a sword against Gog across His mountains — imagery of cascading, uncontrollable escalation.
Ezekiel 27 (the Lament over Tyre): Tyre in Ezekiel is the great maritime trading city whose destruction sends shock through the entire commercial world — merchants of Tarshish, Arabia, and the coastlands standing aghast. Singapore, as perhaps the world’s preeminent maritime trading hub and oil transshipment center, occupies a structurally Tyrian role in the global economy. When the sea lanes are threatened, the “merchants of the sea” stand at a distance weeping (Ezek 27:29-36). The Strait of Hormuz is to Singapore what the Mediterranean sea lanes were to Tyre.
Ezekiel 7:25 — “Destruction is coming; they will seek peace, but there will be none.” The interplay of military buildup and parallel negotiation in Geneva, Oman, and Istanbul, with no deal actually closing, mirrors this prophetic motif with unsettling precision.
III. THE LENS OF PSALMS
Psalm 2 is the inevitable starting point: kings and rulers of the earth taking counsel together against the Lord’s anointed, nations in uproar. But several other Psalms speak more directly to the structural dynamic here.
Psalm 46 — “nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall…come and see the works of the Lord, the desolations He has brought on the earth. He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; He breaks the bow and shatters the spear.” This Psalm was written from within the terror of military threat, not from safety. It is a call to be still precisely when the military situation demands maximum agitation.
Psalm 76:10 — “Surely the wrath of man shall praise You.” Both Trump and Khamenei are, on the evidence, using the threat of conflict as a domestic political instrument — Trump for coercive leverage ahead of midterms, Khamenei to survive internal protests that have already killed over 6,400 people. Iran’s leadership is increasingly concerned that a US strike would reignite protests, with top officials warning Khamenei that fear is no longer a deterrent to protest. Council on Foreign Relations Human ambition and fear are driving the escalation — but the Psalmist’s point is that these forces, however dark, are not outside providential ordering.
Psalm 83 — a coalition of nations surrounding Israel, seeking to “wipe out the name of Israel.” The current situation includes not just Iran but its proxies — the structural coalition that Psalm 83 describes.
IV. THE LENS OF REVELATION
Revelation 6 and its horsemen framework is relevant here: the second horseman (red horse) is given power to take peace from the earth and make men slay one another. The third horseman (black horse) carries scales — economic scarcity, commodity disruption — which maps precisely onto what analysts are projecting for oil markets.
More specifically, Revelation 16:12 describes the drying up of the Euphrates to prepare the way for the kings of the East — a passage that has traditionally been read in the context of Asian powers (China, India) being drawn into Middle Eastern conflict. China imports 5.4 million barrels per day through the Strait of Hormuz, and India imports 2.1 million barrels per day via this route. Wionews Any closure of Hormuz pulls both powers directly into the crisis — not merely as spectators.
Revelation 18 — the fall of Babylon — is structurally the most relevant to Singapore. The lament of the merchants in Revelation 18:11-17 describes a sudden collapse of the maritime trading economy: “in one hour such great wealth has been ruined.” The theological point is not that Singapore is Babylon, but that the global commercial order — which Singapore uniquely exemplifies — is depicted in Revelation as fragile, dependent on the continuation of sea-borne trade, and subject to sudden disruption.
V. SINGAPORE: THE SPECIFIC IMPACT VECTOR
Singapore’s exposure to this crisis is direct and multi-dimensional:
Energy and shipping: Signal Ocean data shows Singapore and Malaysia receive 64.7% of tanker discharges from the Middle East Gulf, making them the primary transshipment hub for crude destined for China and East Asia. The Signal Group A Hormuz closure would devastate Singapore’s refining and re-export business in ways that no other city-state would experience as acutely.
Oil price: Lombard Odier warns that a Strait of Hormuz closure could push oil above $100 per barrel, triggering commodity price spikes, equity market volatility, and a flight to haven assets globally. The National Singapore’s highly open economy — trade is roughly 300% of GDP — would face imported inflation, shipping insurance costs, and risk-premium surges simultaneously.
Financial markets: Singapore as an Asian financial center would likely see capital outflows to the dollar and gold, equity market volatility tracking global indices, and stress in the regional banking system if oil-importing partners like Indonesia and Vietnam face currency pressure.
Strategic positioning: Singapore has historically maintained careful neutrality and has deep institutional relationships with both Washington (Five Eyes-adjacent security cooperation) and major Gulf states (sovereign wealth fund ties). A US-Iran war would force Singapore — as it did during the Iraq War of 2003 — into difficult diplomatic triangulation.
The deeper biblical resonance for Singapore specifically is this: Singapore’s entire existence as a prosperous city-state depends on the free flow of maritime commerce through the Indo-Pacific. It is constitutively a “merchant of the sea.” Ezekiel’s lament over Tyre and Revelation’s lament over Babylon are not primarily predictive texts about specific cities — they are theological meditations on the fragility of commercial civilization when it substitutes prosperity for faithfulness. For Christians in Singapore, this moment is an invitation to ask not merely “how will this affect our economy?” but “where is our security actually located?”
SYNTHESIS
The most sober reading of all three prophetic lenses together is this: what is unfolding is not simply a geopolitical standoff but a moment when the structures that underpin international order — nuclear deterrence theory, the freedom of navigation, the global oil price system, and the credibility of US coercive diplomacy — are all simultaneously under stress. Ezekiel speaks to the vulnerability of nations who trust in military power. The Psalms speak to the steadiness available to those who locate their security elsewhere. Revelation speaks to the systemic fragility of a commercial world that has become, in theological terms, a form of idolatry.
For Singapore — a nation that has more reason than almost any other to want this crisis resolved through negotiation — the next 10-15 days are genuinely consequential. US officials have signaled that all military forces required for possible action would be in place by mid-March. NBC News The window for a deal is narrow, and both leaders have domestic incentives that may not point toward compromise.
Psalm 46:10 remains the clearest word for the moment: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” THE WATCHERS ON THE WALL
A Novel of the Last Negotiation
“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the people of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me.”
— Ezekiel 33:7
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“The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One.”
— Psalm 2:2
PROLOGUE. The Mouth of the Strait
The sea does not sleep.
At 0340 hours on a Thursday in February, the USS Abraham Lincoln turned her bow into the wind sixty nautical miles south of Muscat, and her flight deck blazed like a small city caught between the dark water and the darker sky. Forty-two aircraft were chained to her deck. Below, in compartments that smelled of hydraulic fluid and burnt coffee, seven hundred and fifty men and women lay in narrow bunks, each one dreaming of a home they were not certain they would see again.
Ahead of her, through the narrowing corridor of the Strait of Hormuz, twenty percent of the world’s oil moved on any given day. Tankers the length of three football fields, their hulls sitting low with crude from Kharg Island and Ras Tanura, moved in convoy through the traffic separation scheme, their AIS beacons blinking faithfully in the dark. The strait was twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. It was the throat of the world, and everyone on the Lincoln knew it.
Behind her, over the horizon, the Gerald R. Ford was coming.
In Singapore, it was already mid-morning. The price of Brent crude had risen to $94 a barrel.
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Her name was Maryam Hosseini, and she was forty-one years old, and she had not slept in thirty-six hours.
She was the Iranian delegation’s senior interpreter at the talks being held in a hotel in Muscat — a building of white marble and potted palms where the air conditioning ran so cold that the diplomats wore their suit jackets all day regardless of the sun pounding the glass outside. Her job was to render one world’s words into another world’s grammar without losing the weight of what was being said. It was, she had come to understand over fourteen years of this work, an almost impossible task. Languages did not merely encode meaning. They encoded civilization, fear, history, honor.
The American lead negotiator had said, in English, in the morning session: “We are prepared to extend the window for a diplomatic resolution.”
She had rendered this into Farsi. But she had also heard, in the original, the thing that was not said: that the window had a frame, that frames had edges, and beyond the edge there was a fall.
After the session broke for lunch, she stepped onto the hotel terrace and looked south, over the Gulf of Oman. She could not see the carriers. But she knew they were there. She had seen the satellite images on her phone that morning, leaked from somewhere, reproduced on every news site in the world: two colossal steel islands, bristling with aircraft, moving deliberately toward the strait.
She thought of the book of Ezekiel. Her grandmother had read it to her when she was young, in Tehran, in a voice that was careful and unhurried, as though the words were fragile and required slow handling. The prophet had stood on a plain between the Chebar Canal and the burning throne of God and been given a task he had not asked for: to speak to a people who would not listen, about a catastrophe that was already coming.
“Whether they listen or fail to listen — for they are a rebellious people — they will know that a prophet has been among them.”
She looked at the grey-green water of the Gulf and pressed her phone against her chest and closed her eyes.
I. The Envoy
His name was David Pearce, and he had spent twenty-seven years in the State Department, and he was tired in a way that went deeper than sleep could fix. He had been present at the Lausanne framework. He had watched the JCPOA signed and then, a decade later, unsigned. He had watched the centrifuges spin up again. He had watched three administrations make the same mistake in different directions. He was fifty-four years old and his knees ached and he had an ulcer that flared whenever he ate red meat, and he was the last American diplomat in this room who still believed a deal was possible.
The President had given him twelve days.
Not twelve days to reach an agreement. Twelve days to determine whether Iran would make the concessions required before the military option was exercised. Those were the words from the White House Chief of Staff, spoken on a secure call three days ago: “the military option.” As though war were a financial instrument. As though thirty thousand dead could be entered in a ledger.
Across the table from him sat Mohammad Javad Salehi, Deputy Foreign Minister, a small man with precise eyes and a beard going silver at the chin, who had been negotiating nuclear agreements since before David’s oldest daughter was born. Between them sat stacks of technical documents: enrichment ratios, breakout timelines, inspection protocols, verification mechanisms. The documents were real. The positions they encoded were partly real. The thing that was most real in the room was not on the table at all.
It was the question of whether either government actually wanted a deal, or whether both governments needed the war.
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David had a habit, which his wife called eccentric and his therapist called “meaning-making,” of reading the Psalms in the morning before any briefing. He had started the practice during his first posting, in Beirut, in 1999, when the city was still rebuilding itself from a war that had eaten fifteen years. He had read Psalm 46 on his first morning in that shell-pocked apartment: “though the mountains fall into the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake with their surging.” He had found it not comforting, exactly, but clarifying. The Psalms were honest about catastrophe in a way that briefing cables were not.
This morning in Muscat he had read Psalm 76:
“In Judah God is known; his name is great in Israel. His tent is in Salem, his dwelling place in Zion. There he broke the flashing arrows, the shields and the swords, the weapons of war. You are resplendent with light, more majestic than mountains rich with game. The valiant lie plundered, they sleep their last sleep; not one of the warriors can lift his hands. At your rebuke, God of Jacob, both horse and chariot lie still.”
He had sat for a long time with verse ten: “Surely the wrath of man shall praise You.” In the Hebrew, the word translated “wrath” carried connotations of hot anger, of a man so consumed with his own importance that his vision narrowed to a single point. The wrath of the President. The wrath of the Supreme Leader. Both men, David had come to believe, were running the same calculation: that a confrontation served their domestic position better than a compromise would. Trump needed to look strong before the midterms. Khamenei needed to redirect a population that had been in the streets again, demanding his removal.
“Surely the wrath of man shall praise You.”
He did not know how. He never did, in advance. But the Psalmist had been recording a pattern across centuries of human violence, and the pattern held: God worked through the wreckage of human ambition. Which was not the same thing as saying God approved of the wreckage.
He put his Bible in his briefcase, put his briefcase under the table, and waited for Mohammad Javad Salehi to return from the break.
II. The Merchant City
Eight time zones to the east, in a glass tower on Marina Bay, a forty-four-year-old Singaporean named Jonathan Tan was staring at a trading screen and feeling the particular species of nausea that comes not from physical illness but from watching a number move in the wrong direction.
He was head of commodity risk at one of Singapore’s largest trading houses. His firm handled roughly 6 percent of the oil flowing from the Middle East Gulf to Northeast Asia — a river of crude measured not in barrels but in supertankers, each one carrying two million barrels, each one worth, at current prices, close to two hundred million dollars. In the past seventy-two hours, the insurance premiums on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz had risen forty percent. Two major shipping operators had quietly suspended bookings for Hormuz transits pending “security reassessment.” The price of charter rates for alternative routes around the Cape of Good Hope — longer by three weeks, but outside the blast radius of whatever was coming — had doubled.
His firm was not at risk of insolvency. But it was at risk of something worse in the short term: being unable to deliver. Customers in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan depended on his firm’s contracts. Refineries had scheduled turnarounds around arrival dates. Petrochemical plants had production schedules tied to feedstock delivery. If the strait closed — even for two weeks, even partially — the cascade of broken contracts, emergency substitutions, and spot-market chaos would be extraordinary.
He thought of his grandfather, who had been a child in Singapore during the Japanese occupation, when the ships stopped coming and the city discovered, slowly and terribly, what it meant to be an island that produced almost nothing it needed to survive. His grandfather had told him once: “Every day I am grateful that the sea is open. The day the sea closes is the day everything changes.”
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Singapore was not a city that wore its biblical resonances on its sleeve. It was a city of pragmatism and efficiency and air-conditioned malls and the studied neutrality of a small state that had learned survival through trade and institutional competence. But Jonathan, who had been raised in a Hokkien Methodist household and still attended Barker Road Methodist Church most Sundays, found himself thinking, as he stared at the screens, about Ezekiel’s lament over Tyre.
Tyre had been the Singapore of the ancient world. A city-state on the Mediterranean coast, built partly on an island, a maritime entrepôt whose merchants ranged from Spain to Arabia, whose purple dye and cedar wood and silver and gold moved through the known world on ships whose sails were embroidered linen from Egypt. Ezekiel had written his lament — chapter 27 — in the form of a ship’s manifest, a cargo list, a catalogue of luxury and commerce. And then, without warning, the catalogue had collapsed into dirge:
“Your rowers have brought you into the high seas. The east wind has wrecked you in the heart of the sea. Your wealth, merchandise and wares, your mariners, sailors and shipwrights, your merchants and all your soldiers, and everyone else on board will sink into the heart of the sea on the day of your shipwreck. The shorelands will quake when your sailors cry out. All who handle the oars will abandon their ships; the mariners and all the sailors will stand on the shore.”
Jonathan closed the Ezekiel passage on his phone and looked out at Marina Bay. The water was green and still. The supertankers in the eastern anchorage sat quietly in the late morning haze. The city looked exactly as it always looked: impossibly functional, improbably prosperous, a miracle of human organization held together by port fees and container throughput and the willingness of the world to keep trading.
He called his risk manager and said: “Activate our Cape of Good Hope contingency. Don’t wait for an announcement.”
She said: “Are you sure? The premium is—”
“I know what the premium is,” he said. “Activate it.”
III. What the Watchman Saw
In a suburb of Tehran called Elahiyeh, in a house with a garden that still had roses in it despite the February cold, an old man named Reza sat in a chair by the window and read his Bible.
He was seventy-three. He was a retired professor of comparative literature from the University of Tehran who had converted to Christianity forty years ago, quietly and with full understanding of what it might cost him, and had spent those forty years navigating the particular narrow path of faith in a country where faith of his kind was simultaneously invisible and illegal. He had not been arrested. He had been careful. His wife had been less careful — she had helped with a house church for twelve years before the authorities closed it in 2019 — and she had been arrested twice, detained once for eleven days, and released both times without explanation.
She was in the kitchen now, making tea. He could hear the kettle.
He was reading Ezekiel 33, the passage about the watchman, and he was thinking about what it meant to see what was coming and to be responsible for the warning. The watchman’s duty was not to prevent the disaster. The watchman could not stop the sword. The watchman’s duty was only to blow the trumpet — to make the sound that gave people the chance to flee, to repent, to choose differently, before the moment of choice was gone.
He had been blowing the trumpet for years in the only way available to him: letters written and sent through careful channels to people he trusted, conversations in rooms with the windows closed, the slow patient work of saying to whoever would hear: there is something more permanent than this regime, there is something more lasting than this anger, there is a kingdom that does not rise on military hardware.
He did not know if anyone had listened. He suspected most had not. Ezekiel’s people had not listened either, until the city fell, until the exiles sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept.
His wife brought the tea and sat across from him.
“Are they still talking?” she asked.
“As of this morning.” He turned the page. “Whether anyone is actually hearing, I cannot say.”
She wrapped her hands around her cup. “Will they strike?”
He was quiet for a moment. Outside, the roses in the garden were the color of old blood in the cold light.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that the question is not whether the two governments want to strike. I think the question is whether God will permit them to be as foolish as they want to be. He sometimes does. He sometimes does not.” He paused. “The book of Ezekiel contains both.”
His wife looked at him with the expression she had worn for forty years when he said things that were true and terrible. Then she picked up her own Bible from the side table and opened it without speaking, and they read in the winter quiet, while outside the roses did not move, and the city of Tehran breathed its complicated breath, and somewhere in the Gulf of Oman, the carriers turned.
IV. The Last Session
On the ninth day of the talks, Maryam Hosseini woke at 5 a.m. and could not go back to sleep. She lay in the white hotel room and listened to the air conditioning and thought about the word “threshold.”
In diplomacy, thresholds were the moments that could not be uncrossed. A first strike. A closed strait. A sunken vessel. Once the threshold was behind you, the logic of what followed became almost mechanical — each side responding to the last action in a sequence that had its own gravity, its own momentum, pulling toward outcomes neither side had explicitly chosen but both had made inevitable by choosing not to stop.
She had been thinking about Revelation 8. She was not a theologian. She was a linguist. But she had read it many times, in Farsi and in English, and she had always been arrested by the image of the angel standing at the altar with a golden censer, throwing fire to the earth, and the consequence: thunders, lightnings, an earthquake. The image was not of a God who threw the fire. The image was of a God who took human fire — the fire of human sin and human violence and human pride accumulated over centuries like incense — and returned it to the earth. Judgment was not alien visitation. Judgment was the harvest of what humanity had sown.
She thought: we are standing in front of the censer.
She showered. She dressed. She went down to the breakfast room, where David Pearce was already sitting with his coffee and what she had come to recognize as his small blue Bible, open to the Psalms. He was an American diplomat reading the Psalms at a breakfast table in Muscat while two aircraft carriers waited in the Gulf. She had never known what to make of him. She had decided, over nine days, that she did not need to make anything of him. He was real in the way that people were real when they were not performing.
She sat down across from him.
He looked up. “Sleep?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
He nodded. “Me neither.” He closed the Bible. “How do you read this morning, Maryam? Honestly. Not as the interpreter.”
She was quiet for a moment. The breakfast room was mostly empty. Sunlight was beginning to come through the eastern windows.
“I think,” she said at last, “that Salehi’s instructions have changed. I think Tehran has decided to let the talks fail on a technical point, so that neither side appears to have walked away. I think the Supreme Leader has calculated that a limited strike, followed by a limited retaliation, followed by a ceasefire brokered by China, serves his position better than a deal that requires visible concession.”
David looked at her for a long time. “And your President?”
She did not answer that. She poured her coffee.
He said quietly: “The wrath of man will praise Him.” He said it not as a threat but as a prayer — the way you say something when you are not sure it is true but you need it to be. “Even this.”
“I don’t know your God well enough to say,” she told him. “But I know that what comes next will not be chosen by either of us, and I know that we will have to live in it. Whatever it is.”
He nodded. He picked up his briefcase. “Then let’s go try to make it something different.”
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The final session lasted eleven hours.
At 9 p.m., with no agreement reached on the enrichment ceiling, Salehi pushed back from the table and said, in Farsi, in a tone that was entirely courteous and entirely final: “We will need to consult with Tehran.”
Maryam rendered this into English with precision, including the tone.
David Pearce looked at Salehi for three seconds. Then he said: “Tell him that I understand. Tell him I hope his consultations are fruitful.” He paused. “Tell him I will pray for his country.”
She rendered this into Farsi. She watched Salehi’s face. Something crossed it — not quite surprise, not quite contempt, and not quite respect. Something that was all three at once, too fast to name.
Salehi stood, buttoned his jacket, and walked out of the room.
V. What Remains
It did not happen the way anyone expected. It never does.
On the eleventh day, as US strike packages were being loaded onto the Lincoln’s catapults, a message came through the Omani channel — not the official diplomatic channel, but the back channel that Oman had maintained between Washington and Tehran since the 1970s, the channel that was technically unofficial and actually essential. The message proposed a partial freeze: enrichment suspended at sixty percent pending further talks, in exchange for a partial lifting of secondary sanctions targeting pharmaceutical imports.
It was not a deal. It was not peace. It was a ladder lowered into a hole — something to climb, not something to stand on.
David Pearce read the message in his hotel room at 3 a.m. and sat with it for a long time. Then he called Washington.
The President, he was told, was reviewing it.
He went to the window and looked at the black water of the Gulf and thought about Psalm 2, which he had read that morning: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord.” And then, improbably, miraculously, without deserving it, verse twelve: “Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
He did not know what would happen. He had not known for eleven days, and he suspected he would not know for the rest of his life what had actually turned the calculation in Tehran, what hand had moved what piece, what prayer or what threat or what fear had finally shifted the weight enough that the ladder appeared.
He knew only this: that the sword had been at the throat of the world, and for this one night, at least, it had not fallen. That was not nothing. That was, in fact, everything.
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In Singapore, Jonathan Tan watched the Brent crude price fall twelve dollars in forty minutes and felt something he would not have called relief but which was indistinguishable from it. He called his risk manager and told her to stand down the Cape contingency. He sat in his glass office while the city glittered below him and the tankers rode quiet in the anchorage, and he thought: the sea is still open. Today. The sea is still open.
He did not think it would always be. He had read enough history to know that the Strait of Hormuz had always been, and would always be, a place where the world held its breath. Ezekiel’s lament over Tyre was not a prediction about any specific city. It was a theological observation about the nature of commercial civilization: that it was always one crisis away from its own elegy, that the catalogue of goods and the lament for their loss were two sides of the same page.
He stayed late at the office. He watched the sun go down over the water. He thought about his grandfather.
“Every day I am grateful that the sea is open.”
He closed his laptop and went home.
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In the suburb of Elahiyeh, Reza put down his Bible and went to the window. His wife was asleep in the other room. The garden was dark. The roses were invisible.
He had heard the news on the radio — the partial framework, the incomplete deal, the fragile and temporary avoidance — and he had felt the thing that he always felt in these moments: not triumph, not relief, exactly, but a kind of quiet sorrow for all the violence that had been avoided and all the violence that had merely been deferred, and underneath the sorrow, at a depth below human accounting, something that he had no name for in Farsi or in English, something that the Psalms pointed toward without quite describing — the knowledge that the arc of the world was longer than any single crisis, that the watchman’s trumpet had sounded, that some had heard it, and that this was enough.
He went to bed.
Outside, in the February dark, the roses did not move.
EPILOGUE. After
Maryam Hosseini flew back to Tehran on a Tuesday. She sat by the window of the plane and watched the Gulf pass beneath her — the brown water, the tankers, the narrow throat of the strait that was still, for now, open.
She did not know what she believed. She was forty-one years old and she had spent her adult life inside the gap between languages, inside the space where one world’s meaning tried to reach another world’s understanding, and she knew better than almost anyone how often that gap was uncrossable, how often what arrived at the other end was a ghost of the original, stripped of its weight.
And yet something had arrived. Somehow, across the tables and the technical documents and the enrichment ratios and the mutual suspicion, something had moved. She could not say what. She was a linguist, not a theologian.
But she thought of what David Pearce had said in the breakfast room: “Even this.”
She thought of the watchman on the wall in Ezekiel, given a task he had not asked for, given words that might or might not be heard, required to speak them regardless. She thought of the Psalmist writing in the middle of military threat — “though the mountains fall into the sea” — and finding in the middle of that threat something steady, something that the sea could not dissolve.
She did not know if she believed in the God that Reza prayed to in Elahiyeh, or that David Pearce read about in hotel breakfast rooms. She did not know if the thing that had moved in those eleven days was providence or accident or the self-interest of two frightened old men.
She knew only that she was on a plane flying toward home, and that the sea below her was still open, and that tomorrow she would wake up and the world would require her to try again.
She thought: perhaps that is enough.
She looked at the water for a long time. Then she closed her eyes, and slept, and for the first time in eleven days, she did not dream.
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END
“He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear. He burns the shields with fire. He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.'”
— Psalm 46:9–10