Mahmoud Maher Elterawy (Titoxz) is an Egyptian physician and writer who knows the body can be healed, but the soul rarely survives.
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In my earliest memories, everything is quiet. Not peaceful, but subdued, as if the world is holding its breath, waiting for some noise or catastrophe that never quite arrives. Even then, I sensed a tension in living—a tension I would only begin to articulate years later, through reading, through argument, through endless cycles of disappointment. It seems the reasons for my life’s trajectory—the estrangement from people, the burying of hope—were always there, embedded like seeds in the very streets I walked, in the fading sunlight over sagging rooftops. And as I sit here now, sifting through the fragments of my history, I see three great strands that led me to this vantage point of utter mistrust: my love for Elena, my time in the academic sphere, and my final break with the only friend I had ever trusted, Igor.
I am Victor Mercer. And what follows is not a confession but a record, a kind of post-mortem on optimism itself. I find myself in a cramped room overlooking a haze of skyscrapers and battered buildings. I have come to understand human society as a monstrous organism, feeding on illusions of progress, devouring authenticity. This document, however lengthy, stands as my last honest attempt to outline the slow, fateful sequence that turned me against humanity—if, in fact, I was ever truly on its side to begin with.
* * *
PART I
The industrial town where I was born lingered in a state of perpetual twilight. The factories that once promised decent wages emitted plumes of gray smoke into a sky that seemed to darken each season. The local shops stood half-empty, their owners peering out with weary resignation and the occasional forced grin. My father worked as a shift supervisor at one of those plants, leading crews of exhausted men who dreaded pay cuts and layoffs. He talked little about hope or ambition, preferring to focus on weekly tasks: “Keep your head down. Don’t give them an excuse to let you go,” was his general wisdom.
My mother, by contrast, clung to a shred of idealism. She taught high school literature, introducing restless teens to the resonance of words. She believed that reading could break cycles, that a single poem could uplift a battered spirit. I loved her for that faith, but even in childhood, I sensed an inevitable letdown. Her stories of redemption—Dickens, Dickens everywhere—warred with the quiet despair I saw on the faces of our neighbors, with the gloom settling in the factories’ corridors. She lost more and more battles every year to standardized tests, indifferent administrations, and students too jaded to care.
I disliked my hometown not because it was poor or dirty, but because it felt resigned. Even in childhood, I sensed the weight of its inertia: the adults around me seemed paralyzed by forces they claimed were beyond their control. Jobs vanished. Pensions evaporated. Families scraped by. “That’s life,” they would say, as if no possibility existed to alter the course of their destiny. I bristled against that fatalism, uncertain of what would replace it but sure it was no way to live.
Growing up, I read constantly, huddling over every volume I could borrow. At eleven, I tried reading “Crime and Punishment,” far beyond my ability, but something in Dostoevsky’s overarching guilt-fueled introspections appealed to me, even if I couldn’t decode all the sentences. This sense of displacement, of tension, and of moral crisis became my everyday background. And from it, ironically enough, sprang the only friendship that truly mattered to me in those years: Igor Kuznetsov.
Igor lived four blocks away. His family was in a similar predicament—his father had lost a managerial job, ended up driving deliveries for a distribution center. His mother was too ill to work, and government assistance rarely sufficed. Igor didn’t complain much; we simply recognized, on a wordless level, that our families walked parallel tightropes over a gray void of poverty.
We first spoke in the school library. I must have been just shy of thirteen. I noticed him reading a battered textbook on world history, scribbling notes in the margins. He seemed so intent that I wondered what possessed that level of concentration. I approached, not sure what to say, and ended up babbling something about how pointless I found our social studies class. He glanced up, his bright, inquisitive eyes flicking over me. Then, suddenly, he snorted a laugh and said, “We’re the last ones who believe there’s something beyond this place, aren’t we?”
Strange as it sounds, that single comment sparked the closeness between us. We were children, yet we carried an adult’s cynicism about our decaying environment. We also shared a grain of ambition, though it manifested differently in each of us. We would stay after school, reading in hushed corners while janitors vacuumed. Igor brought me pamphlets about successful entrepreneurs, about men who overcame financial turmoil. He said we could escape, too, if we found a strategy. I was more comfortable with Plato, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky—tomes that explored the darker folds of the soul. “Ideas shape men,” I’d say. “What good is success if you end up the same as those corporate drones?”
We formed a kind of secret alliance, though no oath was sworn. We recognized each other as two minds unwilling to accept our parents’ fate. We devoured all the knowledge that came our way, from tattered library books to late-night documentaries on the local public station. Our debates were fervent, sometimes playful, sometimes intense. Often, we parted ways late in the evening, only to resume the conversation the next morning.
By high school’s latter years, our synergy had shifted toward friendly competition, each daring the other to excel. When college applications approached, we scoured every scholarship. I recall long nights in Igor’s cramped bedroom, the walls plastered with newspaper clippings about economic trends, social revolutions, educational reforms. He told me, “Success is a game. Either you figure out the rules, or you get left behind.”
I retorted that the real issue was the game itself, that it exploited people and bent them to the will of invisible powers—capital, policy, empty rhetoric. This difference only grew. Igor wanted to harness the system. I wanted to expose its fundamental sickness. Still, at that point, we didn’t see these stances as contradictory. We thought we could remain friends forever, balancing each other out. In that battered town, we needed each other’s presence—allies forging a path out of the gloom.
Upon graduation, we slightly parted. I was accepted to a state university, majoring in philosophy and critical theory. Igor won a partial scholarship in economics at the same institution but enrolled in the integrated business track. We were thrilled to be going together—two small-town boys with big minds, diving into the unknown. The plan was that we’d remain roommates or at least live close enough to keep fueling each other’s ambition. We left behind parents who gave us tired well-wishes and hobbled moralities, certain we’d conquer the world where they had failed.
PART II
University life felt like another planet compared to our rundown hometown. The sprawling campus, with its manicured lawns and stone buildings, swarmed with restless ambition. Everyone seemed fixated on “networking” or “career-building,” words that meant little to me but everything to them. I was immediately intoxicated by the library’s vastness, by the array of journals devoted to critical theory, sociology, and philosophy. Within those walls, I discovered an entire canon dedicated to dissecting the illusions of modern life—thinkers who argued that capitalism, religion, the justice system, indeed every social institution, was a scaffold of deception.
Igor, meanwhile, gravitated to the business and economics departments, enthralled by advanced seminars on market analytics and policy manipulation. At first, we tried to maintain our old routine, meeting regularly for cheap cafeteria meals. We’d bemoan the superficial parties on campus, the fraternities fueled by beer-laden silhouettes of brotherhood, the clubs that worshipped bullet-point resumes like holy scriptures.
But subtle tension crept in. Igor’s language shifted. He began speaking excitedly of data-driven strategies, corporate expansions, the potential for “ethical marketing,” as though such a phrase was not contradictory. I, on the other hand, dove into Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse—names that hammered home what I already suspected: that capitalism was an unholy machine that commodified everything, from love to education, from justice to spiritual longing.
Sometimes, in the lounge, Igor and I would have friendly spats over coffee. “You see illusions everywhere,” he’d say, half exasperated. “But illusions can be leveraged. If we understand them, we can guide them—maybe even for good.”
I’d narrow my eyes. “Exploitation can’t be sanitized. And if you sanitize it, you’re just making it more palatable for the masses.”
He’d shrug, unconvinced. Our dynamic held, but I sensed we were no longer two kids huddling in a dilapidated library corner. We were on diverging paths—he on a mission to conquer, I on a mission to expose. Yet we still believed we could coexist; we were, after all, the last remnants of each other’s childhood sense of belonging.
Midway through my sophomore year, I wrote a paper titled “The Manufactured Self: Capital, Cognition, and the Illusion of Autonomy.” Fueled by late-night reading sessions and a mounting disgust at the corporate infiltration of the human psyche, I poured every ounce of my frustration into that piece. A tenured professor took notice, commending my ability to integrate philosophy, sociology, and critical theory into one searing indictment. He invited me to present at a small departmental colloquium.
Igor attended out of loyalty. I remember standing before a sparse audience of faculty and graduate students, heart racing, as I outlined how consumer culture manipulated desire itself—how entire legal structures, religious institutions, even educational frameworks were subservient to profit. The Q&A that followed was intense. Some called me too absolute. Others found my condemnation refreshing. Igor raised his hand:
“Victor, is there truly no way to repurpose these forces for the collective good? Couldn’t we redirect consumerism, say, to improve infrastructure, or use corporate sponsorships to elevate underfunded communities?”
His question didn’t surprise me. “These structures inherently rely on exploitation,” I replied, steel in my voice. “They can shift their target, but the principle remains: someone or something is being commodified. The so-called ‘collective good’ becomes another marketing angle.”
A flicker of hurt passed across his face, but he nodded graciously. We parted ways that evening with an uneasy mutual respect. In that moment, I realized how deeply we were drifting. Yet a part of me still clung to our friendship as if it were an anchor in a raging sea.
Despite ideological rifts, Igor and I shared an apartment near campus. We still laughed about how incompetent we were at cooking, how ridiculous we found the endless round of campus “leadership seminars.” We also reminisced about our hometown, recalling the sagging rooftops and factory smoke with a mix of disdain and nostalgia.
“We escaped,” Igor said once, stirring watery spaghetti sauce in a battered pot. “I, for one, am never going back.”
I nodded, though with less certainty. My memory was riddled with the paternal litany of “keep your head down,” the maternal hope that a single poem could save a person. The older I got, the more I questioned whether true escape meant physically leaving a place or intellectually renouncing its fabrications. I had done the latter thoroughly enough, but physically? My father was still there, my mother still fighting an unwinnable battle in her failing school district. Could I ever truly leave that behind?
Such questions weighed on me, but I rarely voiced them. Igor was forging onward, and I needed to keep pace, if only to hold onto the one connection that had defined my adolescence.
To be continued...
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