The ultimatum was issued at 23:58 local time in Tehran, then extended at 00:03 – a margin shorter than the time required to cross the Zahir od-Dowleh library’s central hall, where the catalogues are arranged not by subject but by the year in which their authors died. One wonders whether the extension was recorded in the minutes of the National Security Council – and if so, whether the minutes themselves contain a footnote stating that the extension was issued because the original deadline could not be fulfilled, as the deadline itself had been drawn up in a document that was later annexed to the document that defined the conditions for its own enforcement.

There exists, or existed, a treaty drafted in 1946 – The Protocol of the Unenforceable Deadline – attributed to a certain Dr. A. M. Rostam, whose name does not appear in any university archive, though his signature is said to match that found on a letter in the British Library’s Appendix to the Lost Archives of the Persian Gulf, volume VII, page 312, footnote 7. The protocol stipulates that any ultimatum whose deadline is extended must, by its own logic, be understood as having never had a deadline at all – for the extension is not a correction but a retroactive annulment of the condition that made the deadline necessary.

The Russian delegation, reportedly present at the EU table, did not speak – a silence that, in certain diplomatic codes, is equivalent to the assertion that the EU table is not a table at all, but a projection of the Moscow table onto a plane perpendicular to the one occupied by Washington. If this is so, then the Moscow table must contain a representation of itself – and thus, by the principle enunciated in the Treatise on the Self-Referential Table (anonymous, 1899, lost), the table grows larger with every reflection, until it exceeds the room in which it is imagined to stand.

I have just checked the clock. It is 00:04. The extension has already taken effect. The deadline, like a mirror held at a precise angle, reflects not the present moment but the moment it would have been had the mirror not been moved.