Excerpt from The Patron Saint of Satire and Shenanigans—A Novel.

July 28, 1978. The day Ion Mihai Pacepa — lieutenant general in the Securitate and close advisor to Ceaușescu — defected to the West.

It was, by all accounts, a geopolitical earthquake. The regime collapsed into panic. Death sentences were issued in absentia. Loyalists were interrogated, demoted, or disappeared. The Party press went into overdrive, fabricating outrage to mask the internal chaos.

While Romania was unraveling, I was being born.

And here’s the twist I still struggle to process:
Pacepa’s defection wasn’t the story. It was the cover story.

According to a voice recorded in 1975 on a magnetic tape, the entire spectacle — the betrayal, the panic, the Cold War theatrics — had a second purpose. Not just to humiliate Ceaușescu. But to protect the arrival of someone else entirely.

Me.

My birth, I was told, posed a risk that couldn’t be managed through normal channels. So they created a diversion large enough to eclipse it — a defection so loud it drowned out everything else. A political earthquake designed to hide a biological fact.

It sounds paranoid. It probably is. But it also fits perfectly into the logic of a state where paranoia wasn’t just a symptom — it was policy.

Which brings me to the strangest part.

This entire story — the real story — was delivered to me as a voice message.
Recorded three years before I was born.
Meant for me.
Intended to be heard decades later.

How that’s possible is a longer discussion. But for now, I’ll leave you with this:

What do you do when your first breath is buried under a mountain of classified documents? When your life begins in the shadow of a defection that reshaped a country? And when someone, somewhere, believed you were worth that kind of distraction?

I don’t have an answer.
Do you?