by Jinn, Bo
Pope remained staring at him with purpose.
“Is there something else?”
Pope was slow with his answer.
“There is … just one more thing.”
“What is it?” he asked, his suspicion roused anew.
“A small formality,” Pope answered with a dismissive air. “You must understand that after you walk through those doors, you will remember nothing. Nothing at all.”
“That is what I want.”
“I know,” Pope nodded. “The problem is that you will not even remember why you did not want to remember. And there may come a point where we will have to remind you.”
He paused for deliberation.
“What do you need from me?”
“Simple,” said Pope. “Just answer the questions as I ask them.”
He studied the commissioner fixedly through narrowed eyes. Somehow, he had the sense that it would not be as simple as he made it out to be. He put his hands over the armrests and straightened up in his seat.
Pope delayed before he spoke: “First question,” he said: “What caused you come to us? – I’ll rephrase that…” A smile twitched in the corners of his mouth: “What is it that you want more than anything?”
The answer to both questions was the same but the second afforded a far simpler answer.
“Freedom,” he replied without hesitation.
“Freedom from what?” Pope asked. “Imprisonment? Monotony? Mediocrity?”
“The past,” he said.
“The past…”
“Yes.”
Pope hummed and nodded slowly.
“What past, Vincent?”
“You know what past.”
The question roused a spark of ire.
“You have to be the one to say it.”
“Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answers?”
“I could waste your time explaining my reasons,” said Pope. “Or you can just trust that I am not the sort of man who would waste his time on something if it were not of the utmost importance.”
He lowered his head and gazed into the bleak, bespectacled eyes over a knotted brow.
“What past, Vincent?” Pope asked a second time.
He paused and took a deep breath. His hands released their tight grip on the rests. He lifted his head and exhaled.
“I killed my family.”
“More specific…”
The flash of ire went through him again.
“My wife,” he said. “…and my daughter.”
“How long ago?”
“Eight years,” he replied with strain, “four months… seventeen days.”
“Do you remember why?”
“My wife had a lover.”
The wrath began to shoot through his arms in jolts.
“Who was her lover?” asked Pope.
“Senator John Clarke Jones.”
Pope bowed his head with approval at each answered question.
“How did you kill them?”
“Why is that important?” he broke suddenly and the blood beat up hot inside him.
Pope waited for his temper to allay.
“It’s alright,” he replied, calmly. “You may be brief.”
Without realising, his hand had tightened into a fist and his appearance transfigured, becoming instantly feral.
“I loved my family,” he began in a low, pleading voice. “But … they feared me. By then, everyone feared us.” He stilled his breaths and lowered his eyes, and proceeded to recount point by point: “It was after an assignment in Angola. I came home and found my wife gone…. I went to the senator’s residence … I killed the guards … I broke into the house … I found them together.” He started to tremble. “I killed them… together.”
“And your daughter”
“No!” His voice changed extraordinarily. Long, juddering lungfuls of air rushed in and out of his nostrils.
“You have to,” said Pope, with consistent equanimity. “I promise you: a few hours from now, none of this will matter anymore.”
A long and nervous silence proceeded during which his mien shifted swiftly from raw anger to a kind of fearful sorrow, and the fever of fury tempered breath by slowing breath. His fist loosened and his fingers started to tremble. He lowered his eyes and his jaw hung loose and quivered.
“I...”he faltered. “I … did not know that she was there.”
He stopped.
“Go on…” said Pope
“There is nothing more to tell,” he replied. “All I remember was the look in her eyes when she saw her mother’s blood on my hands. Everything after is a blur.”
“Why did you kill her?”
“I do not know.”
“Yes, you do,” Pope persisted daringly. “You have already told me.”
“I was not thinking.” He grappled with his memory as though his mind were reaching for fire. “She … she tried to run away,” he said.
“And you did not let her.”
“No,” he said. “No, I could not.”
“Why not?”
He paused on the question, mustering the pride he needed to look up and give the same answer he had given every time the same question had been asked of him before:
“Because I knew I could not live in the same world with her.”
“You wanted to … erase her,” Pope surmised with a murmur, “like the past?”
“Yes.”
“Yes…” There was a disturbing note of exultation in Pope’s whisper and the tiny black points in the middle of the bright blue orbs enlarged.
“I cannot change what I am.”
“No,” Pope nodded and the eerie simper returned. “But we can, Vincent. We can.”
…We can.
The recording stopped and the light of the holoscreen evaporated with his memory.
A dead calm ensued across the chamber; there was only the sound of the air pumping hurriedly through his locked throat. He could not speak. His eyes bulged from their sockets. The sweat covered his face and streamed down his heaving chest.
“Do you remember now… Saul?”
Pope’s voice spoke from the dark as step by measured step, he re-entered the circle of light and stopped, and waited, and drew a deep breath, and exhaled, lifting his eyes up to the light. “The nightmares … they all begin and end the same way, don’t they? Then, one day, the nightmare finally comes true … What if they were always true?”
He paused and his eyes lowered again.
“What if the mind had a way of always bringing us back to the same place we started? You wake up. And the cycle begins again. No way of stopping it.”
He gasped the only word he could heave to his mouth:
“No…”
“It is a paradox, I know,” Pope continued, pacing around. “To think that the illusion you have been chasing all this time is the same thing from which you have been trying to escape…”
“No…”
“The cycle ends precisely where it begins: The truth. The answer to the question: why are you here? The first people you ever loved, you destroyed. To chase down that paradise lost, only to find it and destroy it over and over and over again – it has been the predicate of your every action since the moment you were conceived. It is your meme. It is your fate.”
“No!” he broke. “I do not believe it.”
“Saul, try and think. Why did you want to escape from us? You had to know that you would never find the freedom you were really looking for. The martial world became the manifestation of everything you despised about yourself – your past self. You merely lacked the memory with which to see it clearly. It is for this reason you did not trust us. We knew the truth that you did not want to know.”
“No.” The word became a platitude of denial. “No.”
“Think back to any moment that might have roused some shadow of the past,” Pope persisted.
“I know that you always felt, deep down, what you now see clearly – tha
t you belong with us, Saul. You have always belonged with us. You chose us. You were not trying to escape from our world. You were trying to escape the truth. You were trying to escape from Vincent.”
The universe imploded upon him. He fought back with all of his denial, but there was no escape from the monster which now confronted him, having lurked in the backdrop since the very beginning, eluding him, leading his every step up to that precise moment. His throat locked to suffocation, his sweat turned to blood before his eyes and the screams deafened his soul until his eyes turned into his skull in an attempt to flee from the nightmares. But there was no waking this time…
Day 0
A scalding heat pressed against him and an arid wind whistled in his ear. The knots of hair swayed before his eyes. Small puffs of dirt blew from his lips and the loose hairs backlashed with the wind.
His eyes blinked open.
He was prostrate with his face in the dirt and he felt his limbs stir. He could move.
Bringing his palms flat on the floor, he pushed himself up. The dust sifted through his fingers and poured off his back and through the seams in his gear. He lifted his sights to an endless, scorched plane, extending out unto the horizon where the dry, fawn earth met with the blood-red sky behind a cloud of acrid dust.
He staggered to his feet and gazed about, turned and turned on the spot. Not a soul in sight.
Kamchatka…
He had been in this wasteland before. Had he ever left?
The image of Pope’s augur eyes and the sound of his voice were clear in memory as the revelations.
“Vincent…” he muttered in a daze.
His thoughts were all awry: no sense of being asleep, awake, alive or dead.
“Naomi.”
His throat was so dry he could barely breathe her name.
“Naomi…”
He stumbled, fell in the dust, lifted himself up, then stumbled and fell on his knees again. Had it been a nightmare? Was it all true? Which was the nightmare and which was the memory? Perhaps they were both true. A dual reality did not seem even implausible anymore. The thoughts tore him to pieces. He palmed his head, grimacing, teeth grinding. The tears stung like acid.
“NO!”
He threw his head back, baying at the red, red sun.
He came to his feet and almost stumbled a third time.
“Saul…” A small voice whispered in the wind.
He gasped and his eyes gaped.
“Naomi…”
The whispers came again and he spun around trying to find the voice.
“Where are you?” he muttered incessantly. “Where are you?”
Silence fell across the desert again.
“NAOMI!”
“Saul.” The voice altered and became suddenly deeper, more orotund.
He stopped, breathless, and stared into the bright red disc over the horizon.
“Saul.”
The godlike voice resounded across the land. He suddenly felt as though he was being drawn into the flaming disc, as the light became brighter and the air hotter and hotter, searing him. Throwing his arms back, all of the torture unbridled in one great howl.
He re-awoke.
His eyelids recoiled from the same blinding light that had ushered him from one nightmare to the other. He tried to start but could not. His body had gone dead again. The mask was removed from over his face and the dark outline of a head emerged between him and the white light shining from above.
“Saul.”
The same orotund voice from before spoke, resonant through the haze of his waking.
“The girl, Saul.”
“Naomi…”
“Had the thought of killing her ever crossed your mind? A dream perhaps?”
He wanted so badly to reach out and strangle the looming head.
“Yes…” Pope hummed, nodding. “Moments of affection. Re-enactments of past events. The more typical causes…”
The silhouette withdrew from the light.
He felt himself rising again, cocooned in his familiar seat, in the middle of the circle of light, surrounded by the same congregation of obscure figures, with Eastman sitting in his usual place. He could still feel the heat of the blaze from the wasteland.
He had lost count of how many times he had woken from one realm to the other, though he could remember each world vividly after each crossover. His body may have rested, but his mind had had no respite. As soon as one nightmare ended, another began: no point of reference for time. His skin had healed but it may or may not have been reconstructed, and with age-suppressant medicine these days, even the aging of the flesh was nothing to go by.
“Things are different this time, Saul.”
Pope began pacing, forming circles with his paces once again.
“You have never been one to choose death over life,” said the neuralist. “You have always been led back into the cycle by the vain hope that you might somehow be able to break it so long as you kept trying. But, this girl…’ his voice took a dip of loathing. “She has latched onto you in a way unprecedented in any previous case. I fear we may lose you forever.”
“What does it matter to you?”
“You think too little of yourself.”
“I could die in a war zone tomorrow.”
“The duration of your life is irrelevant.”
Pope’s answers were quick, sharp and calculated. He went on circling, disappearing and reappearing from his peripheral vision, the sound of the deliberate footfalls ringing through the dark.
“A note of irony, in passing,” Pope digressed: “At the time of his untimely death at your hands, Senator Clarke Jones had been a leading anti-militarist prospect for the U.S. presidency. His assassination at your hands inspired the fear and hatred that would forever separate our worlds … That’s right,” he added with subtle delight: “The world which you so despise – without you, it might never have existed. We might never have existed. You, Saul, are perhaps our greatest living hero. You should know it pains me to see you this way.”
“Then kill me,” he groaned weakly.
Pope stopped momentarily, turned to him and lifted his head with a sigh.
“You despise us, Saul, because you do not understand us. Because you despise us, you resist us – that is only logical. Therefore, in this session, I shall try to help you understand our vision. And let there be no mistake about it: It is the only vision.”
Pope pushed the pince-nez back over his eyes, reached into his suit jacket and there followed a familiar rattling noise before his hand emerged, wielding a black canister. He opened it, rolled a single neural tablet into his hand and cupped his palm over his mouth, raised his head, swallowed and inhaled deeply.
“I suppose you must have realised by now how the neural program works…”
Pope looked to him for the answer.
“Memory,” he answered weakly.
“Yes,” Pope droned. “Memory” He tucked the canister back into his pocket, and began to pace around again. “All thought – all reality – is locked in memory,” he preached. “All is memory and everything is past -- the future and the present included. That is difficult, I know.”
He paused, as though to allow the thought to permeate.
“If the past is nothing more than a collection of experiences in the mind, the future exists only as a set of vague predictions. We assume, naturally, that the future will follow the same pattern as the past, but there is no objective guarantee for this – it is merely useful fiction. All temporality is the same. Time therefore exists only insofar as it is a mental construct. Or, to put it simply: Memory – is the key to time. Alter one’s perception of time and you alter his entire disposition to the world: fear, anxiety, guilt, remorse. Blur one’s sense of the future and all fear – even fear of death – dissipates, leaving only the ever-contracting point of the present. In the world we envisage, the very notions of past and future will collapse. There will only be the present – the euphoria of being in the m
oment – which we will continually augment. The balance is a delicate one, which we are continually perfecting. It is one of our principal projects.”
“You drug the mind,” he muttered, spitefully.
Pope stopped and faced him.
“What was that, Saul?”
He started to gather his thoughts, and the ire bubbled up again.
“If people regret and fear nothing, they will accept anything,” he said. “Your world is blind. You keep it that way. That is the only way it survives.”
“It is how you survived,” he said. “I have already told you, Saul: Truth is as arbitrary as the wind __ the product of random atomic collisions without meaning or purpose beyond our own propagation, no more existent than the past or the future. Living a lie was the only thing that allowed you to assume some semblance of sanity.”
He wanted desperately to counter – to howl at the top of his lungs that they were the ones slowly crafting a world of lies and war. It would have made no difference. He already knew what Pope’s response would have been, and it would have been correct. He, like the rest of the Commission, was nothing more than a catalyst. As much as he would have liked to believe they were the tyrants, they were not.
“The problem lies far deeper than any bullet can pierce.”
He recalled the words, but not where he had heard them.
How?
How could the race have freely come to this? To think that one day the pages of history would be wiped out and that this would be the default world, accepted for what it is as a matter of course. The vision flashed before him in a curl of flame: A world at war would be the only world.
No!
Martial order had to fall.
It has to…
“Saul.”
His eyes opened and he was lifted from his thoughts, drawn back into the cold, blue eyes. Pope had that usual look about him, a look that mirrored his own thoughts back.
“Do you really believe that the world would find its peace if martial order were to crumble – if our world were to fall?”
He had become accustomed to the trick questions. No doubt Pope was laying some new trap, designed to mire him in his own presuppositions. But the answer seemed elementary and irrefutable: “Martial order is war,” he growled. “If the war economy falls, there can only be peace. You keep it alive. You keep the cycle going.”
