Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet

by Jinn, Bo

  A silence of anticipation across the theater preceded Pope’s reply:

  “No, Saul …” he said, his voice deepening to an abysmal bass. “We keep the cycle in control.”

  Pope started to pace again, his voice exalting:

  “Do not fool yourself into thinking that war is the disease, Saul – war is the cure of the disease! The world has always known war. The cycle existed long before us; it will exist long after. For centuries, our predecessors made the mistake of believing that the cycle could and should be averted. Your mistake was the same. Every one of your previous cycles followed precisely the same pattern, ultimately culminating in a conflict which could not, and cannot, be resolved any other way other than the destruction of the cause. The cycle always ends where it begins. You might think, as those who came before us, that war is some blunder in reason, a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal. In one sense, that is correct: All conflict is the resolution of paradox – blown-up struggle in an essentially flawed mind – synapses fighting to maintain their rhythm. The struggle cannot be reasoned away. It is built into the very fabric of our thoughts. We are doomed to failure. There is no escaping the vicious circle…”

  Pope’s voice faded into the violent flow of his thoughts. He spoke as one would expect of a man who had never seen a battlefield, who had never seen bodies broken apart, entire cities razed to ruins -- incinerated, obliterated. Before long, he stopped with his back turned to him and his head raised.

  “As long as we live, the fire of war will continue to burn, steadily purging the race.”

  “No!” he broke again, breathless with vexation. “It will stop,” he slurred.

  Pope lowered his head again and turned.

  “How?”

  “It is inevitable.”

  “And why would you imagine that?”

  “The race will not sustain itself on war forever! It has to end!”

  “That is where you are wrong.” Pope bowed his head. “For you see, the race has not only sustained itself on war but thrived on it. We are the living proof. War is, was and always will be one thing and one thing only: the pursuit of power – the will of man to unremittingly supersede himself without restraint. Can you not see that we are the manifestation of that will, Saul? What has always driven man to new heights if not the will to power?”

  Pope’s eyes flashed, his voice escalated and his expression became suddenly indignant, fanatical, relentless.

  “Do you honestly believe that a society built upon your fatuous notions of peace, love and altruism would ever stand up to us? We would annihilate them! Wipe them clean out of existence! You do not need me to tell you this. You already know that it is true. You beheld that dung heap of dead renegades – you took part in their destruction. Remember that image, Saul. That is what becomes of anyone who defies the new order.”

  “It will self-destruct,” he growled. “You cannot build a world on unceasing death.”

  “Death has always been the hero of our story. It is something all men have done and every man must do if the race is to endure. Progress demands the elimination of the weak. The value of a dimitar is measured in blood. Death is the final expression of power. Without it, power would not exist.”

  “What about life?”

  “Life,” Pope echoed definitively, “a fleeting commodity that must be exploited to the utmost for however long it lasts – whether the duration is thirty years or eighty makes no difference in the grander scheme of things. Do you really suppose that the individual will ever regard his own ephemeral existence as anything more? If so, tell me what it could be… Tell me what difference it makes whether a life, however brief, is claimed by war rather than disease, famine or age. Perhaps you imagine that the wars will escalate out of control to the point of mass destruction…”

  “It will happen sooner or later.”

  “No. It will not,” Pope averred, gravely. “The war economy ensures that that we will never cross the point of no return. To be sure: all economies rise and recede but they always balance out in the end. The world could have obliterated itself long ago, yet here we stand, you and I, as we have for millennia, and the wars shall go on now and forever as they always have. The reason is simple: the very thrill of power that drives the wars demands that the race endures. It will never destroy itself. Our order will continue to grow until it is the only order.”

  At this point, Pope was at full momentum, lifting one hand aloft as though a globe were suspended on his fingertips, invoking the heavens as witness to his words, galvanised by the silent reverence of his congregation of acolytes. There was no objection for which he was not prepared, no flaw in the insane vision that had not been meticulously resolved.

  “People cannot live with war forever,” Saul averred with dogged denial. “They cannot suffer it … They will not.”

  Pope lowered the raised hand and crossed both arms at his back again.

  “What is there to suffer?” he resumed, quietly. “You think that we lack something essential that mankind requires, love perhaps…? Do not be nonsensical, Saul. Do you really suppose that human affection offers something we cannot? Do you believe that love has any less of a propensity toward war than pride, greed, retribution or any other cause that you deem ignoble?”

  “Love is the opposite of war.”

  Pope stopped at once on his words.

  “Is that so?” he purred, deviously.

  It was almost as if he had detected the flash of insecurity in his words. Knowing what he knew now: the dejected and contemptible thing that he was, the unforgivable past – who was he to speak of … love? (The word had become so suddenly insipid). But, even though he himself might have been neither capable nor worthy of it did not mean that it was not real. It had to be real! If there were one – just one – axiom that could be appealed to against the lunatic perversion of martial order, it had to be the only thing left.

  Naomi…

  She was his last vestige of hope. His last preserve.

  “Naomi.”

  Saul opened his eyes again when the frozen voice uttered her name.

  Pope was now standing feet in front of him, the ashen visage closer and more substantial than ever before. The ice-blue eyes flaunted some fresh and sinister purpose, as he leaned forward and whispered, chillingly: “We have her, Saul.”

  His breath jolted to a stop. All his thoughts foundered.

  “Suppose I told you,” Pope continued, with maniacal relish in his voice, “that we are going to torture her … defile her in ways even you could not imagine. Torment which we shall inflict in steady increments over several days, beginning with her body, easing into her mind until the plea for us to kill her is all she can think to cry through the pain.”

  He visualised the torture unfold before his eyes with Pope’s every word: heard the sounds of the helpless cries and squeals of agony.

  A blaze went through his blood and the thin red lines split and forked over his bloated eyes. The swelling fury made his fingers twitch through the deadness. He would destroy Pope; tear him limb from limb! He would slaughter everyone in that room! His respires came out in savage growls through borne teeth.

  Pope rose, smirked and snorted.

  “Look at you,” he said with scorn; “primed to kill at the mere suggestion of any harm coming upon her! Why, you would kill me right now if you could! You would destroy everyone and everything in the world – and for what? For love.”

  He turned and strolled away, raising his voice to a new oration.

  “Soon, love will become an archaism – a relic of the past just like you. Subsistence. Pleasure. Pain. Purpose. These are the four unique forces that have driven every human since the inception of the race. Our purpose is grounded in the martial economy and the purpose of the martial economy is power. Pure propagation of the will – it is the quintessential purpose.”

  “You are insane,” he mumbled feebly.

  Pope stopped. He seemed to snicker.

  “You
have nothing, nothing with which to defend all your notions of love, truth, higher principle, peace, paradise, utopia -- nothing but the high-pitched squeals of your own intuitions and the very defects that have reduced you to your present state. You endure only in the hope that we will put you out of your misery.”

  “Then do it,” he rumbled.

  “No,” Pope glowered. “What you want is an execution. You cannot hide your will from me, Saul. If you want to die so badly; ask for it…”

  He was silent.

  He could feel the two words about to break from him. He wanted so desperately to say them – anything to bring the torment to an end. Annihilation had to be better than 10 more minutes in this world.

  He could not. The promise still bound him to life – that cruel promise. When his eyes dropped, defeated, Pope took out the pince-nez, pressed them over his eyes, then lifted his head up and sighed with exasperation.

  “Until she is utterly eradicated from your mind, you will be forced to live.”

  Day 0

  Swirls of arid dust blew up in a squall and flogged him as he trod wearily onward, dragging his feet in the dust, gaping at the undulating line of earth and sky under the crimson sun. An eon had come and gone and that red sun remained precisely the same distance from the horizon. The prophecy of absolute martial order – the inexorable state of war – may have long come true. And Naomi…

  “Naomi…”

  His last step planted deep in the dust. He stopped.

  His leg buckled. He fell to his knee and the pain shot up through his body with the blow. He groaned and he wheezed. The air grated his throat like fire. And as he looked up he remembered, now, why he had begun to march toward the sun. It was an end he could never quite reach, always bringing him to where he started. It almost seemed to be waiting to set before it could rise again and begin the fresh rotation. And so it hung there like an augur, scorning him with the sign of the new cycle.

  The bright red orb flashed in his eyes with a scowl.

  “What…” he rasped. “What do you want from me?”

  He fell silent, as though waiting for an answer.

  “Tell me…”

  He fell upon a fist when another gust of red dust blew and toppled him.

  His head hung. The wind ceded.

  His scourged back shuddered with the spasms of his sobs and red drops fell from his eyes and melded with the red sand. He wondered how many tears of blood must have been shed to stain the sand so red. Perhaps this place was more than the figment of his racked mind. Perhaps it was a vision of the future: of a day when the earth would cease to spin, and the blood-soaked ashes of the dead continued endlessly, covering the face of the globe, over the deep gulfs of drained oceans. The image the mind turned in on itself.

  He lifted his head. The red lines streaked from the bottoms of his eyes down to his lips. His own blood quenched him, denying him death, keeping him alive for no other purpose than ongoing torment. He must have bayed at the sun, begging for annihilation a thousand times. The agony was worst when he tried to remember what had brought him there. The more time (or the impression of it) elapsed, the more the past faded into oblivion, leaving only the residual essence of regret ever-rising, eternally grinding at the soul until even the hope of death was gone. Somehow the notion that all of this could end with something as swift and as comfortable as death seemed ludicrous. There was no way out. No atonement to be had anymore. No forgiveness – no one left to proffer it. Only the enduring knowledge of the truth -- that this is where he belonged.

  “Saul…”

  The winds whispered his name again.

  He gazed up at the brightening sun.

  “Saul…”

  The light swelled and consumed the sky.

  “Saul.”

  Saul opened his eyes.

  He was back in the Sanatorium. Pope assumed his usual bearing before him, under the circle of light, the host of silhouettes above and around them in the theatron, waiting. Pope’s genuflected head bore the aspect of conquest, deepened by the contrast with his own inner defeat.

  “You see clearly, now, Saul,” hummed Pope.

  “…Yes,” he murmured.

  “You are ready to accept what you are.”

  “Yes…”

  His voice spoke autonomous of his will. There was the sense that his every action and word was an impulse flowing with a continuum, outside his control. He had become something mechanical: a bundle of synapses moving with the undeviating, mindless and unguided laws of time and matter.

  Pope smiled.

  “I knew you would not disappoint us.” He paused and stepped forward. “Now,” he said, “you know what comes next.”

  His head hung and his eyes drooped, unresponsive to the educing stares all around, beckoning him over the final brink to sanity.

  “Your choice, Saul,” stirred Pope.

  His jaw locked tight in a last effort to fight back the last words of capitulation. He had to be the one to say it. The aberrance toward surrender was innate in him, but that is not what kept him silent at that moment. Fate was inevitable; there was no denying that now. He understood everything he had been told. And because of that, he also understood that there was one thing left for him to do – one thing standing at the brink of the new cycle.

  A spark of will came back to him. He lifted his eyes.

  “Take me to her.”

  Pope observed him silently, momentarily casting a disconcerted gaze over his shoulder in Eastman’s direction. He adjusted the pince-nez with an index finger.

  “The cycle is not over,” he muttered.

  Their stares remained interlocked.

  Pope’s eyes glinted and the crooked, satisfied simper returned. He looked over to Eastman again and the latter seemed to assent to some tacit understanding with a single bow of the head. Then, Pope nodded to his left and then to his right.

  In the next moment, he heard footsteps come from behind and then stop a few paces later. Short, tapping noises came from just behind his ear. The sequence of short taps was followed by two quick beeps and a sharp, disengaging twinge like a bullet leaving the brain, shot through the back of his skull. A sudden intake of breath, his eyes flared open and the feeling came back to his limbs in a wave of tingling, like stickpins beneath his skin. The sound of much heavier footfalls approached from ahead as four heavily geared SGs marched forward, the opaque visors over their eyes, guns at their chests.

  Saul lifted an open hand; his fingers swayed up and down and then closed into a fist. The cocoon pried off his body. He rose from his seat and stood still and unclothed before the theater of onlookers. The tingling pains moved through his body in pulses.

  One of the Guards stepped forward, wielding a pair of manacles.

  “It’s alright,” said Pope, coming between them. “He will not resist.”

  Pope stopped inches away, looking directly into his blank eyes.

  “We will make the arrangements for full expurgation to be effected upon your return,” he explained in a low voice. “After that, Saul Vartanian will not exist. He will never have existed… She will never have existed.”

  She will never have existed, he repeated in his mind.

  Pope inhaled deeply and exhaled and removed his glasses.

  Their stares remained interlocked.

  “Goodbye, Saul.”

  Pope turned and walked away, through the doors at the back of the theatre. Another figure came forward and stood in his place.

  “Take him away,” said Eastman.

  About an hour later, the Guard vehicle was on the fast lane of Highway Route 6 southbound for Nozick District. As they flowed back into the bloodstream of Sodom, the sky above was dark and starless and the metropolis lights were blurred through a mist which settled just below the highest peaks of the skyline. His insentient eyes were on the oncoming traffic and the touring maglevs zipping past in lines of light against the tinted window. A frightening, skeletal face and two haunted eyes stared bac
k from his reflection.

  Eastman sat across, breaking his fixed stare to glance at his watch every time the traffic slowed. Not a word was uttered until the vehicle decelerated to a stop right outside the familiar entrance to a terraced low-rise of about 10 floors, lightless windows and façade streaked black.

  The engines switched off and the succeeding silence brought him back to consciousness. There was the sound of pneumatic hisses, the clicks, rolls and thuds of opening and closing doors, followed by heavy tramp of boots. Two Guards marched up beside the car and came to a halt face to face on either side of the open door.

  “We will be waiting,” said Eastman. “Do you what you have to do.”

  The snow began to fall the moment he stepped outside the car and drifted in a kind of spectral trance, through the mist, down the final path through the portal, down the darkened, cobwebbed corridor, stopping outside the innermost door. The number “1” shone on the veneer.

  He raised a slow fist and knocked: One. Two. Three.

  Pause.

  One. Two.

  And waited…

  And waited…

  The door opened.

  He looked up.

  “…How long has it been?” he asked.

  “Long enough.”

  The hermit opened the door wide and stepped aside.

  As soon as he stepped into the candlelit passage, he seemed to wake precisely where he stood, as though his mind had come full circle in time and everything came crashing back in a tide of emotion, disassociated from the past – everything that happened since the first day of the cycle: the people who had come and vanished in time, names and events he could no longer remember, never to be remembered again.

  He looked up at the door at top of the stairs. A warm light seeped out through the seams. He could feel her presence like an aura. She was there. She was still there.

  “She waited for you,” murmured the hermit.

  The words went through his core like a bullet.