Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet (37 page)

  
There was an almost ascetic silence.  No formalities had been exchanged and
after a few seconds of the gravest silence, Doctor Pope took out a file marked
with the insignia of the UMC and an air of content surfaced in his grave
feature as the file gently slid across the table-top, past the unusual cubic
device in the middle.  He looked from the commissioner to the file and eyed it
a moment before reaching out with peculiar hesitation.

  
“What is this?”

  
“This is you,” Pope replied.  “The
new
you.”

   
He picked up the file, opened it and the silence quickly fell again as he
browsed through the contents. The pages contained a long list of personal data:
a martial identification number, addresses, bank accounts, PMC sponsorships,
martial insurance details and a list of names which he presumed to be
commissioners. 

  
“Do you like your new name?”

  
“I never cared much for Vincent.”

  
“Vincent no longer exists.”

  
“Good,” he nodded.  “Then, this is it.” 

  
“Yes,” Pope nodded.  “You have officially been released from civil
jurisdiction.  Once you are cleaned, you will be reborn, a child of martial
order.”

  
“The highest caste?”

  
“But of course,” smiled Pope. 

  
The file closed and was laid back down on the desk.

  
“You will be denied nothing,” Pope added.  “As long as you live, we are your
committed servants.  And it will be my pleasure and privilege to fulfil the
debt our world owes you – and a great debt it is.”

  
“So I hear.”

  
“Yes, it is a shame your celebrity must be lost forever.  Are you at all
lethargic?”

  
“No … I think I have had enough fame for one decade.”

  
“Well, that is hardly surprising.  They have made you a villain. 
We
will make you a hero.”

  
“It is all relative.”

  
“Quite,” Pope hummed and the smile enlarged eerily.  “As long as we are agreed
that you are here because you belong with us, that is all that matters.”

  
“What do you mean?”

  
Pope was silent and his smile softened.

 
 “Let us say, simply, that we insist upon freedom,” he said.  “We do not want
you to feel as though you have been driven to us against your will.”

  
“I do not believe in will,” he answered.  “War is all I have ever known.”

  
“And now, all you will ever need to know.”

  
Silence fell again. 

  
From outside the door came the sound of heavy, marching footfalls.  He expected
the doors to open at any moment, and for the blue-geared men to enter and
escort him away.  But his anticipation faded with the sound of the footfalls as
they carried on down the outer corridor.  And then he was left wondering why he
was still there. 

  
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 – that 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…