Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet by Bō Jinn
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 joining 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 wheezed. The air grated his throat like fire.
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, like an augur, scorning him with the portent of a new cycle.
The bright red orb flashed in his eyes with a scowl.
“What…” he rasped, “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. A vision of the future. 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 a thousand times, pleading for his own obliteration. 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. The notion it could end with something as swift and as comfortable as death seemed ludicrous. There was no way out. Nothing but 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.”
He 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 theatre, waiting. His genuflected head bore the aspect of conquest, deepened by the contrast with his own inner defeat.
“You see clearly, now, Saul.”
“… Yes.”
“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.
“I knew you would not disappoint us.” Pope smiled and stepped forward. “You know what comes next.”
The educing stares all around, beckoned him over the final brink.
“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. 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 and adjusted the pince-nez with an index finger.
“The cycle is not over…”
Their stares remained interlocked.
The neuralist’s eyes glinted and the crooked, satisfied simper returned. He nodded to his left and then to his right.
Next moment, footsteps approached from behind and then stopped a few paces later. 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.
He 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 theatre 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, bringing them to a halt. “He will not resist.”
Pope came forward again, stopping inches away, gazing 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..
Pope inhaled deeply and exhaled and removed his glasses. Their stares remained interlocked for a good minute before the neuralist turned and disappeared 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 back 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, lightless windows, façade streaked black. The engines switched off and the long silence that followed brought him back to consciousness. There was the sound of pneumatic hisses, the clicks, rolls and thuds of opening and closing doors and the 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.
“Do you what you have to do.” Said Eastman. “We will be waiting for you.”
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 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.
He waited…
And waited…
The door opened..
“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 c
“She waited for you.”
The words went through his core like a bullet. He lowered his eyes. His breaths started to shake. And for a long time, he stood frozen before the first stair. His head turned slowly toward the hermit and they gazed at one another silently. The ravaged look in his eyes imparted what must come next.
The hermit bowed his head, turned and walked down the narrow passage into the small room with the two chairs set across from one another, where the foretelling of this moment had been made.
With stark clarity and a dead, frontward stare into flashback, he proceeded to recount to the hermit everything that had happened and everything that had been made known to him: about the massacre at Dolinovka, about Naomi’s family, the destruction of her life at his own hands, about his past, what he was and was forever doomed to be – the destroyer of all destroyers – a true son of martial order. And he concluded with the three final words of submission.
“You were right.”
The hermit remained silent, his immovable, vaguely commiserative stare summoning the confession from him.
“Take her,” he struggled to get the words out, “as far away from this place as you can.”
“I will.”
“Protect her,” he gasped. “At any cost, protect her.”
The hermit nodded.
“She will not understand why it has to be this way,” he said, staring blankly ahead. “She may grow to hate me.”
“She won’t,” the hermit reassured. “I will make sure she knows the truth.”
A longer silence followed.
Soon, he began to shudder again and his hands trembled furiously, clenching into tight, shaking fists. He felt, at any moment, as though the bloody tears would break from him again as he dwelt on his deepest agony.
“They will clean me,” he shook, choking on his words. “She will never have existed. She will be … a lost memory. A faded dream. It will all be forgotten.”
“The soul never forgets,” said the hermit. “You carry her light now.”
“I want to die,” he said. “I should have died long ago.”
The hermit did not answer.
When the silence continued long enough, the hermit rose from his seat.
“She is waiting for you.”
It was a while before he stood and when he did, the hermit moved from his path.
With slow, soundless steps, he ascended the stairs and stood outside the barely open door. He stopped at the threshold and rested the palm of his hand against the door. Not a sound came from the other side except the intermittent wails of the swelling blizzard.
He nudged the door open and looked immediately to his right, where a slightly taller figure than the one he remembered cradling in his arms so long ago, stood staring out of the bedroom window. He stopped and stared at the reflection in the glazing.
When the door clicked shut behind, their eyes met in their reflections.
Naomi gasped and twisted around and froze, her broad eyes shimmering and her mouth wide. For a long time, it seemed both denied the reality of the other.
Her first step toward him was gradual and hesitant. After the second step, the third followed almost immediately. She rushed straight toward him, throwing her arms around his back and bursting into immediate, quiet tears.
“Hello, little one.”
Her little breaths shuddered. “I knew you’d come back,” she cried. “I knew you would.”
He laid his hand gently on her head.
“He said you’d come back,” she whispered. “He said you would.”
In spite of his pain, he waited for her to exhaust her tears and when her arms loosened from around him, he lowered himself to her, wiped the tears away and gazed into the moonstone eyes. She had grown since that first day and the blurred passage of time revealed itself to him in her.
“It is late. You should not be awake, little one.”
“Stay with me.”
She buried her head into his chest again and an ache went from the very point where she rested her head and seized onto his heart so that his breath broke again. When he gathered himself, he gently held her back.
“There is something I must tell you.”
Unable to look into her eyes, he hung his head, lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed, feeling so weak, old and ruined as he lowered her down. Her inquiring eyes seared into his heart. He would die at any moment.
“I promised I would come back,” he muttered achingly. “I did not promise to stay.”
Her large eyes shimmered.
“What?” broke the small voice with a tremble.
He looked away.
The silence was long and excruciating.
“But…” she faltered. “But, you came back. You came back –”
“I know. I kept my promise,” he nodded woefully. “This time it is you who must leave.”
Her little hands seized onto him, on her face was a look of utter confusion.
“But, why?” she begged helplessly. “Why?”
“One day I hope that you will understand,” he strained. “When you do, you must decide whether you can forgive me. But, now. Now is not that time.”
“No,” the little head began to shake.
“You have to.”
“No!” She plunged her head into his heart and began to weep again.
The little trembles of her sobs shook him like a quake and he could do nothing but stare into the void.
“I am sorry, little one.”
“Don’t go, Saul,” she begged and repeated. “Please don’t go, please don’t –”
“You are not for this world,” he said. “I belong in this place.”
“Saul…”
“Know that you are special,” he continued. “There is no one in this world like you – no, not one. I know that you will do many great things, little one.” He paused to muster the very last of his fading spirit. “Never forget me. You must remember for both of us now.”
The last words barely wrung from him.
Naomi lifted her head and pressed the side of her face against him. She would rather lay there forever than leave. Her tears had soaked into him, percolating to his heart.
“I love you, Saul.”
The knife twisted. His eyes shut. A sole tear fell from his gaping eyes.
“I love you too.”
IV