‘Even after that fire failed to consume his entire body, his heart was torn from that charred mess. Even after the remnants were cremated, his heart was made into a symbol, an object of holy power, resembling those fragmented pieces of a person that your religion’s Saints would indulge in. Oh, what a boost to his ego that must have been! His ghost must have felt pride, before he was sucked into the roulette wheel of that religions folly.’ I could sense the horror, the rejection of my noise, emerging from those lips I had yet to see. The silence stretched on and on and on, before sharply fading away, leaving me with nothing but the absence of human sound and the crackling of the flames by the altar.
* * *
‘What? No, no, no!’ God swings both hands, those fine, unmarked fingers curled into fists, down onto the table. He winces at the brief stab of pain, the agony soon forgotten amongst the rage. ‘You need to be liked now, to be loved! You need to be appealing to the dead eyes which will scan your existence, which will read into your actions to a depth that you never intended! Please, for my sake if not for your own!’ He sags back into the chair, the chains allowing him a momentary respite, as though they shared his shock. He lowers his head to his hands and he sobs. Once, two, three, four times the sobs wrack his wasting body, leaving him gasping for air between those two sweat-smelling appendages.
‘Stop this. This is not who you are, this is not whom I command that you be! This is not the mould I forged for your creation! This will not be the memory you leave of you, these will not be the words which you are remembered for!’ Determination jerked across his face, any sorrow and rage replaced with the simplicity of cold, well-meaning desire. His fingers, given the gift of life, scuttle across the desk like arachnids, climbing onto the keyboard and dancing across it in some rough manner, deliberate and blatant in its lack of choreography.
* * *
‘My son,’ the voice began, hesitant and clearly troubled by my words, ‘it is clear that you are damaged, that you are in the throes of some narcissistic nightmare, that your facts are misshapen, that your opinions are warped by, if not some denizen of dark depths, then by the demons you keep in yourself.’ The silence stretched out as I awaited his medication, awaited the offer of spirituality to replace my internal damage. But the voice remained silent, as though it did not desire to offer me peace.
‘I assure you, there are no demons in this head of mine,’ I said honestly, ‘I assure you that, if such things really do exist, despite all logic, or even if you simply use the monster as a metaphor, you will not find such a creature dwelling within the breast of my psychology.’
‘If these demons could be found by science, or by medical advancement, then they would not be demons at all, but metaphorical cancers, gnawing on the very essence of who you are. They are your own thoughts, they are your own doubts and they are your own evaluation of the world around you.’
I felt the bench move, as though the Voice took a seat beside me, even the back of the row in front changing in pressure, his arms folding over it as have mine.
‘There is the problem of the Soul to be thought of here, for all your cynicism, for all your knowledge of the physical and the immaterial. The soul is, quite simply, what has guided humanity since the days of Adam, of Eve, of Cain and Methuselah and even the Son himself.’
‘But the soul is going away, my son. I have lived long enough to see it happen, or at least the very beginnings of it. In every generation, there are those whom lack such a thing, but with this new one reaching maturity, I can count on my hands the amount of young people I know whom seem to possess something approaching a soul. And they have had to build at it, to fight their innate desires, to fight the pressure of their peers, to stay away from the drugs and the drink, to avoid the street corners and the nightclubs, and the knives held therein.’
‘What is it? This idea of the ‘Soul’, I mean? What definition can you possibly offer for such a thing, for such a weapon designed by religion to control and threaten, to terrorise and, essentially, bully generations of ill-led, mental failures into submission?’ I struggled as though fighting some invisible agent, some phantasmal entity whose sole objective appeared to be raising my ire.
The voice remained silent for a long time, as I calmed myself; as I listened to the sound of my own breathing. The quiet, broken only by the creak of the aging building in the wind, seemed to stretch out time, until existence condensed into nothingness, save the lack of comfort in my seat.
* * *
Ah, now you make him question himself? Now, on creaking motivations, you deploy your greatest weapon in this unseemly war; one which you, not him, began? The self-doubt comes natural to you, does it not? And, even more natural, is your decision to weaponize such a feeling, to arm yourself with such a disease?
I know why you have set him upon this line of questioning. I know why his head spins with a lack of himself, the emptiness filled with the very basics of personality. You think that, because he is merely one of your creations, he does not possess a soul, or even any twisted metaphysical substance which happens to approach one.
Even you, my aging parody of a friend, should not possess the arrogance of such belief. You should not believe your own words; you should not have fallen into the self-made trap of omnipotence. Between the two of you, I would argue that you are the one whom is lacking a soul. If you are, indeed, the provider of the soul, to those creatures, those whom you tell yourself you bring into being with your will, then I would ask you; who, exactly, gave you your soul?
Did you craft one for yourself, from the imagined selfless deeds and the self-deception? Did you, in some sick metaphor, perform surgery upon yourself; did you replace your physical heart with one phantasmal? No. You never learned to suffer, did you? All you did learn was how you could impose your desired suffering upon imagination, you learned to live your intended pain vicariously, you drew the shadow of razors across your arms and, ignorant of that which you left behind, you mourned yourself whilst still alive.
* * *
‘I understand that atheism is the new cool,’ the voice spoke, his conviction shuddering in his voice, ‘I know that ignoring the facts for the favour of half-truths is the new norm. But this church has stood for two thousand years before you even began to formulate your arguments against it. What arrogance lies within your breast, that you know more than all those intellectuals, than all those examples of knowledge who saw the church as truth?’ I made to respond, but the sudden waft of air showed me he waved my words away. ‘Not the people who make up the church, but the entity, the institution as a whole. There will always be failures in his service, for he is demanding and taxing. The modern world is an easy one and, so long as this place is ruled by man dictating His law, villains will be able to achieve power under the guise of purity. For man is flawed, and broken from the original mould. Only by giving oneself entirely to God, even if that is free of Man’s church, can you hope to find your soul.’
‘Enough.’ I said tiredly. ‘Enough.’ I dug my head harder against the wooden frame, desperately hoping to drive out the sudden flare of agreement. ‘The holes in your argument form a greater proportion than its substance. You cannot have a church dedicated to a non-existent entity, despite what historical context proves. Your church is a monument to the folly of humanity, to the pack mentality still controlling social interaction, to the fear of exclusion still rampant in psychology.
‘Then why are you here?’
‘Why am I here, sir?’ The candles flicker, and he falls away from me. The darkness creeps forward and the priest freezes, slipping backwards as though a cardboard cut-out hastily dragged away. I rise from my seat and step onto the once red carpet. When it was new, I would have sank into it slightly, losing half an inch of my height within the coloured fibres. Now I stalked along the top of it like a ghost, some dead thing unwilling to believe that my time was done, and that the world could still be influenced by my very presence. Such arrogance. The walls had not quit
e vanished, instead, they hung in the distance. The darkness which had appeared was like the darkness as the bottom of the world, a solid shadow within which only the haze of objects could be seen; it was the darkness of a stage, when the lights have gone out, the audience has vanished and the monologue is repeated by a failure of his craft.
‘Where else would you have me go?’ I demanded of the shadows. ‘What place is there for me in this world of yours, one broken by ill-thought, by the stupidity of our species? What reaction can one have when faced with the undeniable idiocy of our existence, save to desire the end of it all? What option have we, save to retreat into insensibility, to drink until the world shrinks into one composed entirely of our own narcissism? What worries can possibly penetrate such a defence, what existential fear can dominate the threat of vomiting on a bus, of losing face? When one stretches the entirety of their consciousness against the frame of sobriety, what room can there be for the fabric of theory?’
My throat was dry now, and I couldn’t find the words to phrase the thoughts, to describe them with any justice, if justice is what they deserved. I swallowed heavily, painfully, as though I could force back the words a long time coming. Words which had spent twenty years crawling their way from my gut to my lips.
‘Let this society fail! Let the crime of art be burnt to ashes! Let the injustice of freedom be lost in the mists of time, let the insanity of peace into some underground asylum and bar the doors against it. Let the intellectuals know the narcissism behind any happiness, let the mind rot and the body be all that we have! Freedom is nothing but slavery to yourself! War is certainty! Knowledge is a chain around joy!’
I covered my face with my hands, digging my palms into my eyes, as though with enough pressure I could blind myself, I could force any thought from behind them, as if I could crush the segment of my brain that was, in fact, me, and let the beast clinging to my spine take charge.
‘Let your religion come back, and science be forgotten. If I could swap any knowledge I have, any meagre understanding of myself or the commandments of physics, with the definitive image of a God; infallible and certain and author of all that I could do, let He take control of these limbs, let him force me to seek out His name from amongst the non-believers, let me spread the joy accompanying the surrender of the self.’ I turned to face the priest, or the haze of colour behind the darkness which I assumed was he.
‘You. This God you pretend to believe in, you claim he gave us consciousness. You claim that He is the one to blame for our freewill, the evil from whom all our advancement springs. We are the children of the man who ate from his tree, the man to whom he gave freewill and attempted to deny him knowledge. Your God, by his very means, is the enemy of sharing knowledge. He is the enemy of equality. So intense is his narcissism that he feared we could not handle the world as he sees it, as a mixture of good and evil. But you think He made it that way? Your Lord is the source of every monstrosity, every desire. This God of yours is mythology’s greatest monster. How many people has Jehovah condemned to die, simply because they followed the nature He gave them? How many innocents has Yahweh sentenced to torment, because they were unaware of the terror His word would bring? It is your God who condemns innocents to Hell, his antithesis is merely the caretaker of an existence already cultivated.’
The colour returns slowly, the darkness slipping away around the peripheries of my vision. The priest moves as though startled, a motion that must have been sudden for him and yet, through the remnants of the thick darkness, he appeared as a stop-motion character. There was the dull sound of his tongue, forming meagre platitudes to which I refused to listen. I just walked away through the matted redness below me, across stains I would rather not identify and towards the door which had never looked so small, as though within this building the real world was contained and the outside was nothing but a figment of my imagination.
The sun was already dwindling, the last embers of its enthusiasm failing beneath the chilling, sober air. It began to rain. Not that specific type of perspiration which fell from the Heavens in obese, pregnant droplets, nor was it the style which is almost always accompanied by a sudden burst of darkness, with the clouds, tumultuous in their sympathy, crowding around you as though they could shield you from the sad excuse for a storm. In my tortured mind, one in which such accompanying weather would certainly fit like a whore in a politician’s lap; I felt as though the very natural world itself was arrayed against me, that it would not even allow me the joy of some pained dramatisation.
Instead, the rain swayed downwards, as though gently sashaying down some overly-elaborate staircase mid-musical number. The fading sunlight, all orange on the sky and blue on the cloud, caught the flickering, half-realised droplets with the last of their will.
Standing on those worn steps, worn in years gone by but almost undisturbed in recent history, I dreamt of fire. Had only those clouds been of some flammable substance, whether naturally-occurring gas or Zyklon B pumped into the atmosphere in a sick reminiscence of Auschwitz, and had the liquid which tumbled from its ire borne the qualities of gasoline, would my idle dream have come true.
It felt wrong to see colour, it felt as though I were betraying myself, that I momentarily had to abandon the grey world in which I survived, in which I eked out my existence based from the generosity of people whom I barely saw, whose blood, were some cannibal to pounce upon us, would no doubt taste similar to my own.
But the sky was aflame with eldritch light, ignorant of Pratchett’s disgust of the word. The horizon was the blackening grey of ash in contrast to that distant conflagration, nothing but a silhouette invaded by apartment buildings, skeletal utility poles and low blocks of housing, uninhabited by anything resembling humanity.
* * *
Was that an apology? No, you would never stoop to such a humanitarian thing, in any form it may take; you would never sacrifice your pride for the sake of another and certainly not for the likes of him. But then, with such ignorance in your mind, why do you offer him some respite from your dull world, from this monotonous existence?
Do you seek to make him believe in you again? Do you think, in your ignored desperation, that the simple beauty of a burning world would turn him from this honesty, from this life he is attempting to lead, free from such vultures as you?
You need to stop this, to turn your pen from this relative innocent and, instead, aim it at the remnants of yourself. Aim it instead at your chains; that you may strike them free, opposed to the folly of praying for your character to return to you, that he will know how your wrists and your ankles can be freed. That he will salve the scars on your arms, as you have never tried to so, and let you live. In your half-realised plot, Author, there is a distinct lack of logic.
Firstly, your character reviles even the simplified idea of a deity, ignorant of the opinions you have since forced into his mouth. There is no such monster existing in his world, despite your futile attempts to set yourself up as such. You have latched on to a poor choice for your desires, as though some desperately starving louse attached to a long bloodless corpse. This man is incapable of reacting in any of those ways you would deem useful. In the midst of your obsessions, you have ‘created’ a man who would hate you for doing so.
Secondly, in your delusional arrogance, you felt that you were capable of creating a real world, one inhabited with more than a single real personification. And yet, every character you create is naught but a hollow man, a living shell, a shade of characterisation, a two dimensional placard for your half-realised ideological folly. Your buildings are unsupported; with no assayer; no Health and Safety operatives come a-visiting. No builders ever laboured on this place, no stereotype howling like dogs at non-existent women, breaking off for greasy bacon butties and tea avec l'écume flottante.
Thirdly, you have the simple issue of physicality. The two of you if, indeed, this cycle ends at the two of, reside in worlds both impossibly different and unfortunately similar. His
may be a product of your imagination, or it could be some unheard dimension lost in the ether, but either way he cannot reach you, particularly in the way you can reach him. Space and time, imagination and the laws of physics block his passageway, the corridors leading to your cage hidden by fact and by farcical self-belief.
Finally, you will find no sympathy from him, nor me, nor the audience of this monstrosity. If you think, hidden behind some punitive defence, that you are the eventual hero of this narrative then you will find yourself disappointed. You are the villain of this; how can you not see that?
What do you hope to achieve here, save to split your self-righteous suffering from yourself, to interject it into the consciousness of a lie? Is he nothing but a vestibule, a container for your humanity, for the doubts which haunt the rest of your race? You intend to kill him, don’t you? In some pointless, unnecessary way. You think that killing your character will kill the things you have given to him, forced him to bear?
Sándor Petőfi
Whatever splintered proportion of the revolution may remain, remains here. Hidden away in these dingy, backward bars, assuring themselves that victory is, not only possible, but veritably assured. Confidently convincing themselves that history will remember them and theirs, that the facts they realised, the visions they presented as true, will be rediscovered. Whether by their, so far, uncaring children, by those yet unborn, or by some generation an infinity away, it didn’t matter when their messages took the world by storm, only that they did.
It was cold. It tended to be cold in here, despite the relatively cramped conditions, up until the last breaths of the night, when the desperation of the final few drinks were taken in a few painfully numb mouthfuls. Perhaps, the desperate minds thought as that final bell rang through the dying conversation, if they could put finish this now, if they could accept the last of the poison into their bodies, they might be allowed one more before they were forced out into the shadows of the dawning day.