The Six Messiahs

'What do you want?'

'Not a thing; perfectly content, old chap; thanks, ever so—''

'Monstrous; rude; invasion of privacy. Not like you at all.'

Then, as if a subject he'd been meaning to bring up had come rushing back into his mind, Doyle fixed Sparks with a benign physician's eye and paused dramatically before asking, 'How have you been, Jack?'

'What sort of a deeply moronic question is that?'

'I can't honestly say I don't have my concerns about you____'

'Now you are really making me angry—'

'Perhaps if I express it this way, Jack: There are certain ... behaviors you exhibit that, as a doctor, one can't help but take notice of.'

'What?'

'Certain symptomatic tendencies—'

'Stop mincing around and come out with it: What do you mean to say?'

Doyle regarded him with a thoughtful series of nods. 'It occurs to me that in the years between our periods of acquaintanceship, you may have become mentally deranged.'

Even in the shadowy haze, Doyle could see blood rush to his face like mercury up a raging thermometer; it seemed to require a supreme act of will for Jack to contain the violence that fireballed inside him. For a tense moment, Doyle feared his strategy had backfired and he might have to physically defend himself; he knew how to box but Jack knew how to kill. But instead of attack came the rigid pointing of a scarred and crooked index finger and a voice strangled with fury.

'You ... don't know ... a bloody thing ... about anything.' Corners of Jack's mouth flecked with white. Snorting like an agitated bull.

'I don't know the facts, of course,' said Doyle, somehow keeping his pitch at the same infuriating even keel. 'All I have are my observations. What else have you given me to go on?'

'Would you like to hear that there were times when I begged whatever passes for intelligence in the Creator of this world to let me die? That I got down on my bloody knees and prayed like some simple-minded vicar to a God I don't even believe in? Is that what you want, Doyle? Because that would be true. And I am pleased to report that there is no God of the kind they try to sell us, because nothing bearing a resemblance to such a being would have left one of its creatures alive in such a state.'

Right, thought Doyle, now we've primed the pump.

'So instead He ... left you alive to suffer, is that it?'

'What a stupid, common presumption: Didn't you hear a word I just told you? Regarding our fate no decision is made; no one presides, no being, no thing even bears witness. Can you begin to understand me?'

Doyle stared at him mutely: Let him talk.

'No great or lesser intelligence takes any notice of our existence whatsoever because we are alone, Doyle, every one of us, left adrift in cold and empty space. That's the dirty joke on the washroom wall: It's all a mistake; cruel, random, and senseless as a railway accident....'

'Human life?'

'I mean creation.'

Jack leaned forward; the piercing lightness of his eyes like diamonds in the dark of the carriage. His voice fell to a whispery rasp. 'Every stone, every blade of grass, every butterfly. Man most assuredly of all: no design, no underlying purpose; it's a folly, our so-called mind, a japery; if there's poetry in our nature, it bleats out of us with no more conscious intention than the babblings of an ape. But the world of man— society—conspires to keep this secret from us. Don't you find it curious? With all your scientific training?'

'What's that?'

'Animals are born with instinctual drives for survival and develop techniques to ensure it. Man is the only creature that needs to delude himself into believing there's a more elaborate reason he's alive; we flood our minds with lies and fantasies about love and family and a benign God in the heavens watching over us.

'But it's only a survival instinct, drilled into each of us from our first breath; it's vital to a society's survival that its members be prevented from discovering how squalid and meaningless their existence truly is. Otherwise we might lay down our tools, leave all this soul-destroying work behind, and where would your precious society be then?'

The silence lay deep between them, broken by the distant, rhythmic clacking of the rails. Jack never blinked, never moved his eyes from Doyle's: Doyle looked through them to darkness, thick and churning.

'Picture another possibility: What if the origin of our world is worse even than this? What if there is a Creator who worked to give our earth design, forethought, shape and contour? And what if this creature is completely and utterly insane?'

'Is that what you believe, Jack?'

'Do you know what you find, down here'—he stabbed a fist sharply into his gut—'when every article of civility, every habit, cherished memory, every manufactured shred of this puppet we assume ourselves to be is stripped off us like the skin of an animal?'

Doyle swallowed hard. 'Tell me.'

'Nothing,' said Jack, his voice barely a whisper. 'A void. No sight, no sound, no thought; not a ripple or the faintest echo. That's the secret at the base of the stairs no one is supposed to find. They warn you when we're young: Don't look down there, children; stay here by the fire and we'll tell you the lies our parents beat into us about the greater glory of man. Because they know coming face-to-face with that emptiness would obliterate every trace of who you thought you were like a beetle crushed under a jackboot.'

Jack held up his ruined hands. 'And this is the glorious mistake you see before you: I entered into the emptiness. I'm there still. And I'm still alive. And it means.. . nothing.'

Sparks smiled, a death's-head grin, eyes shining with a diseased and twisted triumph. The train shot into a tunnel, plunging them into darkness. Doyle clenched his fists, not knowing if he was about to live or die, but he would have welcomed a physical fight, pain, anything palpable and real in place of Jack's spiraling fall.

'So with this cheery whisper in my ear, I greet each new dawn,' Jack continued quietly, his voice worming sinuously out of the dark. 'It never leaves, I have no relief, and in this way I go on living. Mentally disturbed? Don't waste your pathetic shopworn judgments on me, Doctor. Posing at enlightenment. No better than the rest of them; you put a name to what you can't begin to comprehend to push the darkness away. That's the first refuge of a coward. There was a time when I could expect more from you than the parroting of empty screed. Or has success seduced the better part of your mind as well as your pockets? Maybe that's it. They haven't cut you down yet; you're still a fresh face, drunk on the adulation of the masses. Prepare yourself, Doyle; a reckoning is due. They won't tolerate any success from one of their own for long. They cut down all the tall poppies.'

The train left the tunnel; lights flickered back on. Jack sat only inches away; his eyes trained on Doyle, who didn't know how to keep the fear and disgust off his face. Doubt crowded in on him: This man's sickness was not only of the mind but of the soul, and its profundity crippled his ability to respond. Where had it come from? What had caused it? He had to press forward with his questions: 'If you had come to such a pass, why didn't you take your own life?'

Jack leaned back, shrugged, and casually picked a piece of lint off his sleeve.

'This ... place ... is hellish but not without interest. Picture happening upon a street fight: You come around a corner and find two strangers trying to kill each other with every reserve of viciousness in their bodies. The outcome means nothing to you, but the flow of blood, the raw naked spectacle, rivets you; you can't tear your eyes away. Embrace the emptiness and it exerts the same mesmerizing hold on the imagination: How perfectly and regularly human beings embody a vast, horrific meaninglessness. It would almost qualify as tragic if it weren't so deeply hilarious; all the pomp, the effort, the strained, puffed-up self-importance of people, handing out awards to ourselves, parading around; achievement. Working, striving, worshiping, loving. As if it mattered.

'Why didn't I kill myself?' Jack laughed, a harsh, brutal rasp. 'You might well ask. Because life is so cruel