The Last Apostle

The abandoned city roads cross like shadowy vapors, and felines move forward bony and lean. Moss-pasted stones and conspicuous passageways are abandoned beneath flickering bollards that refract an ominous harp over hidden cellar doors. Aged brick walls are jagged and plummed by harsh weather. Slanted architecture, bizarre and oblique, cross-shaped stones where names grow pale, and vines that coil left through worn weeds remain webbed by dark thread connected pole-by-pole as if it were taut kite string. Shattered and hollow bottles mingle with adolescent toys shaded by surrounding skyscrapers tattooed against the night.

—

Saul stands and hobbles about on frail legs. The coarse, scratchy gown dangles strangely, scarcely covering his behind. He finds a sink in the corner of the room and holds himself up by the taps. He puts his face in the polished ceramic and lets cold water run over his head. He urinates a few painful drops into the adjacent toilet. He raises his gown and palms more water over his shrunken stomach. 

A nurse enters.

"What are you doing?” She asks.

"Do I know you?" Catechizes Saul.

"Hush now," she replies. "Let's go. Back in bed." 

Saul obeys with disgruntled humility.

"Okay, that's it now. Nice and easy."

He lies back, sheets clammy and salty damp. The nurse lowers the head of his bed with a foot switch while he fans his belly with the gown's skirt.

She covers him, reconnects the IV, and leaves. 

He lies half awake and floats in the oblivion of his thoughts as he hears water dripping in a bowl and slaps of sneakers in the hall beyond from some other kind of kingdom.

—

Saul's eyes flutter, half asleep, despairing his world. He wakes to a skittering creature beyond a boxy casement framed in a milk-tinted padded door. It hops and sprawls erect through the shadows of the tenebrous hallway beyond. In the next moment, it is gone. Saul mutters curses. He rolls out of bed and frantically drags himself toward the cacophony of hounds, yelping and crying.

He pulls himself up to his feet as the beasts scamper. Their panting grows to a crescendo of grunts and howls. Saul stands naked in a vast, pale blue void. His eyes widen. They crash into him and drool in a pack of soaking matted fur. They round and snarl in an aggressive flurry, once, then twice. They rapidly streak with expeditious flight into a boundless, pastel abyss. Saul beholds the crest of a bone-tinted moon before being pulled back to his cell. 

—

The priest visits. The bed is elevated for him to see. Saul's body droops like a veined invertebrate. His sweat pools on the sheets. His surrounding bed sores soak in mucilaginous vaseline. 

"Is there anything you would like to confess?" 

"I saw them again," says Saul. "They came after me." 

The priest smirks.

"Did they?" 

"I'd like some wine." 

"Oh, that's not a good idea," says a nurse. 

"It was never an idea." 

The priest bends, opens a leather case, and removes a small corked apothecary jar.

"You must have seen something. You had a had a close call yesterday," says the priest.

"Life is always a close call." 

The priest uncorks the jar and tilts wine drops from a miniature spout down Saul's throat. He closes his eyes to savor it. 

"Do you have any more?" 

"Just a drop. Not too much." 

"That works," Saul says. 

"God must have been watching over you. You nearly died." 

"They are all watching." 

"Oh?" 

"They never stop watching." 

"Is that really true?" 

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." 

"I see," says the priest. 

Saul shakes his head. 

"No," he says. "You don't." 

The priest's eyes furrow. 

"And why is that?" 

"You know not what you see even with the freedom to see it." 

"So you want to see the world?"

"I do, but not like you."

Saul closes his eyes, and the priest leaves. The pain returns, and he clutches his bald head and mumbles, gags, and vomits, but only saliva comes up. He turns and writhes in torment with his eyes wide open.

—

Saul awakes to footsteps in the room. Shapes cross between his thin and crooked eyelids. He's pulled on a gurney through the never-ending corridors and spaces. Saul is pushed through swinging doors, which are unordered and maze-like in their construction. He's wheeled through auscultating and yellowish regions, like the inner gut of an enormous living thing. To and fro, his soul goes by floodlight through the universe's renal areas. 

Phantasms and shapes drift through tomb-like rooms, with glass and mirrors reflecting the fear of God. The faces of the living bend. Gray, geometric apparitions lurk about the halls in murky corners where lost souls can only descend. The freaks and phantoms sculpt away under the cold white plaster of the ceiling.  Saul smiles and then laughs at their retreat. 

"Go on. Get now," Saul says. "You had your chance, but you neither see nor understand."

—

Saul meticulously observes a cathedral's wide shale steps and the crest of a bone-colored moon that rides in a dark void beyond the steeple. A tear crosses over his smiling cheek. Sheathed in a blanket, Saul stares aimlessly at the moon, tilted and arced in slow motion around a population of birds that fly and gather quietly in harmony until departing in a flawless formation, dissipating in the pale phosphorescence like a twirling spire of smoke, softly attended by a plethora of light diffusing through the gunmetal and leaden clouds that disperse over the basilica like a glorious mist.

He saunters through the vestibule, where there are mounted brass brackets with torn books, long, worn leather knee benches, and gaudy altars that rise like gothic plateaus painted with ornaments of carbon marble. Arching steeples ascend with cobalt angels beneath the pinnacle of a jaundiced Christ. God agonizes beneath a plastered thorn crown with nailed palms and a speared anemic belly juts beneath sharp ribs while limbs sag above chipped flesh-colored fastened feet. Saul gazes into the spectacle with enraptured awe. The sanctuary, brighter than the sun, enthralls him. Saul swoons dizzily and collapses to his frail and doddering knees. He sees and understands without consideration of truth or peril.