The Book of a Thousand Sins

by Wrath James White

  The FBI agent continued to stare at the blood on the floor.

  “Yeah, he must have.”

  ***

  The moment Father O’Reilly saw the dying terrorist he completely understood why that MP had looked so ill. The man who lay strewn across the bed like a piece of fetid meat looked terrible. The terrorist’s legs were gone and one of his arms had been amputated at the elbow. The fingers on his one remaining hand looked as if they had been fused together. Half the hair on his head had been singed off and every visible inch of skin was covered in 3rd degree burns. He was covered by a big plastic oxygen tent supplied by two huge tanks at the side of the bed to help his wounds heal faster. They had performed a tracheotomy on him and a tube stuck out from the hole in his throat attached to a respirator. Father O’Reilly covered his face from the sweet smoky stench of burnt flesh. It smelled like rotten pork on an open fire.

  “What are you doing here? I did not call for a priest. I’m a Muslim!” The dying man croaked. His nose and lips had completely melted away leaving his face frozen in a perpetual grin. All the fat beneath his face had liquefied and boiled away so that his crinkled skin clung tight to his skull. The priest’s stomach roiled at the ghastly site of him.

  “You can speak. That’s good. I was afraid this was going to be a soliloquy.”

  “I do not wish to speak to you.” Abdin growled in a hoarse whisper. His throat had no doubt been scalded as well from the heat of the explosion. The tube sticking out of it probably didn’t help either.

  “Yeah, well I told these guys that you did. I told them that you’d spoken to me several times in the days before your big stunt and that you were interested in converting.”

  “Converting? I would never join your heathen religion!”

  “I know. But it was the only way I could get in here to speak with you?”

  The priest continued to look over the dying man’s flame ravaged torso. He reached out for the nurse’s call button, which was wrapped around one of the bed-rails and unwound it, allowing it to drop back behind the bed.

  “Whewww! You certainly did a number on yourself. What the fuck were you thinking flying that little twin engine into the side of Madison Square Garden? Were you expecting to do the kind of damage your misguided brethren did to the Trade Center? Couldn’t get a real plane huh? You know, you killed the Heavyweight Champion of the world? I bet you’re proud of that though aren’t you?”

  Sharod Abdin’s raw shriveled flesh wrinkled even more as the ragged remains of his eyebrows knitted together. A clear liquid oozed from the blisters on his face.

  “What the hell kind of priest are you?”

  “I’m just your average servant of god here to perform last rights on you, for all the good it will do. You’ll be rotting in the earth being devoured by maggots and worms in a few hours. No way you’re going to survive this.”

  “You think you scare me? You think I am afraid to die? I go to join Allah in heaven!”

  The priest pulled out a White Owl cigar and bit the tip off of it. He reached up and yanked the smoke alarm out of the ceiling then lit it up and inhaled deeply.

  “Cheap fucking cigars. It doesn’t pay very much to be a priest. I bet you smoke those expensive Cuban cigars huh? It’s a damn shame.”

  He took another long draw on the cigar and blew the smoke out at the terrorist as he leaned closer, forcing himself to look right into the man’s tortured visage. He saw Abdin’s eyes widen as he neared the oxygen tent with the lit cigar. One spark and the whole tent would go up in flames.

  “So you think you’re going to heaven huh? You think you’re going to collect your harem of wives and sit at the right hand of Allah?”

  “I have done the will of Allah!”

  Father O’Reilly leaned back and eyed the dying terrorist curiously. He turned and walked over to the barred window and looked out at the setting sun as night drew first blood, fiery red blood, in its battle to wrestle the day from the sky.

  “Yeah, so you said. You know you killed 7 people in that little stunt of yours? Injured about 35 others.”

  The terrorist continued to breathe heavily as the respirator inhaled and exhaled for him. Father O’Reilly paced back and forth and Abdin’s eyes stalked him around the room. The old man was up to something. If the priest had come to kill him than Abdin was more than willing to meet his maker. He’d proved that when he’d crashed his plane into the stadium. Maybe the old Jesuit was here to try to convert him to Christianity, a final victory for the capitalist dogs. Abdin imagined them placing an audiotape of him begging Jesus for forgiveness on the evening news. He chuckled.

  “Americans are so arrogant.” He thought, he would never renounce his god for the anemic pasty-faced devil these heathens worshipped. If that was the old man’s plan than Abdin was ready for him

  “I know you won’t really care about this. But, I care so I’m going to tell you anyway and you’re going to listen.”

  Father O‘Reilly stopped to check Abdin’s expression to make sure the man was paying attention. The terrorist glared at him murderously. Satisfied, Father O’Reilly continued.

  “There was this little boy sitting there at front row; a big fight fan. He was also an exceptional artist. He was drawing pictures of the fight, hoping to get the champ to autograph one of the pictures once the bout was over so he could hang it on his wall. Then your plane came hurtling into the building and he was struck in the face by a piece of flaming debris. Scorched both of his eyes. He’ll never see again. I mean, you lost your legs, but this talented kid will never see again! Your eyes look okay though. You wouldn’t happen to be an organ donor would you? Maybe I’ll scoop those out of your skull before they feed you to the worms.”

  “What the fuck do you want old priest?”

  “I want to tell you what you’re about to go through when I pull the plug on this little machine of yours. See, that little boy was my nephew and you ruined his life. For what? So that you could be some kind of martyr for some fucked up ideology that had nothing to do with an innocent ten-year old who just wanted to watch his hero fight?”

  The priest’s voice lowered to a growl as he leaned down closer to the dying terrorist his teeth clamped down on the cigar and his eyes went flat and dead. “In my book that makes you one evil sonuvabitch and I just cannot suffer a sonuvabitch like you to live.”

  “Pull the plug old man! I was prepared to die when I woke up this morning and I am prepared to die now! So go ahead! Pull the plug!” The electrocardiograph monitor spiked as Abdin’s pulse-rate jumped to 140.

  “Calm down before you have a heart attack. You have no idea what death is. Your deluded little fanatic ass believes that there’s something waiting for you after all this is over, but there isn’t. Believe me, I know. This life is all there is. Religion is one big lie and you’re just another sucker and perhaps the biggest of all.”

  “Your religion is a lie. Mine is real! The word of Allah is truth!” Abdin hissed, that lipless smile looking even more grotesque and sinister than before. His eyes glowed with that peculiar mixture of madness and intelligence that were necessary ingredients in making terrorists of this sort. You needed a madman to crash a plane into a building, but you needed an intelligent man to get it out of the airport and avoid being shot down long enough to get it to the target. Father O’Reilly shook his head in disgust as he looked down at the half-baked zealot whose eyes still shone with the rapture of faith.

  “And your god tells you that you’re going to heaven after killing all those people?”

  “Yes.”

  “You really believe that there is consciousness after death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me ask you something Abdin, how is consciousness achieved?”

  “What?”

  “How exactly are you conscious of my presence here in this room? How do you know I’m here?”

  “Because I’m looking right at you!”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Because you can see me,
you can hear me, you can smell me . . .” The priest reached underneath the plastic and poked his finger into one of the blistering scabs on Abdin’s chest, causing the man to wince in pain. He was so close that his cigar was almost touching the plastic tent. Abdin stared at the lethal glow even as the priest dug his finger into his wound. That pain was nothing like what would happen if his cigar burned through the plastic. The priest grabbed hold of the scab on Abdin’s chest and ripped it off. The terrorist screamed. “. . . And you can feel me.”

  “You son of a bitch!” The terrorist panted out of breath as his nerves cried out in agony.

  “These are sensory perceptions. Senses that are all destroyed at the moment of your death or at the very least, once your flesh rots off the bone . . .

  “You can’t see without eyes. Just ask my nephew. You can’t hear without ears. You can’t taste without a tongue. You can’t feel without nerves and skin and flesh. That’s why I grabbed your chest instead of your missing legs. All of these things will rot away with the rest of your body and then what will you see with? What will you smell with? What will you hear, feel, taste with? How will you be conscious then? Extra sensory perception perhaps? Maybe there’s some mysterious sixth sense that will somehow materialize after you die? Yet we find no evidence of a sixth sense anywhere. Even those people who claim to have it speak of it in terms of their five senses. They have visions. I worked in a home for the blind for many years and I can assure you that people who have never seen before have no visions. They cannot even imagine what the world truly looks like, just as you cannot imagine a color that you’ve never seen before or a sound that you’ve never heard. The blind do not have visions and the deaf do not hear voices. At best any sixth sense would be merely an augmentation of your existing senses which, being dead, you would no longer possess.”

  The old priest began to pace again.

  “So there you would be, alive but unconscious, a vegetable of sorts. Oh, but perhaps this afterlife is like some of the Eastern religions believe, an eternal dream state? But see the problem with dreams is that they require memories and you wouldn’t have any. Did I forget to mention that? You see when you die your brain rots and everyone knows that that’s where your memory is housed. That’s why a blow to the head, a high fever, consciousness altering drugs, can all screw up your memory. Furthermore they can screw up your entire consciousness. Now how could that be possible if the consciousness where some non-physical spirit? How can you physically affect the non-physical? How could a blow to the head render you unconscious and even wipe out your memory if the soul and not the brain were the seat of consciousness? Why is it that we can link the damaging of brain cells to the loss of both memory and consciousness if the brain were not a necessary and vital part of your consciousness? Obviously that is not the case. When your brain goes so goes your memory and all other type of consciousness for that matter.”

  He leaned in and put his hand on the oxygen tube sticking out of Abdin’s throat leading to the respirator beside his bed. This time Sharod Abdin’s eyes followed the hand. He was nervous, scared. His faith was not nearly as strong as it had been minutes ago. The old priest smiled at him and then pinched the plastic respirator tube closed. Abdin immediately began to gasp for air. His injured lungs tried to work, but they were far too badly scalded and could not inflate without artificial help. Without the respirator he would asphyxiate, suffocate in a bubble filled with the purest oxygen available. His face turned blue and his hand clawed the air while his ragged stumps waved helplessly.

  “Oh, I’m not going to kill you. Not yet.”

  “Pleeease!” he wheezed out between clenched teeth as he struggled to breathe with his scorched lungs.

  “Please what? Please spare your worthless life? Please kill you? You haven’t figured out yet that I’m not here to give you any mercy? I’m here to bring you the truth before you die.”

  The priest let go of the tube and Abdin’s breathing slowly returned to normal. The wounded terrorist’s eyes were wild with fear now. Father O’Reilly breathed another cloud of cigar smoke at the tent.

  “So, let’s look at this afterlife of yours. You are a disembodied spirit without the ability to see, feel, taste, smell, or hear, no way at all to experience anything new and no memory of ever having experienced anything in the past. Remember what I said about not being able to imagine a color you’d never seen? What if you’d never seen or experienced anything? How could you dream then? Dreams of an eternal blackness without form or substance or sensation? Does that sound like heaven to you?”

  The Priest leaned in close again and Abdin winced, as it appeared the cigar was headed straight for his face. The old man stopped just before the cigar touched the plastic.

  “Hey, but maybe those New Age freaks are right and life is just this eternal energy that’s a part of everything and last forever. That could very well be possible, but so what? That energy is not you. That sounds like that mindless disembodied spirit with no memory and no consciousness. Your self is created by your perceptions of the world, shaped by your own unique perspective. The perspective of a murderous hate-mongering fanatic in your case. The fact that you are a certain height, a certain weight, a certain race, a certain sex, all go into shaping your identity. If I were to remove all of that would you still be you? Think how drastically your perception of the world and your sense of self would change if I were to put your consciousness in the body of a short, fat, American female? You think you’d still somehow retain your identity? Even if I was to remove all memory of you ever having been anyone else? Would you still be the same person or would your entire identity, your entire self, be destroyed?

  “I mean even in your current state you are still you, because you remember what it was like to be whole. But what if I took all those memories away and you woke up like this with no memory of ever having been anything else but this hideous malformed thing lying in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of it? Do you still think you’d be the same evil twisted fucker you are today without all the experiences that made you this way?

  “Now how about if I didn’t put your mind into another body but just set it adrift in the ether without memory and without senses, without consciousness, essentially without you; as dead and lifeless as a stone? Would that mindless, deaf, dumb, and blind thing still be Sharod Abdin? No, Sharod Abdin would be gone forever. Well, that’s death pal! That’s what happens when you die. That’s why no animal on earth has any desire to shrug off this mortal coil except for man who alone has the imagination capable of self-delusion. And that’s what you have to look forward to.”

  The priest smiled. Abdin looked terrified now. He could see the pall of death lowering over him. And it was not the promise of heaven, not even hell or eternal slumber. It was annihilation. The elimination of all that he was, had ever been, or could ever possibly have become. For the first time he had doubts, he had fears, his faith had faltered and fell, shattering against the reality of oblivion.

  “But what about becoming one with the infinite? I have heard many Asians speak about it; uniting with the all, becoming one with the universe?

  “Yeah, like a drop of ink in an ocean. Essentially your mind would go through the same process as your body, disintegrating to reintegrate with the larger body. Pretty nice cozy way to describe the extinction of the self. You become part of the all! Digested by the earth or the universe to be recreated as new things that of course would not be you. See you are a specific thing with a specific definition, specific hopes, specific dreams, specific memories and experiences, a specific way of perceiving the world and interpreting those perceptions. Without a body, without a consciousness, and without a memory you would not be you, but something entirely separate and unique from you. What you are describing is akin to melting down a shiny new Ford and making silverware out of it and still trying to call it a car. Sure all the same material is there, but that car is gone. Man is more than just the sum of his parts and I assure you that while all the chem
icals and minerals and perhaps even the spark of life that animated your worthless carcass may continue on, once this deep fried meat casket your consciousness is wrapped in right now ceases to inhale and exhale, Sharod Abdin will be no more.”

  Abdin shivered with a combination of fear, confusion, and righteous anger. The things Father O’Reilly was saying to him made sense, but they couldn’t be true. Allah would not abandon him now. He reached out and found his faith again and wrapped it tightly around himself. Protecting his mind from the torturous truth. “Don’t think. Believe!” He told himself. And with that he pushed all the doubts out of his head.

  “You lie old man. Allah will protect my soul from death. He is almighty! None of the things you call impossible are beyond him!”

  “Yeah, I had a feeling you’d feel that way. God will protect you huh? Even after you have sinned against him?”

  “I have never sinned against the word of Allah!

  “Oh no? Isn’t it a sin to ingest swine?”

  The priest unwrapped the parcel he’d been carrying under his arm. Inside it lay the partial intestines of a pig.

  “You ever have chitterlings before? Pig’s intestines? You have to clean them real well before you eat them because they’re usually still loaded with feces.”

  The priest cut a small hole in the IV bag and dumped the intestines inside. The bag turned brown; clouded with blood and fecal matter.

  “No! Noooo! You can’t do this!”

  Abdin began to thrash about on the bed as the murky pork infected liquid made it’s way down the IV tube and into his veins. O’Reilly held the dying man’s one good arm down so that he couldn’t yank out the IV until the pig’s blood had entered his system.

  “You have damned me! You have corrupted me!”

  “Not so eager to meet your maker now are you? Not with your veins full of pork.”

  “Please. I cannot die like this. I must be cleansed.” Abdin was in a panic now. Terrified for his suddenly very mortal soul.