The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  And now he was watching her. Had he been staring the entire time? She couldn’t remember him moving from the first words of her long monologue until now. His prodigious arms still held his upturned knees close to his chest. She wasn’t sure he was alive except for the occasional drowsy blink. But his eyes were more focused than she had ever seen them and still a ghostly gray.

  “Glad to see my story was good enough to keep the actual you here. Now you know why I can’t help you with this… this… there’s nothing else to call it but a suicide mission. I can’t help someone do this. It’s too… you’ll hurt, just, everything, everyone. You’ll shatter lives.”

  The statue woke. He spread his arms beside him like eagle wings on a totem pole as he stretched.

  “There are more outcomes than death in the space beyond this world.”

  “No, no, no there’s really not. Because you’ll run out of resources up there. It’s an experimental ship. The damn astronauts who signed up for the trip, who you’re screwing out of a lifetime of work by the way, they had to sign declarations acknowledging how risky this would be even for space travel. The whole launch mechanism is experimental, too. It’s a suic…”

  “There are more…”

  “And you will not interrupt me about this.”

  She was on her feet and shaking a fist at him.

  “You will not lie to me about this. Even if you do it, do this stupid, stupid thing and get what you want, then what? You just orbit up there and play with all your fucked up memories until what? You die? That’s what I can’t understand. How is this…” she flung both hands at him, “how is the beast inside you even allowing this? It’s physical death. Shouldn’t it be overriding your personality right now, or is this all bullshit you’ve tricked me into finally letting myself think just might be true?”

  He started to speak but she shouted over him again. There was nothing else to shout at out here in the middle of the empty Pacific. He could toss her into the volcano and forget about her, couldn’t he? This could all end. Hell, she could toss herself into the volcano and forget about it. Her mom probably wouldn’t miss her worst daughter. Tim could adjust. Helena obviously didn’t care enough to even tell her the truth. She could just not be here, like him, and no one would… she dropped back to her seat.

  “You owe me a story. I showed you mine. Now you show me yours. That was the deal. Talk.”

  He smiled, and for the first time she found it pleasant, even endearing. Crow’s feet crinkled around his weathered eyes as if he was the whole world’s grandfather.

  “Be quiet. There is little time before…” His eyes rolled to the top of his head and then closed. “This is not something we want. It is something we need.”

  “We?”

  “Quiet,” he growled while still smiling. “We. Even speaking this weakens the walls… There is no other path. I have tried more ways than days you have lived.”

  His eyes were closed tight.

  “There is always a new danger. The world before was more violent each day but less like now. Beasts, fire, priests, disease, drought… I have died a hundred times. These are not…” he knocked a knuckle the size of her thumb against his skull, “we are not as you think. Not pieces of a whole but distinct… there is… we are…”

  He hit his skull again and again until she thought it would shatter. She lunged forward to grab his arm and was snatched into the air. He saw her dangling and eased her down.

  “Who is we? Start there.”

  He gaped, stared at his trembling fist, and closed his mouth. She started to speak but stopped as his fist unclenched. A black coin rested in his palm. She took the iron totem from him. It was not a coin, exactly, and was almost as large as her palm, with four lines running to the cardinal directions while many smaller lines jutted at strange angles and curves from the directional lines. She held it up to the setting sun. Fading pink light filtered through the spaces between lines. A pair of stacked X’s stood in the ring that marked the object’s center.

  DontPullThisShitOnUsYouKnowItsRealDontStartWithTheDoubtLookAtTheManBelieveHim

  “This is the… but you had it when… and you kept it all through… Charlie. This is the vegvisir. This is your wayfinder. From when you were at Auyuittuq and then in Tenochtitlan and you brought it with you all the way down here and that means you’ve had it for, oh my god, it has to be centuries old, almost a thousand years. We could test it and figure out when it came from, maybe even trace the ore back to a native source, and then we could help you figure out… I guess you could have picked it up along the way but… no.”

  She handed the holy gift back despite her urge to hold onto it forever. No museum display, no relic, no tablet, had ever felt so much like a living, breathing, scared person as that sigil. Was this what the faithful felt when they held a cross or prayed at the Weeping Wall? A simple carving felt like life with all its age and sorrow. He was still smiling from behind those pale eyes, still waiting, always waiting for someone to believe him.

  “I believe you. Charlie, whatever your name is, I believe you. Please,” she took his warm hand. “Tell me.”

  Night was at the horizon and over them before she realized the sun was gone. Stars sprouted like weeds in the vacuum above. The volcano cast a haunting orange glow that seemed to darken the places its burning light touched. She looked down the mountain to a collection of huts and sheds that constituted a research base for scientists investigating the singular species of the Galapagos. As she held his rough hand, she felt like one of them. There would never be another person like the man in front of her.

  It didn’t even matter that she was not, and if he left the planet then she would likely never be, Doctor Eliza Reyes. This was the purpose of her work here, wasn’t it? He was not a relic. Those were dead things, carved from wood or forged from iron, filled with forgotten meaning and stained with blood from wars and theft and pain. People clung to those empty vessels as if they could offer purpose.

  A gentle pulse beat in his hands. The fingertips curled around hers as he let himself exhale for what she thought must be the first time in centuries. She felt the vegvisir rub her palm. His rumbling voice broke her revelation.

  “Look. A satellite crosses the sky.”

  She folded her arms against the cooling evening despite the heat rippling from his body. How had she never understood he was a real person, desperately struggling to tell his truth?

  “Yeah, yeah, they do that all night.”

  “As they have for decades. I remember the sky before satellites. No one watched the world while it slept.”

  His guttural growl lingered long after his words stopped.

  “If you believe me then you will understand and I will ask for my promise. If not, I will go all the same but I will go alone. You will forget me.”

  “I could never forget…”

  “Time is short. The walls between are… we will leave. I remember almost nothing. There was a fishing village on an island full of flowers as pink as the setting sun. There was a mountain of fire on an island full of children who left me to burn because I tried to hurt them. There was a woman on a mountain to whom I gave the moon. I cannot remember more. You know the other stories. Each ends the same.”

  He ran two fingers along his sternum. She wanted him to push inside and show her the cavity the Mexica priest must have seen. But it wasn’t there anymore. She had seen the X-rays.

  “Death,” she whispered.

  “Then I found this place and became like a man again. I lived a life until the conquistadors came with their steel and disease, and I forgot again. Pachamama helped me remember. It grows so heavy, Doctor Eliza Reyes, the forgetting and the remembering. But this world held me in the safety of the apus until more people came. They brought the influenza and then the wars. They raced across whole oceans on steam ships. There was a War to End All Wars and then another behind it. The Americans dropped their nuclear bomb on a place I thought I knew. How would I live in a world like this? Ca
n you imagine the fury of the sky burning when all you have known is the spear and the arrow?”

  He was heaving as he spoke. She had never heard him talk for so long. Entire syllables, words, sentences flowed among accents she couldn’t recognize. So many words weren’t English at all.

  “People spoke of angry Germans launching rockets across entire oceans. How could I be safe? Those same failed conquerors fled here when they lost their greedy war. They brought their black thoughts. That was when I knew there was no other way. Das ist das Wissen, ein Imperium für Lebensraum zu bauen! There is no other path.”

  ThinkAboutTheDatesWhenTheseThingsHappenedThinkAboutTheRecordsHesAlwaysBeenRunningStopHim

  “But Charlie, the world, it’s changing, it’s…”

  “Flat. That is the word you people use.”

  His carnal melody fractured into hate as he continued speaking. When did she become one of the others?

  “You have wired the world to see all things. I will be found, eventually. Someone will come to drain the serum from my blood and craft my body into tools to end the next final war. What I am will be used to hurt and kill.”

  “But we can stop them. You’ve been hiding for so long. We’re getting close to…”

  He was on his feet and stumbling near the caldera’s edge, a specter of darkness hiding so many distant stars. She knew she could not catch him if he fell. Would he even fall? Could his body let him? It would be a more direct suicide. He surely thought of that.

  “What they will find is something else. You,” he swung a drunken arm to her, “you have not yet seen but it is in here. You see the best creature I have ever been. We know they are coming and they will be damned when they arrive, because what is in my place will be terrible. I will end worlds.”

  She followed him to the edge. It wouldn’t be so bad to fall. It would be worse to watch him fall and lose him like this, even if some other version emerged alive from the toxic gasses and scalding molten stone.

  “I… I think I understand. You’ll change, you’ll become something else to protect yourself. And you’re afraid of forgetting again. But it’s different this time. I’m here. We’re all doing so much to try and…”

  “I WILL NOT BE AN EXPERIMENT!”

  The roar echoed across the caldera. She heard it shatter the peace of distant birds as his words tore through the night.

  “I will not be a tyrant,” he whispered.

  YouHaveToTalkHimOutOfThisSayTheRightThingFigureItOutHelpHimHesTrappedThinksThisIsTheOnlyWay

  “Okay. I understand.”

  Eliza’s hand shot up to cover her treacherous lips. When had she given them permission to say that? They said it again. She held her hand there as she mumbled it a third time.

  “I understand. You have to go.”

  Each syllable sliced her aching heart. It was so wrong, too wrong, a burden she couldn’t carry.

  “Charlie, I hear you. It’s okay. You have to go. I understand. This, this thing, your life, being pulled like this by two, hell maybe three, different people all trapped inside the same person, living in nightmarish loops that only end when you die, or I guess try to die… that’s Hell. You don’t want to live in it anymore. I don’t have any right to ask you to keep trying when you’ve been trying for such a long time. I’m late to the dance. You want to go home. It’s okay.”

  His heaving frame turned to face her. The volcano’s primal glow cast long shadows on his carved face. His eyes twitched inside their sockets but were still, somehow, void of the ugly serum. Whoever this was, he was still here.

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  His twitching eyes locked on her as his lips formed, discarded, and reformed a flock of sounds.

  “Char… Chari… Ryu… Sharrrrriiiiiyuuu.”

  “Shariyu? But that’s… that’s your name now, isn’t it? Charlie? You must have remembered it at some point and the name Charlie made more sense in a 20th century context.”

  UseThisForceHimToStayShowHimTheDevelopmentHeHasToUnderstandHeWontUnderstandItsJustHisNameHeWantsToGoHeNeedsToGoYouCantHurtHimLikeThis

  “I… I understand that staying will guarantee more pain for you while going will, will… it’s a chance at something else. Maybe you’ll adjust, maybe up there will be a haven for you. What promise were you going to ask me for? You better ask now while I’m still acting like an idiot and not trying to make you stay. Ask me.”

  Warm fluid ran down her clenched fists to drip from her aching knuckles. She knew it was her own blood without bothering to check her pierced palms. It had only been a matter of time before she cut herself like that again. Now was as good a time as any.

  “Ask me, dammit! You want me to promise to help you, right? To let you leave, to help you in these final days, right? Ask me! I won’t say yes unless you ask.”

  “Do you know what a sin eater is, Doctor Eliza Reyes?”

  The simple question, a firebreak in the whirling wildfire of this moment, startled her. She unclenched her fists and felt her fingernails withdraw from her palms. More scars. But this was a cultural question and she knew the answer.

  “Yeah, I do. It’s an idea, a religious concept. A person would bake, you know, ceremonially bake, your sins into food. They’d take your infidelity or rage or whatever and bake it into a pie and then they’d eat it and take on your sins.”

  He nodded.

  “Is that all?”

  “No. I never understood what the sin eater did with the sin. Maybe they just arbitraged their own lack of concern about sin against the weirdness of religion. But they would take the pain away so that the sinner wasn’t stuck with it any… Oh.”

  “Tlazolteotl was the god the priest named for this,” he said. Of vice and purity, filth and salvation. This is the promise I ask. You must be my sin eater.”

  “But I can’t help you if you’re dead. Or lost up there beyond earth’s orbit.”

  “Not for the sins we have committed but for those we will commit. The world is changing. It would be helped if someone like me were here to be… studied. To be understood.”

  “You want me to, what, carry this on for you?”

  “Help those who have worked so long to protect me. Us. We. They will be exposed in the changing world.”

  “Protect those who… Michael. He’s actually your friend, isn’t he? You’ll break his heart when you leave. Oh. He knows? He’s been doing this for you for years. Does he know you’re asking this of me?”

  The man in front of her nodded. Shariyu. His name was Shariyu. The sounds evoked no memory of any particular culture. She would have to study it. There had to be a record. She would find it. She could find his whole story.

  “Not only him. Do this for Rachana, the Pachakuti, Pachamama, and all the changing people. The whole world is changing. Will you do this for me?”

  Of course she would. It was a problem to solve, after all. She needed the answers, not only to what happened to him and where he came from but about where the world was headed. He was right, though she admitted to herself that she never had the thought before he just spoke it. Michael, Jim Finch, even people like Tim with his peculiar memory and those fertile women from the bus, they were all examples of a changing species. Charlie was just the oldest, maybe even just the first she had stumbled across. Who else might be? She knew she would say yes but wanted to let the question linger. There were so few moments left to learn from him.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll be your sin eater. But on one condition.”

  His hooked eyebrow exposed a disturbing amount of his eye. Nothing about the man was human anymore, was it? It was easy to see, now that she accepted his absurd hypothesis. He was cobbled together from all the pieces that make a man but rooted in primeval principles that long centuries of civilization could never override. He would always be what he was. She realized she thought of him as Gilgamesh, the god king humbled into humanity, when he was really Enkidu, a beast made man for a little while but always fated to return to the wilderness or die. But
hadn’t Enkidu taught Gilgamesh the beauty of life? She needed to revisit the old myth.

  “Unfettered access. I own every waking minute of the rest of your time here. All of it. And that means you can’t go walkabout in your head when the questions get tough. And you have to share as many stories as you can, even if you’re unsure of them or they’re painful or you just don’t want to. Got it?”

  He held up his index finger.

  “That is many more than one condition.”

  “Too bad. That’s the deal. Do you agree?”

  “We cannot guarantee… cannot stay… will return, revert, sleep into…. You will not have me but who you had before.”

  She sighed. Of course he couldn’t stay. How he had managed so many hours today was beyond her understanding. This person she spoke with now might never return. It took so much luck to draw him into the open.

  “Charlie, right. You’re going back into your head, aren’t you? It’s happening now.”

  “The other conditions, I will try to uphold but cannot promise. It is not as you might think inside, beyond, beneath… I will be gone again. We will not meet a third time. Do you promise?”

  “Yeah, I do. I promise. I’ll be your sin eater, long after you’re gone. I couldn’t not promise. This world I’ve seen, that you’ve showed me… I could never go back. I promise.”

  He collapsed backwards, clouds of dust and stone scattering beneath his mass to plunge into the waiting lava. She crouched beside him.

  “Wait! Wait! A third time? And who did I remind you of? Shariyu! Shariyu!”

  She slapped his face, held each eye open to check for the purple stain, and slapped him again. A pair of coal black eyes looked up at her. His paw wrapped around her wrist to stop the next slap. A familiar voice with a familiar cadence spoke.

  “It is time to go home.”

  CHAPTER 26 - WALKABOUT