Transcripts

Episode 5: That Sinking Feeling

There was no food for the hungry, no shelter for the homeless.

The dead floated in the streets and the rich prayed in their penthouses. But the prison system kept on going.

I had no objection to being imprisoned; I had killed a man, and worse than that, I did not regret it. The terror in his eyes, the way he'd screamed as he fell, unwilling to accept the fate he had ordained for others - it had been enough to keep everyone else from jumping. And I felt... fine.

When they threw me into my cell, I laughed, and it was a bitter laugh, but at the same time, I felt strangely at peace. Perhaps I was mad, as mad as Bartholomew, or maybe this was my path.

I dreamt of Simon's face, of course, although sometimes he was Thomas, too. He screamed, and I felt pain, but not regret.

The other prisoners were terrified, convinced that sooner or later, we would be abandoned, left to drown in our cells. They were probably right, but still I felt calm, disconnected. It never occured to me that I was in shock. I thought I might have experienced revelation, and maybe I had; who's to say they're not one and the same?

I was certain that soon I would meet Matthew or John. I had decided to seek out my forgotten brothers; now my path was set, and some force was shepherding me from one to the other. Or so it seemed to me in my probable madness.

The guards hated me, but then the guards hated everyone, knowing deep down that depriving another human being of their freedom is always a sin, even when it is justified. The prisoners, on the other hand, knowing that even the worst criminal can be saved, treated me with reverence and humility.

One day, one of the older prisoners approached me. He wanted to ask me about my faith. He was earnest, but I had to laugh, because I recognized him. It was Matthew. 

When he realized who I was, and I told him how I'd ended up in prison, Matthew was perplexed. He could not believe I had committed such a serious crime; we hadn't seen each other in decades, but he said he knew me well enough to know I would never do something so wrong.

I told him I had certainly done it, but that I didn't know whether it was wrong. 

"Don't you believe life is sacred?" he asked me. I told him I believed it more now than I ever had before; and that, I said, is why I killed him.

But what about Matthew? My story was dull; I wanted to know his. The last time I'd seen him, he had abandoned his studies and given up on faith. How had he ended up here?

His eyes grew distant, and he began to talk.

Matthew had always had doubts. The world seemed too cruel to allow for the existence of a benevolent god; his mother had died when he was young, and although he hoped she was in heaven, a lot of the time he thought she was rotting in the ground. He would find himself picturing her decaying corpse, and then such a horror would rise within him that the only thing he could do was grab the nearest Bible and pray. He embraced faith because it allowed him to keep going, but he always felt like an impostor.

He thought that by dedicating his life to the Church he could make up for the doubts that plagued him, but instead, he started feeling trapped. Faith made existence bearable, but he also wanted to live - to fall in love, to have children, to be a man of the world, not only a man of God.

So he left. He thought it would be difficult, but in fact it was easy. He felt light, as if he'd shrugged off a heavy burden. And then he met Mary.

Mary was a librarian, and the moment he met her, Matthew was smitten. She was beautiful, she was smart, and best of all, she was funny. He'd never met anyone who made him laugh so much, or who made his own wit come alive like that. Every conversation was a little dance, and he found himself speaking with a conviction he had never felt before. The slightest joke, spoken between lovers, contained more truth than a thousand sermons.

He experienced everything faith was supposed to offer, from ecstasy to peace, merely by being in her presence. His life had meaning, it had purpose. He felt this more clearly than he'd ever felt any spiritual calling. When they were together, he knew where he belonged. He wasn't just a better man, he was a different man, capable of the greatest acts of kindness and altruism.

There were cynics who told him it was only lust, or that as the years passed, these feelings would stop. But the cynics were wrong, as they often are, and Matthew loved his wife intensely every single day of her life.

And then her life ended.

Just like that, all of a sudden, he was alone. Her things were still there, her scent lingered in the house, but she was gone.

He felt like his mind had broken in two; reality no longer made sense, and the truths he felt could not be reconciled with each other.

He knew, with absolute certainty, that she was nothing now. He would never see her again. She was dead, and everything she had been was dissolved into dumb, purposeless matter. She was rotting in the grave like his mother, like his father, like every generation of humans before them.

He also knew, with absolute certainty, that she still existed. He did not believe in the soul, but he believed in Mary. Their bond was not gone; he felt it every single second of every single day. And he knew her; he could imagine her; sometimes, at night, he felt like he could almost touch her.

He could not believe that he would see her again, but neither could he accept her death. He refused to accept it; in fact, it offended him to think that anyone, even God himself, could break their bond.

On some days, when people told him to move on, he got angry, furious at the cowardly stupidity of just accepting something so impossibly awful. It ought to be unacceptable, he said. Accepting death was not wisdom, it was treason.

On other days, he thought about killing himself, and if he had been certain that it would lead him back to his wife, he would not have hesitated. But he still wanted to live, because... what else was there?

And so he kept on going, strangely, mechanically, feeding himself because it felt wrong to stop, breathing because he refused to give in to the universe. And then the continents began to sink, and everything collapsed, and still he kept going, because Mary would have been upset if he let himself starve, and because death had already taken enough from him.

Until finally, one day he was arrested for looting a flooded supermarket, sent to prison over tins of tuna. God might be dead, but Mammon was alive, and he had a zero-tolerance policy.

Matthew had hoped that I might have answers, that I might have some way of assembling all the pieces into a coherent whole. But I had wanted to believe that he was the next step in my path, that something he would tell me would justify what I'd done. Because no matter what I told myself, I still saw Simon's face in my dreams, and the pain never went away.

So there we sat, two old men in a drowning world. The end was approaching, but we refused to die. We had no faith, and yet we believed. 

Life was sacred. Death was the enemy. But what did any of it mean, if the battle was always already lost?

Not even love has power over the sea, and in the end, the sea will claim everything.

—

Narrated by Peter Wingfield
Written & Directed by Jonas Kyratzes
Music & Sound by Chris Christodoulou

Violin - Kalliopi Mitropoulou
Violoncello - Zoé Saubat

Cover art - Daniele Giardini