Transcripts

Episode 6: The Eye of the Needle

The sea crept closer as the land continued to sink, and soon the prison's ground floor was beginning to flood.

The prisoners panicked, trying to break out of their cells, and the guards opened fire. We never heard from the ground floor again, and we weren't let out of our cells, either.

When there was food, it was old, mouldy bread. Half the guards had stopped showing up. Matthew thought the end was near.

And then, suddenly, a chance at salvation. One night, half-starved and half-asleep, we were herded into buses, driven on a road more river than tarmac to a place in the mountains. Chained to each other like prisoners in an old Western, we were marched past a construction site where some vast, colossal thing was being assembled and into the dry, pleasant warmth of a mess hall.

Here we had proper food for the first time in weeks. Our hands trembled, and we couldn't help but smile. You have to have known starvation before you can understand the miracle that is an ordinary meal. Suddenly I felt glad to be in so human a place; to be away from Nature, from perpetual hunger, from tearing at living flesh with my teeth.

It occured to me that perhaps what made us human was not our souls, but simply the world we had built for ourselves. We had surrounded ourselves with the things that turned life into something more than hunger and fear, and that allowed us to be human.

It was impossible to deny that our religions were artificial, the products of specific times and places, determined by culture and politics... but what if that artifice, in the end, was precisely why they contained some deeper truth? We were always looking for God in Nature, and claiming that our holy books were written or inspired by some force beyond ourselves - but what if it was the exact opposite, and God only revealed himself in the human form? What if holiness required those acts which separate us from the animals, and we could only understand the Creator by following him in the act of creation?

Or perhaps there was no Creator. Perhaps we had not been created, but had created ourselves.

My thoughts were interrupted when a man stepped into the room, surrounded by guards, and someone announced in a loud voice that the prophet had arrived.

It's easy to believe in prophets when you can't see them, when they’re figures of mythology, lost in the mists of time. The concept of the prophet is believable and satisfying; it seems almost intuitive that such figures should exist. But in reality, face to face, a prophet is just a human being. We imagine prophets in the desert, or on mountaintops; not in the supermarket, or on the toilet. Like all the most powerful ideas religion has to offer, we are only comfortable with them as long as they are metaphors.

The closest I had come to meeting a prophet was Bartholomew, whose visions drove him to madness. This prophet, however, was different. He wore a hood, to protect himself from the rain, and he walked with a cane that might as well have been a staff. His beard was long and white, and his bright blue eyes seemed to see straight into the core of your being. As he entered the mess hall, where we prisoners were gratefully partaking of the feast he had prepared for us, he seemed like a messenger from God himself.

It was John; of course it was.

His first act was to have all our chains removed, and we felt light and free, like our humanity had been restored to us. Then he spoke to us of his vision, and of the end of the world.

John had lost his family at a young age; first his mother to cancer, then his father to alcoholism. Their deaths had changed him forever, but not in the way most people expected. It wasn't the grief that affected him; children can understand sadness, and sadness slowly passes. 

But parents do more than provide love; they stand like a wall between the child and the agonies of life. While you have parents, you have role models; you can cling to the belief that there is a way to live your life, a set of rules and traditions that make sense. While you have parents, you have a context, a story in which you matter. While you have parents, you are not next in line to die - there is still time, and you don't need to think about death.

When your parents are gone, it all falls apart. You realize that rules and traditions are arbitrary, your existence is a footnote, and in that final moment when everything you are is about to be extinguished, you will be utterly and unbearably alone.

That's what had happened to John when he was a child, and no amount of well-meaning adults could restore the illusion that he was not alone. The loneliness was always there, an existential terror always waiting to leap to the surface. He kept thinking of that moment of death, the moment both his parents had experienced, and counting the seconds as it came closer and closer.

To distract himself, he started drinking and taking drugs, pushing himself to ever more extreme behaviours. Breaking the norms, doing things he knew to be wrong, made him feel that he was in control, that even if his life had no meaning, at least it had flavour. But even that flavour quickly waned.

One day, driving home drunk in the rain, he lost control of his car and almost killed someone. Crawling out of the wreckage, dragging himself through the mud covered in blood and vomit, he finally understood how low he'd fallen. He looked at himself and realized just how much he hated this wretched, selfish creature.

It was in that moment, when the crushing loneliness and misery of existence overwhelmed him, that he felt the warm, loving embrace of God. He had done nothing to deserve it, but there it was anyway - eternal and absolute. He knew in that moment that he still had a long way ahead of him, that he would suffer greatly as he struggled to become a better person... but he would never be alone again.

Letting God into his life changed everything. John realized there were others who were just as lost as he had been, and he dedicated himself to helping them. He knew it would be difficult, because he himself had struggled to let go of his habits and stay true to his faith, but he was willing to give anyone a chance to work at redemption.

When the flood came, God began to speak to him. He had blessed John with great success in life, lifting him up to befriend mayors and advise presidents - but all that glory had been heaped upon him for a reason. Now was the time to repay what he owed, and save the human race.

God had commanded him to build an ark.

That's why we had been brought to this place. Society considered us the lowest of the low, but John knew that we deserved a chance to prove ourselves to God. He knew that many of us were willing to work hard, to make sacrifices, so that we too could experience God's love. Even we could be saved.

I looked around me, and saw tears in the eyes of the prisoners. This was all we yearned for, in the end: not to be alone. Not truth, not wisdom - just an end to the great cosmic loneliness. A voice to keep us company, a loving embrace to keep us safe in the darkness. We would give anything for that, myself included.

Of course, I knew John. I knew he'd always been an entitled little shit from a wealthy, well-connected family. And though he really had caused a car crash, the other person had not survived, and his father had covered the whole thing up. To John, religion was a career, and becoming a prophet was the ultimate promotion.

And yet, I said nothing. They all wanted to believe, to feel safe and loved, and what did I have to offer them? Should I tell them that their prophet was a liar, that if there was a true prophet in this world, it was Bartholomew? That God had sent a murderer to lead them to a madman?

So I said nothing, and urged Matthew to do the same.

John did not recognize us. We quietly finished our supper, and on the next morning we started building an ark.

—

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

Benjamin Kroger as the Voice of Wrath

Violin - Kalliopi Mitropoulou
Violoncello - Zoé Saubat

Cover art - Daniele Giardini