Chapter 483

The silver sunlight pouring in from the left made the boundary between Gabriele’s irises and pupils clearly visible. His eyes, which had been fixed on the view outside the window, turned toward mine. Gabriele spoke, “Brother.”

At the word, I gazed steadily into Gabriele’s eyes. I could read the deliberation in his black pupils.

“I cannot put into words what I feel knowing that I can still call you brother. You must remember that I feel that way.”

What exactly are you feeling? As I was about to ask, Gabriele continued as though he had read my thoughts.

“However, I have not yet been able to put a name to the conflicting emotions that clash deep within me, nor do I know how to deal with them. I hope you will understand that, for that reason, I cannot explain everything to you in detail.”

He was still speaking German in the same way as before, with the same manner of speech I had heard during the Pentathlon. I gave a slight nod. Gabriele’s long, wavy black hair stirred in the breeze. He spoke again.

“How much have you figured out?”

About what? But I immediately sensed what he was asking, so there was only one way I could answer.

“You know without having to ask, don’t you?”

“You know that the German heretics known as Pleroma have chosen you as their Messiah.”

An unwelcome fact pierced straight into my chest from the very beginning. The accuracy was astonishing. So this was the power of Insight at Level 4—before I could even finish the thought, Gabriele spoke.

“I can even see a fake among them.”

A fake? He must have meant Ismailov. I hadn’t expected him to see even that. Gabriele tilted his head slightly during the brief moment I was caught off guard. His eyes never left mine. He spoke again.

“Yes. That he was your substitute.”

He continued as though he were speaking to another version of myself living inside me. I was confused. Insight at Level 4 had conveyed far more to him than what he let on. I didn’t know why he claimed he could only know things vaguely. I was used to having my thoughts seen through because of Narke, and I had no particular regret about it, so I asked what he had discovered.

“All right. How much can you tell me about that?”

“It is true that the fake has no intention of harming you.”

“That much I already know.”

Gabriele responded with an expression that suggested he had expected that answer.

“You have no choice in whether or not you meet that fake again. He already loves you.”

“What does that mean?”

“With that, the preparations are already complete. I do not know why.”

The overreach and limitations of Insight intersect. It feels like playing twenty questions. But I’m no longer bewildered by it. Whenever I listen to him, what I know and what he tells me keep meeting and pulling apart, fitting together in some places and falling apart in others. I rubbed my chin and said, “Sounds like I should never have met him in the first place.”

“Unless you were born again, you would have met him eventually.”

That’s an unsettling thing to say. Just as I had thought before—I was standing upon the still-wet ink of Oedipus Rex. And Delphi was here. I listened to him as I felt the blood in my body slowly growing cold.

“What matters is that he is your prototype, while you are the ultimate ideal. But the person you are now has grown distant even from the prototype. They will try to restore you to your original state.”

“Return me to how I was before I changed?”

“That is correct.”

“How much have I changed, and where, that they know enough to do this?”

“You already know the answer.”

I smiled to clear my thoughts. Gabriele, knowing full well that I intended to remain silent, continued.

“Farnese will try to save you on that day, but he won’t be able to. It is fundamentally impossible.”

“Why?”

“I cannot tell you.”

Of course. He had promised Narke earlier. I looked at him without expression.

“But, brother, there is something you must know. You must not believe everything surrounding you.”

My head was beginning to ache. I brushed my hair back and quietly asked, “If Narke Farnese cannot save me, can I save myself?”

“Even after learning everything, you will choose to believe. It is not because you are foolish. Rather, because you are capable of understanding too much, you are able to look down upon the foolishness of others. I can see that in you.”

He was pitying a version of me that I did not know myself. I had asked him about his previous remark, but he skipped over my question and continued with what he felt he needed to say. Our conversation wasn’t lining up. His gaze wasn’t on me. Like Narke, he was looking beyond me.

“That does not mean I can stop you. Christ knew that one of His disciples would betray Him, yet He did not flee. He knew what would befall Him, yet He did not leave His place. So, following Christ’s teachings, I who must walk the narrow path—how could I dare advise you to enter through the wide gate that leads to destruction?”

He said that, then slowly shook his head and whispered, “Even if I were truly a being like Satan, and I took your hand and desperately begged you, ‘Please, don’t take that path,’ you would still refuse my plea and walk toward the narrow path.”

“Why?”

“Because that is who you are. That is where your fate began.”

“…….”

It sounded as though this was the reason I had come to this world. Because I chose to seek out the narrow path rather than the broad one. Because, as Leo had told me time and time again, I was willing to do things for the greater good. For small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life…

Well, it wasn’t as though I had ever thought I was living out the very essence of the teachings in the Gospel of Matthew. I had never thought of myself as someone who followed Christ’s teachings.

Before I knew it, my lips moved.

“Do I die while passing through the gate that leads to life?”

“What does ‘I’ mean?”

He answered my question with another question. Gabriele had struck at the heart of it, and I had nothing to say. Yes. What did I mean? Was it my body? My mind? The habits that made me who I was? The values I never wanted to lose, no matter what happened? Time? Memories…?

If I were to lose one of these, what would I lose?

I had stared into Gabriele’s eyes for so long that my vision was gradually losing focus. I murmured, “I’m an atheist.”

“I know.”

“There is no such thing as God in my world. To me, God is something humanity created because our minds evolved to consider far more than they once did, back when humans lived on all fours and spent their days searching for something to eat, until we could no longer bear all those troubles on our own. Is the human brain, developed to a degree incomparable to that of any other animal, a blessing? I could talk about this for hours and still not finish, so to put it simply, I don’t think it is. Humans may support their brains on two legs, but in truth, we don’t have the strength to bear their weight ourselves. God is the child of humanity that came from that burden. That is my atheism.”

“……”

“Then why did someone like me become a messiah-like figure to Pleroma? Simply because of my capabilities? Or because of some ridiculous revelation from someone?”

By ‘capabilities,’ I meant both the trait Gabriel had just mentioned—the part of me that was drawn toward the narrow gate—and the disposition I had shown on the day of the Ash Wednesday Eucharist. Silence fell.

If so, he could have simply said so. But Gabriele said nothing. It seemed as though he thought I had asked exactly the question that mattered, while at the same time believing that I had arrived at the wrong answer. Beneath the Roman sunlight pouring down hotly through the window, I felt a chilling cold.

I continued.

“Christ believed in the existence of God. The prophets never doubted that God existed, either. As for me, I’ve gone beyond doubt. I simply believe that no transcendent being exists at all. I don’t expect someone with a theistic worldview like yours to understand the thoughts of an atheist like me. To you, my disbelief probably looks like a direct train to hell. But no matter how angry or compassionate you may feel toward me, unlike you, I don’t believe hell exists. These days, I can at least entertain the possibility that a soul might exist, but I believe nothing beyond that. I don’t believe in things that haven’t been proven. At the same time, I understand that in your world, an afterlife and God exist. But that’s all it is. They don’t exist in my world. For a Messiah to function as a Messiah, surely that person would have to be a theist. So why was I, an atheist who ought to be falling straight into the fires of hell, chosen by them?”

Only then did he speak.

“First, the difference in how we regard things that have not been proven is a deep and contentious divide, as wide as the gap between the atheism that has surged in our age and traditional theism. There is something else as well. What I am about to say will probably sound perfectly obvious to you as you are now. But that is a grave mistake. I want you to remember every word I say without forgetting a single one. And remember them on the final day.”

“…….”

“There are those who seek to prove what has not been proven. They are people who seek to summon God before their very eyes. But the foundation of faith is accepting something that cannot be proven, even while leaving it unproven. To insist on proving what lies beyond the limits of human understanding is a challenge to God’s authority. It is the kind of pride that will bring ruin and scatter us, just as it did the descendants of Noah. With apologies to the scholars who have appended Q.E.D.¹ to theology, that is how I see it.”

Unlike at the Pentathlon, when he had looked down on me with contempt for being an atheist, Gabriele continued calmly, his expression unreadable.

“This isn’t a matter of atheism or theism. As an atheist, you regard the stories of the Old Testament as little more than another set of religious tales, no different from the myths of Mesopotamia. But most importantly, you don’t ask us to prove that God exists.”

“There’s no reason for me to.”

“Exactly. You simply aren’t interested in God. You’re neither persistent enough to demand proof nor do you consider it important enough to warrant one. You simply observe the world, believing that atheists may live as atheists, theists as theists, and among the theists, Christians may believe in Christianity, Jews in Judaism, and Hindus in Hinduism. To me, someone like you is a person whose beliefs I cannot agree with, but whose matter is of low priority. That is because you extend the same indifference toward the world and the universe to everyone equally, and in doing so, you respect our world. But an atheist who hounds us to prove that God exists, or boasts that they will prove once and for all that God does not exist, is just as rude as a theist who pressures me to believe in Hinduism. And some of them—some of these people—are very dangerous.”

Gabriele said I was indifferent to the world and the universe simply because I was an atheist, though I didn’t particularly think that was true. Still, I had no desire to argue with him over it. What I wanted to understand was the thought process that had led him from my question—‘Why would Pleroma try to use an atheist as their Messiah?’—to what he was saying now, even though he had never answered my question.

“They aren’t dangerous because they’re rude. They’re dangerous because they become obsessed with proving that God exists. Or proving that He does not. If their obsession remains nothing more than speculation, all I can do is advise such an atheist to let go of their pessimism and stubbornness. But if that zeal is put into action, especially in an age when humanity has been granted God’s grace in the form of magic, that pursuit of knowledge, like a train racing downhill, is bound to hurtle toward a catastrophe no one can stop.”

Gabriele fell silent. He seemed to be remembering something as he stared into the distance, then murmured, “The same goes for theists.”

The same goes for theists. That was when I understood why he had said this wasn’t a matter of atheism or theism. This time, Gabriele didn’t meet my eyes. He looked out the window as he continued.

“We must be wary of theists who become obsessed with discovering what lies beyond the limits of human understanding. These are people who mistake their desire to prove things and their thirst for knowledge for faith, or who seek to monopolize God. Every catastrophe begins with the desire to accomplish what humanity is not meant to accomplish.”

“…….”

“Whether you believe in God or not is a deeply divisive question, but that is not the issue here. Whether God exists or not is irrelevant to this matter. We will not be able to prove His existence or nonexistence through this matter, either… nor should we. That is why, if we are to resolve the disaster before us, the only thing that matters is whether the people standing before us intend to restore God or not. On this matter, neither atheists nor theists can be trusted.”

Isn’t this about Pleroma? That was what I wanted to ask. Theists who sought to prove the existence of God were different in some ways, but they resembled Pleroma in many respects. Yet Gabriele had said that what I would naturally assume right now was a mistaken thought. So this wasn’t about Pleroma…? Then who was he talking about? I slowly nodded.

“Why do I need to remember this on the final day?”

“I only want to set things right.”

Gabriele was telling me something with his eyes. Not to me, but to the me of the distant future. He was saying the same things Narke had. I still didn’t know what he was trying to tell me.

“Then what should I do?”

“You must not waver. Everything you have believed in will collapse.”

I narrowed my eyes and gave a derisive snort. The smile faded almost immediately. Gabriele looked at me without the slightest hint of confusion—as strangely as ever, his eyes seemed to be telling me something. He was right. He knew more than I did. I didn’t know why he knew. Looking him straight in the eye, I said quietly, “What if it was already collapsing?”

“Even so, do you still believe that there is no God in this world?”

“Yes.”

Gabriele smiled. He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he gave me the prophecy of Delphi.

“After everything is reenacted and everything falls, everything will come into your hands. When that time comes, you must remain yourself. Even if you take the long way around, as long as you hold your ground, you can escape.”

I had heard those words before. In the end, I had to keep my center. I smiled at his words. Gabriele continued.

“The key is in your hands now. Even if it seems that you will have no choice on that day, you will.”

“…….”

Gabriele watched the smile I used as a defense mechanism and leaned toward me. For the first time—for the first time since entering this room—there was anxiety in his eyes as he pleaded with me.

“So please, believe in nothing.”

Translator Note

1. Q.E.D. stands for quod erat demonstrandum (“which was to be demonstrated”). It marks the completion of a logical or mathematical proof. ↩︎