Keijo Kangur
THE NIHILIST
A NOVEL
This book is inspired by true events and is dedicated to nobody.
1
A woman with black hair pointed a revolver at my face and pulled the trigger. When the bullet exited the barrel of the gun, however, everything went into super slow motion and I could see the projectile slowly traveling towards my forehead.
Eventually, when it penetrated my skull and entered my brain, I could feel my consciousness starting to fade away and with it the whole world began falling away as I slowly succumbed into nothingness—as I did, I felt the greatest sense of peace that I had ever felt in my life.
When I woke up from the dream, I realized that I didn’t want to be awake at all. I wanted the dream to continue. Forever. For being dead didn’t hurt. Only being alive did.
Most people feared death and the nothingness it brought. That’s why we’d invented impossible ideas such as rebirth and afterlife. Why we put dying people on life support. Why suicide was stigmatized. And why we overall tried to think about death as little as possible.
Yet there was nothing wrong with being dead. No one that was dead wanted to be alive. And no one that was unborn wanted to be born. Those of us that were alive only had a vested interest in existence because we already existed. The dead did not share our passion.
Although it was thought that death was something strange, that it was unnatural, that it was something to be abolished, it was obvious that death was in fact the standard in the universe. Surrounded by infinite nothingness on both sides, it was life that was the great exception.
The living being, as Nietzsche said, was ultimately only a species of the dead. And a very rare species at that.
2
After about an hour of lying in bed, thinking about the dream I’d just had, I finally forced myself up and got dressed. I was at an all-time low. It was Saturday.
I went to the fridge and grabbed a slice of cold leftover pizza that I had ordered the day before. I sat on the couch of my small living room/kitchen and ate the pizza whilst gazing into the distance through the black venetian blinds covering the windows. It looked gloomy outside. Autumn had arrived just in time.
I’d had hope once. But my hope had all but vanished by now. Hope was a finite resource. It needed to be constantly replenished. By money, by love, by a success—or illusion—of some sort. And I had none of these things. I worked at a job I abhorred, barely making enough to survive. My girlfriend of three years had recently left me. I had no friends. And although I wanted to be a writer, I couldn’t write.
All in all, I felt as though I was in a hole and the hole was so deep that the only thing left to do was to keep on digging until I could feel the flames of hell underneath my feet.
And why not? Everything just kept on repeating anyway. We woke up. We went to work. We ate. We slept. We suffered through misery. We kept our brains satiated with meaningless entertainment or alcohol in order to dull the misery of our routine. And yet, although we hated our routine, we couldn’t imagine life without it. We were slaves to it. This was our paradox. And I was no exception.
Vicky leaving me had shattered my routine. I had come to rely on her. I had needed her. And then suddenly she was gone. And I was alone. Alone in the entire universe. Or so it seemed.
Naturally, I had considered suicide. But I was weak. I feared pain. If only there was a painless way to do it. But there wasn’t… as far as I knew.
I looked around my apartment. It was a fucking pigsty. Empty boxes of pizza and Chinese food littered the room, along with countless empty cans and bottles of beer, whiskey and wine. My diet had been rather lousy for a while now. It would end up killing me eventually. Unless I killed myself first.
After I was finished with the pizza, I walked to the sink to get a glass of water. The sink was full of dirty dishes. It reminded me of the kitchen sink in the movie Withnail and I. I hadn't washed the dishes in weeks because I hated washing dishes. In fact, I hated all menial chores. And life, as far as I was concerned, was full of menial chores. It felt strange how we had to do so many pointless little things over and over again just to be alive when being alive wasn’t even all that good.
Still, as I was planning to go out—for you see, I couldn’t stay in this tomb of an apartment for too long all by myself in fear of going crazy—I decided to freshen myself up a bit.
I took a shower, trimmed my beard, slicked my hair back with pomade, and picked out a nice black shirt to wear. When I was all done, I went to the mirror and looked at my reflection. I looked like a man going to his own funeral.
At first after Vicky had left me, I had gotten drunk at home. I had passed the time by listening to depressing rock music, masturbating, and practicing five finger fillet. All very healthy habits, I know.
However, the atmosphere in the apartment soon became unbearable to me as I continued seeing her shadow in every corner. And so, I started going out to bars instead, where I drank myself into oblivion whilst attempting to have meaningful conversations with random strangers—as futile an endeavor as ever.
It wasn’t so much that I was searching for something but rather that I was trying to get away from her shadow.
And perhaps also from my own.
3
After I stepped out of the apartment, I noticed that a note had been crudely stuck through my front door handle. From the poor grammar, I could tell it had been written by a Russian.
I read the note whilst walking down the stairs. “Stop listening to music so loudly at night,” it said. “People are trying to sleep. If you want to listen to music at night, use headphones. Otherwise, we will call the police or you will be evicted.”
I suppose what it said was indeed true. But then music—at least the kind I listened to—was meant to be listened to loudly and at odd hours. Besides, they had no idea what I was going through. So fuck ‘em, I thought, as I crumbled the note and threw it away.
I walked to a small store nearby to buy some cigarettes. It was a Russian-owned store where time stood still. I hated going there since the cashiers only spoke Russian and all the food they sold was close to the expiration date. Still, as it was the nearest shop to my apartment and they sold some cheap—and strong—Russian beer, I often frequented it.
As usual, when I stepped into the store there were no people around aside from a couple of cashiers and a security guard. I wondered how they were able to survive. Perhaps the store was a front for money laundering?
After I got my Marlboro Reds and exited the store, I lit a cigarette and walked to the bus stop at a nearby plaza. The plaza was surrounded by a casino, a liquor store, a sleazy bar, and a pawnshop. All the necessities of life were present.
As I stood at the bus stop, I saw an old man uncork a bottle of vodka and take a hit from it. I didn’t blame him. Life was hard. And sometimes you had to do anything you could just in order to survive. Even if others scorned you for it. But what did they know? Fuck ‘em.
The bus soon arrived and I stepped on. As I sat in my seat and looked out the window at all the people passing by on the streets, I wondered how they had all managed to live day by day in this crazy world for such a long time without having gone insane from the banality of everyday life. From its endless repetition. Its constant disappointments. Its inherent emptiness.