So in conclusion, consciousness was an illusion, the self was an illusion, free will was an illusion—hell, EVERYTHING was an illusion if you thought about it enough. Colors didn’t exist without light bouncing off of objects and entering our eyes. Even shapes were abstractions as nothing ever really touched anything; the sense of touch was an illusion created by electromagnetism. The actual universe was dark and shapeless, and we were only grouped parts of it that moved about deterministically, all the while hallucinating a dream which we called reality.
I took a long drink, some of it spilling on my shirt.
Everything was an illusion. And yet it was real. Although the world was constructed of illusions, since there was no “true world” to compare it with, the illusions were our only truth. So if life was little more than an absurd dream hallucinated by our brains, killing ourselves was the act of becoming free of this dream.
And what did freedom look like? It looked like nothing. The only freedom that existed was non-existence. A thing that existed always had rules and conditions and limitations. A thing that did not exist had no rules. It was infinitely free. Free not to be.
Perhaps nothingness was our true home and existence was our exile, as Emil Cioran proclaimed. And perhaps entropy was a way for the universe to show that it longed for this nothingness. Was meant for it. Because it was the natural state of things and not this aberration called reality.
Back when I was into science, I kept seeing how scientists were cooing over how “wonderful” the universe was and how everything was “connected” in it since our bodies contained elements that came from exploding stars.
I had even heard it proclaimed that we were the universe “experiencing itself”. But if so, wasn’t every suicide then a part of the universe killing itself? As was every murder, catastrophe, genocide, and war. In fact, weren’t all harms that had ever been committed then the universe harming itself? So what good were such meaningless and prosaic one-sided statements? They meant absolutely nothing.
And—did it change the fact that we were forced into this world without a choice? A world where from an early age we were fed fairy tale lies about how wonderful it was and how everything was possible in it. But if all these fantastic things were possible, then why did they never materialize? Why did people end up working at McDonald’s? Why did they shoot heroin into their veins? Why did they molest their children? Why did they kill themselves? Our parents never seemed to mention those parts for some reason. Or when they did, they thought it was the person’s own fault. How fucking convenient!
And then we were forced to go to school. Which was essentially a mandatory prison sentence where we were little more than slaves and learned almost nothing useful at all since it was not actually designed to educate people, but rather to train them for a job, which in this society consisted mostly of a variety of menial and meaningless tasks, which we were forced to partake in to feed ourselves and to pay our rent. And yet, we were “free”. The world made sense. Everything was beautiful. Everything was good. Being alive was wonderful.
And if one got depressed over living in this scam of a society—again, without a choice—one was declared mentally ill and was either brainwashed by psychologists or drugs. This was really convenient. It was always easier to blame the victim, you see. And when someone committed suicide, we were shocked. But why? They had merely stood up against the scam they were born into. The scam of life.
Suicide was the only way to escape from this hell. Killing yourself was nothing more than the disruption of the mechanisms that created consciousness and kept the body alive. By shooting a bullet into your brain you were simply speeding up life, which would end in death anyway. The question was, when? And how much suffering did you have to go through before you’d had enough?
Nietzsche said that to live was to suffer and to survive was to find some meaning in the suffering. But what if there wasn’t any meaning in the suffering? All there was were explanations. Explanations that revealed how hollow and meaningless everything was, making reality senseless. And it was this senselessness that filled me with rage. Nothing in the world actually made any fucking sense at all if you thought about it enough. In truth, we were all born into an insane asylum and the only reason we thought it made any sense at all was because it was all we knew.
I started pacing in my apartment. The whiskey bottle was empty now. The idea that I had been born into this world only to suffer and to then violently off myself because I just couldn’t take it anymore filled me with rage.
What was the point in any of it? There wasn’t any. There couldn’t be. Life was but a monstrous and cruel joke that nobody asked for.
A joke?
No—a nightmare.
32
I woke up on the floor of my living room with a throbbing headache. My right hand was covered in dried blood and the skin on my knuckles was broken.
I saw that the room had been trashed—a table lamp had been smashed on the ground; framed pictures were lying on the floor, the glass smashed to pieces; liquor bottles, drinking glasses, books, DVDs, candle holders, a clock, and various other knick-knacks had been thrown all across the room.
The cherry on top of the shit pie was a picture of Vicky pinned to the wall with a black butterfly knife through her face. Of course, I didn’t remember doing any of this.
When I went to the bathroom to puke, I saw that the mirror on the wall above the sink had been smashed—with my fist by the looks of it.
After I finished puking out my insides, I gazed into the broken mirror. A fragmented monster looked back. I had a black eye, my eyebrow was busted, my hair was disheveled, my clothes were dirty, my face was anemic. I looked half-dead already. I decided it was finally time to kill the other half. This last week I had put the value of life to the test. The conclusion, as always, was negative. There was no value. None as far as I could see.
I went looking for the gun I had gotten from the Russian. For a moment, I considered whether the whole incident involving it had all been but a dream due to its inherent absurdity… until I found the gun laying on the floor of the living room.
I picked it up and examined it. It was made out of metal and it was heavy; it was, without a doubt, real. I recalled a passage from Will O’ the Wisp:
A revolver is solid, it is made of steel. It is an object. To come up against an object at last.
Aside from alcohol, this book had been my only companion during this last miserable week. It was based on an actual person who had committed suicide—the author’s friend. And now I was going to be inspired by it. It would be life imitating art imitating life.
Could a book even inspire somebody to commit suicide? Probably not. It could merely give you the final push needed, which might come from any direction. In my case, it was no single thing that had led to this point but many things in tandem. The direction had been set many years ago and it was now time for the culmination. The finale. The wild finish.
In the end, it wasn’t even my decision to kill myself. For I was but a small part of the universe. It was the universe, constantly at war with itself, that had decided upon removing this one sentient being from its midst for no good reason aside from having tortured it long enough. And that was all right by me. For I did not condemn the universe for it, as I was sure that it was but another victim of external circumstances, just like everybody who has suffered ill or done ill in this evil world of ours. I very much doubted that the universe could choose whether it wanted to exist or not. It was forced to. Just like me.