There was silence. I lit up another cigarette. “Want one?” I asked her.
“No thanks,” she said. “I’m done with you.”
She left the room.
Oh well. It wasn’t as though I wasn’t used to this reaction. I’d been telling people the same thing for at least ten years and their reaction had almost always been the same—anger and dismissal over everything I had to say. As Thomas Ligotti said, there are more cannibals than pessimists at any given time in the world. And (un)fortunately I had almost nothing optimistic to say. About anything.
I often felt that my views had made me into a pariah. An outcast from human society. And although I had been looking for similar outcasts to hang out with or to be my lovers, I had yet to find any. I knew that they existed… but they were spread too damn thin.
A few new people entered the smoking room, but they didn’t seem interested in me. After I had finished the cigarette and beer, I exited the room and went back to the bar counter. I sat down on a bar stool and ordered another beer and a shot of whiskey. Fuck it, I thought. It’s time to get really drunk. I downed the whiskey and started drinking the beer.
Not far from me sat a bearded guy and a girl who I assumed was his girlfriend. I asked them whether they minded my company. They said they didn’t. So I tried to chit-chat with them a bit, holding back the things that I really wanted to talk about, such as the futility of all human life for instance.
“What are you guys doing here?” I asked.
“Oh, we’re just visiting some of our favorite bars in Tallinn,” the guy said. “We’re from Tartu.”
“Ah, Tartu,” I said as though with fondness, trying to recall something about the town from when I still used to go there on account of an ex-girlfriend. “You ever been to a rock bar there called Subterranean?”
“Sure. Nice place. Great selection of music.”
“Yeah, and those one-liter beers, man. I used to visit it every time I went to Tartu back in the day.”
“So why’d you stop?”
“Due to an ex-girlfriend.”
“Ah. That reminds me, actually we were planning on going to that rock bar in Tatari street after this place.” He looked towards the girl he was with. She was young and attractive.
“Rock… something,” she said.
“Rockstar?” I offered.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” he said. I’d been to the bar plenty of times. It was an all right place. Unpretentious. As rock bars tended to be.
“In that case, do you mind if I tag along?” I asked.
“Not at all. The more the merrier.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was just being polite or if he indeed didn’t mind. But I was desperate for some company. Any kind of company.
After we finished our drinks, we left the bar. It was dark and cold outside and slightly rainy. I lit a cigarette and followed the couple.
The city was empty: As it tended to be on Sunday evenings. For some reason, society had deemed it acceptable to get shit-faced on Fridays and Saturdays, but not on other days. I guess it was to keep us in line.
We soon reached Tatari street. Aside from the rock bar, the street held an all-night pizza joint, a hookah bar, a sex shop-cum-adult theater, a gay dance club, and a sex club. I had visited four out of the five.
When we entered the bar, Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself to Live” was playing in the background. The bar had a red and black décor and the lights that hung overhead were made from real drums. On the walls were written the names of various Estonian rock bands along with the years when they were formed. I didn’t recognize most of them. No one did.
We ordered some beers from the bar and sat down at a booth with red vinyl seats. My companions were talking about something, but I wasn’t really listening. Soon, a friend of theirs joined. She looked like she was barely twenty. The three of them started talking with each other and I was beginning to feel left out. I always did. For some reason people rarely seemed to show any interest in me. It was usually me that had to intrude upon them.
A guy who’d been drinking alone in the bar came to our table and asked if he could join us. “The more the merrier,” the bearded guy said again.
“Who wants to go for a cigarette?” the new girl asked.
“I wouldn’t mind one,” I replied.
We went outside.
“So what brings you out?” she asked as we lit our cigarettes near the doorway of the bar.
“An impending sense of doom.”
“Aww,” she said. “Are you feeling depressed?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want a hug?”
“Sure.”
She hugged me for five seconds.
“Thanks,” I said after her body separated from mine.
Ultimately, however, it seemed to be an empty gesture. For when we went back to our table she stopped paying attention to me and I sipped on my beer alone. Depressed, negative, and pessimistic people were often treated like lepers in this world. It was as though people feared catching what they had. Perhaps because what they were saying made sense? Hell, if everybody would see the world as it truly was, we’d all be depressed. But if that were the case, there wouldn’t even be any people. For nobody would want to bring a child into this fucked up world if they truly understood the sorry state of things. The fact that we kept on breeding showed that delusion was necessary for the continuation of the species.
It began harder and harder for me to listen to this makeshift group’s inane chatter about nothing and I soon could hold back no longer. Fuck it, I thought; it was time to ruin someone’s evening.
I started telling the guy sitting next to me how things weren’t nearly as good as we had been led to believe. The truth was that most of us would never become successful or find soulmates or even be happy for any meaningful length of time because such ideas came from fiction, from Hollywood movies with happy endings. The real world didn’t work that way. In the real world, most people worked their fingers to the bone and had nothing to show for it in the end. They had a string of miserable relationships with people they had nothing in common with, which ended in heartache and despair. And they never achieved the happiness they so desperately sought because happiness was like a mirage in the desert—it evaporated before you could ever reach it.
“In conclusion,” I said, “pretty much everything we do is ultimately futile and based on delusional thinking.”
“Hmm…” the guy next to me said and finished his beer in one big gulp. “I applaud your courage to say something like that, but it all sounds a bit too grim to me.”
After that, he turned his attention towards one of the young girls, clearly not interested in hearing me bitch any more about the shortcomings of reality. Because hey, who needs pessimism when you’ve got pussy.
Alone and ignored again, I observed what the other people were doing. The bearded guy seemed particularly happy for some reason since he soon ordered champagne for everybody. It appeared as though he was celebrating simply being alive, which was something I tended to mourn. Hell, that was the reason why I drank so much. It seemed we both drank for the same thing but for opposite reasons.
When the bartender came to our table with the glasses of champagne, everybody took one but me.
The bearded guy stood up, lifted his glass into the air and said, “To good drink and good company!”
I wondered whether his toast included me.
The rest of the table then got up and raised their glasses. But when they brought the glasses together, they did it with such drunken vigor that all the glasses shattered on impact and champagne and shards of glass came raining down all over the table.