‘Kutulu, king of the underworld,’ says Stoker, rubbing his hands. ‘He who doesn’t live, yet dreams.’
‘Who?’ asks Jón Karl, tearing his eyes from the picture.
‘Bought it on the internet,’ says Stoker with a secretive expression, pointing towards the picture. ‘A priceless treasure which the civilised world doesn’t actually appreciate.’
‘No. Quite,’ murmurs Jón Karl and sits on the couch.
A priceless treasure? Did he mean the picture or the degenerate subject of it? Is it meant to be some famous elephant man? If there’s one thing Jón Karl can’t stand, it’s innuendo. If people have something to say, they should say it or keep quiet.
‘The only true mercy of creation, to my mind, is the inability of the human mind to see and understand the big picture,’ says Stoker, waxing profound in the presence of this stranger. ‘We live on the peaceful island of ignorance in the middle of the ocean of the darkness of eternity, and we were never meant to leave our birthplace. The sciences, fumbling about in different corners, have not yet caused us harm, but one day some shreds, some fractions of knowledge, seen as a disparate collection until that moment, will come together in a new and unexpected way, revealing a horrifying reality that will either madden us or drive us from the true light and into a period of rejection, stupidity and stagnation that could be called the new Dark Ages.’
‘I came in here to smoke a pipe,’ says Jón Karl, irritated. ‘Not to listen to a lecture on the vastness of your granny’s underpants.’
‘So you smoke,’ Stoker says with a foolish grin.
‘Wouldn’t be here otherwise,’ says Jón Karl with a bored yawn. ‘It’s not as if I want to get to know a crackpot like you, understand?’
‘I don’t have any need for friends.’ Stoker takes off his ragged bathrobe and tosses it on the bed. Underneath he is wearing grey cotton trousers cut off just above the knee to form sloppy-looking shorts. ‘In fact, I make a point of keeping human company away from me and my personal space.’
‘I see,’ says Jón Karl, staring at the hairy, bony excuse for a body he’s faced with in the dim light of the candles.
The stomach is sunken and distorted by a Y-shaped scar that pulls it together into an awful knot; Stoker’s chest is virtually fleshless and his thin arms are covered with homemade tattoos – mostly upside-down crosses, five-pointed stars and letters or calculations – and in amongst the tattoos are raised scars from cuts or some kind of branding.
‘I do that with a red-hot wire,’ says Stoker with a victorious grin when he notices his guest’s interest in this hellish body art. He stretches out his left arm to show Jón Karl a brand reaching from his left chest down to his wrist. It’s a sentence that appears to have been burned again and again into the meagre flesh.
That which sleeps forever is not dead.
The letters, some of which are backwards or upside down, are highly ridged, some pink, some fiery red.
‘Do you do that in front of a mirror?’ Jón Karl asks, smiling crookedly.
‘Yeah,’ says Stoker as he sits down at the table, lifts an open book from a paper of hash oil, a pocketknife and tobacco in burned foil. ‘Face to face with…’
He goes silent, clears his throat and looks at Jón Karl with his skull-like grin frozen on his face like a grimace.
‘You’re welcome to dance naked with the devil every night as far as I’m concerned,’ says Jón Karl, taking a deep breath as he pulls over a black gas lighter and sneaks it into his left pocket. ‘I couldn’t care less.’
‘They call me Stoker,’ says Stoker. He scrapes a bit of the thick hash oil from the wax paper it’s stuck to. ‘They say I shovel coal for Satan and no one else.’
‘Some would say that shovelling is a waste of time,’ says Jón Karl with a low laugh. ‘At any rate, I reckon that old guy doesn’t pay well – if he exists, that is.’
‘Satan exists, both as a shadow or inversion of the godly in the world view of Christians, but above all as a spiritual archetype in the society of men,’ says Stoker as he ignites a gas lighter under the knife and melts the oil from its tip onto the tobacco. ‘Satan is a dependable companion and a fun guy, but he is neither the beginning nor the end of the diabolical chaos at work behind the weak stage set that humankind is dancing on.’
‘You’re no different from any other Bible-basher!’ says Jón Karl, laughing in Stoker’s face. ‘You’ve just turned everything upside down, that’s all. The same self-righteousness, the same dogma, the same empty expression, the same arrogant tone, the same idiotic conviction of your own safety and everyone else’s certain death.’
‘What you don’t understand—’ Stoker begins, putting down the lighter and knife.
‘What I know and understand is that life has no real purpose and there is nothing once it ends,’ Jón Karl says forcefully. ‘Good and evil are just ideas, God and the devil don’t exist – the stage set is all there is. There’s nothing behind it… nothing! Not even darkness or death.’
‘Good, good,’ says Stoker, smiling like a teacher who purposely challenges his pupil in order to get him to express himself. ‘But can nothingness flourish without existence? Is it technically possible for some nothing to take over from some thing that is without at the same time gaining existence – that is, becoming something?’
‘I can’t be bothered to argue with people who…’ Jón Karl trails off, pushing aside some books in English, German and French whose hard covers have been torn off. ‘With people who have nothing better to do than read fucking books!’ he finishes.
‘Nothing, or that which is not, can only flourish as the shadow of something that is,’ says Stoker as he starts to heat up the tobacco over one of the flames. ‘If something which is disappears, that doesn’t mean that something that is not takes over, but that the nothing disappears at the same time. Nothingness only exists as a phenomenon without independence on the surface of, or in the shadow of, existence.’
‘Speak Icelandic, man!’ says Jón Karl, whose mouth is beginning to water as the hash oil warms up on the foil.
‘The nothing gets its existence on loan from the existence itself,’ says Stoker, stirring the aromatic tobacco with dirty fingers.
‘You’ve given this a lot of thought,’ mutters Jón Karl.
‘Yep!’ Stoker grins again.
‘But if the nothing is dependent on the existence,’ says Jón Karl after a moment’s thought, ‘couldn’t you just as well say that the existence is dependent on the nothing? I mean, otherwise it wouldn’t be existence. It’s the nothing that distinguishes existence from being, you know… not being, right?’
‘Well…’ Stoker shrugs his bare shoulder.
‘I mean…’ says Jón Karl, sitting up straight, ‘the only thing that makes existence is is that it’s not nothing!’
‘Yeeaah… maybe…’
‘So the nothing does exist.’ Jón Karl smiles widely. ‘In fact, it’s the basis of everything that is. When something that is disappears, the nothing disappears as well. You said it yourself! And that which can disappear, that can also be. I mean, otherwise it couldn’t disappear. So if the stage set that we sense, live in and call “the world” is the one and only existence, then the nothing must flourish in its shadow – it is its shadow and reigns beyond it, beside it, all around it. Where the stage set ends, the nothing takes over. So there you have it!’