The Nihilist: A Novel

First five chapters

These are the first five chapters from my recently released novel The Nihilist, available on Amazon, Book Depository, and AbeBooks. The novel is also available in Spanish.

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 crumpled 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.

Then it hit me. They were insane. They had gone insane a long time ago. They had to in order to want to continue repeating the same pointless bullshit every day — sitting in traffic, working at a shitty job with low pay, wrestling with bureaucracy, being brainwashed by advertising, having a dysfunctional relationship, a stupid child, a decaying body, and so on.

They were all insane and I simply didn’t have the good luck of having gone insane like they had.

I always did have such rotten luck.

4

After I stepped off the bus in the city center, I headed towards a nearby Irish pub called Dublin. It was one of my usual places.

It was about three in the afternoon when I entered the pub. I sat in a corner furnished with a worn mahogany table and chairs as well as a dark green leather bench. On the wall were portraits of random Irish celebrities, movie stars, and musicians, such as Enya, Gabriel Byrne, and the autistic girl from Harry Potter. I was certain they had never visited the pub, so I wasn’t sure of the reason for having their portraits on the wall, but I assumed it had something to do with celebrity worship.

As was often the case, football was playing on TV. It was the biggest downside of the place since I despised football. The game was too simplistic, its players ridiculously overpaid, and the fans worshipping them severely underbrained.

A waitress came to ask whether I was ready to order. I ordered a Grimbergen Ambrée draught beer. Not because it was fancy but because it was the strongest beer they had on tap. She shortly came back with the beer.

I took a sip and looked around. A bunch of young women sat at a table nearby, talking enthusiastically about something. They looked like students to me. I couldn’t hear them all that well, but I assumed that they were talking about some event, maybe connected to the college they were no doubt attending.

I myself had never been to college. I had wanted to, but life had other things in mind. Perhaps things would have been better had I attended one. Or perhaps not. It was impossible to know. Besides, I didn’t really believe in free will, so what did it matter? As far as I was concerned, everything was inevitable. Every misery. Every disappointment. Every humiliation. Every bad experience. The world was a nightmare to those who weren’t lucky enough to arrive at a better random — yet inevitable — outcome. To those like me.

But then, for so many people it was infinitely worse. After all, I wasn’t starving. I wasn’t being tortured. I didn’t have a debilitating disease — aside from existence that is. And yet I suffered. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have anything particular to suffer from that I suffered so acutely from the general misfortune of being alive.

After I had finished my beer and ordered another one, I took a book I had brought with me out of my jacket pocket. The book was Will O’ the Wisp by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. It was the first English print from 1963. It had cost me nearly a hundred euros.

The book told the story of Alain, a depressed heroin addict who was tired of living. I had read through it once before and, despite not being a heroin addict myself, could easily identify with Alain’s blight. Indeed, I seemed to share his lethargy now more than ever.

I opened the first page and began reading:

At that moment, Alain was watching Lydia relentlessly. But he had been gazing at her like that ever since she arrived in Paris three days earlier. What was he waiting for? Sudden enlightenment about her or himself.

I drank one more beer and stopped reading. I could rarely read very much at once. Sooner or later, my mind tended to wander off. With badly written books, this usually happened on the very first page. But then, most books weren’t worth reading anyway. They were written only to make money.

I looked around. The girls nearby were gone. Other people had replaced them. I wanted someone to talk to. But this wasn’t a good place to socialize with strangers.

I took out my phone and looked through my contacts. There weren’t many. Of the few people whom I’d had some deeper connection with, one was now living in the UK, one was an ex-girlfriend who hated me, and one was the ex who had recently left me, reducing me thereby to a state not unlike a glass balloon. I decided to go with the last option.

I rang but she didn’t pick up. I then sent her a text message, though I doubted she’d be answering it any time soon. I didn’t feel like contacting anyone else. I had alienated most of the people I had ever met in my life, even the few that I had actually liked. I didn’t know why I had alienated the ones that I had liked, but regarding the others the answer was simple — I didn’t like them. Why? Because they tended to be deceitful, stupid, and full of shit.

What made everyday life so terrible was that on each day you usually had to come into contact with at least some of these so-called human beings. And every time you did, you were reminded all over again how ugly the world was. How it was populated with such ugly beings. Ugly, wretched, delusional beings. Beings who thought that they were kings and queens, yet, as a famous singer once put it, they were all fucking peasants as far as I could see.

Ah, fuck it, I thought; I’ll call an old friend of mine. He was almost always up for a beer or two.

I didn’t like him much, but beggars can’t be choosers.

5

I was on my third beer when Martin stepped into the bar. He acknowledged me with a curt nod and went to order a beer at the counter.

I had known Martin for years. We had first met while working at the same data entry position at a company which by now had gone bankrupt. He was good for drinking with, but profound conversations weren’t exactly his forte. Considering that he studied law, that may not have been altogether surprising.

He placed his beer down on my table. “So what’s the occasion?” he asked.

“The occasion, my dear Martin, is that there is no occasion. For you see, all occasions are equally meaningless and made-up. Therefore, having no occasion to drink is not only as good an occasion for drinking as an actual ‘occasion’ but even better since we choose it ourselves instead of being led like sheep.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, seemingly not understanding what I was talking about.

I sighed. “Let’s just say I wanted some company. And since I don’t have any friends, I invited you.”

He looked at me awkwardly and chuckled. “Oh, come on. I’m your friend.”

“Right.”

We took some sips from our beers in silence.

“So how’s life?” Martin suddenly asked

“It’s shit, Martin, as always. In fact, I’m thinking of hanging myself.”

He laughed. I had told so many suicide jokes to him over the years that he had probably stopped taking me seriously on them. I was like the boy who cried wolf. But at the same time, I was the wolf.

“And how’s yours?” I asked.

“Oh, the usual.”

“In other words, shit?”

“I wouldn’t quite say that.”

A pity. I wished he had.

We ordered another beer. We talked about life, work, our mutual acquaintances, and so on. Typical stuff. As usual, Martin didn’t seem to have anything very interesting to say. Eventually, unable to tolerate the dull conversation any longer, I suddenly asked him whether he believed in God.

“Well, uh, I’m not religious if that’s what you mean. Not sure about God though.”

“Did I ever tell you where God and religion came from?”

“Not that I recall, no.”

“Well, let me tell you.” I took a big sip of beer and cleared my throat, trying to recall a few lectures I’d heard on the topic not long ago. “So,” I began. “A long time ago there was this big guy in a big castle who called himself the king. He ruled over thousands of people who all lived in misery and squalor. And because they had nothing, they tended to steal from the only place there was anything worth stealing from, which was the king’s castle. Naturally, the king had spent a fortune on hired guards, but they weren’t doing a very good job, occasionally even stealing from the king themselves.

“Then one day a magician caught the king’s ear. The magician suggested another way of preventing the people from stealing from the king, without needing any guards. Greedy as the king was, he agreed to try the magician’s method.

“First he got the people’s attention by performing magic tricks for them, much like magicians do nowadays, but which the primitive people took at face value, making them think that this guy actually had magical powers.

“Then he told them, ‘The being that granted me these powers is called God. God is all-powerful, all-seeing, and he has sent me here to tell you that you must obey the king. You must always do what the king says and never steal from him. And if you don’t do as the king says, God’s punishment will be severe!’ And this is how the ‘magic man’ scared the shit out of all the people.”

The pub was beginning to get quite crowded and noisy. “To enforce the word of God,” I continued in a louder voice, “a large and powerful building was constructed called the church and the magician became its priest. The church came with rules. No more stealing, no more killing, no more fucking around — God said so.

“Well, the laws worked for a while, but eventually there was a famine and the people went back to stealing from the king. To appease them, the priest then invited them to the church and told them, ‘You too shall one day live in a big castle and have feasts beyond your wildest dreams.’ And when the people asked him when, he said, ‘Right after you kick the bucket.’ Because then you went to heaven, where everything was fine forever. And the people ate up his bullshit story because it made it seem as though their suffering was worthwhile in the end.

“And so, they slaved and suffered and even went to war for the king. All in the name of a God created out of a desire for power and embodied in fear and false promises. And the priest? He got paid and lived comfortably. And this, my dear Martin, is essentially how all religions were formed.”

Although Martin seemed to be quite mesmerized by my story, as expected, he still asked, “Okay, but how do you know that’s the way it happened?”

“How do I know that’s the way it happened? Because in the bible it says that Moses cast a staff before the Pharaoh and the staff became a snake. But did you know that if you take a certain type of snake and squeeze an area behind its neck it becomes rigid like a stick?”

“Can’t say I did, no.”

“It also says that Moses put his staff into the water and the water turned into wine. But do you think that’s what really happened or did he simply use a hollow bamboo tube with a red dye in it? Which one do you think is more plausible?”

“The second option I guess.”

“And then it says that Moses talked to God through a burning bush on top of a mountain.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Although I doubt this ever happened, for argument’s sake let’s say it did. Firstly, you can get oxygen-deprived on top of a mountain and it is quite normal to start hallucinating. And secondly, if there was indeed a ‘burning bush’, it was probably just a will-o’-the-wisp, a natural phenomenon in nature which happens through chemoluminescence. So Moses was ultimately little more than a magician or a hallucinating fool. And in fact, there are people like him even today. Magicians who engage in trickery, thinking they have actual magical powers — or at least they tell the public they do. Like the spoon-bending Uri Geller, for instance.”

“Who’s that?”

“Just a charlatan.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind. However, I’m sure you’ve heard about the Virgin Mary statue in India which ‘miraculously’ wept?”

“Yeah, I think I heard about that somewhere.”

“But did you know that when this occurrence was investigated by a skeptic, it turned out that the water dripping off its face came simply from bad plumbing? Of course, that didn’t stop thousands of people from praying before it and kissing its dirty feet.”

Martin squinted his eyes and tilted his head. “You sure about that?”

“Yes, Martin, I’m sure. All so-called miracles are based on trickery or misunderstanding. Or they’re just flat-out lies. For instance, did you know that the flood story from the bible was plagiarized from the oldest known story called The Epic of Gilgamesh? Which, believe it or not, I’ve actually read.

“But regardless of all that, precisely how I know all this is beside the point since we’re talking about ancient history, man. You can’t really prove anything in ancient history unless you use carbon dating and stuff like that, which you clearly can’t for the things I’m talking about. So you’ve gotta ask yourself, what makes sense?

“Now, the story I’ve told you may have various inaccuracies, but considering everything I know about humanity, the gist of it makes perfect sense to me. I mean, how else do you think they controlled all those people? By fooling them of course. Which is precisely what religion was designed for. It’s the oldest scam in the book. The king had everything he wanted, you see, and he wanted to keep it that way. Which he did, through violence, manipulation, and lies. Just like it is done today. And he was helped along by the priest.”

“If you say so,” Martin said sheepishly.

“I do say so, Martin. I say that the first king was nothing but a gangster, and the first priest a fucking phony. And as a philosopher once put it, man will never be free until the last king is strangled by the entrails of the last priest.”

Not that he’d be free even then, I thought. At least, not from himself.

Followed by 29 more chapters.

You can also find the novel on Goodreads.