Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz

Author:Steve Toltz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

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That night, at the Bitter in Soul, I drank in anguish. The clientele looked like they’d taken a wrong turn during a pilgrimage. A man walked around patting everyone on the shoulder, asking, ‘How’s your husk today? How’s the old shell?’

There was more talk of dead doctors and engineers shanghaied at the arrival point, and an all-out war that could end either in one town enslaving the next or in a peaceful unification and the creation of a super state. These frenzied discussions went on and on: about cartographers who died under mysterious circumstances, looted granaries and firebombed casinos, and just how lame the failure of the Resistance was (resisting what, or who, I didn’t know).

I closed my eyes and let the snippets of conversation wash over me: ‘The border always shifts on the anniversary of the third armistice’ and ‘You know “the angel of death” is just an honorary title, right?’

It seemed impossible to get the hang of the place. On my wanderings, I’d seen billboards advertising nightmare sketch artists, excess memory draining, murderers under bridges who would end your torment for a price. I’d shared park benches with embittered motivational speakers, good Samaritans in it for themselves, and first-life sceptics—those who disbelieved memories of earth, even dismissing their own recollections as mind-control propaganda.

Mostly, wherever I turned, I saw a traumatised population with an embarrassing number of epiphanies per capita, some with a siege mentality, others who were deathly quiet, as if afraid to give away their position. It was like we were living in the city version of a ghost ship, marooned inside a vanishing point. More than just a large, dreary town, it was a place of potentialities, and I was uncertain all our realities were consistent; I’d seen people gazing skyward, but when I looked up I saw nothing of consequence. I’d spotted men laughing at their reflections, whereas I found mirrors here totally dehumanising. The reflection looked queasily like me, but as if I could be anyone at all; it gave me the vivid sense of an animal that had strayed from the herd into an abattoir.

And the business of only three-fifths of the human dead arriving here; I’d heard many argue for wildly different amounts, half or even two-thirds, and a multiplicity of reasons. But no one knew if we were the forgotten or the creatures who gave up on love, if we were the chosen people or the unwelcome guests, or what we were beneath our human form, or if we were on another planet or the same planet in an alternative time period or merely still alive but on a well-trodden path to the psychiatric hospital.

People were still disputing how they got here; the man next to me at the Bitter in Soul insisted he had ‘permeated some kind of hymen’. His drinking companion responded wearily, ‘When it comes to the elixir of life—you can’t give it away.’

I took another slug of whisky and said, ‘I have no intention of ever learning any of the new astrological signs.

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