Nothing has happened to us, W. says, not really. We've led ordinary lives; we're just like anyone else. But we've a sense, don't we, that things might be different?
Leave this place!, we tell the young people we run into. Get out of this country! And for those of us left here? Drink! Drink your way through the day.
Haven't I spent years doing just that?, W. says. I'm like an advance guard, a scout, out ahead of everyone. Yes, sometimes he has the sense of that: I'm ahead of him, ahead of everyone, drinking on my own in the squalor of my flat.
I'm preparing myself, W. says. I know what's to come, and I've prioritised rightly. Live each day as though it were the last, the very last. Drink your way through it. Numb yourself.
If only death would come cleanly! If only it would fall like a great axe from the sky! But that's not how it will come, and that's the horror. You won't be able to die: isn't that it? The power to die will be taken from you.
That's why you have to drink yourself into a stupor. It's practice, practice for the coming end. That's how to meet death: dead drunk, and without a care. That's how to meet the death that will not come.
Lars Iyer's Blog 