Funny thing is, he's never really been a pessimist.
No, being a pessimist means seeing things worse than they are, like some kind of depressed piece of shit. Pessimists should be the happiest fucking people, what with everything always turning out better than expected and all.
The day he wakes up a pessimist he'll give that, after all, maybe there is a God.
No, fuck that. Life has made a realist out of him, thank you very much. No point running around deluded till you wake up at fifty in the middle of a fucking war.
When you're still alive, buried deep—way deep—there's always this sense of better. A vague chance to a nondescript bright tomorrow, just beyond reach. Hope, the snob bitch, does not dwell in the shitty present. Hope lives in this hypothetical future. A nice little prairie home in the when of all things. A moving post that, mirage-like, shuffles further away the closer you get.
It's always when. If you're in a deep, deep desert of shit, it's if.
(When things will be different. When he got clean. When the debt cleared, when the nightmares stopped when the ring fit back on when when when.
Language is arbitrary. Say anything out loud long enough, it loses all meaning.
(He knows all about language.)
Then you die, you think it will all stop, and there's this waiting.
Ongoing turf wars and yearly Cleanses with everything spiralling into blood and chaos, sure. Actual fire and brimstone's a blessing compared to the rest. The sisyphean humdrum of everyday. This sick parody of humanity—a life, a body, fucking bills—for eternity. Why? For what? Jesus Christ, he wants a drink.
"Hey," someone in the small audience yells, "d'ya think this shitty magic show thing's gonna start anytime before the Cleanse comes?"
Nervous laughter. Hell has a vibration going through it, in the days before a Cleanse. Pulses with an undercurrent of fear. Feverish anticipation. It's hard to talk about anything else, to keep it out of every joke and cheer. It's an infestation.
Then, something cuts through the looming thoughts of reckoning and Angel spears. A strident, dissonant noise. Sounds the way a bleeding eardrum feels. It only lasts a second.
Husk grits his teeth. Shrugs it off. He is, alas, accustomed.
(Because of course, of course just tonight, to make it extra special, that guy is here.)
How did I end up here, Husk finds himself wondering, reverse cosmonaut, head floating cloud-light above his vest-clad torso in a fishbowl of existential doubt. In Hell, hope holds you by the ballsack and shakes you down for spare change. When did it all go so wrong?
Because it's not that he is opposed to things going ok—it's just that really, shit, with a life like that and an afterlife like this, how long can it take anyone with an ounce of sense to take a hint? In this piss-stained puke-soaked backstabbing wreck of a place, hope's nothing but a pain in the ass.
Fine, fine, if he has to be a pessimist, at least he is a Pessimist. Capital fucking P. A cat of the same dour breed as Leopardi and Schopenhauer. If the curse is the when, if sense of time is the source of all despair, then hope is the devil's pocket watch. Non c'è limite al peggio, the worst has no limit, they say over there, where they call giving someone the air a Two of Spades.
Because oh, the grinning one that now sits at the piano—this creature is the goddamn personification of hope. Felt mallets on the metal tines of his nerves, that's what he is.
(Don't let him know.)
And at the end of it all? The heat death of the universe, if they're lucky.
What a big fucking riot.