One day after I had moved in, my landlord (and an owner of a nice compact digital radio) informed me he was going to kill himself.
Actually, if he was right and God didn't exist, he had no particularly good reason to live. A long time ago he had worn away whatever happiness he once had; and he hadn't discovered yet who to get more of it from, nor was anywhere close to that discovery, it seemed. He had spent a sizable part of his life in prison (where, to give you a fuller picture, his newest prostitute girl-friend - whose room I now occupied - had ended up a short while ago after having beaten up an elderly man; she, to give you an even fuller picture, acted under a misapprehension that the chap had enough cash on him to buy her a line or two of coke, or some other over-hyped God-substitute). As to his family situation, he hadn't seen his millionaire parents for a decade or so; he couldn't care less, or so he said, what was happening with his successful sister; nor could he remember whether he had ever been loved by any of them, or they by him.
'I see no point', he'd say, 'I've lost all interest. Nothing thrills me any more. Not even women. I look at them, see they are sexy, but it doesn't do anything for me'. At that point I tended to offer my brilliant religious pitch, after which he'd say: 'I just wish I could fall to sleep and never wake up, just go, just disappear.'
He was extremely quick-witted and excelled in satanic jokes; his public school education helped him deliver them in highest-quality English.
If it hadn't been for and the fact that he preempted me, and for his diagnosed depression, I would have felt tempted to tell him that if we are to believe in nothing and have nothing to believe in, it made perfect sense to go ahead with his nihilistic plan.
Yesterday, while I was away saving someone else's life, he tried to call me. I didn't answer the phone - I feared another useless chat during which he'd invariably have started slagging off God. This kind of thing seemed to cheer him up a bit, but I was in no mood for that. I texted him a poor excuse, he texted me a poor joke, and we left it at that. A few hours later, when I was on the train back to the Welsh metropolis, he raised the bar - the message went: 'I had a visitation from DEVIL and he told me to KILL YOU'. I wrote back 'Tell him to f*** off and go to hell!' Then I resumed reading Omer Englebert's biography of St. Francis of Assisi.
When I got back home, quite late, he wasn't there. After an hour he still wasn't there; I imagined his head being smashed by a speeding train, the way he had planned and vividly described to me once. I said a short prayer and called the police. Another hour passed, I said another prayer. 'Will the police and his family bother me much?' I wondered. I called 112 again: no one had died on the local rail tracks recently. I went to bed.
I woke at about 3 am. and checked his bedroom - he was not there. I called the emergency number once more: somehow I didn't feel that the no-news they had for me was good news. Then I felt a highly embarrassing wave of some kind of calm; I realised it was a post-death calm. Ashamed, I dropped to my knees and began a decade of the Rosary (the Resurrection).
When I finished, a thought crossed my mind: Should I keep the radio?
