At the End of the Day by Michael Noonan

I saw Frank in the morning, while I was walking my dog in the park. He looked rather downcast and ill at ease, as if something was bugging him. We swapped a few perfunctory words and went our separate ways. 

Just after dinner I went down to the village to put a letter in the postbox, and I saw Frank sat on the bench, near the market cross. His mood hadn't seemed to have lightened at all, and he looked unusually pensive and thoughtful. I waved at him, and he waved back. 'Don't forget tonight,' I shouted. He nodded his head. I turned and went back home. 

He was always something of an oddball and an eccentric, who came out with all kinds of crazy notions, ideas and conspiracy theories, but I'd rarely seen him so down in the dumps before. 

That evening, as was the established routine on a Friday, I met up with Frank and we both went for a leisurely stroll in the country. We always took the same route and we ended up on the hill that overlooks the village. And we strolled down the road towards it, with the intention, as always, of arriving at the public house, for a convivial evening, and a few drinks. 

It was a calm, clear, cloudless night. There was a full moon and a sprinkling of stars overhead. The birds were chirping in the tree branches, and I at least was in relatively good humour. 

We would often talk about the news, politics or sport, or whatever scandal was doing the rounds, on those evening strolls. Though for some reason, and at the prompting of my friend, we began to talk about philosophy and the meaning of life. My friend told me, with quite passionate conviction that he now believes, as did the philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, that matter doesn’t exist. That there is no such thing as an objective, material, external world, and that only our internal, sensory experience is real. 

This was obviously his latest obsession. The latest in a long line. And, of course, I took issue with him straight away. I told him that that was a preposterous notion; and that we can only exist because an external, material world supports and sustains us. It gives us food to eat, and air to breath. It puts the ground beneath our feet. And that we couldn’t exist without it. Nature is our very life support system. But he stuck to his guns and said that only experience and perception are real, that each person is entirely enclosed within his or her our own psyche, and that the so-called physical universe is an illusory entity. 

I believe that the descriptive term for that strange belief is Solipsism. And people have subscribed to it down the ages. But that doesn’t mean that it’s true. And I also knew how stubborn and pig-headed Frank could be, whenever some new obsession or conspiracy theory took his fancy. 

I was ready to argue with him again, but then I noticed, to my surprise and utter alarm, that the surrounding countryside, the roads, dry-stone walls, farms, livestock, trees and hedges, the electricity pylons, the distant public house, the parish church, the buildings, houses and cottages of the village, all began to fade away and slowly dissolve into nothingness. The streetlamps in the village blanked out. Then my colleague beside me became ghostly and transparent. His voice faded away, until no trace of sound was left, and he too disappeared, into the void. Overhead, the moon and the stars vanished from the sky. 

An eerie calm descended, and everything was enveloped in utter darkness and silence. And now I can feel that I am beginning to fade away as well; just as my friend and everything else had done. I am disappearing into darkness and nothingness. And there is nothing I can do to prevent it. Am I real? Do I exist? Have I ever existed? Have I just imagined all this? Is the whole world just a mere sensory illusion? Without any true substance? But what is the point of even asking these questions, when I am now, no more? 

Michael Noonan has had stories published in the anthology volumes, Even More Tonto Stories, Shades of Sentience, and an anthology published by the Academy Arts Press. Has had published a book of his short stories entitled, Seven Tall Tales, and has had a play accepted by an online publisher.