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With the Net of Truth now glowing at Connie’s hip, Faust needed to relive his death so that he would be able to kill himself.

The undertaker kept his basement flat in a mess, and the little light that struggled through the windows cast the magnolia wallpaper in a sombre, pitiful tint. Clothes that he’d put down months ago and never picked back up spilled off the available surfaces onto the carpet, with his drawers pulled out and empty like someone had ransacked the place. Connie’s first thought was that this was a cheap, tacky place to live and that it didn’t impress her. Her second thought was that it was okay for things not to impress her.

Upon stepping into the room, Faust unhooked his Double-Edged Sword and clumsily propped it up against a neglected pile of guitars, accidentally knocking them and bathing Connie’s ears in a chord so out of tune that she cleared her throat in sympathy. Afterwards he dived fully-clothed into bed, sandwiched between a lumpy burrito of a duvet and a sheet that curled away from the corners it was supposed to be tucked into. He stared at the ceiling with utmost sincerity.

“Man,” said Connie, shuffling with her hands in her pockets. “What are you doing?”

Faust didn’t move his head from the pillow. Whatever he was seeing in the stalactite droplets of paint, it was apparently more important than her.

“Hello?” she said, grabbing onto the duvet to rip it away.

“I’m reliving the day,” said Faust, tugging it out of her grip. “If I’m supposed to psych myself up into a suicidal rage, then I need to show you my authentic self.”

“What’s authentic about having a fucking lie in?” she cried, looking at the remote to back her up. It pointed at the bed.

“I feel overjoyed that you managed to come to terms with Alan.” Faust smiled. “Don’t you see the problem with that?”

Connie looked for somewhere to sit, but every chair was covered. She settled for leaning with her back against the wall and resting her feet on a pair of old t-shirts.

She said, “Can you start making some sense?”

“I’m inundated with felicity, after that beer and all! If I don’t have a lie in and deny life, cut off contact with the real world and start hating myself ardently, I’m never going to get round to tying a noose! It has to be an authentic wallowing! I can’t hate myself if I don’t hate myself!”

“What’s authentic about wallowing?” she asked. “Didn’t we just agree that’s not the real you?”

He sighed. “It’s not the real real me, but it is the real me, if you follow what I’m saying.”

“The other Faust?”

“I guess. All I know deep in my heart is that I must remain in bed until noon so that when I inevitably get up, starving and hot and needing to relieve myself, I can know that I’ve wasted the day. I can stare at myself in the mirror and lean in and I can whisper ‘you fuckup’, ‘you fuckup’, ‘you fuckup’, and maybe then I can begin to understand the depths of despair felt by the other Faust.”

It was so absurd that she laughed. He glared at her and brimmed with disappointment, then drew the covers over his shoulders so that only his head and beard poked out, and for five or so minutes, Connie watched as the twinkle in his eye faded and his smile contorted. Her back ached against the wall; she wanted to move and pace around, but the floor was covered in such nice funeral suits that her own authentic self would die in having damaged them.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

She found a clock buried under a load of job-related paperwork, and it informed her that midday was still an hour away.

“Faust, dude,” said Connie. “What the fuck am I supposed to do here.”

“If I didn’t lie in every day like this,” he said. “There’s so much I’d be able to do. I’d tune my guitars and record that song from ages ago. I’d batch-cook meals and eat something healthy for dinner every day. I’d join that jogging group that leaves at 8AM. I’d tidy up the place and feel proud of it. But I can’t do any of that, because I’m lying in.”

Connie sighed. “Have you thought about, I don’t know, just getting out of bed? You could easily clean up all this shit in an hour.”

“But then I’d have to get out of bed. And it’s so late in the morning anyway, and I feel awful (at least the real me does), so it couldn’t hurt to lie in just a bit longer. How else am I going to come to terms with my death?”

“Faust,” said Connie. “I mean this in the nicest possible way, and I’m just trying to be as honest as I can be, but you are a fucking handful.”

“Thank you for that comment,” he grinned. “Now I have something to ruminate over. Tell me more about how I’m just a burden, I can feel the urge to end my life rising by the second!”

But Connie didn’t grin back. In fact, she felt a lump in her throat and for the second time today found herself wiping tears from her eyes. It could have been her newfound commitment to honesty, but imagining a world in which Faust had killed himself because of an offhanded comment like that and a cocktail of trivialities was just – unfair. She was beginning to understand how weakness could be constructive, and, of course, he picked up on it instantly.

He said, “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Look, I’m just using humour to process--”

“Stop!” she shouted.

She ripped the duvet away, grabbed him by the hand to pull him to his feet, slung open all of the thin blue curtains to bathe the room in sunlight, picked up the Double-Edged Sword and thrust it into his hands.

“No,” he said, pushing it away, “None of this is what the real me would do.”

“Stop!” she shouted. “Just… stop being such a sarcy fucking prick! I need you to be honest, Faust, because I don’t know why but you’re fucking lying about how you feel! Do you know how hurtful it is for me to sit here and listen to you joking about killing yourself so casually? Be honest with me, because I need to know if this is a friendship even worth saving! Do you actually think there’s anything funny about suicide? Well? Do you genuinely believe, deep down, that the world would be a better place without you in it? Or is there something else going on here?”

He looked at her, blankly, tears already welling up.

He said, “Connie… that’s a lot of questions. Do I have to answer ‘Well’? Sorry. I’m being a sarcy prick, aren’t I. Let me find us some tissues.”

Somehow, he knew exactly where in the pile of madness the table and the box were, and soon they’d both managed to dry their eyes.

She said, “Talk. Tell me what the real you thinks. The one that’s alive, not the one that already killed himself and is fighting against you for a second chance. Is suicide funny?”

“No,” he said, sniffling. “I don’t know why I did it. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

“So why are you keeping up this charade of trying to be the real you?” she asked.

“At the same time, I just – I don’t know how I can make you understand the level of self-loathing I feel, how crushing those thoughts can be and how they corner me and push me back into bed because I’m too scared the only thing I’ll ever have the courage to do is to reach into the back of the medicine cabinet and swallow everything I find in a final act of self defeat.”

Before Connie even knew she was doing it she’d barged into his bathroom, pulled back the toothpaste-stained mirror, tossed aside the vanguard of beard-oils, cracked open the tablets out of their shells into the toilet and pulled the lever to flush it. The linoleum was littered in small plastic tubes.

“There,” she said, nodding at her distraught face in the mirror.

Faust peeked round the corner, frowning. “You have to understand, Connie, this isn’t the kind of story where you become a manic-pixie dream girl and show me the true value and joy of life. You can’t save me from these thoughts, because that’s not a burden that’s fair for anyone to carry. I just… I’m just happy to have made a friend like you. It’s hardly suicide, but when I get the wordcount I’m going to give myself over to the flesh mound so that you have a better chance of winning.”

“Stop,” she tried to shout, but her voice was hoarse from shouting. She couldn’t find words that were honest enough. Instead, she perched on the rim of the bath, and she gathered up a great mass of toilet tissue, and she sobbed, and she sobbed, and she sobbed.