Nothing will happen. What’s left, after all? What’s more to happen? Everything has happened and there is nothing left, so go on, proceed, nothing will happen.

Everything’s new here. Everything old has been done with. Everything old had to do with nothing happening, all of that is gone, history. Buried. You’ve walked over it this way and that, and now all of that is flat and well under. Everything there is, is new. Redone. Go on, hesitate not, it’s we who have to light up the way. We go, the rest follow, that is how things are going to be. Be brave, carry on. Badhe chalo!

And so on and so forth.

But lo! Oh no!

So on is all very well, but there’s no so forth. It’s more like a firth and a fall all the way down into its pitiless darkness. What’s happening? Will someone say? Hey! Is someone even there? Hey! Eyyyyy! Arreyayyyyy!

What’s this vanishing? Where’s everyone gone suddenly? What’s this clamour? Why’s nobody here and it seems everyone’s screaming? I am screaming too. Am I screaming too? And I am falling. Everything’s falling.

The voices. The bodies that the voices are escaping from. The parts of those bodies. Flailing. Whipping what’s there to whip — the air, the darkness, the confetti of panicked syllables, just don’t fall, no, stay up, stay where you are. I could define gravity now like nobody else, just let it not take me down and I will tell you gravity. Give me wings, give me a flapping, give me flight. Oh no, oh no, oh no!!! The fall. This drowning. What a terrible splash it’s made, the model of models. It’s such a splash, it’s all over, imagine a river hitting the ceiling. And the ceiling swallowed. Neither bottom to be felt nor top, and everything in between taken by the fall of everything. They said go on, nothing will happen. Everything happened, everything that we were assured would not. They said that about the liner too, didn’t they? The one whose brow Wait Kinslet and Dionardo LiCaprio stood on to Deline Cion’s score? That Unsinkable one? It came to sink, and Magnus Enzenberger came to write with all the lyricism of darkness — or was it the other way around? — about how and why, and the wherefores and therefores. Models. There’s a reason they have newer and newer ones.

But have no fear

The leader is dear

Just say it with a tear

The end is near.