It started with the sound of nothing, which was unusual even at that time of the morning. The power was out in the kitchen, and when I peered out the window, there was no traffic, no one on the sidewalk, no construction sound, no plane passing overheard, no hum of electricity, nothing.
There was no one. Sometime overnight, everyone had disappeared. Everyone except me.
I assumed, then, I didn't have to go to work; so I finished a book I'd been reading for too long. I made myself a sandwich, and finally, not knowing what else to do, I went back to bed, around 3pm. I really needed to catch up on sleep.
I woke suddenly, well-rested but draped in so much darkness: dark as far as the eye could see. Haha. People are still missing, or seem to be. Maybe it's an elaborate hide-and-seek.
It's so quiet that it hurts my ears. That is, in the quiet, I hear a high-pitched whine. I've been told that this is the onset of hearing loss: the pitches I hear are the pitches that I no longer can hear, if that makes any sense. I wonder, then, is deafness actually loud, a cacophony of all pitches?
I'm wide awake; it's midnight; I'm the last man on earth. It's flattering, really. My whole life I've wondered about disasters and apocalypse, and now I'm the center of one. But it's frustrating, too—so many things left unfinished: the report I was writing on at work, which Alex told me was quite good. Alex is my immediate supervisor. (Or maybe I should say was.) Also, I had Mets tickets for next week. They were playing the Orioles.
It's harder than I expect to pass the time in the dark, but it gives me unexpected joy—the dark gives the familiarity of my apartment refreshing newness. I also stub my toe, badly, on the corner of the sofa.
I walk through my neighborhood. Everything seems to be where it belongs: cars are parked, trash cans lined neatly against the walls. The black outline of a nearby skyscraper blots out a patch of stars. In the dark, there are more stars than I've ever seen in the city, but I don't remember the names of any of the constellations.
I start jogging. I don't usually jog. It's funny how we behave differently when there's no one around to see: there's no one who knows I don't jog, so I can be a jogger if I want. Central Park is covered in light mist, and I twitch with vague foreboding: "Don't go into the park alone!"
But when you're truly alone, no one is a danger.
I keep glancing at my cellphone to see if there are any new messages, but of course there aren't, because I'm the last man on Earth.
Anyway, it's not like very many people called me before.
I'm standing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, underneath the twine of steel cabling. The wide sidewalk on the bridge is empty. The lanes of traffic on either side are empty. The water below me is calm, but everything is so quiet that I can hear it roaring by.
I get guilty pleasure reading Cosmopolitan magazine. It's embarrassing because it's a chick's magazine, but I read it whenever I go to the doctor or the dentist. I like knowing what women are supposed to be thinking about me.
Every issue of Cosmopolitan is almost exactly the same as the last issue: it has articles on sex positions and how to "drive him wild in bed." Cosmopolitan has more sex in each issue than Playboy. I'm surprised they manage to come out with new issues each month, since eventually they must run out of sex positions. But I guess people forget, so they don't mind reading the same things twice.
It occurs to me that the Cosmopolitan I read today in the park outside City Hall is the last Cosmopolitan that will ever be printed. I wonder, does that mean the hairstyle they describe will be in fashion forever?
I decide to go door to door in my apartment building to see if anyone is still around. I've lived in this building for three years and I've never knocked on anyone's door till today.
I like the people who live here. (Lived.) (Liked.) (Insofar as one can like people to whom we don't speak.) People in this building are quiet, and clean, and polite. (Were.) Sometimes they'd hold the door for me when my hands were full with groceries, and sometimes I'd do the same for them—so we were neighborly, I guess is the word.
I bring a box of Girl Scout Cookies, so that if someone does open their door, I can ask them if they want one.
You'd be amazed by the variety of doors in my apartment building. You'd think they'd be all the same, bought in bulk, at a discount rate, but in fact nearly every one is a little different. I imagine they've been replaced, one by one, over a long period of time. Some doors seem incredibly heavy. One, on the third floor, is light like the closet door in a child's bedroom. Knocking on that door is like knocking on paper.
No one is answering any of the doors. It was a forgone conclusion, but I got caught up listening to the sounds that my knocks made without ever really thinking about why I was knocking, till the paper-thin door knocked me out of my reverie.
I climb out on my fire escape and eat some Girl Scout cookies. I pour milk to go with the cookies, but the milk has soured, and I throw it out after a mouthful. That was the last milk I will ever have. I might never wash that taste out of my mouth.
Though there is no one else left in the world and therefore the status of my obligations is vague to say the least, still, I am a man of my word: I spent my morning paying bills for my cellphone and cable. I won't do it again next month, though, if this continues, since neither of these services has been working for several days.
I also decide to finish the report I started at work, the one which Alex liked so much. I bike to the office. Without traffic, without stoplights, without car doors, without pedestrians in crosswalks, biking is the purest joy: it's really like flying.
I'm quite productive, working alone. The phone doesn't ring once. When I've finished assembling my PowerPoint deck, I do a practice run of my presentation in the conference room. It goes well, I think.
On the way home, I head west and watch the sunset over the Hudson. I wonder why I didn't do this more often, before. Then I bike home, the strobe light on the back of my bike seat flickering to protect me from non-existent traffic.
My watch stopped and I'm quickly losing my sense of time, but I wake naturally just after dawn. Today is the day of my scheduled work presentation and I decide to go ahead with that plan. My PowerPoint deck has got a kind of structural elegance and it deserves to be shown.
I own three suits and I have trouble deciding which one to wear. I never expected I would be the sort of person to own three suits, the sort of person to have enough suits that it's hard to decide which one to wear to work. I'm not sure when I became that sort of person, but the transformation wasn't awful, like I might have imagined. If anything, the third suit was liberating. The first two suits were obligatory, but this third suit seemed somewhat for fun.
I put on the third suit. It has pinstripes.
But as I'm tying my tie, I notice there's a blemish on my face, a black spot on my cheekbone, like a beauty mark. I've never seen it before. It is sudden and alarming. My heart quickens, and I wonder, should I call a dermatologist or an oncologist?, before I realize that phones are dead and there are no doctors. I am alone with my blemish.
Looking closer in the mirror, I see that the blemish is nothing: it's not a pimple or a lesion. It's a tiny spot of pure nothing, a little black hole on my cheek. I poke at it with tweezers and the tip disappears. It is unsettling, and I decide not to go to the office today.
I've returned to the paper-thin door on the third floor and I'm smashing it down with my tennis racquet. "Hello?" I call out, after destroying the door. "Anyone home?"
The apartment is nicely furnished, and very clean and comfortable, and has a very fresh smell. There is a vase of cut flowers on the kitchen table, and I fill the water in the vase, though the flowers are nearly all dead.
"Hello?" I call out again. The view out the window is good. I wonder what she pays in rent.
Then I notice: there is water running. The shower is running in the bathroom.
"Anyone there?" I ask again. "It's me, from upstairs."
I turn the knob of the bathroom door, and push the door open with my tennis racquet. Steam pours out and fogs my glasses; I can't see a thing. "Hello?"
I pull back the shower curtain. There is no one, just hot water pouring down into the drain. The showerhead is very nice—one of the overhead ones that pours out like rain.
On my way out, I borrow a stack of DVDs from a bookshelf, and bring them back to my apartment.
There is a scene in the movie Amélie where the main character (a French girl named Amélie) has the television on in her apartment with the sound turned down. She looks over at it and notices a news clip: a horse has escaped its corral so it can run, side by side, with a team of bicyclists. Amélie watches in wonder and decides to record it on her VCR. Later in the movie, she gives the videotape to another character, who also watches the scene with silent wonder. I doubt either one of them could explain why it was wonderful, but it was, and they knew it, and it made them happy.
I felt the same way about the movie Amélie. I can't explain why, but when I saw it, it made me feel happy to be alive.
I decide to learn French. I practice saying, Sans toi, les émotions d'aujourd'hui ne seraient que la peau morte des émotions d'autrefois: "Without you, today's emotions would be the scurf of yesterday's."
I don't really know what it means, even in English.
Something strange happening with time. I don't mean in the sense that "Time flies when you're having fun" or that, in absence of outside obligations, we lose track of days like children in the summertime. Whatever is happening, it is alarming in a way that it never was when I was a child in the summer.
I blink my eyes and a week goes by. Or anyway I think it's a week. It might be longer or shorter. There's no way to know.
It happens in the midst of a day, too: sometimes I'll sit at my kitchen table in the morning, flipping through a magazine I've already read, and then, after twenty minutes or so, the sun will begin to set.
But then twilight lasts for days.
When I look in the mirror, I think I look much older than I remember. But then as soon as I concede this is the case, I seem much younger.
I'm losing track of things. Something's not right, but there's no way to measure, and no one with whom to compare.
And I'm not sure when I stopped eating.
Of course I wasn't watching the DVD of Amélie. Electricity had been out for days, weeks, who knows how long? Instead, I stood the DVD box on top of my television, and I watched the box. I stared at Amélie for hours, days, who knows how long? And she stared back.
"Hello," I said.
"Bonjour," she answered, and proceeded to tell me, in detail, in French, everything that had happened in her movie, to the best of her memory. I don't know French, so she would stop periodically to recap in English.
"Thank you," I said.
"De rien," she replied. "It's nothing."
It was, without a doubt, the best movie I've ever heard.
I find that the people I used to know are beginning to blur in my mind. I remember a funny story, something I did once with a guy named Adam. I laughed out loud when I remembered this story. Fun times. Then I realized, "Oh. That wasn't Adam." And I couldn't remember who it was.
Since no one has any further use for street signs, I've begun to paint them over with the names of the people I knew. I walk around during the day with a can of green paint in one hand and a can of white paint in the other, and I gradually re-map the city: Jonathan Street. Caroline Boulevard. Adam Lane. Before I forget.
I rename Broadway after my mother, whatever her name was.
I had a nightmare that everything that's happened recently was in fact only a dream. In the nightmare, I woke up, and the world was still full of people, same as it ever was. My alarm clock chimed and beckoned me to another workday, and I was filled with great emptiness.
Then I woke from the dream, and the night was still, and the city was empty, and everything was as it had been.
I went to the bathroom for a glass of water, and noticed the black hole on my cheek has grown, now big enough to fit a finger.
"What do you want?" Amélie asks. "What do you want to do? Ce qui vous veulent faire?"
"I want to write a manifesto."
"Bah!" She wrinkles her nose. "Your life is a manifesto."
My life is a manifesto. "Ma vie est un manifeste!"
I have more paint now. I roam the city, and one by one, I'm painting over all of its billboards.
Left to our own devices, maybe we all become artists.
I am painting enormous murals, scenes I remember from my life. As I paint, I remember everything, everything I ever did, everyone I ever knew. I remember long forgotten years and feelings of communion: road trips and road trip games; sunburned days at the beach; present-wrapping and unwrapping; long, hot innings of stickball; queuing at the funeral buffet, everyone sad and hungry for potato salad; dashing through woods and soccer fields and streets; reaching inside shirts and skirts and pants to clutch and claw at love, without yet knowing what love is or that there's obligation in it, but starved for it just the same; the betrayal every time a shoelace breaks or an ankle twists or a phone call goes unanswered, every time a tooth sinks eagerly into a cherry tomato that bursts with secret rot; every morning waking alone. I remember every birthday, every congregation, every rainy afternoon at the cemetery, every "I do." I remember the smell of my mother, the tinkling of the mobile ceramic swans over my crib, the cozy caress of the satin baby blanket. I remember, before that, sweeping forests far as the eye could see; thick, rolling oceans; endless, mind-flattening plains. I remember fields coated with mustard gas; the groans of sinking ships; piercing bullets and bayonets and the sticky warmth of my own blood; I remember rounding Cape Horn, scaling Mount Everest, building the Pyramids brick by behemoth brick; I remember Pangaea, and the terrible, explosive rending of the Moon. I remember the ignition of the Sun, and the swirling center of the galaxy, the whip of its arms screaming through the vacuum. I remember the end of infinite density, the Big Bang, a gasp of breath, a baby's laugh, a cosmic orgasm, the same spasm of anticipation that comes at the dawn of love, the true fear of loss; and I remember, before all that, the bottomless, bottomless silence—like the silence I hear now.
It's all right.
(This story first appeared in Crack the Spine.)