Silence falls like a steady rain beyond heavy glass. You are alone. The city is quiet. The streets are slow streams of grey shadow. The cars are motionless, the machines quiescent. You are alone.
Time to catch up on my flossing, you think. You go to the cabinet and ponder your choices: wintergreen, peppermint, chai, orange sunburst, honeydew, walnut, rump roast, cinnamon. Chai puts you in a suitably meditatave frame of mind. You cut off a length, wrap it tight around your purpling fingertips, and set to work. The gunk between your teeth is no match for the waxy thread, and you are soon fresh as the north wind.
That still leaves you very nearly 24 hours to fill before – well, before anything. You are alone with the bottomless quiet of an abandoned city. Sparkling windows full of merchandise never to be sold and restocked. Fire hydrants faintly vibrating with pressure. Stoplights keeping watch, sentinels against the return of their charges.
How much do you have in your wallet? Four, five, ten, thirty, thirty-five, thirty-six, seven, eight, thirty-nine dollars. It isn’t much. You are an economy of one. You are the richest 1%, fat and obscene, and that pitiable 99% with barely enough to survive. Yours are the wild excesses and the desperate scrapings. You are an economy of one.
You could pay yourself thirty-nine dollars a year. Think of it – your salary is equal to the gross national product! You can buy anything you like, except companionship. Or bison.
The others have all long gone. You woke up one morning, took a shower, and had the world to yourself. At first it was all lazy Sundays: cupcakes, marathon Wii sessions, Celine Dion as loud as you like and no one to criticize or care. But after you’d made up your own answers to your third straight crossword, it got a little boring.
Did you miss the spaceship? Or the war? Is it some kind of joke – maybe a mad experiment, or some cruel performance art? You are alone, an economy of one in a quiet city.
You step out in the thin sunlight. Your heavy coat protects you against the wind. The park is nearby. You can watch the swans gliding on the pond. Squirrels chitter in the trees, gathering nuts as the leaves burn slowly. The leaves gather underfoot, crackling like dry paper, like the sunburned pages of all the books in all the libraries.
Memory no longer haunts you. You cling to the past like a drowning man cutting the bricks from his feet. This world holds no ghosts, has no past. There is nature, the primacy of now, and nothing else. You are alone with all this immediacy.
Galaxies spin around your feet. Suns burn across empty meaningless miles to light your sky. You go to the store for Ho-Ho’s.
You are alone.
