I had been alone for so long. I could not remember how long. In the beginning, I had written down the days; I had tried cutting notches into a stick, to feel like a survivor, like a Robinson Crusoe-type, but it felt like a parody of reality and I stopped. Then, after a long time, I stopped writing down the days too. That was after fourteen years. I don’t know how long it has been since I stopped writing down the days. It had become harder to, as the weather systems changed and the days and nights blended into one. My home was quiet today. Sometimes I have to get down the gun and drive off one of the packs of wolves or wild dogs that still roam the city; other times the roaches have come back, and I have to leave the house and raid a hardware store for more repellent, after which the lower rooms always smell of chemicals.

I don’t know how I’ve survived for so long. I don’t know a lot of things. When it all happened, at the start, I felt rage, loss, grief, numbness, and despair; it all moved round in circles, like a stagnant pool stirred by a child with a stick. The bottle of grief would nudge the bank; he would stir again, and I would feel suicidal. Once, I ate some of the roach-repellent stuff. I was sick for a fortnight; that was perhaps the only set of days during which I was absolutely certain of how much time was passing. I ate the chemicals and lay there, slumped against the wall. I let myself just go still, and tried to simply pass on, to join all the others that had already left. I couldn’t; my body wouldn’t let me. First it heaved, ignoring my attempts to stop it from spewing up my way out. Then, when I tried to stay slumped against my wall, staring blankly out through the windows into the dead grey sky, it refused to be still.

A hand would creep forward, lunge and snatch at a passing roach; my mouth would chew, my throat would swallow. It was all beyond my control. I sat there. And gazed out. At the start, there had been beautiful sunsets and sunrises; I couldn’t appreciate them then, but now, when I was ready to move on, I would have given anything for them. Objective beauty; beauty points us on to something greater, something Real. Or so I had been taught in college by an idealistic young professor. It had been her first job. I didn’t believe any of that any more, and if she was alive, I didn’t suppose she did either. But now, the sky was lead, a blankness that seemed to look down unpityingly, not so much with disgust with what it saw as with resignation. It could not have been otherwise, the sky said. In my delirium, I hated the sky.

Then the boy stirred again; the bottle swirled over to the opposite side, and a little cork bobbed closer to the stick. A tiny speck of hope; or not so much hope as a recognition of the need to go on. To do something; what that something might be, I neither knew nor cared. After a fortnight, the wall against which I leaned either dully pink, the paint peeling, or black in the night, my body got up. It staggered over to the cupboards, where I had piled can upon can in the first months, and opened up a tin of Heinz tomato soup. Then it drank the soup, cold. I didn’t taste it. Some trickled down my chin, just a drop. Then my body drank some water. After that I gave in. If I couldn’t die, I would at least amuse myself in some way. I remembered where the library was from when it had all still been real, before it got turned into something out of Dante. I only learnt about Dante from the library; and, come to think of it, I’m not sure anything like what I was experiencing was in Dante anyway. In the library was a theatre. It had been newly built before everything changed, and it was resplendent in plush seats, in red velvet and satisfaction. In the beginning there were still lots of people about; many of them were mad, roaming up and down with crowbars and shotguns, looking for people to hurt or find pleasure in. I wasn’t able to use the theatre then, so I stole into the library at night; there was a young mother in the Spanish Literature section, reading to her little baby in her native language. I nodded to them, and made my way on. I never saw her again. In the early days of my reading, I didn’t go much further than fantasy or light children’s books. I had never been that intellectual, and I wanted escapism; I wanted a way to forget, if only for a short while, what lay around me.

Then, after several years in which I did little more than eat Heinz products and read about dragons and chivalrous knights, I branched out a bit. I read lots of Solzhenitsyn, books about the Holocaust, and about war; the grimness of it reminded me that even before, there had been others who, if anything, had had it worse. I wasn’t being tortured, for instance. At least, not actually; I could torture myself with my thoughts, and did, but there was not a harsh-faced KGB man kicking me in the face everyday. In the gulags, I learned from Ratushinskaya, there were women who killed themselves by gnawing through the vein in their wrists. They had to gnaw because they didn’t have any knives or glass to do it with; the fact that I had never considered doing something like this made me, for a brief moment, look away from where I was and feel pity and sympathy for someone else. I sometimes remembered that moment, that time when I felt sorry for the women biting through their veins, and felt a little happier.

It became gradually clear to me that I would soon be the only one left. The roaming nutjobs were encountered less frequently; I seldom had to take my little pistol out of my belt. I went back to the library, every day, and paced up and down the stage in the theatre. I would declaim plays, acting out each part; I learned almost all of Shakespeare off by heart, and gave heartfelt renditions of Prometheus Unbound and Paradise Lost, my voice disturbing the creatures that lived under the seats and in the lighting rafters.

Then, all of a sudden, there came yesterday. I had not been into the attic for many years; there was nothing of any use to me up there. Somehow, though, I decided to go up there again. It was to look for photos. After it all happened, when I knew that all my friends and those that I loved were gone, I brought down all the memories I had, cardboard boxes full of them; I knew there was nothing more to be found up there, but I went anyway. I had just finished Cancer Ward for the second time, and I felt like moving. That was when I saw it. The wiring was exposed, and it was rusted, but it was a camera; a small one, with a chipped glass lens, and it swivelled to keep me in its view as I edged uncertainly around it. A little red light blinked as it followed me. I heard a knocking at the door, suddenly. It was a heavy pounding, a large fist thumping the wooden frame. I came downstairs, and there were so many people. I didn’t know there were this many people left alive. There must have been at least two hundred; some of them had balloons, and there was a cake. They told me it had ‘all been for TV’, and smiled and hugged each other; they had ‘broken a record’. I curled myself up into a ball, and shivered on the ground. You bastards, I thought. You bastards. I thought I wasn’t being tortured; how could you do this? How could you ever let somebody think this when the truth is so far away? Then my body got up. It smiled widely, a large, relieved smile; it laughed, and sobbed, and shook hands with the big jolly man with the spectacles. ‘It’s lucky we’re not on live,’ somebody said; ‘We’ll have time to edit that bit out.’