You think about who might have lived in this apartment. You think it's got to be an apartment, because there are only a couple of rooms and no stairs. You're not opening the front door to make sure, though.
You imagine a woman, neat and tired, coming home and heating up old takeout. Falling asleep on the couch in front of the T.V., late-night news reports with the volume turned down low, so that she could pretend the noise was the murmurs of people talking in the next room. Waking up before dawn and taking the subway to work.
You're not projecting, or anything.
The fact is, you're the only person left. You think so, at least.
Once you had a life and you had a girl and you had hair that stayed one color. You lived in a house that was big and airy and its windows opened to the California sunlight. You had a place. You knew where you were.
You had a name. People called you by it.
You didn't ever crouch on the floor of someone else's kitchen, bare feet on the linoleum grimy with dirt, hands clutched up into fists so the electricity you summoned with an unconscious wish won't get out, won't burn down her apartment. You didn't ever feel responsibility to someone you've never met, who you made up inside your head. You didn't talk to yourself. That was all before.
The fact is, you don't know anything for sure. You don't know why you can't go to sleep without changing place. You don't know if there's one, two, ten people alive in the world, somewhere. Some survivors, sorcerers clinging to the blackened sidewalks and fighting the magic that hangs like poisonous clouds in the air.
You don't really want to know, though.
You don't open the door.
The fact is, as far as you know any facts, the girl you loved is dead and so is the rest of the world you knew. The fact is, one morning you woke up and the sky was bright as usual and the sun came in through the windows of the bedroom you two shared, but no one was in the house and you couldn't hear any birdsong, any noise from the neighbors' houses, no bark of dogs or voices of children. The fact is, the later it got the more your limbs tingled, and when you caught your reflection in a store window you realized it wasn't just fear. The fact is, when you tried pointing at a parked car and saying Deleo, it exploded into shards of glass and metal. There was a huge scorch mark on the pavement where it had been and the fact is, none of the glass cut you when it flew past your face.
The fact is that when you went back to the house, because there was nothing else you could think to do, you fell asleep and woke up in a shack in what you're pretty sure was Austria. You couldn't find anyone there, either, and maybe that's good because your German isn't so hot. And there wasn't anyone in Tokyo and there wasn't anyone in Canada, and after you had a bad dream about biological warfare you noticed strange clouds misting above the streets in New York, and that's when you stopped trying.
You don't dream anymore. You have that much control, you know.
The fact is, you don't know what comes next.