Alone at the End of the World

John Montague lived alone. While he had lovers in his younger years, he had never settled down with any of them and as middle age set in, he found that he was quite content with his lot. A successful software engineer, he had purchased a private home tucked away in a quiet corner of a popular neighborhood on the edge of town. Some nights, he lay awake thinking of the nightlife downtown and considered getting a Lyft or Uber to a trendy bar to recapture the exploits of his youth, but he always decided he would rather just stay home and watch TV. He didn’t care to keep up with what was considered trendy these days anyway.

While the rest of the world had locked down during the pandemic and hid in fear in their homes, he was living the dream and no longer needed an excuse to order in, binge watch the latest Netflix series, and catch up on the news on his phone instead of chatting with overly friendly co-workers in the office. When the pandemic ended, gradually and in starts and stops, there was a slow but steady push to return to the social norms of the past. Ultimately John’s employer demanded that he return to office. He politely declined and found another job that allowed him to continue working from home.

John watched with some concern as protesters took to the streets on various sides of issues he didn’t fully understand or relate to. He couldn’t understand why people couldn’t just get along – sure, prices were rising, and it cost him more and more each week to have his groceries delivered. For a time, he had tried to cut costs by shopping in person at cheaper grocery stores but found that the stress and discomfort of dealing with the public was hardly worth the ten or so dollars it saved him. In any case, his job was quite secure – there was always a need for a talented software engineer.

Then the layoffs swept across tech companies. He watched disconnectedly as former coworkers got the ax, and then one day the ax finally came for him. He spent hours scrolling LinkedIn, reading unhelpful articles from recruiters, self-proclaimed experts, and executives about everything he was doing wrong in his job search. He submitted job applications by the hundreds, briefly entertained the occasional scam for an unsolicited interview, and drew down his savings as auto-rejection emails flooded his inbox.

Three months after he was laid off, he sold his beloved Tesla to buy himself more time. It was hard to justify the expense since he rarely drove it anymore anyway. He continued to job hunt, prowling the world wide web for job opportunities and flinging resumes at everything he could find. Beginning to suspect that perhaps these were never going to be viewed, he wrote cover letters that were increasingly blunt or generated by AI to see if it would make any difference. It hadn’t.

One Friday night about six months into his unemployment, he stifled the growing nausea in his belly as he updated his resume for the nth time. He tried to think of a creative way to explain the gap in his resume in yet another cover letter that would never be read. Finally, he covered his face with his hands and wept quietly, his tears flowing slowly and pathetically onto the crumbs left on his shirt from dinner. In the background, Frasier bemoaned the trivialities of life after another farcical failed date while pouring himself a glass of sherry. Closing his laptop, John turned off the TV, no longer comforted by the unreality of the decades-old entertainment.

Standing at the window and staring out into the night, John saw the lights of the city out over the hills. He wanted it all to end – to simply cease and free him so he could give up the ghost. Recognizing these as nihilist and potentially self-destructive thoughts, he considered renewing his online therapy subscription but remembered he no longer had health insurance and doubted he could afford it anyway. He sighed deeply, wished it all would go away, and went to bed.

The next morning, as dawn’s soft light suffused his bedroom, he lay in a liminal state on the bed, relishing the experience of sleeping in late on a Saturday. Then his eyes opened, and he realized the unbearable weight of unemployment and the truth that it really didn’t matter what day of the week it was. Rolling over, he tried to go back to sleep but his bladder demanded relief, so he got up and went to the restroom.

As he washed his hands, looked up at the mirror and recoiled inwardly at what he saw there. He was normally clean-shaven, but now his stubble was threatening to turn into an unkempt beard. The bags under his eyes would have satisfied the packing requirements of even Mary Poppins. His hair had grown long enough to put up into a bun and he hated himself for it, knowing that he was too cheap and lazy to get a haircut. He dried his hands roughly on the dirty towel by the sink, dropped it back on the counter, and stumbled into the kitchen.

As he poured himself a bowl of stale Cheerios, John looked out of the window over the kitchen sink. A pale light filtered through the grimy window. Glancing at the microwave, he confirmed his suspicion that it was midmorning. He noted the absence of noise from the outside world. It seemed everyone else was having a quiet morning as well, which was just fine by him.

Taking a seat on the couch, he picked up the controller and hit the power button. The TV screen sprang to life with a colorful display of the manufacturer’s logo before bringing up the menu of streaming apps to choose from. Try as he might, none of the streaming apps would load. Sighing, he dropped the controller and picked up his phone. He supposed any of a myriad of social media apps would suffice in place of the TV. His phone screen blazed into life but there were no notifications – not even the meaningless ones meant to trick you into opening the associated app. He scrolled through the pages of app icons on his phone, opening the most frequently used ones first then randomly selecting others and eventually realizing that none of them were going to work. Then he saw with confusion, munching on his cereal, that he had no cell service or internet. He had most certainly paid his bill this month – it was one of the more affordable ones and necessary, he had reasoned. His carrier was a nationwide brand which had never let him down before, especially at home so near the cell phone towers providing service to the suburbs.

Wiping the milk from his mouth, John rose from the couch and put his bowl and spoon in the sink, adding them to the pile of dirty dishes. He made a mental note to remedy that later, when he was feeling up to it. Not knowing what else to do with himself, he thought about going next door to see if his neighbor – an older woman named Agatha who lived alone with a cat – had any signal or knew what was going on. But thinking perhaps it best to save that as a last resort, he opened the sliding glass door to his patio and stepped outside onto the pavers.

He could see his neighbors’ roofs nearby on all sides but looked straight up at the sky. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for – and in fact realized it had been some time since he cared about the weather and what was going on up in the azure expanse above him. In any case, he didn’t see anything – which in itself was perhaps odd, he realized, noting the lack of airplanes and their vapor trials. The eerie silence he had noted in the kitchen was deafening out here – even more profound outside of the four walls that bound so much of his life like the hardcover of a book. He had expected to hear at least a barking dog or the muffled sound of his back neighbor’s TV which was usually going at a deafening volume at all hours. Yet he heard nothing.

Suddenly, John was worried. Sweat filmed his palms as he made his way back into his house, sliding the glass door closed behind him. He made his way through the living room with the useless TV, pulled out his phone and checked it again – still no signal, and progressed through the kitchen to the foyer. Unlocking his front door for the first time in he didn’t know how many days, John hesitantly turned the knob and pulled it slowly open. The storm door creaked as he pushed it open and he stepped out in his slippers and pajamas, letting it close behind him.

He walked down his narrow disused driveway, looking up and down the street. His neighbors’ cars were still parked in their usual places up and down the street and in their driveways. He found this comforting, having subconsciously associated the cars with his neighbors, as if the cars were in fact the people themselves and not simply a means of transport. Yet the total absence of noise and movement along the street soon became unsettling as John stood at the end of his drive and saw nothing and no one aside from faceless houses and lifeless cars.

Finally realizing there was no other option, he turned and walked down the sidewalk and then made his way up Agatha’s drive past her old Subaru Forester, a dark green relic of the late-90s which he doubted she would ever part with even if it ceased to run. A fine layer of dust and grime coated the car but was largely concealed by the paint and patina of age. He thought briefly about tracing a finger in the dust as he passed alongside but put the childish inclination aside. Unable to distract himself further as he reached the door, he saw that Agatha had embraced modernity in a surprising twist and had installed an electronic doorbell with a camera. It was a popular brand he himself had invested in years ago, even before the pandemic, though he rarely checked the notifications that popped up on his phone anytime someone walked past his door.

Wondering if she was perhaps watching him at that moment, John tried to smile politely and pressed the button with his finger. The familiar blue light spun around the circular button but seemed only to spin in confusion. He waited a few moments before raising his hand and knocking firmly but politely on the door. He thought about what he would say when she came to the door – but found that he had nothing better than a lame excuse about lack of signal and it seemed silly to mention everything else – the absence of everything else. A few minutes passed and no one came to the door, so he knocked again. Eventually, he gave up, deciding that he didn’t want to bother her at least as much as she didn’t want to be bothered.

Turning away, John made his way back across the front of his house alongside the street to his other next-door neighbor and repeated the ritual. This time, a sleek modern sedan sat in the driveway, all chrome and black paint, freshly washed. He knew the man living there preferred to keep to himself except to point out when John’s grass had become overgrown, or his fence needed repairing. He pressed the doorbell, waited politely and knocked, as he had before. This time, the old-fashioned doorbell had emitted a tone inside the house which filtered muffled through the door and John waited in the confidence that at least he had been heard. Yet, again, nobody came to the door.

He repeated this process, crossing the street and working his way outward away from his own home. He crossed back across the street after he ran out of neighbors that he was at least somewhat acquainted with, not desiring to meet anyone he didn’t know at present and realizing that clearly something was going on. It must be some kind of holiday, he thought, or there’s a neighborhood meeting of which he was unaware. He avoided having anything to do with the HOA and didn’t want to start now. He went back home and waited. They would all come back home in an hour or two in any case, and then he could find out what was going on. It occurred to him that perhaps they were out protesting the lack of cell phone and internet service and would find some solution to the problem. He stared blankly at the 55-inch screen on his wall, holding the remote in one hand, and his useless phone in the other. He kept checking his phone as the minutes ticked by.

Remembering after half an hour that he kept some books in his home office, he wandered down the hall. Dust covered everything from the bookshelves holding a few sci-fi novels and best sellers to the keyboard at the desktop that he hadn’t turned on in months. He browsed the books on the shelf and saw one he had at one point in his life been excited to read. He struggled to recall the details of the books he had previously read in that series, but he took it off the shelf and wandered back to the couch in his living room.

John spent the rest of the morning immersing himself in a fantasy world of made-up names and a world of lore that gradually revealed itself to him. Yet he struggled to focus on the details – names blurred together, and he couldn’t keep track of who was on what side of the fictional conflict, or what it was about to begin with. In the back of his mind, he kept thinking about the strange morning he had had, unable to connect with the outside world. A fear crept in, spoiling what should have been a relaxing morning – he began to wonder what he would do if none of them returned. What if they’re gone for good? He thought. He looked up from his book. He remembered his wish, spoken only to himself, as he gazed out the window the night before. How he wished that it all would end. It was silly to think that he had somehow caused all of this, but he couldn’t push the thought away.

In the early afternoon, he stopped for lunch. Making his way to the fridge in his narrow kitchen, he pulled open the stainless-steel door and peered into the frosty brightly lit interior. He was relieved at least to see that the power was on, and nothing had spoiled. Yet there wasn’t much in the way of food – he hadn’t ordered groceries in over a week and found that all he had left was a moldy slice of cheese, a finger of milk in the bottom of the jug, and wilted head of lettuce which he had never really intended to eat anyway if he was being totally honest. The story was the same in the pantry – a can of beans, a nearly empty bag of rice, and some saltine crackers were all that remained. He realized he had finished the last of the Cheerios this morning and left the empty box on the counter. Checking his phone again in vain, he saw that he still had no service or internet. He wouldn’t be able to order groceries or summon the offerings of any local restaurants to his door.

Returning to his bedroom, John got dressed, pulling on jeans and a T-shirt and tying the laces on a pair of sneakers that hadn’t seen the outdoors in weeks. Running a hand through his hair, he decided he didn’t need to be particularly well-groomed just to go get food. In any case, he would just be sweaty and slightly windblown by the time he got to the store. He grabbed a few reusable grocery bags hanging in a closet by the front door, and then walked outside.

He arrived half an hour later, slightly sweaty and out of breath. The parking lot was empty. Not just mostly empty or featuring one or two cars of the sad employees required to work a late shift, but utterly and completely empty. The stoplights at the intersection clicked, cycling through red, yellow, and green in the silence. His skin pricked up in goosebumps as he looked around the empty shopping strips and dead drive-throughs. Looking up again at the blank sky, he breathed the dry desert air and realized it had finally happened. It had all come to a halt, a final silent end, and he had missed it. 

Feeling more alone than he had in years, John reached into his pocket, retrieving his asthma inhaler. Shaking it reflexively, he realized the inhaler was empty - he had intended to refill the prescription and have it delivered later that day. Panic set in as his lungs demanded more air than they could pull in, and  John’s vision tunneled. Fishing his phone from his pocket he dialed 911 with trembling fingers, listening as the phone rang and no-one answered. Falling to his knees as the breath drained from his body, John stared dumbly as a dusty gust of wind blew trash across the parking lot. His phone fell from his shaking hand, the screen shattering as it hit the pavement. Laying on his back, his breath coming in increasingly shorter gasps, John stared up at that empty sky realizing perhaps for the first time that no one was coming to save him.