There is not a wisp of cloud in the sky on this soundless October afternoon, yet the mid-day sun seems dim, the color of its light an oddly distorted orange like a sunset that can only be seen in a city filled with smoke. There is no smoke in this city however, except for the cooking fire I have built out of self-help books in front of my new home. It has been 13 days now since I awoke just like every other Monday morning to my usual ritual of shower, shave, scrambled eggs and run for the door. It had been years since I had been on time on a Monday, yet this one was going to be different, I could feel it. I pulled out of my neighborhood onto the usually busy avenue to find that I was the only car on the road. At first I was thrilled, but about halfway to the office it was really beginning to bother me that I had yet to see a single other person. First I felt fear grip my chest, later came shock, and now the only emotion I have left is a zen-like state of apathy.
This was not your mother’s apocalypse, there was no fire and brimstone, no battles between angels and the minions of satan, no nuclear blasts or bodies strewn about-ravaged by the effects of biological warfare. There was just silence….and me. It was like whatever power had deemed humankind fit to exist had revoked that order, and yet I was somehow overlooked. The feeling was not new to me. I had often thought of myself as the invisible man, the one with the face and name that no one ever remembers, the one who’s voice is never heard in a conversation that involves more than two people. Now the pidgeons and cockroaches make up the majority of the city’s population. The blackjack tables all sit empty inside the dark casinos, the only things swinging on the strip club’s poles are black widow spiders spinning their webs.
When the city’s power went out I had briefly considered driving out to Hoover Dam to see if I could figure out what the problem was. After all I have hundreds of thousands of cars at my disposal, many with full tanks of gas, but I’m an accountant not an electrical engineer. So instead I gathered candles, battery powered lights and propane lamps to provide the only light in this city that had never before slept. There is certainly no shortage of food, but everything I eat now comes from a can, I already long for those first few days before all the steaks turned green. It’s funny to me how what used to be stealing becomes gathering when you’re the only soul around.
I have taken up residence in a bookstore south of the strip for now; my first residence was the Treasure Island casino, I felt comfort there for some reason with its wax pirate statues and fake gold dubloons, but the penthouse suite I wanted to live in was on the thirtieth floor, and the elevators stopped working along with everything else after my first night there. It was here, outside this very bookstore that I met my one and only companion, Buster, the yellow laborador whose facial expressions are so human-like that I can’t help but speak with him as if he truly understands.
I am writing this on my last day here in Las Vegas, for I have to leave. I have an insatiable need to find out if I truly am the only human left on Earth. I am not a pious man, yet I can’t help feeling like my name should be Adam as I set out on a quest to find my Eve. I have packed a truck with all of the necessities to keep me alive until the next town, as well as food for Buster of course, without whom my sanity would truly be in jeopardy. I hold hope that one day this book, in which I will write every night, will help my children to understand this strange world into which they will be born.
(Inspired in part by Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher and in part by a hallucinogen induced dream I had last night)
