It was an April morning, barely seven o'clock, when I woke to an orange blaze shining through my curtains and lighting the room brighter than the dawn sunlight. Firing in the back of my eyes, it shunted all sleep aside and I shook awake and into a sitting position in one smooth move. I panicked a little, thinking (irrationally in a drunken sleephaze) that a war had started, or maybe the cops had the place surrounded and were shining a helicopter spotlight through my window. Then my brain woke and I realized that I'd done nothing illegal. That's when panic subsided to curiosity, then curiosity slowly gave way to dread as I oozed myself out of my blankets and drew back the curtains to look out the window. A sheet of orange pain sledgehammered its way through my eyes and stabbed the back of my head with dazzling light. The world outside was a great orange blur. I stumbled over last night's teeshirt, stained with ketchup and animal fat and slowly dissolving in the fumes of what seemed like pure ethanol, stumbled to my nightstand and grabbed my glasses. One lens was broken. Maybe I'd fallen on my face last night, but my face didn't feel bruised. My glasses did nothing to clear up the orange world. The apartment buildings across the courtyard shimmered like a mirage or a halfremembered dream: impossible to pick out details but the shape was discernible with a little effort. Nothing seemed to move except the air itself; the very space between things breathed and writhed and twisted and warped, but relatively speaking all was still. I thought it must have been a dream, one of those crazy halfawake hallucinations brought on by a particularly bad hangover. I had no frame of reference for what I was seeing. No precedent. My mind tried to make sense of it in tiny chunks—desert and mirage analogies springing up unbidden—but I couldn’t fit any of it together. This was no dream, the pain of stubbing my toe on the bedframe assured me. Something had happened during the night; something had gone wrong at sunrise. Something had happened to make the world look like this, like looking through that wobbly tinted glass old people sometimes have in their front doors. I couldn’t take it all in at once. The building opposite mine; the vacant lot down the street; the old church spire I can see from my pillow when I sleep with the window open and whose copper plating glints green in the moonlight: all the landmarks of my bedroom window had changed into shimmering sunsetcoloured grotesque spectres of a cityscape. I went through the usual routine: pinching myself, rubbing my eyes, shaking my head (I had to stop that quickly: my splitting headache exploded at the slightest movement), still the world was washed orange. I really started to panic then. I decided to go to the kitchen to get some aspirin for my head, and maybe all this would clear up after some drugs, but the kitchen too was glowing, the false-hued sunlight pouring in through the small window over the sink. Needles of orange glinted on the faucets and I was afraid to touch them to pour a glass of water so I slumped cottonmouthed on the couch and turned on the TV to see if there was anything on the news. Nothing but static. I can see now the fuzz on the screen being tinted the same orange, but that may be misremembered. My apartment was cool; I looked to the airconditioner but it was off. I thought it should be hotter than this if the world outside was on fire. A thin slice of orange flame speared through the gap in the livingroom curtains, translucent motes of dust dancing suspended, momentarily illuminated in a snapshot before moving on. It was beautiful in its own way. I couldn’t look at it without feeling like throwing up. I went back into my bedroom—now the same orange as the outside world, as if the strange glow had slowly seeped in while I was out—to get dressed. As I was pulling on an old pair of jeans (torn at the knee from a combination of regular wear and a small motorcycle accident several years back) I noticed that it was quiet. Too quiet, as they say. Normally, even at this early hour, there would be traffic on the street below, garbagetrucks lumbering about, sirens screaming toward some emergency or other, but this morning there was nothing. I could suddenly hear my heart beating in my chest and my blood roiling around in my ears as if I had seashells ducttaped to the sides of my head. Not even the sound of a breeze whipping across the powerlines over the courtyard trickled in from outside. I stood and threw open my window, but it was the same as if I hadn’t. No change in temperature, no quick rise in volume of the city’s soundtrack, nothing. It was like I’d opened a kitchen cupboard (my orange kitchen rushed back into my mind and I shuddered involuntarily). For no particular reason, I began to sing. Quietly at first, then louder and louder until I was almost shouting the chorus to Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. I hadn’t woken with a song in my head that day (which I then realized was unusual; most mornings I’ll wake up singing some awful pop song or other that I didn’t even know I knew the words to) but here came Kate Bush crashing into my mind. The absurdity of what I was doing struck me and I began to laugh as I was singing, the words coming out distorted by giggles like the world outside was distorted by the orange whatever-it-was. I fell on my bed, out of breath but still humming the tune. I laced up my sneakers as quickly as I could, given that my hands had stopped working on account of last night’s chronic alcohol abuse, and decided that I had to go outside. I was terrified by the thought, but figured that I’d only degenerate into paranoia if I stayed inside. I had to go out and see what was happening, maybe find someone to talk to about it, hopefully find someone who could explain it. I stumbled into the kitchen again (thinking that I had to first conquer my fear of my own kitchen if I was to conquer my fear of the orange world outside) and swallowed two aspirins. My keys lay on the coffeetable. I picked them up and stuffed them into my pocket. I was halfway out my apartment door when I felt that my cellphone wasn’t in my left pocket, where it always is. I returned to the livingroom and there it was on the coffeetable, almost where my keys were. I picked it up to turn it on but it didn’t respond. Must be out of battery. I stole a quick glance at the sheet of orange haze cascading through the gap in the curtains, swallowed hard, and left.
Every great adventure begins with boredom. That’s why you always see Sherlock Holmes plucking his violin and mainlining cocaine before Watson bursts in with a case. Our hero is destined for greater things than getting desperately high and twirling his thumbs around one another. Me, the only reason I leave my apartment these days is to get more cheap vodka from the hole-in-the-wall liquorstore across the street. Sometimes I drink wine, but usually only when I’m hungry. Ennui, that’s what it is. Only the French would have a word for it. Boredom and despair and nihilism all rolled into one. My life is desolate but I don’t think I’m on the verge of any great adventure. My life isn’t a detective story: it’s my life. Nothing has to happen in life. Life doesn’t have a plot, it’s just chaos. There’s life and there’s death and there’s nothing in between. Cause and effect are meaningless; corollary and corroboration, correlation and causation, cast and crew, certainty and circumstance, choice and destiny: these are things scientists and pulp novelists use to explain what goes on in their worlds. My world doesn’t have things like these. My world has entropy and decay and inertia and these things will go on until the heat-death of my apartment, my stinking stickyfloored apartment that I have no reason to ever clean. People’s houses only get cleaned when they have something better to put off and I’ve never got anything else to do so the Coke stains on the couch fade into different colors like an old atlas; the ashtrays spill over with papery roll-up butts and old fingernail clippings torn off with yellowing teeth; the dishes pile up at the sink, forming an orderly line around the block outside a methadone clinic; the empty vodka bottles roll around inside my plastic recycling bucket in that way that bodies find a convenient tessellation in a mass grave. All the inanimate things in my life seem like they’re lying around waiting to die while I’m lying around waiting for something to happen to me, waiting for someone to come along and say I recognize the genius inside you that nobody’s given you the chance yet to show, waiting to find out what exactly it is I can do, what sort of contribution I can actually make to society besides those fragmented thoughts I record by calling my own answering machine and do nothing with. I’m waiting for direction and purpose, for something to rein me in and focus me so that I can really shine, something to force me to consider what’s below the surface of my useless existence, something to make me more than a cockroach, more than a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, but somebody’s said that already so I can’t use that one. I need to be human again, to have a job to get up for in the morning, to buy coffee and records and go out for dinner, to eat something more than hamburgers made of rat intestines and bits of spiders topped with cheese slices that have the nutritional value of a floppy credit card, to go deeper down than I can see, to stop scratching at the door and kick that fucker down and live, to go beyond what I can see out my window, to find some detail in the world that isn’t blurred by a methylated haze. From a life lived through other people’s words this seems like it could happen, but I’m kidding myself. I tell myself, every now and then, that life isn’t like a movie where I could be thrown into an extravagant set of circumstances by the end of the first act. Life’s more like a Bruce Springsteen song, where everything’s just shit all the time and you can either make the best of it by singing about it in huge stadiums or you can disappear lost in memory like a Vietnam vet or a knocked-up Midwestern girl, only remembered when you die in a few terse words by a preacher spoken in a quiet mortuary in which only the first row of seats is occupied. I can’t live without doing something, but I can’t do anything without living. Please explain to me the mystery of this unbroken circle. Explain to me how to get into this human existence thing that I can’t make head nor tail of. I can’t see an entry point, only the circumference of the circle, the surface of the sphere, watching it go round and round perfectly fine without me. I don’t know how this happened. I had such extraordinary plans. I was going to be the best at… whatever it was that I was going to do. No, I do know how this started. When you have a brush with death you’re supposed to take stock of your life and live every day like it’s your last, right? You’re given a new lease on the world and everything seems bright and shiny and you watch the most beautiful sunrise of your life. Bullshit. I was in a bar a few years back—a real dive where the whiskey’s got dead flies in it and the wood seems to have curdled into existence and they try to be classy by putting out small candles in tumblers but the place just gets filled with that smell of recently-burnt-out candles because they don’t replace them every few hours, the sort of place where the middle-of-the-road country-rock gets louder as the sun gets lower—sitting and just stewing in my own selfhatred—because you can’t talk to bartenders any more: that’s just a thing that happens in movies—sitting and stewing when this old man sidled up next to me, struggling to get his atrophied legs around the stool, spittle permanently lodged in the dimple between his quivering lip and upturned chin, a chin that looked like it had never stopped growing, like a plant moving heliotropically up toward the sun. He sat there, didn’t say a word, and the barman brought him a shallow glass of rippling amber and he just sniffed it and sat in silence. He looked at me briefly with eyes that seemed to have a mind of their own; caught in his strabismic crossfire, I had to mentally bisect the angle between his eyes to figure he was looking at me. I raised my glass to him and he nodded slowly and stared into his own. I looked away eventually. On my other side sat a young guy, barely eighteen I’d guess, steeped in artificial pheromones as if he was trying to convince everyone that his glands naturally produced like formaldehyde to preserve his youth forever. He was one of those guys who thinks that everyone in a bar is a kindred spirit, like you can talk to the guy next to you and it’ll cost less than a shrink, and he started telling me about his life and how he’d broken up with his girlfriend and how his car wouldn’t start that morning and his watch had stopped and when he went to the store they didn’t have his brand of cigarettes and how life’s little injustices pile up on you until you’re consumed with impotent rage that you can’t vent properly without looking like a complete psycho. Life's little injustices? What about its big ones? What about the huge fuckoff glaring injustices that kick you when you're down? What about those schoolyard-bully injustices that you can't do anything about because if you tell someone it'll just get worse? What about those injustices that are so fucking big you can't even see to the end of them? Don't give me life's little injustices, okay? I've got enough of the big ones. So I left. I staggered out into the orange arclit street and clambered onto my motorcycle and drove around for a while thinking about how everyone else has got it easy. Maybe I wasn’t concentrating, maybe I was more drunk than I thought, but I didn’t see the cat crossing the street in front of me and mashed it into the tarmac like old pizza into carpet and I listed and skidded along, tearing a hole into the knee of my jeans and shredding the skin underneath and I lay there for a while with my bike on top of me breathing heavily and looking down at the river which seemed like it was flowing backwards, but it was only a trick, the wind pushing the waves back upriver while the rest of the water underneath flowed down to the sea as usual. The streets were empty: nobody saw me fall. I stood up and limped to the nearest station. I didn’t trust my bike so I left it in the middle of the street. I got on the train going uptown, my chest still heaving itself into my throat. At the next station an old lady got on. She could barely make it over the gap between the train and the platform that those prerecorded announcements keep reminding you to mind. She sat in the square two-and-two seat across the aisle from me. Muttering eschatological nonsense through her underbite, she shamelessly slipped off her moccasins and slid them under the seat, resting her arachnodactylic sportsocks on the opposite seat, flaking off little crusts of grime and age onto the orange plastic. When you get that old only comfort matters, I guess. She looked at me sideways, like daring me to say something, and I looked out the window beside me to watch the black tunnel’s sporadic lights rush by like fireflies with a pressing appointment, trying to ignore the blood pooling in my basketball shoes which I wear even though I’ve never played basketball in my life; they’re just damn comfortable. I chanced a sideward glance at the old lady and she was in the middle of rolling a cigarette from a pouch of Drum, which she wobbled between her mismatched lips and after three strikes coerced a flame out of the twodimensional match from one of those matchbooks you get at newsstands that are no good for anything except sliding under unbalanced tables to steady them. She dropped the match to the floor of the carriage, letting it burn itself out or else burn the whole train down. Another prerecorded announcement blasted through the car—we were the only two there—saying Thank you for not smoking on…. She ignored it, enjoying her cigarette. I said nothing. Who am I to deny an old lady her simple pleasures? If I ever get to be that old I’ll probably smoke on the subway too. But I’ll probably die before I’m forty unless I can find some way out. I’ll leave a bloated corpse on the city streets and the cops will put up that yellow tape and make me into a chalk outline and I’ll end up just another toetag in the morgue, not even worth the autopsy. Death by misadventure, that’s the official line. That’s what they say when you just fall down dead drunk on the sidewalk because you have nothing else to live for, but they don’t know that. Death by misadventure. Death by fucking ennui. So yeah I’ve looked death in the face and I learned nothing except that when I’m old I can take off my moccasins on the subway. I crashed my motorcycle and I nearly threw up on the subway and I looked death in the face and it just made me worse, kept me indoors forever not leaving except for more vodka and cigarettes. I’ve cheated death and it didn’t make me enjoy life. Life by misadventure, death by ennui. Life inside my safe shoebox apartment with my safe empty glass bottles and my safe overflowing ashtrays and my safe Cokestain maps. Life that means nothing and death that makes no difference to anybody. Life of smoking on trains and straining to focus my walleyed gaze on whatever it is that I’m drinking. Death by life’s little injustices. Death by pheromones and formaldehyde. Death by misadventure.
The world outside my apartment was sodium orange, the sky buzzing like a giant arclight had replaced the sun. The river was still: a ten-mile-long sheet of glass made of raw sewage and the frames of old shoppingcarts glowing that red of a TV standby light. Nothing had detail, nothing was discernible unless you were right next to it. The only thing that I could see clearly was that I was alone. The streets were still and quiet; not even the wind made a sound. I walked a block or two without seeing so much as a roach. The sidewalk was clean and dry, all the old gum and newspapers and candy wrappers evaporated in the night. I shouted out a Hello or two, but my voice didn’t echo and went unanswered. I’d never seen the city so quiet. It was that old cliché, you know: The Last Man on Earth. Hundreds of movies can't really prepare you for the sheer loneliness of knowing—somehow knowing even though there are no bodies and no stench of putrefaction, you just know—that you're the only person left alive. Not loneliness, really, though; you can get used to loneliness, I've gotten used to loneliness, to being ignored, to being like a pebble on a riverbed getting knocked around and worn down while the great volumes of water rush past completely oblivious and unaffected by a little circle of stone. Not loneliness, no, but aloneness. A sharp and distinct mixture of emotion and knowledge, both knowing and feeling that you are completely on your own, and having to settle yourself into the fact that there's definitely nothing you can do about it. You can't just go and find somebody to talk to outside if it gets too much: there's nobody left. No matter how far into a bottle of vodka I dove I was always aware, if even only subconsciously, that all I really had to do was just talk to somebody outside and I'd be a real person again but here there was nobody else, even outside I was alone; if I can't fit into the world then I become the world, the world inside my apartment and the orange world-on-fire out here. Stillness. Stillness and aloneness and solitude. I used to call my apartment my Fortress of Solitude, as though it were a mansion of crystals in the frozen North and I the Man of Steel, Last Son of a Dying World, humanity's only hope for salvation from itself, taking my power from the light of the yellow sun. But I'm not Superman. I'm not really anything like Superman, though I guess Superman felt kind of isolated sometimes too, but at least he had something to do: he knew why he was here. I had no Metropolis to save except this burnt orange one sprawling out around me, and that wasn't worth saving because who would I be saving it for? There was nobody anymore to live there and the whole damned empty waffleiron of streets and parks and teetering highrises meant nothing to me really: it was just someplace I lived. Everybody has to make a home someplace, and mine happened to be there. The place was unfamiliar to me, like all the other people who lived here. The city was a stranger in a bar who gaped at me crosseyed and who I only ever knew by looking at. I never really got into the heart of this place; I knew it by touch like a blind man feeling his way around his own home. The river is the heart of the city. I’ve never known the river. I can see it from my apartment, but I’ve never watched it rise and fall, never been familiar with the movements of the tide. I only use it to navigate, uptown downtown, north and south. It’s a compass, a tool, not a living breathing entity keeping the whole town alive. It’s a map and a road and an artery and a grave. I took my cellphone out of my pocket. It didn't work and besides now there was nobody left alive to call me, not that anybody had ever called me before now; come to think of it I don't even know why I had a cellphone, just because it seemed like I should I suppose. I tossed it into the river. It skipped twice like a flat stone and went under, leaving a tripartite waveform radiating out across the glowing surface like I'd dropped a rock into molten iron. I watched it until the waves had spread farther than I could see and the surface had settled down again back to red glass. I had to go looking for an answer to this question, a reason for what had happened. I couldn’t look at the sky: it was a dome of light, the whole firmament lit up brighter than the sun, casting no shadows, as if the atmosphere itself was on fire. I’d find no answers up there. I kept on walking downriver until I reached the docks and the ocean. I could only stand there with bricks in my shoes and sawdust in my throat trying to connect up enough thought to work out what I was looking at. A couple miles out, near the edge of the world, the sun had fallen into the sea. Huge plumes of steam hung around it painted onto the canvas of light in the sky, nothing moving or making any sound. The gargantuan globe that provided life to the world now turning slowly to an iron ball in the cooling North Atlantic. This wasn’t the answer I wanted. Everything will die. Death by cold and the absence of life. Life is a melody that plays over the rhythm of the universe if it has something to keep time. No more sunrise or sunset, no more noons or overcast mornings or slantshadowed summer evenings where the smell of cut grass fills the air. The sun was dead. I sat down on the pier and slipped off my shoes, kicking them into the water, watching the sun darken and quench and eventually slip below the surface of the ocean. There was my answer, falling slowly into a salty grave. There was my question, fading away to perpetual night. Looking for answers isn’t the right thing to do. I should’ve gone looking for more questions. Looking for answers only makes you miserable when you find them, but looking for more questions means you always have something to move toward. I know I’m telling this story like some crazy exegesis of how I live in this world, but it’s all true. When I was younger, I used to try to engineer epiphanies by walking around and finding places that looked interesting, by going to bars and trying to meet people who could teach me something, wandering in that misguided way that people who have never had a major revelation go seeking them out, poking around in the dumpsters and dives of society to make myself feel better without ever thinking about how I could change. Epiphany will never come from inside, it’ll only show itself when you stop looking. Real selfknowledge is like those purple UV lights in nightclub toilets that you can’t ever focus directly on, but if you stop looking at them you’ll see that they show up all the flaws in the stitching of your clothes, all the otherwise invisible dandruff that’s fallen on your shoulders. It’s something no amount of clever similes can possibly describe. It’s something really only a catastrophe can show you. You go looking for big sweeping changes but what you really need is to see all the tiny little things that are wrong with you. Move closer to the big picture and focus on life’s little imperfections. Put off those generalizations. Explore the small stuff, examine the detail. Life by adventure. That night when the sun was a million-mile cannonball on the seabed and no light would ever touch these streets again I felt my way back barefoot to my apartment and cleaned it from top to bottom. I brought the empty bottles to the dumpster, poured the overflowing ashtrays into the trash, scrubbed the Coke stains out of the sofa, mopped the mysterious sticky patches off the floor. I slept on fresh linen in a bed that didn’t smell like it could strip the paint off the walls. I woke the next morning with that Kate Bush song still rattling around in my ears. I’d slept with the window open and my curtains billowed tenderly. I got up and pulled them apart, shoving my head outside to taste the newborn morning. The sun was rising stately, a yellow thumbnail disc climbing through the white areolae of rippled clouds: the most beautiful sunrise I’d ever seen. Traffic hummed, the city stank, and a soft breeze blew discarded trash along the streets.
