I can no longer pretend that my daughter and wife aren’t gone forever and so I immerse myself in WeFuture profiles for work. I scroll through the lives of strangers, studying videos and photos and status updates of new jobs, engagements, cross-country moves. For some of these people, few relatives and friends have survived to remember these moments. Like how Brianna Estes, forty-seven, an insurance adjuster in Pensacola, Florida, dropped out of medical school to care for her mother with dementia and posted poetry late into the night. Sometimes I call the numbers listed on these profiles. Mostly they are disconnected. Every now and then a relative will pick up, though, and say something like: “This is Shannon’s phone. This is her mother.” If I were a braver person, I would speak. I would tell Shannon’s mother who I am, what I’ve lost, and that she can call me anytime, that I would welcome a voice in the night that was real.
I spotted a group of you a few days ago around midnight at the grocery store. I assume we all had the same plan: to venture out into the world in the safety of solitude and silence. Our eyes met for a split second. We quickly pushed our carts in opposite directions, gliding through the aisles on autopilot. I saw Mabel at the pharmacy, Benny ordering orzo salad at the deli. And it was this moment, without really planning it, that I began loading hamburger buns and patties and chips and soda into my cart. I bought paper plates and plastic cups, citronella-scented tiki torch fuel, bags of ice. It was almost as if Shelley was whispering into my ear as I checked out at the register. We need a party to break the silence, to begin to heal. Had she lived, I know there would have been one every week—parties to forget, parties to remember, parties to dance the night away. She would have declared that the postapocalypse doesn’t mean we stop dancing. She would have told me to stop being such a stick-in-the-mud.
I realize there aren’t many of us left and maybe this won’t be much of a party, but there’s the rest of the street, the community bulletin at the pool. It just opened for the first time since the outbreak. As you know, I never showed up to anything back then. I was never one to connect. I’ve been that way my entire life. I went to work, kept my head down, and came home. I let old friendships fizzle. I orbited my family and all of you like a distant planet—there and yet nearly impossible to reach. I know I can’t survive alone. Maybe this will be lost in a stack of your unopened mail; maybe you’ll read it and throw it away, saying it’s too late. Or maybe you’ll peek out your window and wonder about coming over and saying, Hey, me too. I’m hollowed and cracked and imploding. All I do know is this: I will continue to wake up and tell my family I love them, something I never did enough when they were alive. I will go grocery shopping at midnight. I will tell strangers online that I’m sorry for their loss, and I will eventually wash the bedsheets and their clothes and be okay with a quiet home. Maybe, with help, I will wave at you when you cross the street. I will begin setting the table for one.
Your neighbor,
Dan Paul
Melancholy Nights in a Tokyo Virtual Cafe
In the evenings, Akira walks down the busy streets of Tokyo’s virtual reality district to the neon-lit Ameyoko Market and browses knockoff VR visors and discounted bento boxes with his hands in his pockets. Projectors camouflage old buildings, immersing visitors in a different environment each night—nineteenth-century Paris, the halls of the Louvre, an anime wonderland filled with creatures from Japanese folklore. Around nine thirty, the crowds begin to disperse. Vendors close their shops, lock their stalls, load their merchandise into the backs of vans or onto carts attached to their bicycles. There are certain vendors Akira suspects are homeless like he is, the ones who stay later, long after the projectors are turned off, because they have nowhere else to go. Sometimes he catches himself yearning to speak to them in the darkness, except they probably prefer the illusion as much as Akira pretends he’s shopping like everyone else. Like them, he has nothing left, and yet he’s still one of the lucky ones—he never got sick, he survived.
Most nights begin like this for Akira, who at thirty-five joins the growing class of underemployed who couldn’t finish their education during the plague years and now aren’t satisfied with the limited positions offered by the transition programs. Before he was reduced to the two duffel bags he carries everywhere, before he constantly counted the yen in his pockets—which have holes that need to be taped or stitched shut—Akira was an intern designer at a printing company that eventually went out of business when virtual advertising became all the rage. His fisherman father died more than ten years ago. He was among the first adults to die from the plague in Japan after the virus reached the coastal Siberian towns—organ failure after organ failure at Akita City Hospital, until the virus transformed his heart cells into lung tissue and the doctors could only stand by and watch. Akira doesn’t want to burden his mother. She moved to a mountain village to stay healthy and he’s never told her the truth about his life.