Perfectly Alone

            Lawrence could feel the weight of the week settling upon him yet there was only one more day to reach the weekend. He could see the top half of the clock from his workstation and the thought of watching the minute hand reach the twelve, while the hour hand teased an approach to the five, he leaned back in his seat, tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling, letting out a long and exaggerated breath.

            “Five more minutes, I can skim through my email, return my inbox to zero, and finally go home,” he thought. The next few moments passed far more quickly than he expected, and he watched his co-workers rise from their seats, prompting him to join them in a mass exodus to the hallway. He hurried toward the row of elevator doors and stood alone, waiting for the first one to open. As it breached the silence with a small squeak, he stepped inside to find himself alone.

            “Huh, that’s weird, did everyone else take the other four elevators?” he wondered. “I guess this will be a slow, silent descent from the eighth floor to the parking garage.” He watched the numbers slowly count down until the glowing red symbol read “G”. With another slight squeak, he passed through the doors and entered the parking garage to find himself alone, looking at a disturbingly empty space, seeing only his car parked at the far end of the lot.

            ‘Umm, this doesn’t make any sense, was my elevator that slow that everyone else descended and departed ahead of me?” he wondered. He fed his fingerprint into his phone to see that he had no signal whatsoever. “Must be the concrete and the depth of my location.” He started his car, drove up one floor and entered the normally busy city. The sidewalk was empty, the street was empty, and he rejoiced at his unusual luck of experiencing so little traffic.

            “Something isn’t right,” he said. “I have never seen this street empty before.” He pulled to the curb, turned off his engine, locked the doors and began to wander the sidewalks, looking for any sign of any activity but finding no one. The next thirty minutes passed, and he saw no people, no birds, no rodents, no police cars, and no homeless people. He again checked his phone to still see no signal, no social media feeds, no missed calls, and no texts from friends or family.

            He stopped walking, knelt upon the sidewalk, and focused all of his attention on the strange absence of sound. No sirens, no steady drone of traffic, no air traffic overhead, and no random conversations. He continued to focus on hearing something, anything and could hear nothing but his own heartbeat in his ears. He returned to his feet and visited seventeen different stores on both sides of the street. He checked his pulse and gladly found that he still had one, wondering if he had passed into some different phase of reality.

            Feeling a bit peckish, he entered an empty coffee shop, made himself a chocolate mocha, left a five-dollar bill on the counter, knowing that simply taking something without paying was wrong and spent the next thirty minutes walking from store to store to find zero activity. “How is this possible that I am completely alone in a city that should be teeming with millions of people?”

            Businesses were open for business, cars were parked along the curb, and many were left abandoned on the streets, in intersections, and on bridges. “Check the subway,” he thought. “How can everyone be gone?” He snagged a hot dog from an abandoned hot dog cart, walked, drank, ate, and explored every possible location that should have been populated by numberless human beings. “There are literally no people anywhere, all the homeless are gone, all the prostitutes are gone, all the gang members are gone, and I don’t even see any rats or birds… so, so weird, and without explanation.”

            He descended to the subway, to find the exact same situation below the street as on the street. “No people, no activity, no animal life, all life has disappeared. I guess I’ll go home then.” He ascended from the dark and gloomy underworld, returned to his car and carefully weaved through the streets, parking in the garage for his apartment building and decided to take the stairs to the fourth floor that held his home.

            “Well, I would place an order for food delivery but obviously that won’t work,” he said. “I guess I’ll have to walk to the grocery store, pick up what I need, cook myself some dinner and hopefully watch a movie.” Placing his briefcase and car keys on his kitchen counter, he returned to the street, found an abandoned bicycle, rode three blocks to the grocery store and found the perfect filet mignon, a bag of frozen broccoli, a loaf of sourdough bread, and a bottle of Merlot.

            “Perfect, it doesn’t get any better than this…. Well, it would be better if I had someone with whom to enjoy this meal,” he said. “I can say that I have never bought groceries and never had to wait in line. A quick bike ride home, cook up this glorious piece of meat, enjoy my own company, and watch a movie. I can only assume that the streaming services are still functional, as all of this sort of work is done by computers. Wow, what a weird day.”

            Lawrence finished preparing his dinner, stepped out onto his balcony and marveled at the bright lights and the absolute silence. “Here I sit all alone, but that is really nothing different. Finish my day at work, come home, make dinner, eat alone, watch a movie alone, but doing all of this alone is different than knowing that right now, I am actually, literally all alone. Not a single soul in the city, as far as I can tell.”

            He struggled to stay awake until the end of the movie, ate some chocolate, took a shower and went to bed. Dragged from his sleep from his screeching alarm, he staggered to the balcony to once again find the unnatural absolute silence. “I wonder what work will be like today. Will I literally be alone in the office. I really have no choice but to go in, be productive, put in my eight hours, and come home for another silent evening.”

            He made himself a pot of coffee, fried three eggs and sausage, dressed for the day, and drove to work, to once again find a completely empty parking garage. He parked in his normal space, took the squeaky elevator to the eighth floor and entered an office full of people, who greeted him warmly. Everything seemed like a normal day, so he refrained from asking anyone how their previous evening was. His morning passed like it always did, he walked down to the hot dog stand on the street out front, purchased two dogs, a bottle of sweet tea, ate in the sunshine and returned to his desk.

            Feeling overly full, he returned to his unfinished project, began feeling drowsy, felt a sudden prick on the front of his forearm and realized that he was no longer at his desk in the office. Everything around him was white, he found himself surrounded by older men and women in hospital gowns, wandering around and talking to themselves. A very large middle-aged woman approached him and asked how his work was going.

            “Do you still work in the office, filling out paperwork for stocks and bonds purchases?" she asked.

            "Yes, I do,” he answered. “I’m sorry, can you tell me where I am right now? I really should be at my desk. I’d hate to lose my job because the day is almost over.”

            “Lawrence,” she said, “we’ve talked about this before. You are at St. Stephen’s hospital and have been for the past twelve years. You don’t need to worry about your job. I’ll call your boss and tell him that you’ve completed all of your work and will be back in on Monday to finish up whatever work needs to be done.”

            “Thank you, so much for taking care of that for me,” he said. “I’m really thirsty, can I get a glass of Merlot?”

            “Yes, of course,” she said. “Take a seat at that table there, and I’ll bring it out to you. Jeffrey has been asking about you and is concerned that you’re not doing very well. Should I send him over to talk to you. You and he have been friends for about eight years now. I know he would love to continue your conversation about your work, your apartment, and the steak you ate last night.”

            “Yes, please do,” Lawrence answered. “I’ve been quite lonely lately.” Lawrence sat down, watched the handful of wandering elderly people in their hospital gowns and waited for Jeffrey to arrive. “Honestly, I have no idea who Jeffrey is or how he knows anything about me. I really need some answers, but that nurse seemed to think that everything was okay, and I am fine doing whatever it is that I am doing right here, right now.”

Within a few minutes, a man approached him, sat down and looked him directly in the eyes. It was at that moment that Lawrence realized that this Jeffrey, if this is who he was, looked identical to himself. Their conversation began and continued as if they had been friends for a very long time. He could feel himself relaxing inside and truly connecting with another human being, which brought about peace that he had not felt for as long as he could remember.