parenthesis? When he was in his early thirties, five or six years before he died, he had taught an Introduction to Journalism course at Columbia University and been astonished to discover how many of his students – some of the best students in the city, mind you – were incapable of writing a good opening sentence. Not only did they bury their leads, they burned them, dismembered them, and then buried them. This had been one of his favorite classroom jokes, though it had never gotten so much as a single laugh. No wonder. He stuck the course out for three semesters – three semesters, two hundred students, and one love affair, to be exact – before he decided to resume writing full-time. He hated to say that reporting was in his blood, but it did seem to offer him something that nothing else did: the exhilaration of a million small facts. When he was working on a story, he felt as though he were a paleontologist uncovering a set of bones, chipping away at the world until he had enucleated some small, hard object he could catalogue and carry away in his hands: a skull, say, or a breastbone. That was the real reason he kept on writing the newspaper: he didn't know how else to behave.
He was a fool, of course, and he knew it. He had traded the pleasures of conversation and friendship, pleasures available to anybody who so much as stepped out his front door, for a million hours of sitting alone in his office piecing together the next day's copy. He had taken it for granted that the community of the dead, and earlier the community of the living, would always be there, waiting just outside, and so he had neglected it, choosing to watch and listen from the periphery rather than actually participate in it. He ought to have set his notebook down, gone to one of the bars, and sought out a few drinking buddies. He ought to have fallen in love with somebody, or at least tried.
There were so many things he ought to have done, but he hadn't, and now it was too late.
He decided to add the comma to the 'and,' and then he moved on to the next sentence, and before long he had lost himself in the story he was telling.
He must have been working for half an hour before something finally snatched his attention. He lifted his head.
For just a moment he was sure that he had heard a tapping noise. He set his paper aside and listened.
There it was again, the same tapping noise, like a tree limb brushing against a street sign. The sound seemed to be coming from down on the street. When he went to the window and looked outside, he saw the flag end of a coat disappearing around the corner. Holy, holy, holy. He kept repeating the word, first in his head and then out loud. It was a broken-off exclamation of surprise, something he was hardly even aware of thinking until he heard his own voice.
He bounded out of the office and took the stairs at a gallop. The street directly in front of the building was deserted, but he knew which way the coat had gone. He followed after it. He felt the kind of rolling surge of high energy he had sometimes felt as a teenager, when he would have to stop whatever he was doing to rush into the field behind his house and hurl a softball or a tennis ball as hard as he could, then push off from the grass to chase it down. He smacked a parking meter with his hand as he rounded the corner of the sidewalk. At the end of the block, he saw the coat vanishing behind the shining silver window of a building, the polished black heel of a shoe flashing in its wake. He redoubled his speed.
'Wait!' he shouted. 'Hold up!'
He was halfway down the street before the figure in the coat reappeared, taking two steps away from the corner of the building. He stood there with all the calm of a street sign, the wind parting slowly around him. Something about the way he held his arm extended toward the brick wall, like a diver keeping his line in reach, told Luka that the man was blind, though he was not wearing dark glasses or carrying a cane. The tapping noise Luka had heard from his office must have been the sound of his shoes striking the sidewalk.
Luka slowed to a jog as he closed the gap. 'Hey.' He was still breathing hard from his run down the stairs. 'Hey, I'm – ' He gasped. 'I'm Luka – ' Another gasp. 'Luka Sims.'
The blind man cocked his head to one side. 'Are you real?' He placed a peculiar stress on the word 'real.'
It felt so satisfying to be talking to somebody that Luka found himself letting out a noise: a quick gust of genuine laughter. 'Are you?' he said.
Something tightened inside the blind man's face. 'It's been a long time since I could say so with any certainty.'
'Here,' Luka said. 'Take my hand,' and cautiously the blind man reached for it. The hand he gave Luka was dry and callused, particularly at the fingertips, and it twitched when Luka squeezed it. 'There,' Luka said. 'I'm as real as that. That's about all I can guarantee.'
The blind man nodded as if to say Close enough, then withdrew his hand.
'I didn't think there was anybody else left around here,' Luka admitted, though it seemed ridiculous now, like a nightmare that had lost all its power as soon as the sun rose.
After a moment, the blind man asked, 'What's happened? Can you tell me?'
'All I can give you is a theory.' He switched into reporting mode. 'It looks like the world – the other world, I should say – is shutting down. From what I can gather, there was some sort of virus over there, and it knocked out most of the population. Maybe all of the population, I don't know. And when they go, so do we. That seems to be the way it works. Mind you, all of this is just a theory. It doesn't explain what the two of us are still doing here.'
'I came here across a desert,' the blind man said.
And that evening, as he sat lightly on the cushions of Luka's sofa, like a paper kite poised to catch the wind, he was still recounting the story. He had finished off the last of the red wine and fettuccine Luka had prepared, and he was tearing tiny pieces of his napkin off and collecting them in his palm. 'I thought it was only the whistling of the wind at first. It took me a while to hear the pulse.' The blind man repeated the exact same detail for what must have been the sixth or seventh time, and Luka made another little affirmatory noise. He was unwilling to let the blind man go, unwilling to leave him alone for even the few seconds it would take to rinse the dishes or put the leftovers away, for fear that he would disappear. 'All that sand, and it wouldn't stop moving,' the blind man said, and when he brought his hands together, the confetti pieces of his napkin drifted to the floor.
They stayed up talking until long after the sun had set. Then Luka offered the blind man a place on his couch to sleep, and because it was late and the blind man was still tipsy from the wine, he accepted.
Luka lay awake half the night listening to him breathe.
The next morning he was still there, sitting on the sofa, running his hands over a wing-shaped piece of driftwood that Luka had fished out of the river. He had folded the blanket Luka had given him into a perfect square, positioning it in the center of his pillow. When he heard Luka come into the room, he said, 'I think there must be more of us.'
'More of us?'
'More of us left in the city.'
'Why do you say that?'
The blind man was quiet for a long time. 'Instinct.'
And though Luka couldn't say why, he was inclined to agree. Since he had noticed the tapping noise outside his window, he had been quick to investigate any unusual sound: a nut falling from an oak tree, his refrigerator hatching another clutch of ice cubes. He would let the sounds sail around in his short-term memory until he was satisfied that he could identify them. Then he would get up and head to the window or the kitchen just to make sure. It was as though every sound that was not the wind or the birds or the river was by definition human. He imagined people all over the city, hundreds of them, trying everything they could think of to pierce through the walls of their solitude, but uncertain there was anybody out there. Hundreds of faces behind hundreds of windows. Hundreds of coats gliding around hundreds of corners. He was determined that he wouldn't stop looking until he had picked out every last one of them.
He and the blind man spent the day searching for anyone they could find. Luka tried to offer him his elbow as they started out, but the blind man refused it. 'A man who's walked as far as I have doesn't need anybody's help,' he said. Instead, he navigated by trailing his hand along the wall of whichever building they were passing, listening to the echo of his hard-soled shoes as they hit the sidewalk.
The two of them began at Luka's apartment building, venturing outward in a series of linked rings. 'We should stay in one place,' the blind man argued. 'Other people are going to be out searching, too.' And he had a point – someone could easily happen by the apartment building while they were away – but Luka was too restless to stay put. He preferred to take his chances in the city.
They walked down street after street, the blind man shouting out, 'Hello?' and Luka shouting out, 'Anybody?'
