Yes, I too was supposed to die like the rest of them. By all means I should have been incinerated in that hellfire; vaporized in the blink of an eye. But no, nothing of the sort happened to me. Only, the life I had lived till then turned, in one screaming flash, into a memory of something that had perhaps never existed. That was thirty-three years before. Or was it thirty-three hundred? I stopped counting time long ago.

Everything changed that day. For one, I stopped chronicling my life on the Internet – yes, it was destroyed too, contrary to the designs of the smart-asses at DARPA who had invented it – and started scribbling in this tattered notebook I found somewhere afterwards, my handwriting growing smaller and smaller as days and decades crawled away and its pages started filling up like nothing on earth has filled up ever since. Now, the mere thought of running out of ink and paper brings back the anxieties of deadlines and word counts from my unremarkable days at the tabloid. You see, this notebook and this ballpoint pen are possibly the last pieces of writing equipment left in this world.

But wait. Am I still supposed to call it ‘WORLD?’ What difference will it make if I call it a hellhole – which is indeed what it has become – or  get a little imaginative and call it ‘zybamunk’ or ‘puthroald’ or whatever? Who’s there to tell me I’m wrong? And why just stop at ‘WORLD?’ For that matter I could make up a new word for every single thing I know and yet civilization won’t fall apart: that has already happened. Not because we all used different words for the same thing but because we insisted on giving different meanings to the SAME WORD! Why, I could invent a whole new language all of my own and the entire world would be speak it. For I am the world now, you see. But again, am I still supposed to call it ‘WORLD?’

Sometimes I amuse myself with thoughts of her. She worked at the same tabloid as I did but that was all. She loved coffee while I enjoyed tea. She preferred cats, I dogs. She gave herself wantonly to every guy that showed up with a grin and a wisecrack while I kept saving myself for The One: I knew it would never be her. During one of our big arguments I even yelled that I wouldn’t have her if she were the only woman left on earth and I the only man.

Now I wonder if she survived. If she’s out there somewhere, trudging over a scorched plain, hiking up a denuded mountain, crawling through some slimy cavern in the bowels of the earth, looking for a fellow human survivor – wishing it to be male and picturing herself as the next Eve.

It gets scary here sometimes. No, there’s nothing out here waiting to get me. Even loneliness has lost its horror for no other state is possible. Rather, it’s this total absence of challenge, this sense of absolute invulnerability that frightens me. I mean, how long do I go on like this? Hunger, thirst, sexual desire – things that could kill me don’t even touch me now. What if that apocalyptic flash, while sparing my life, somehow altered my genome in bizarre ways so that I’m condemned to exist in perpetuity? What if it were engineered to infinitely fortify whatever it couldn’t destroy and thus inflict torment one way or the other? Tell you what, I feel like I haven’t aged a day since it happened and it terrifies me.

I could still have the last laugh though. You see, I lived in a world where guys like me usually died regretting the things they couldn’t do in their lifetimes. Clearly, things have turned out a bit different in my case. Time’s abundantly on my side, I’m assured. So here I am, writing in the hope that civilization makes a comeback on this planet even if it takes a hundred million years. I’m convinced I’ll make it to Round Two. I visualize archaeologists stumbling upon this notebook and epigraphers putting their reputations on the line trying to decipher my writings, an inscrutable ancient script to them. And for eventually cracking my journal – the only existing record of a previous civilization – I imagine one of them winning a Nobel or something in the next one.

Sometimes I dream it’s me…

– Sandeep Shete