“To have thoughts that you can convey easily is to risk a disastrous mistake. When crossing the street, you should look not only both ways, but also up. And also down. And also inside.” — Pavel Furmi, in the late morning of the 21st century

By the time he reached the first and perhaps final landing in his stumble down the stairs of life, Pavel would have settled for remembering rather than experiencing. But even that was proving elusive. He knew his psyche was curlicued into a fetal position, but there was nothing to be done about it. At this point, he just had to listen attentively and emerge from his various crouched positions when commanded to do so.

Ah, listening! The truth and all its dark sparkles were nestled there, in the sounds of unknown origin. The second you actually saw something, Pavel felt, it became vulgar. The trick was to avoid looking directly at anything you wanted to know more about. It was just like when you’re a kid and they tell you not to look at the sun directly. If you do, your eyes turn to candy and the candies melt.

Although incurious as to whether he was unique in this respect, Pavel had become accustomed to isolation long before the mind-flu hit and the city locked itself away. Subsisting largely on tap water and the dried beans that he whipped up in his pressure cooker, as well as the approved videos that he’d watch on his telephone under his unwashed covers, he often reflected on how he was the most fortunate version of himself possible. This was what he was made for.

Others, not so much.

He could smell their complaints in all the rays of light. They missed their dinner parties, drink specials, and families. Moreover, they missed the long, loud whooooosh of the latest and greatest, the wet marketplace of ideas. The way they spread the Sunday papers all over the place and sent each other terribly interesting links on their newish telephones all day long. Sometimes he’d seen them at sidewalk eateries and bus stops, waiting in line and never looking up. How refreshing that he no longer had to engage with such people, never had to rub words with them!

Unlike him, they probably didn’t have amber-orange pill vials resting in sock drawers. Some of these chalky dangers went way back. In fact, Pavel often wondered if the medicinal properties inside them were changing even as they remained unchanged without. He could bin them, of course, but he liked holding onto them as a kind of backup plan.

One day, a filthy mourning dove landed on his windowsill. It peered inside, leaning on one bird-foot and then the other, as if confused about its role and no longer understanding it was meant to be an idea. Soon it was night again, though. Then again: day. Time now simmered rather than flowed. The dove never returned.

The approved videos Pavel watched on his telephone were not only curated, but categorized: Sexy Booties, Foodstuffs, The Sports, Pohappenings, Weather Fun, and Current Styles. All the biggies. Daily word puzzles were also pushed onto his telephone. Although their ostensible purpose was to keep the minds of the populace sharp, they were always either too easy or too hard for Pavel, and he quickly grew frustrated. He decided they were for those who took pleasure in being smart, and he rated himself as too intelligent to fall into that silky confinement. The telephone itself had actually been a free upgrade because his old model had grown too stupid to keep up with the network. This one, too, Pavel sensed, was becoming moronic, probably as a result of all the inane content; he had to watch it, to be sure, but the telephone had to let it course through its veins and use its voicebox. That had to take a toll.

Attractive people were living in his apartment building, and when Pavel needed to go get his mail, he scurried away from them like a pigeon before dogs. He made a point of never looking at himself fully in the mirror, so he could only imagine what he was sparing them. At all times wearing a blue-and-white baseball cap—one that he’d found in the neighborhood park the previous year, when parks were uncomplicated things—Pavel was aware he was aging dramatically but had no desire to check on the details. He could run his hand through his hair and get a sense of its weight. He could purse his lips and see the gray bristles that had accumulated below his nose. He could remove his baseball cap for three or four seconds, stare at it, and wonder about the brand of beer it promoted and what it tasted like.

Almost every night, in the middle of the night, he heard animals in the walls. At first, Pavel imagined them rats, but he knew that was too old school. Too fanciful. They had to be mice, or, given the frenetic heaviness of the sounds, squirrels. He would listen to them scrambling vertically, sometimes diagonally, often dislodging plaster or something else that crumbled audibly, in the two or three hours he’d be up every night in the middle of the night watching the approved videos on his telephone under his bed covers. He knew it wasn’t healthy to miss so much sleep night after night, so he chose to blame his insomnia on the hidden rodentia. But the truth was that unsavory dreams woke him, and the wall clatter merely added some bleak accompaniment.

Pavel hadn’t been tested for the mind-flu yet, and that was a point of pride. He would see how long he could make it without going through that rigmarole. He had nothing against science or the government except that they involved people, and as a result they already exhibited signs of spoilage.

The mind-flu was simple, really, in its scope and approach, and as long as you adhered to a self-monitoring regimen, you could probably spot the symptoms. In its simplest terms, it made you care too much about things. Everything became horn sections blaring like the score to Creature from the Black Lagoon. You went kind of whoo-whoo.

Pavel wrote it in soap scum: whoo-whoo.

Then he swapped in zeroes: wh00-wh00.

On any given day it was a toss-up as to whether he would take a shower or do the dishes—most days, it was neither. As a result, foul odors would arise in the vicinity of the drains as hair or food scraps would sit there, holding a group meeting. Pavel would eventually force himself to take action, and his motivation was usually not to be discovered dead amid such conditions. Afterwards, as a kind of reward, he would retreat to his bed once again to watch his telephone and lie very still. During the day, however, there were no critters to be heard in the wall above his headboard, and that’s what made him decide that it was squirrels who were the culprits. While the sun was out, they were no doubt frolicking in the park where he’d found his baseball cap; come night, they retreated behind the plaster to stay warm under whatever they used for bed covers.

At night they sounded like this: sometimes chasing each other, sometimes trapped in private hidey-holes.

He thought about that park again. Was there now graffiti, or chalk writings on pavement, that carried the mind-flu?

Twice a month on Saturdays, Pavel ordered food online and it would arrive an hour or two later. His instructions were explicit: buzz the buzzer, knock on the door, once, leave the parcels at the threshold, then retreat back into your hidey-hole to earn your tip.

On more than one occasion, Pavel had wondered if he could work out a similar arrangement with his landlord, or perhaps one of his neighbors, regarding the mail. As things stood, he had to organize everything in his life around that weekly field trip to the first floor. On his way there, he would hear others in the echo-y stairwell two or three floors above. (They seemed to be enjoying neighborly conversations, but if he was being honest, he didn’t listen closely enough to discern if there were multiple voices or really just one.)

Pavel would return from these journeys to dump his mail on an untidy surface and forget about it. He would remember it only when, much later, he would knock it to the floor in the course of his lumberings. He had little interest in mail, in those who might be trying to contact him, and only slightly more in the neighbors with whom he had once chatted so amiably. Where was Sandor these days? And Guy? And Shelley? These were powerful personalities whose laughter and criticism of building management were loud, outgoing. Nowadays, though, there was nothing but a gigantic absence that, in its own way, was equally outgoing.

Gradually, Pavel began to wonder if he was creating his own problem by fetching the mail so dutifully. What if he never went to collect it? There would be little impact on him—the few checks he still received were never actually received anyway: they went into his bank account electronically and out again as if by some natural digestive property. Besides, if his mailbox started overflowing, someone would eventually carry the mail up to him, and that could mark the beginning of the arrangement. He would leave them some spare change or cooked beans for their trouble.

“I am someone else’s scenery,” Pavel whispered one evening. He tried to keep the “I” lowercase in his thoughts, but his ego kept asserting itself. I am a symptom of everything that’s happening, he reflected. A symptom has no self-awareness, true. But a symptom can express itself. A symptom can have freedom!

In the meantime, he continued violating the human rights of that mid-century chair over there, using its leathery leather as a resting place for the damp lid of his pressure cooker.

Over the subsequent months and minutes, Pavel stopped watching the approved videos when he would watch them: they were good for audio pleasure only. He’d take in the garbled shouts, too-loud guffaws, theme music, voice-overs, and large doses of the unidentifiable. They were enough. They contained the wisdom. To watch the accompanying images, or anything really, was facile and unintelligent.

Also over time: he started to suspect that those outsized characters, neighbors like Sandor and Carol and Jo Jo and Helmut, had fallen victim to the mind-flu. After all, these were the same boisterous folks who exhibited no hesitation walking right up to you, starting a conversation, and then yelling back over their shoulders to other neighbors as soon as they were sensed nearby. Extroverted people like that, they were probably soaking in sickness.

Soon, though, Pavel started to approach the truth of the matter. He put it together, bit by bit, in the middle of the night as he attended to his telephone under the covers and listened to the invisible scurrying over his head. First, it wasn’t just the extroverts who were missing from the hallways and the stairwells, but all his neighbors. There had not been a conversation filtered through closed doors or a yammering out of opening elevators in weeks, perhaps longer. Slowly, and without any trace of remorse or anxiety, it dawned on him that he was the only remaining human resident in the building.

He coupled this realization with the fact that the night-creatures were growing emboldened, chasing each other up and down and along the ceiling as if they had fashioned some kind of wonderland for themselves in there. They were much noisier now, and when they thought he was sleeping and therefore not paying attention, they made gnawing sounds that hinted at their true design: soon they would break through the walls and rule the now-empty apartments. They would hoard and hide any nutrients they could find, and if Pavel came across them on the way to the mailboxes, they would probably accost him with friendliness and questions and building gossip.

You can’t get the mind-flu, he reasoned, if you were already born with it. If you already were it. Or maybe the mind-flu was the true healthiness. Something something something.

In such careless moments, they (whoever they were) gave away not only themselves, but also the mind-flu itself, and how it had made quite an impact on local society. If you cared too much, you hurt people. You did things. The idea was to stop caring. If you didn’t, you could hurt yourself, too. You were people, too, don’t forget.

Early one mid-afternoon, Pavel tried to think of you. Of course, he was unsuccessful in this endeavor—he’s never even met you, after all—but you deserve to know, you really do.

The neighbors who were scurrying, they already had had a mind-flu. Not the one that was currently all the rage, but an ancient one, one endemic to the species. Ah. Maybe he was on to something. Something something something.

To celebrate this victory of deductive reasoning, Pavel turned down the volume on his telephone and pressed his hair-covered face to the walls and called their names.

“Sandor?” he would say. “Guy? Shelley?”

The only response was more scurrying, more gnawing. It was possible they wanted his help—he didn’t know. In time, though, he was sure he’d learn their language. Then they would see that he wasn’t the lone figure they had gossiped about, but a person deeply concerned about world events. Meanwhile, all they were capable of was sometimes chasing each other pointlessly, sometimes trapping themselves in their hidey-holes. But Pavel was careful—he’d never make the equivalent mistake. After all, he had his little telephone and it kept him connected to the world. He made sure it was always charging, even on those sometimes nights when his blue-and-white baseball cap would slide off and hit the floor like a head.