I’d brought the clown’s balloons and gas cylinder home in the Porsche, and spent a party day inflating and releasing them, watching the multicoloured signs of life rise into the windless sky. No response. It’s been two weeks, the power’s still on and I’m eating rather well in high-priced restaurants, nuking gourmet meals from their fridges, and, with air conditioners still running, and extra garlic sizzling in the kitchen, dining with the dead. Max my ever-present admirer does well too. I’ve developed a trick for removing troublesome bodies by rolling them onto a jumbo garbage bag and sliding them out the door. I spent many happy evenings sitting on the wooden bench outside Daniel et Daniel. Their entrees were excellent. Were.

     I worry that our nuclear power station may overheat or something if we’re not using enough power, so I leave everything turned on wherever I go. I doubt if it would go Chernobyl—and what if it did?—because we’re Canadians. You wouldn’t catch us switching off all the safety devices to see what happens, like those drunken Russians. Without our mandated team of operators keeping an eye on the dials over coffee and donuts, the power flow will naturally fluctuate. Eventually it’ll rise far enough to trip the switch, drop the safety rods to absorb all those neutrons, and shut down—well, not really shut down. You can’t shut off radioactivity, but still, so far so good.

     The air is now much fresher, I’m staying in shape and catching up on my reading, always focussed on finding out what the hell has happened to us. To them and not to me. A universe in which everyone’s dead except me surely beats the reverse.

     I seem to have bypassed the standard five stages of grief. Denial? Not really; it’s pretty obvious what’s happened, and if other survivors are around I don’t know where. It’s a big planet, with humans metastasising over every square mile of it. More like hilarity and gratitude that I’ve inherited a much-improved world, quieter, safer, unpolluted once these damn corpses stop stinking. Isolation? Of course, but being an educated man I’m not dependent on chit-chat.

     Anger? Yes, some. I miss my wife and Ginge our cat and feel mildly angry that whoever stupidly did this to our world was so goddam thoughtless. Still, they’re gone too, so I can hardly track them down and what--kill them? As for Bargaining, who with? There’s no God to play dice or favourites, and flattery will get me nowhere.

     Depression, and finally acceptance? I seem to have skipped to acceptance, though depression might arrive any moment. I spend my hours working through those strangely popular webcams, watching somebody’s squirrel feeder, a view of Sydney Harbour from Kurraba Point with drifting ferries, the melting glacier on Blackcomb Mountain dotted with late skiers, grassy ski trails, the evaporating coffee-pot in an LA lab, strangely fascinating, like watching paint dry, the unchanging inside of some narcissist’s (solipsist’s?) bedroom, where last night I glimpsed a shadow that could have been human but who knows? The animals are taking over. Good. I focus on the animals, to keep away the horror of a city full of corpses.

     Shopping is fun, I’m a kid in a toyshop with Amex platinum. I shop with my trusty crowbar, though most doors are open anyway, the event having happened around midday. I test-ride the new carbon fibre bikes, but it’s so hot. And dogs have taken to chasing me, nipping at my spinning ankles. I hate that. Max’s no protection, he just wants to herd them into an orderly pack. I milk Dolly while Max practices herding the sheep and the ducks. I’ve always hated roadside billboards, and detested the vandals who spray graffiti everywhere, but combining the two is rather fun. For three days I tour the city in my new ride, a roofer’s truck, climbing up to signboards and spray-painting in huge red caps,

     ARE YOU ALIVE? CALL 416 960 0337

     Fat chance.

***

At midnight the phone rings. “Yes? Alvin Williams speaking.” But nobody speaks and nobody (somebody?) hangs up. I Star 69 the number and wait, panting, while it rings, rings, rings. Others must be alive. Whatever cosmic fluke happened to me must have happened to others. There were billions of us. I have to widen my search. Unable to sleep I Google Are you alive? and learn of a new fragrance from Diesel. Fuel for life? Diesel fuel smells awful and the exhaust kills you. A video rant then demands to know if I am really alive, or just existing day to day. A blogger reports that he has often pondered the question of whether he was alive, in the corporate environment. Hmm...Tomorrow I start a serious search.

     The internet is a vast interlinked web of stupidity. For every sensible paragraph there’s a library of fools. I spend days, a week, hunting for a live voice among a billion ill-typed words and stupid human stuff videos, from conspiracy to porn. All the news is frozen on that one day, May 1, with its standard celebrity misdeeds and gossip, the statistically usual murders, mayhem, business takeovers and findings of corruption among those in power. A few news sources do however mention that the multi-billion dollar Collider—a black hole for money—is due to start up on full power. Maybe. No details.

     The anonymous know-alls at Wiki remind me what the Large Hadron Collider is for: to magnetically whizz protons round in a seventeen-mile loop till they reach near light-speed, then smash them into lead nuclei to see what flies out, what particles of particles. The Higgs Boson, that gives things their mass, is their holy grail. The thing was fired up on 19 September 2008 but two superconducting bending magnets broke—a design fault, though the plans had been checked by four teams of engineers. Murphy’s Law as usual. But now, after a US$21 million repair job it’s “due to be operational in mid-November 2009” (apparently not.)

     The ultimate stuff of matter, inflating everywhere at once since the Big Bang, turns out to be impossibly small bits of electrons—or else waves, vibrations, strings; likely all of the above at the same time. This latest high-energy physics combines seriously weird quantum mechanics and supersymmetry: for every bit of matter there’s an equal and oppositely charged bit of anti-matter. Or not.

     And for every stupendous collision there could be, for a split instant, stuff called dark energy (everywhere but embarrassingly undetectable). And, perhaps, information-sucking black holes. These, we’re assured, will dissolve, and definitely not expand like the small fragment of nothing that exploded into “our” Universe, or as it’s now known, Multiverse. No—“our” universe would only be one member of the Multiverse—which really is nonsense.

     But perhaps these tiny black holes didn’t dissolve. Maybe they joined up. Something happened on May 1st, at 1:25 p.m. Toronto time (7:25 p.m. in Geneva). Could some wave of energy, some vibration at a frequency antithetical to human life, have shot through the Earth? But missed me? And who else? There must be survivors.

     Or could there be alternative universes full of survivors? Nah. One of the silliest ideas I ever read was that quantum mechanics predicts a vast number of branching worlds within a single universe, in which everything that could happen does happen. And probability determines which one does. But that’s ridiculous. How could you have a world in which there’s a flyspeck in the letter O in one book in the Library of Congress, and another world, absolutely identical, in which the flyspeck is a bit lighter? Total crap.

     I’m feeling omniscient, that or else going mad, as if my vivid dreams are shaping events. Late that same night, my phone is ringing. I wake from my boxing dream of being pounded, and pick up in the dark.

     “Right,” I sneer, “I’m the lucky winner of a prepaid vacation. Where to this time?”

     A silence, then a voice. Terrified. “Is that Mr Williams, Alvin Williams? Am I speaking to Mr Alvin Williams?”

     “Yes. Who the hell are you?” I’m choking.

     “You don’t know me but I’m phoning everyone in Mum’s book and you’re the last one.”

     “Well—“ I finish coughing. “Good for you! I’m alive and I assume you are—unless you’re some very annoying computer-generated program.”

     “Please don’t hang up. Everyone’s dead. Aren’t you in Canada somewhere?”

     “Toronto, and you’re...?

     “Sydney. It’s a good line though, like you’re next door.”

     “Right. Right.” Then we’re both laughing. It’s so ridiculous. So wonderful to hear that young Aussie girl’s voice.

     “Well!” I manage to say. “I bet you thought you were the only person left in the world. I did. So how you doing? Not too lonely down there? What’s your name?”

     “Carolyn. Brickford. Mum’s name was Danson.”

     Now I can’t breathe.

     “Not Alison Danson! Listen, how old are you?”

     “Fifteen.” So she’s not my daughter.

     Silence.

     “Carolyn, are you OK?”

     “No I’m not. I’m pregnant and I don’t want it. I killed myself but it didn’t work and I still want to kill myself.”

     She hangs up. Star 69 doesn’t work. The dog is gazing at me from the foot of the bed, so I explain it to him, the whole sad story.

     “You’re only number 10 on the smartest breed of dog list, Max, but it’s a simple tale so listen up:

     “Boy meets girl (boy 31, girl 19.) Girl loves boy and he loves her. Boy has to go away for two years, but girl says she will wait. Boy likewise. But girl doesn’t quite believe him. Meets and marries another boy.”

     The dog approaches and puts his head in my lap. He looks up at me with those understanding eyes, one brown, one blue. I’m crying again, dammit.

     “Boy returns from overseas, heart breaks, brief adulterous affair, goes back overseas. Boy no longer believes in God, women, people in general, goodness in the world.

     “Following so far, Max?

     “Boy meets another girl. Makes love, thinking of first girl. Girl gets pregnant, weeps. Boy marries girl. One week after wedding , girl comes home with long auburn hair cut off, for ‘freedom.’ Girl is now round-faced stranger and marriage over. Girl becomes woman, mysteriously dies in the shower and boy buries her with her cat.”

     Max growls at the word “cat.”

     “What, I hear you ask, became of the baby? There was no baby.”

***

     The phone didn`t ring again, except twice to tell me what a winner I am, and once with a special offer to clean my non-existent carpets by someone “currently in your neighbourhood.” After a day sitting by the phone I left a careful message on my machine. In a forced-calm voice I say,

     “Hi Carolyn, thanks for ringing back. I’m out walking Max the dog. Listen, would you mind leaving your number? If you’re going to kill yourself again maybe I can help. I’m Alvin, your best mate. ‘Bye for now.”

     At midnight Tuesday (Wednesday afternoon, her time) I snatched up the phone and she talked and talked.

     “But I already did kill myself. It didn’t work but Mum’s right: I’m a sinful, useless piece of shit. I deserve to...to— Suicide’s a mortal sin.”

     “Now hold on a sec, love. You never killed yourself, you’re fine. A bit pregnant, but no problem. You’re a good girl; you were tempted to knock yourself off but you didn’t.”

     “You think so? All I can do is keep crying.”

     “Me, I’m cried out; all I do these days is go round singing and talking to the dog. Mad Max is an Aussie Cattle Dog, not the sharpest knife in the drawer but he’s a good listener. So—this famous suicide attempt; how’d you do it?”

     Silence. I thought I’d lost her. Then, “Daddy’s got a fancy double-barrelled shotgun. I found the cartridges and loaded it, straight away I put it in my mouth and pulled the trigger, both triggers at once.”

     “You must have missed. You’re absolutely fine now; you’ve got to be dead to be a suicide and you’re not.”

     “But why? Why am I still here? What happened.”

     I waited for her to stop wailing, then said, “Carolyn, I haven’t a clue, but you want to hear my best guess? I reckon by a fluke, you must have fired at the exact moment this Supercollider thing went off. In Geneva? The big experiment with the protons whizzing round and round and hitting—“

     “I know. We’re doing it at school. Mater Misericordia’s not all that backward.”

     “...and some kind of black hole dimensional thing went out through the Earth and sort of switched off everybody’s hearts, but if your heart stopped at that exact instant, it switched it back on. So you were never really dead. Like Jesus. He was never really dead, or he couldn’t have come back to life. Dead means dead. It happened to me too. I had some sort of heart attack and I woke up with the machines all flat-lining but I wasn’t dead. Obviously.”

     “You’re wrong about Jesus.”

     (Careful.) “I was wrong, my mistake, sorry. You’re a believer, aren’t you. Your mum was. You really believe in sin?”

     “Yes.”

     “Creation in seven days?”

     “Sort of. I know the universe is thirteen point seven years billion old, and that.”

     “The Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve?”

     “Well, yes. Adam and Eve, yes. ‘Go ye forth and multiply’—that’s why I couldn’t have an abortion.”

     “Good girl! Good for you! So now you’re Eve. That’s you, Eve! Doesn’t matter who Adam was, doesn’t matter if it was a bit of a mistake, you’re Eve, you’re the future of the new, second-chance, much-improved human race.”

     But she had hung up.

     I redialled. “Yes, who is it?” she said, laughing.

     “It’s your Canadian admirer. Listen Carolyn, wouldn’t it be a great idea to have your baby now? I’m a doctor,” I lied. “I’ll talk you through. My mum used to say there’s nothing much to it, it’s like having a really hard bowel movement, and there it is.”

     “But it’s twins!”

     “Ah...No worries. They just pop out one after the other. You’ll be great. You can look up midwifery on the Internet, it’s all there. Promise you’ll think about it?”

     “...I’ll think about it.”

     A majestic roar of thunder punctuated the moment as she hung up. Heavy rain, reminding me of happier days, of Sydney rainstorms that blacken the city for ten tropical minutes, then pull the curtain up on a blazing, deep blue sky, and half an hour later the sun has the wet roads smoking.

     For breakfast I felt like fresh creamy milk on my soggy cornflakes, fresh eggs and bacon and WonderBread toast. The 24-hour convenience store down the road was conveniently minding my corn-flakes, biscuits, chocolate bars, packaged and tinned stuff. The milk, ice cream and yoghurt were long gone. So Max and I set off, me under a huge golfing umbrella I’d picked up somewhere, the shaggy dog ready for a wall-wetting shake-out when we reached the barn. As always I milked Dolly the grateful cow, slopped some warm milk from the steel bucket into the sow’s disgusting trough, pocketed four brown eggs and trudged home through the long grass, wading through puddles.

     A week later it was still pouring. Like the forty days and forty nights. The Don had risen to swamp the Parkway, Bayview past the old Brick Works would need a ferry. I considered building an ark and whistling up the animals, but finally the sun returned—and the horrible Toronto summer was under way. This place used to be bearable, but now it’s the poster-boy for Global Warming. No point in wearing clothes.

     No word from Carolyn; her phone just rang in an empty room.

     At night I slept well now, smiling to hear a distant wolf howling, with Max outside joining in. I went hunting next day—no point in taking the camera; who would look at my snaps?—and spotted him. A big grey fellow, likely one of these new wolf/coyote hybrids. He can’t have been howling at the moon: there was no moon. A string of moonless nights; Wikipedia couldn’t help me there. But I learned all about Max.

     The river went down, but I never saw Lake Ontario so full, lapping the boardwalk. Something was up. Even Max knew something was up. I decided to talk it through.

     “Max? C’mere, boy. That’s right, you sit there, listen up. You remember me mentioning the multiverse? Concentrate, lad. Now, You didn’t really think ours is the only possible universe, did you? You can not be serious. I despair. Or that there are only four dimensions: forward and back, up/down, side to side, plus time. Space/time really, as Einstein (you do remember Einstein?) realised at 16, in 1895, and put on paper in 1905.”

     Max coughed and looked away, bored, so I changed subjects. “Around this time,” I told him, “You guys showed up.” This got his attention. “The Aussie Cattle Dog was invented around the space/time of 1897. That’s you. The Smithfields they were using for mustering cattle were too noisy and bit hard, so they were bred with the Dingo, the wild dog, to produce “Timmins Biters.” These didn’t bark as much, but they bit just as hard. In 1840, Thomas Hall bred a couple of Blue Smooth Highland Collies with dingoes and produced “Hall’s Heelers,” great workers but not aggressive enough, so in the 1870s they were crossed with some Bull Terrier. And here you are, Max.

     “OK, you know your four dimensions, three anyway. But there’s more. Try eleven.” He watched, enthralled, as I counted eleven on my fingers. Yup, eleven dimensions. Don’t shake your fuzzy head. You’re right, some of these are so tiny and coiled up that they’re undetectable, but the mathematics of The Theory of Everything insist that they’re there. Somewhere. But hold on, I hear you say, ‘Didn’t you just tell me that Geneva thing would produce tiny black holes? Tiny black holes, tiny dimensions...hmm.’ You could have a point there, pun intended.

     “’And didn’t you just find out from Wikipedia that the singularity of even a tiny black hole has infinite tidal forces? You’re blowing my doggy mind.’

     “All right Max. QED. Dinner! Oh, you’ve got a final question? ‘What’s a hadron?’ Duh! Hadrons are particles in the nucleus: nucleons, mesons, glueballs, gluons, and let’s not forget the strange quarks.”

     He was getting a taste for dry dog food, but I suspect when he went out at night he was thinking cat, or at least rat.

     I so wanted to chat with Carolyn I could taste it. I willed her phone to be picked up and finally it was.

     “Hi Carolyn. You getting plenty to eat, love? Power still on?”

     “Don’t call me that! Um, yes. All the ‘fridges are stuffed with food. I couldn’t finish it in a lifetime. Listen, I think you’re right, Doctor Williams.”

     “Alvin. Call me Al.”

     “The twins are due around Christmas, but I’m really, really scared. I’m only fifteen.”

     “I get it. But no worries; fifteen-year-old have been having twins for tens of thousands of years, maybe more.”

     “But you’re wrong about Jesus. And saying it doesn’t matter who Adam is. It does matter. If they were conceived in sin they’ll be born in sin. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

     “Gee. I’ve been thinking about how I’ll get through this winter if the power goes off. It’s chilly at thirty below. You got it easy. If you want to go somewhere warmer, North, all you’d have to do is grab a car, if... ”

     “ I can drive.”

     “ At fifteen? Isn’t that against the law? I’m shocked, shocked. ‘Course, I lost my license a year ago but I’m still driving around.”

     Her tone softened a fraction, as if she’d decided she trusted me. I could hear her mother’s voice in her, and it was driving me into crazy thoughts.

     “Yeah. Daddy always let me sit on his knee and steer in the Lexus. That’s the trouble. I wanted to drive the new Aston.”

     “Wow! DB4? DB5? The V8?”

     “Vantage V12 actually. So last year when I got big enough to reach the pedals, he’d take me out and let me drive as long as I’m nice to him. I was good.”

     (I’ll bet you were.)

     “I’d drive him through French’s Forest to Palmie. We were doing over the ton but Daddy’s a QC: they’d never dare touch him. We’d park at Barenjoey Head under the lighthouse, and I’d be nice to him and then we’d, you know, come back.

     (Be...nice?)

     “Um...did he abuse you?”

     “Abuse? No way. He’d just sit there and scratch my back and say what a good girl I was. I abused him, really. A B.J. isn’t sex, all the girls do it. I was the best. I could slide a banana down my throat without gagging. Swallow, you know, everything. It’s not a sin, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

     That wasn’t what I was thinking. That moment she was her mother, for whom everything was a sin, although—or because?—she loved it so much.

     “So...but then he went a bit too far?”

     “Bastard raped me! He didn’t even ask or anything. Halfway through he drags me out of the car and rapes me on the sand. Gritty, horrible. I hated it. Hated him. I told Mum but she said I should write books one day, and that she would pray for me. It was just the once, but I got pregnant. Couldn’t tell Mum—or him, or anybody. They just thought I was getting fat, were all nice because I had an eating problem. I used to catch the ferry to go to school and just ride it around the Harbour all day. Sit somewhere and watch the boats, or walk round to Taronga Zoo—I bet they’re all dead,” she sniffled.

     “The animals do fine. I let the tigers out here, was scared stiff they’d eat me but they went after the deer. So... your mum and dad, did you, you know, have to bury them?”

     “The last I saw them they were all dressed up for some formal Lord Mayor’s do. Catching the ferry and waving at me, Mum in all her pearls.”

     I could see her. Pearls. I could hear the ferry’s engine, the splash of water, the floodlit Opera House behind.

     “Al, are you getting these weird high tides over there? They’re right up to Circular Quay. Listen, I got to go, I’m starving.”

     “Carolyn! You didn’t really put it in your mouth, did you.”

     “...?”

     “The gun. You shut your eyes and pulled the triggers, and it blew a hole in the ceiling behind you, right? The noise would have stopped anyone’s heart beating.”

     “I don’t remember. Listen, I’m hanging up now.”

     You’re a good girl, Carolyn,” I said, mind whirling, and hated myself for about ten minutes.

    

***