I'm home. Some Cabbagetown houses still smouldering, but not ours. I park illegally outside our front door and crowbar it open. But the cat is dead, pressed against the scratched door.

     “Anybody home?” but I know there’s no answer, anywhere. Diana has died in the shower, the water still running, stone cold. I dig a deepish grave in the back garden—much harder than you would think—painfully drag my wife out by the shoulders and roll her wet, bare body into it. Then the big ginger tabby cat she loved. Diana had two middle names, Mary and something. I called the tabby joke names, Boogaloo Bill and El Supremo, but for her he was always Puss. Puss Puss Puss! My eyes stay dry; by now I’m all cried out.

     But surely Alison is not dead? Alison Danson, the love of my life, I have to find her. We are linked across the Pacific. She couldn’t have died without her pain shooting through me, killing my heart. I must find her, though I don’t have her address or number. Or her married name.

     Power is on and the phone line gives a dial tone, though 911 cautions me, “All of our operators are busy right now” and plays radio-station music. I dial Alison’s old phone number from memory, from twenty years ago, but of course only a timid recorded Asian voice answers. God Christ! I can see Alison’s face, the shape of her mouth, those green eyes looking at me, frightened of what she was feeling, the gorgeous voice, surprisingly deep for a girl who sang soprano. “Come in” she would say as after work I tapped on the door of her parents’ house. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.” But the tea would grow cold. Kissing, always kissing, no more. Well, a little bit more.

     Our TV is still on but shows no programs, just long black periods interspersed with commercials for trucks, lobster and Viagra. So the satellites are still sending. I fry up a huge omelette and wolf it down with toast and butter and marmalade and tea. I call every one of my friends, not that I have many, and smile to hear their familiar voices on answering machines. I leave a joke message: “If you’re alive call me. If not, disregard this message.”

     Then, armed with respirator and tools, my back already giving me hell, I walk down River Street—this is my domain, my responsibility—listening at the always-locked front doors for animal sounds, scratching or whining. When I break a door open, some dogs trot out, skinny but ready for their walk, others hide, ashamed, having pooped themselves. But half the cats seem content to be freed and stroll nonchalantly past me into the street. Let them eat rats. I open any cans of dog food I can find and leave them on the front porches, to persuade shy dogs to come out and take their chances in this brave new world. River Street is littered with pedestrian corpses, along with the recycling garbage bags waiting for pick-up, though only a few dogs are sniffing around the bodies and taking the odd exploratory nip. I free a blonde dog walker’s six desperate dogs whose leads are tangled round her hand. They have dragged her along. Later I notice that no dog will eat its master—it would rather starve—but will cheerfully attack the body of another dog’s master. Infants, of course, are eaten first. As the sun sets over the city, the air fills with barking and snarling, dogs sorting out the all-important pack order. I glimpse, emerging from Riverdale Park, what could have been a coyote. When I look back, half a dozen crows have landed like a black shroud on the corpse opposite my house. Good. The clean-up crew has arrived. At the far end of River Street, outside the Humane Society, I halt. The sounds are piteous: wailing, yapping, the indignant screech of parrots. Can I even bear to go in? I turn away—but then tighten my respirator, smash the glass doors and run inside. Appalling sights. The cage keys must be somewhere but I have to move fast. Wielding my bolt cutters I snap open every cage with a living animal in it, open the shop with the dry dog food and cat food stacked in bags, and sprint out, gasping. That’s enough. That’s enough.

     Around dinnertime my phone rings and I bang my knee rushing for it. “Good evening. How are you this evening? You have been specially chosen for—“ Then another, informing me that I’m the lucky winner of yet another sweepstakes I never entered. Then another. It’s true, I am the chosen one, a winner, but not of a Florida vacation. (Though why not?) I suspect that all the names of the Do Not Call list have been sold to some new telemarketing company, located in Mumbai? Nigeria? But I leave the phone on, ringer turned up.

     I’m on my own bed, in my own blue pyjamas. No nightmares, please. The dogs have got their pecking order settled and the night quietens. Half dozing I listen for the familiar sounds: at exactly 11 p.m., the Riverdale Park spotlights over the usually empty baseball pitches switch off, but where’s that ever-punctual sweeping machine droning up one side of the (clean) road then back down the other? The dinging signal and the half-empty commuter trains rattling past? The steady all-night rush of traffic on the Don Valley Parkway, some doing twice the speed limit; the inevitable woop-woop of police warnings to pull over, then the up-and-down siren wail to emphasise the point? I lie tensely waiting for the news helicopter clattering home at its usual hour, the self-important din of yet another ambulance climbing from the Bayview Extension past my house. Then in the small hours, the intermittent boom-cars, and around 3 a.m. the nightly drag-race of two screaming Japanese motorbikes away from the Bayview lights—must be two guys who get off work at the same time, engines rising to a screech, sloppy gear changes. Nothing. Silence.. How can I sleep in a silence that says Death? Just before dawn I must have dozed, because I wake from a crowded dream to a rattling on my window air conditioner, and meet the mascaraed eyes of a baby raccoon peering in as if demanding an explanation for quiet, the sudden explosion of excellent street food: bugs, flies, worms, mice, rats. Don’t thank me, I tell him. Haven’t a clue. Why it didn’t kill me I have only the dimmest idea forming. Perhaps I was already dead, and... toggled? back to life. Some heart attack thing? Diana was always trying to get me off cream. I read somewhere that human hearts have a resonance frequency unlike that of any other animal. Not even the pig, not even our closest buddy the oran otang. The graves have not yawned and offered up their dead. The animals are thriving, and when I drove home, the familiar Spring road-kill, two tomcats, one might-have-been groundhog and an unmistakeable skunk still lay baking in the sun. So it’s just me.

     Around six, a sizzling orange sunrise just South of the Don Jail. (That far along already?) Ragged clouds along the horizon, with peach-coloured patches on a lemon-pale sky, demonstrate that this really is a slow-revolving planet with a cloudy atmosphere. I’m ravenous. I clear away my reeking old breakfast things, wash up, drink tea with questionable milk and eat one black banana and the last orange in the fridge—better shop soon and hunt out some of those gourmet dishes to nuke.

     Then cursing myself for not thinking sooner, I cross the park to Riverdale Farm—once Toronto’s popular menagerie with caged lions, a giraffe and a furious bar-shaking gorilla—to free the pet animals. Feeding them would be too much to take on. I find many have been managing pretty well. One rooster is thriving in a pen of dead hens, and the giant black sow, big as a Volkswagen, lies contentedly in the mud, though one of her three piglets is missing. When I swing the gate open, the usually catatonic donkey with the black mane stripes forming a perfect cross (a miracle!) springs into life and trots out, but the two heavy horses seem shy about leaving their home. Later I see them in the park, regaining their taste for fresh grass. Dolly the cow is complaining bitterly. I recall her mad mooing when they dragged her calf away. “OK, OK my girl.” I milk her into the dirt.

     I unearth and boil a couple of farm-fresh eggs. But the stink! Wearing this sweaty halitosis-flavoured respirator won’t do, but without it I retch. I’m too old to load the SUV with dead bodies and dump them somewhere downwind. So I drive across Gerrard Street bridge to where road work goes on night and day, climb on their BobCat front-end loader, and after a self-humiliating game of trial-and-error, get the hang of it. I take a moment to gaze back to the city from Broadview, across the running track, the mass of trees to the hard-edged skyscrapers standing like a forest of glass. Toronto is a city in the woods. Ravines run through it, thickly treed, and the council in its wisdom keeps denying all developers’ applications to build in them. Or in the Don Valley. Less for aesthetic reasons than because Hurricane Hazel, for one, in 1954 floated houses downriver to the lake and killed eighty-one people.

     I drive the front-end loader home—and there’s the dog again, on the other side of River Street, giving me that long, steady Dingo stare. Somehow he’s has tracked me all the way from Leaside, quite a few miles. No stopping these guys.

     He keeps his distance, but gives me a sort of warning bark-howl. Again, my skin crawls. I feel he’s now more Dingo than dog. I know they eat cattle and cats, and the odd human. I slowly back inside. Must be something I can feed him. Nothing suitable in the fridge, but in the freezer, where Diana stores anything stinky that raccoons would rip out of a garbage bag overnight, I find the carcass of a roast chicken she’d brought home.. Last week? A special, diet-breaking treat. We’d stripped it like piranhas, standing, licking greasy fingers. Laughing... It does the trick. On the front deck I unwrap the bony thing and toss it at him. He wolfs it down with great crackling of bones. He could audition for Mel Gibson’s post-apocalyptic companion, so I call him Mad Max and now it’s clear he’s my dog. He’s blue-speckled with a black patch over one eye, probably an Aussie Cattle Dog.

     Then he’s off looking for something to herd, but there’s nothing moving. Panting helpfully, he watches me struggle to scoop up the first of the nearest corpses. There’s little danger of catching a disease from a dead body, but I want my street back. Unfortunately the BobCat’s two front forks are so far apart that bodies slip between them. I try sliding a single fork under a corpse and lifting high; it droops and skims the road as I trundle it along. Finally it’s done. Twelve male, fifteen female and nine kids, piled up together in the River/Gerrard intersection. I douse the pile with jerrycans of gas siphoned from the parking lot opposite, toss in a burning rag and run.

     Nero-like I dance on my front deck, watching the human funeral pyre blacken the air then, within a couple of hours, leave it cleaner. Beyond cleaner; I never saw the sky so blue, the downtown Toronto buildings so magic-realist sharp. In fact the whole world looks slightly different, like a very high-quality photograph of itself. A hologram. Whatever. So far so good with the power. The old nuclear power station must run without anyone at the switch; traffic lights keep doing their thing. How strange that I’m living in an era when everything runs itself, without people; the computers presumably default to Business as Usual. And yet so many people! The streetcars don’t run, though. I tried one.

     But still the stink! I trace it to the open windows of the low-rise low-rent assisted housing opposite. Time for action. I fill a wine-bottle with gas, twist in a rag wick, tip it so the wick is nice and soaked. Then make two more. Light the first one, lob it in an open ground floor window for a satisfying whoomp! That’ll do it, but for fun I toss in a Pinot Grigio bottle, and, for the big finish, through a closed window, the big bottle of Aussie bubbly. The whole building goes up, the flames cross the lane to the row of houses behind, and somehow both the Porsche and the Explorer parked in front of my house catch alight. Find another tomorrow; Toronto is Porsche City.

     I’d forgotten how burnt buildings stink. But next day the air has a different smell, a little fresher and the power is still on. But it can’t last, so at nightfall I find an old van that I can hot-wire, return to Canadian Tire, shop for a Honda 5000X generator that weighs more than a corpse, plus five-language handbook, and dump it on the footpath in front of my house. I’ll get round to wiring it up once the power shuts off. Finding gas is now no problem: the Parliament Street Esso has six cars that had filled up but went nowhere. I can’t find the PIN or password or combination that makes the pumps pump, though. The Tamil Cashier knows it but didn’t write it down, or maybe he’s lying on some button, busily decomposing. And I’m sunburned to hell. I’ll have to start wearing clothes or find some spray-on SPF 60. Unlike cell phones in our last three-day power outage, which was agreed to be great fun and produced a surprise crop of blackout babies nine months later, the landlines work fine. I don’t have a cellphone; who would I call? I go online and hunt around, but all the news is a week old, seven days from what I’m calling Cancellation Day. Spam keeps rolling in, but no emails appear from live people. I have no Facebook friends and all my real ones are dead. I Google Help Me and End of the World and Last Survivor and Is anyone out there? but all I get is religious stuff. It’s a waste of time and my plaintive search saddens me, a sign of weakness, of expecting something from someone. Nothing on the radio, even on the short-wave one I’d bought once for emergencies.

     I hadn’t read the last newspaper, the Star for May 1st and turn eagerly to the comics. Doonesbury ahead of the curve as always, though he missed the big story, the end of the world. I read on. Thankfully Toronto is still civilised, so murders make the front page. Shot teen was good boy, had turned his life around, mother says. Smog alert earliest on record: avoid strenuous exercise (and, presumably, excessive breathing.) Republican Senator denies charges. Where are the missing BC salmon? Methane gas bubbles from Arctic... But on page four, scare headlines read TODAY’S SUPERCOLLIDER START-UP MAY DESTROY EARTH, EXPERTS SAY.

     Something about forming black holes, which other experts insist will be so tiny and so micro-micro-seconds short-lived that there’s nothing to worry about. A big black hole would be worth worrying about, and it occurs to me that a big black hole presumably starts off as a very small black hole. Whatever. I’d better research the subject, for what that’s worth. Sub-atomic physics and quantum mechanics are not my strong point but I do have time on my hands, a lifetime of it. And of course I’m writing all this down in my diary and printing it up every day for...posterity? You’re welcome.

     I work for an hour, as if to write a column. —Oh my God! The zoo! I’ll get out there tomorrow. Pick up a hot ride and head west on the 401. I hope it’s not a nightmarish scene. I love the zoo and it’s time I had a bit of fun and did some good. I’ll feed Bubbles the Indian rhino and let him out to graze, the ungulates can all go free and the tigers and snow leopards can hunt the deer. The birds should be fine. I want to see those Mongolian Przewalski horses capering about, enjoying their freedom; that’s if Przewalski horses do caper. They’re extinct in the wild. Well, maybe they’ll manage a comeback. The two new polar bears though: I don’t like their chances. Still, I’ll throw them all the fish I can find in the freezer and then...try not to think about them. We’ve all been thinking about polar bears too much lately, with the sea ice receding. Or I could lead them into the Stingray Bay shark exhibit? This way, nice bears. No. Forget it. Move on.

     This whole absurd disaster has me surprisingly cheerful. I whistle. I hum. I hear myself singing the old songs, Danny Boy and The Man that broke the bank at Monte Caaaaarlo, sounding more like my dad every day. Why me? If there’s an Old Testament God who’s punished the world for wickedness, I must have been better than I thought. I miss Diana, of course, and Ginge and a couple of old friends. I suppose I’m sad that so many lives, seven or eight billion, ended in a flash of...what? Electromagnetism? Radioactivity? A death ray from Mars? Whatever. Painless, anyway. If human life was the interval between nothing and death, now it’s become the interval between nothing and nothing.

     But my luck is so astounding, to still be here, that every time I think of it I giggle. And the animals are a sort of company. This morning I spotted a doe and two fauns drinking from the Riverdale Park wading pool (which I keep full), and wonder if the River Street coyote has wind of them yet. He’s already snacked on the Farm chickens and one of the four goats. Everything is as it should be: Nature does what She does and it all seems to work out. Minus, these days, us.

     Another moonless night, the constellations blazing, the Milky Way like a highway. You could read newspaper headlines if there were any. West toward the city, the skyscrapers’ lights stay on. Bird-killers, I call them, worse than the wind turbines.. Around now, the bird kill is constant: at dawn, volunteers from FLAP collect hundreds of songbirds from the around the lighted towers. They place each one in a paper bag and struggle to coax back to life those that are only stunned. I once signed an online petition to persuade the building owners to turn off their lights during spring and fall migration. A quarter million signatures: no go. My guess is the owners need to see their giant tombstones shining all night, as if darkness were death, bankruptcy, or an invitation to lower-level crimes than their white-collar variety.

     The zoo trip does not go well. At the Parliament Esso I pick out a superb silver-grey Porsche Turbo, freshly filled, empty it of a young man on a cellphone, and take off like a rocket up the Parkway. Approaching the Millwood Road overpass I slam to a stop. The road is blocked solid. The wreckage has burnt, melting the roadway. End of the line. The 911’s gas tank is easy to siphon from into the jerrycans I carry with me. I climb around the pile of twisted metal, like a suicide bombing or an American air strike, to find my next ride.

     I drag a largish woman out of her all-electric ZENN—Canada’s own car—but it won’t go; maybe she forgot to charge it. Zero Emission No Noise indeed. (What do you do when your electric car runs out? Buy another one?) One of those double-sized eighteen-wheelers has gone through the rail, over the edge, and stuck upright in the trees like a modern sculpture. Nearly reached the river. I trudge on, lugging a jerry can. The cars with gas are wrecks, while those that came to a gentler stop have idled it all away. It’s hot, sticky and the sky is dirty grey, but the air smells fresh ; no pollution, no smog, no exhaust fumes. Later, when it clears, the sky looks empty with no vapour trails melting into clouds. For once I see the point of buying a heavyweight, tank-like vehicle for throwing your children in the back and making your getaway from a disaster area. So many of these monsters are four-wheel drive, though they’ve never been off a highway. SUV—Safe Unstoppable Vehicle? But every fuel gauge shows Empty.

     A mile up the road, a SmartCar Cabriolet, in a riotous mix of red, green, yellow and purple, sits hard against the right guardrail. Number plate ALEC. I hope it stalled instead of quietly emptying its tiny gas tank. I recognise the wider tyres, and it’s a bit less comically high than the “Passion” model (German humour). Must be the Brabus. It sports an interesting after-market feature: a big wind-up key sticking out the back. Behind the wheel sits a clown. He’s in full motley: white face with red-dot cheeks and huge mouth, carrot-top wig, baggy striped pyjama costume. Poor bastard was on his way to a gig. A kids’ party, to judge from the box of balloons and the helium cylinder to blow them up. Or a top executives’ retreat.

     Three-quarters full. Excellent! These things will go 100 km on 4 litres. Sorry , mate. I drag Smart Alec the clown, who weighs nothing, out into the middle of the road. He stares at the sky, smiling. I push his ride away from the guardrail. It starts up, with a mutter from the three-cylinder engine somewhere underneath, I find the button that lowers the cloth hood, making it a toy sports car, U-turn and drive back. Sweating already I load onto the passenger seat the shoulder bag with all my stuff, my armoury of tools: bolt cutters small, bolt cutters large, pry bar, wire cutters, respirators, first-aid kit. At a leisurely top speed I head East along the 401 and, with a certain amount of diverting along the grass verge and some pushing, enter the zoo around midday. So hot for early May! The first sounds you hear on entering Toronto Zoo, that always make you smile, are the indignant screech of the two gorgeous Hyacinth Macaws, competing with the shriek of the Bald Eagle with the bad wing. Not today; a deathly silence.

     I pry open a vending machine and rescue two suspiciously fresh sandwiches. (What do they do to these things; embalm them?) I chew thoughtfully. Maybe I should head back; not sure I can do this. Then three sparrows flutter in, hopping hopefully under my feet. I toss them a sandwich corner and watch them scrap.

     Shouldering my weaponry I march on. Death is everywhere. The macaws and eagle lie flat in their cages, eyes gone. My favourite rhino lounges in his mud hole sulking, and though I hack through his fence he shows no interest in going anywhere. His large enclosure has not a blade of grass; I can’t find where they hide his bales of hay, and the doors are steel.

     “Bye bye , Bubbles,” I shout. “Take care!” (Diana named him that after we saw him underwater blowing bubbles for fun.)

     A week or so without food shouldn’t kill a tough animal, but it seems to have. In the Malayan Woods pavilion butterflies flutter, but the fancy little ducks and their leggy chicks are gone, and saddest of all, the pair of cloud leopards, brother and sister, are stiff in their cage. The word “emaciated” says it better than thin, skinny or starving. The fish are fine, but what can you do? They’ll probably eat each other, smallest to second-largest. I wedge the doors open. You’re on your own now.

     I should leave the big cats to last, in case I don’t make it, but no, might as well get it over. Sumatran tigers are the exquisite darker ones, smallish, but not known for good temper. Here I see my problem. The male, in his enclosure, keeps bellowing and huffing at me, ready for his keeper’s arrival with a nice leg of surplus deer or horse. He has not seen homo respirator and doesn’t like the look of it. Back and forth he paces, body-slamming against the mesh at the keeper’s door end. If I let him out, will he see me as his saviour, or his next meal? On the other side of the walkway, the beautiful mother is quietly hunkered down in her cave with her twin girl cubs, I forget their names, softly panting. I’ll let them out first, and let’s hope the male charges after them and forgets about me.

     I work away at the steel link fence, closely watched by mother and cubs, bend back the wire and—nothing. Yellow tiger eyes stare blink at me, once. Nobody moves. Now the tricky part. I enter the enclosure, knees shaking, repeating “Good pussy, who’s a good pussy, there’s a good pussy,” and reach the dividing door to the male’s enclosure. He bellows, bellows at me as I snap the padlock. The barred door smashes open, pinning me behind it, and a tiger fight begins, the mother on her back, claws flailing. She holds the big guy off as I edge past and sprint for the gate.

     “The deer are that-a-way!” I yell, pointing, giggling as I scuttle away.

     The usually smelly Indo-Malaya and the African Rainforest pavilions stink of death even outside, but I do what I can, breaking the thick glass of the python’s cage—he’ll be fine—and cutting open a gap wide enough for even the big daddy orang-utan to escape, though he shows no interest. He lies wrapped in his blanket like a dying man, dully watching me with his crafty brown eyes. The cayman and his attendant turtles sleep peacefully, and I don’t want to break their glass tank. Leaving, I again wedge the doors open but nobody follows me out.

     The deer, goats and the Oryx catch on fast, and the herd of bison, when I swing open their gate, come thundering delightedly out. Other animals think it’s a trick and cower. I cut a big hole in the back fence for the Przewalski horses to come through, but they seem happy in their denuded enclosure, all protectively gathered around the leggy brand-new foal. The unicorn ignores me. His companion dole has two horns, but small. They should breed: the new world needs unicorns.

     I cut through the wire to free the lovely Snow Leopards. The twins stay in their cave but the mother approaches, growling for me to finish. Her pale yellow eyes stare right through me before she pads off towards Canada Geese far in the distance. The kangaroos and wallabies barely look up, perhaps too dim to know they’re in a prison with now the choice of a larger prison. Sweating like a pig (which pigs don’t) I cut through mesh and prise open gates, and now my personal zoo fills with contentedly strolling animals. A camel spits at me as I approach, but I free him anyway.

     Now the big job. The Siberian Tigers, the heaviest of all cats. Scared spitless, I still manage the same divert-and-release stunt without being eaten, though the huge male gives me a heart-stopping smelly sniff and face-lick before he strolls off, looking for a nice leg of venison, with perhaps a snack of Canada Goose.

     I pass an elephant and a giraffe staring at each other.

     But the real horror is to come. Somehow the chimps have already escaped, and gone on a murderous rampage. I watch them chasing one of their number, a smaller one, as in a game of tag—and beat him with sticks, held like drumsticks, shrieking. Suddenly they are ripping him apart with their surprisingly big teeth. I can’t stand it. They are almost human.