In just three days, it will be Christmas. Despite the bright and cheery decorations twinkling in the streets, wreaths on doors, and Christmas trees peeking through windows, Hector doesn't feel one
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The notice was taped inside the laundry room, between a lost-cat flyer and an ad for a used bike. EXCHANGE, it said. ONE WEEK EACH. YOU WILL COME BACK.
It was two in the morning and the dryer had eaten a sock. I wanted something to happen. I called.
The woman who answered had my voice.
"Which do you want first?" she asked. "The world with no one, or the world with everyone?"
I was nineteen and tired of people. I said no one.
I woke in my own bed, in my own room, in a city that had never had anyone else in it.
Everything worked. The trams ran on time with no drivers. Bread appeared each morning on the bakery shelves, warm, for no one. On my desk was a list in my own handwriting, left by the girl whose place I had taken. Tram at 7:10. Don't bother shouting. The library is best in the rain.
The first day was the best day of my life. I sang in the library. I ate cake for breakfast on the steps of the cathedral. I danced in the middle of the motorway, badly, and it didn't matter, because there was no one to be bad in front of.
In her wardrobe I found a stack of drawings: hundreds of self-portraits, all of them different. Long nose, short nose, sad mouth, laughing mouth. She had never had anyone to tell her what she looked like, so she had never settled on a face.
On the third day I made a joke out loud, and nothing happened. Without someone to laugh, a joke is just a sentence. I realised I didn't know if I was funny. I had never known. I had only been told.
On the fourth day I tried to be kind and found there was nothing to be kind to. Brave, generous, shy, rude: I went through the words I had always used for myself and every one of them needed another person standing in it. Without them, the words went soft, like paper left in water.
By the sixth day I had stopped talking. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone I hadn't met. I was not lonely, exactly. I was unspecified. I was a word said so many times it had stopped meaning anything.
On the seventh night I lay on the floor of the empty city and could not have told you one true thing about myself.
I woke in the world with everyone, and before I opened my eyes I knew that the man downstairs was burning toast, and that he was thinking of his daughter, and that she was angry with him and did not want to be.
Nobody spoke there. Nobody needed to. Every thought arrived everywhere at once, gently, like light.
At first it was paradise. I thought I'm sorry about nothing in particular, and a hundred people forgave me before I'd finished thinking it. No one could misread me. No one could get me wrong. I felt the tram driver's grief and a small boy's fear of the dark as clearly as my own, and I loved them, because loving them was as easy as loving my own hand.
There was no list on my desk. There was no paper at all. Why would there be? Writing is what you do when someone can't hear you.
By the third day, I noticed I didn't know whose sadness I was feeling. When I wanted an orange, I couldn't tell if the wanting was mine. I went looking for the edge of myself, the place where I stopped and someone else began, and I could not find it.
An old woman on the tram felt me searching and turned the thought towards me, kindly. We gave up edges a long time ago, she thought. They only kept us apart. And all around us the carriage agreed.
On the fifth day I tried to keep a secret. Just one. A small, stupid one: that I had once cried at an advert for dog food. I held it as tightly as I could. It slipped out of me like water through fingers, and everywhere in the city people received it, and smiled, and loved me a little more.
That was the worst moment of the week. Not because they knew. Because they could never come to know. You can only understand someone by crossing the distance to them, and there was no distance left to cross. I had become so known that there was no one left to know.
I came back on a Tuesday, in the laundry room, holding the missing sock.
My roommate Dara was folding towels. She looked up and frowned. "You seem different," she said. "Did you cut your hair?"
I hadn't. She was wrong. She was also almost right, the way people almost always are about each other, and I had to hold on to the dryer because I was close to crying with gratitude.
Two notes were waiting on my desk.
The first, in my handwriting: Everyone kept looking at me. I never knew I had a face until someone looked at it wrong. Thank you.
The second was in my handwriting too, but shakier, the pen pressed so hard it had torn the page. Of course. She had never written before. I was alone inside your head for a week. It was terrible. It was the first time I could hear myself. I am taking some of the quiet home.
I sat on the bed and read them until the light changed.
I had gone looking for the place where I would finally understand myself. I'd thought it would be the empty world, with no one to perform for. Then I'd hoped it would be the full one, with no one to misunderstand me. It was neither.
I think a person is a kind of coastline. You can't see it from the middle of the sea, and you can't see it from the middle of the land. You can only see it where the two meet. And the line is never still.
"So where did you go?" Dara asked.
I started to tell her. I knew I would get it wrong, and that she would hear it wrong, and that it wouldn't matter. Somewhere in the space between what I said and what she heard, there I was.
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