He woke in the morning. This was not unusual. Mornings came whether you woke or not, and he had learned early that sleeping through them was a waste.

He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. It was white and cracked, with a water stain in the shape of a country he could not name. He had been looking at this ceiling for fifteen years, give or take a month, and he still could not name the country. This did not trouble him.

He got up. The room was cold. The window was open and the wind was coming through it, carrying the sound of traffic from the street below. Traffic. That was the first thing that was wrong.

No one drove on that street anymore. He knew this because he had walked past it every morning for the past three weeks and there had never been a car. The buses still ran -- the drivers had stopped coming, but the buses were programmed to run on schedules, and they ran on schedules -- but no one got on them. No one got off them either. They just drove their routes and stopped at their stops and drove back, full of no one.

He dressed and ate breakfast and stood at the window and looked at the street.

It was empty.

Not the empty of a Sunday morning or a holiday or a snow day. The empty of a place where everyone who had ever been has suddenly, completely, ceased to be present. The shops were closed. The sidewalks were empty. The park across the street was empty. The benches were empty. The fountain in the centre of the park was empty. The pigeons were gone too, which was something he had not noticed until now and now found strange. Pigeons were everywhere. They were not gone. They were just -- gone.

He went to the door and opened it and walked into the hallway. The hallway was empty. The elevator was empty. The mailboxes in the lobby were empty. He checked them anyway. Every one. They were all empty.

He walked out of the building and onto the street.

The street was empty.

He walked three blocks and turned left. The bakery was closed. The deli was closed. The newsstand was closed. The man who usually sat on the crate outside the newsstand was not there. He had been there yesterday. He had been there every day for as long as he could remember, sitting on the crate and smoking and watching the world go by.

The world was not going by now. It was standing still.

He walked to the school. It was a large building, three stories of brick and glass, with a playground in the back and a football field beyond that. He had gone to this school for eleven years. He knew every classroom and every teacher and every corner of every hallway.

The front doors were locked. He tried the side entrance. Also locked. He went around to the back and looked through the window of the main office.

The desks were empty. The chairs were empty. The computers were on -- he could see the glow of the screens -- but no one was sitting at them. He could see the coffee cups on the desks, half full and going cold. He could see the papers, scattered across the surfaces like someone had been interrupted mid-work and would be back soon.

But no one was coming back.

He went inside through the fire exit, which was never locked. The hallways were empty. The classrooms were empty. The cafeteria was empty. The gymnasium was empty. He walked through every room on the first floor and every room on the second floor and every room on the third floor.

Every room was empty.

He stood in the centre of the football field and looked at the school behind him. It was a large building. It held hundreds of people on a normal day. Today it held no one.

He thought about something his history teacher had said once, in a lesson he had not been paying attention to: a civilisation is not a collection of buildings or a collection of laws or a collection of stories. A civilisation is a collection of people who agree to share the same stories.

If there were no people, would there still be a civilisation?

He did not know the answer. He had never known the answer, because there had never been a time when the question was relevant. There had always been people. There had always been people to share the stories with.

Now there were no people. Or there was only him. He was not sure which.

He walked home. The street was still empty. The bakery was still closed. The deli was still closed. The newsstand was still closed. The crate was still there. The man was not.

He went into his kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was full of food. His mother had gone to the store the day before -- the day before the Silence -- and filled it. There was milk and bread and cheese and fruit and vegetables and things he could not name that his mother bought because she liked the way they looked in the packaging.

He took out a piece of fruit. It was an apple, red and shiny and perfect. He bit into it. It was crisp and sweet and cold.

He ate the apple and stood at the kitchen sink and looked out at the empty street.

In the afternoon, he found the diary.

It was in his father's study, which he rarely entered because his father kept it tidy and ordered and off-limits, and he had never understood why a room needed to be off-limits if there was nothing dangerous in it. But today he entered it, and today he found the diary.

It was on the desk, under a stack of papers, in a leather-bound notebook with no writing on the cover. He opened it to the first page and read the first line:

Dear Catherine,

If you are reading this, then I am gone. I do not know when I will be gone. I do not know if I will be gone tomorrow or next year or in ten years. All I know is that it will come, and when it does, I want you to know something.

I want you to know that I loved your mother before I loved you, and that I love you more than I loved your mother, and that this is not a contradiction because love is not a finite resource. It does not run out. It multiplies. Every person you love makes you capable of loving more people, not fewer.

I want you to know that the world is not as cruel as it sometimes seems. It is cruel, yes. But it is also kind, and the kindness is real and the cruelty is real and they are both necessary. You cannot have one without the other, and you should not wish for a world without cruelty, because a world without cruelty would also be a world without kindness. They are the same thing, in the end.

I want you to know that I am afraid. I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of leaving you alone in a world that I cannot protect. I am afraid of the dark. But I am also not afraid. I am not afraid because I have loved your mother and I have loved you and that is enough. That is more than enough. That is everything.

I want you to know that I believe in something. I believe that when I am gone, something will remain. Not me. Me will be gone. But something. Something that I helped create and that will continue without me. A story. A memory. A kindness. Something.

I want you to know that I am proud of you. Not because of anything you have done. Because of who you are. You are a good person, Catherine. You are the best person I have ever known. And when I am gone, I want you to be good still. Not for me. For yourself. Because being good is its own reward.

I want you to know --

He read the diary three times. Each time, he felt something. Not much. Not enough to call emotion. But something. A pressure behind his eyes. A tightness in his throat. A sensation that was not quite sadness and not quite fear and not quite anything that had a name.

He closed the diary and held it in his hands and sat in his father's chair and looked at the wall.

On the wall was a photograph. His father, his mother, and him, taken at the beach when he was six. His father was holding him up in the air, and his mother was laughing, and the sand was white and the sky was blue and the water was cold and they were all happy.

He looked at the photograph for a long time.

Then he went to his room and took out a notebook and a pen and sat at his desk and wrote:

Today I woke up and the world was empty.

He wrote that and put the pen down and looked at the words and thought about whether writing them made them more real or less real. He decided he did not know.

He picked up the pen and wrote:

I walked through the school and every room was empty.

He put the pen down again. He looked at the two sentences. They were simple sentences. They were true sentences. They were not very interesting sentences.

He picked up the pen and wrote:

I found my father's diary. He wrote it for me. He said he believed that something would remain when he was gone.

He put the pen down. He looked at the three sentences. They were more interesting than the first two. They were still not very interesting. But they were more interesting.

He thought about it. Then he picked up the pen and wrote a fourth sentence:

I am writing this so that someone will know I was here.

He put the pen down and looked at the four sentences. They were on the first page of the notebook. The notebook was blank except for those four sentences. There were probably hundreds of pages left.

He picked up the pen and began to write.