Roberto Arellanos woke up feeling like he had slept for three years. He couldn’t dismiss the possibility: all the clocks in the city had come to a halt.
New Haven’s menacing silence, which had often cured his insomnia, now hinted at disaster. Trying the lamp proved futile. His cell phone, computer, and tablet wouldn’t turn on, and no electrical outlets worked. As he began to discern silhouettes in the darkness, he drew open the curtains. The sky was void of stars, seized by a haunting shade of purple. Cruelly extinguished, the vacant lampposts forced the moon to cast shadows, and there were no signs of life in any window. Nothing was right.
Roberto Arellanos left his room and knocked on the next door, behind which his friends normally rested, but there was no answer. He continued through each room of his suite, only to find books, backpacks, and perfectly made beds. The posters and photographs hanging on the walls had been abandoned.
Desperate, Roberto rushed downstairs. From the college courtyard, he saw the purple sky reflected on the dormant windows. No light, no lamp, no library, no silhouette peeked through the frames. Harkness Tower had never appeared so sharp, bared against the perils of the night, raising its pinnacle against the void of stars.
He considered that perhaps the area had been evacuated, that the bodies breathing life into this campus had been displaced to a distant land. He wondered whether it was a dream, but he couldn’t recall ever being so awake.
He ventured into the streets with a catastrophic premonition. To his left, the billboard clung to a date: Nov. 27, 2023. Just two days ago, but the silence of the night seemed from another time.
Roberto walked in dismay, along the same path he did every morning. Neither the romantic howl of a dog, nor the echo of a drunkard’s stumble, nor the timid chirps of crickets penetrated the night. No cars disturbed the horizon’s solitude. No scooter, no cyclist, no passerby. Only his footfalls broke the silence that covered New Haven like a shroud.
Deep and desolate, the arches seemed to conceal demons. The expansive halls were graveyards of chairs; the police station was a graveyard of telephones. Roberto investigated the corners where silhouettes usually sought refuge from the threats of the night. The old minimarket, the hammocks, the benches, the terraces. The university was a void.
Desperate, he wondered if this was the reality navigated by poets.
He ran for miles through deserted avenues and stretches, beyond what prudence allowed a student, but no soul made itself present. He felt the breath of the night and the stillness of time. While the purple sky showed no signs of dawn, he sensed the memory of Mom and Grandma, as if he had already seen them for the last time.
Nonsense invaded him. How could one find meaning in a purple night, void of stars? How and what could he escape in an empty city? He imagined Lima desolate, Madrid deserted, Paris abandoned, and he couldn’t comprehend it. The world was never designed for this solitude.
He sobbed through avenues of absurdity until he reached a bay.
Among the shadows, he recognized the place, but it was no longer the same. Roberto knew there should have been lights there, across the water, but there was nothing.
Despondent, he knew he was alone.
Roberto Arellanos knelt and pleaded for mercy, but he only received the indiscernible language of the moon, a complicit observer of catastrophe. Lying on the shore, he understood that he had lost everything. The end of the world had come, and he was there to witness it all, because only before a witness could there be an end.
He suspected that everything would soon disintegrate, that the bay and the streets he had traveled would return to the mountains of dust where everything began. Maybe in a blink, his consciousness would become nothing, or the symptoms of sleep would cradle him toward the nevermore. But nothing happened. Perhaps he was there for hours, or days, or years, seeking a new language in the purple, waiting for the night to end.
He attempted self-destruction, at the hands of the water and the rocks on the shore, but it was pointless. He understood that he was the last man on Earth, and thus he remembered what was prophesied by his ancestors in San Daniel. And it was true. It had fallen upon him. Roberto Arellanos was The Immortal. And thus, his craving for death grew, for the disintegration of oceans, cities, and rainforests. But there was nothing to be done.
He waded into the water and gazed at the horizon, murky and nebulous. Purple.
All his surroundings remained unchanged, as real as the palm of his hand, as real as the end of the world. Disheartened, The Immortal surrendered into eternity.
And then, in a second that could have lasted years, or centuries, or millennia, from some window on a distant shore, a light attacked the night.
