Larry Lastman's Not Last

Larry dreaded going back to work after the funeral. His absence must have been generally noted, since he'd been away an entire week. He'd had to travel, and he'd actually spent a couple of the non-funeral days catching up with his old friends who'd stayed in his home town. In fact, going fishing with Bob was the nicest thing he'd done in a long time. The local river was the same, and the local fish, though they were descendants of the local fish he'd fished for twenty years before, looked like the same old local fish. It had been a worthy and happy afternoon, and Larry then learned the whole story about the tragedy from Bob: the six men in the pickup truck, and their unfortunate encounter with the freight train.

Aloud, Bob had wondered: "How did they ever manage to run out of gas precisely when they were on a level crossing? How messed up is that? I mean, as accidents go, it was miraculously accidental."

Bob shrugged. "Crap happens, man."

But Larry had to go back to work, and he expected to have to explain to whoever asked what had happened, about his friend, and about the five other men in his work crew, and about the truck, and about the train. And he'd have to tell them all that it had been a really long funeral, what with six guys from the same town, and the eulogies for the ones he'd never met. "And I actually laughed at some of the jokes, even though they were about guys I'd never even set eyes upon." He had come up with things to say, and at the end of the day nothing more would have to be said, unless someone was absent from work that day.... But that could wait. There was no need to think any absentee would care in the least about where Larry had been for a week.

He went into the big open office space shyly. (He hadn't gotten enough sleep, either.) Distant female voices were talking pleasantly, loudly enough to be heard above the clatter-clatter of the actuarial department of ACE North America, one of the fastest-growing companies in said North America. Larry looked over the vista of the actuarial department, and it was good. He unobtrusively made his way to his desk and sat down in his chair and booted up his computer. Safe at last.

Just then, distant voices came closer, and he recognized the voices of Jean and Joan. Perhaps they were talking about weekends. The two women got to his desk and together looked over the foam partition to stare at him with pathos. One of them said: "Oh, Larry, we heard some stuff about it, and you have my sympathies."

The other one said: "It's a terrible thing, and we all feel sorry for your loss."

(It must be mentioned here that Larry had no idea which was Jean and which was Joan. He'd met them at the same time, and he didn't have any trick up his sleeve to remember who was who. Fortunately, the issue had never come up, since they both treated him in the same way. He never saw one without the other. It was just one of those things. No-one knew he couldn't tell them apart.)

Larry said: "Well, thanks. I knew him very well, once upon a time a long time ago."

"Like Star Wars?" said one of them.

As the other one nudged her, Larry said: "No, not like Star Wars."

"Ah. Of course not."

"Anyhoo, you have everyone's sympathies."

"Mine more than anyone else's."

"No, my sympathies are greater."

Larry broke it up by saying: "You're both very sweet, and I really thank you."

The women smiled in unison. They even looked alike. They had mouse-brown hair, they had blue-green eyes, they were both so many feet and inches tall, and both weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds. Larry had often thought of them as twins, and he had never heard anything to the contrary.

Even though they were still smiling at him, he looked over one of his other two partitions. He said: "Is Mike in yet?"

"Mike's not here, probably."

"He called in sick on Friday, and maybe he's still sick."

"Poor guy. I hope he gets better."

"There was a terrible boating accident while you were gone."

"Right out on the lake."

"It's lake trout season."

"Seven boats altogether, all gone down in a single night."

"A bad lake squall. No survivors."

"Sad."

"No-one anyone knew, fortunately."

"Well, no-one anyone here knew."

Larry, in the sincere voice a griever has when hearing of another grief, said: "That's terrible. Almost unbelievable."

"It's all true."

"Yes, it's true."

Larry said: "Anyway, thanks. I should catch up on the doings of ACE North America's actuarial matters."

"Yeah. See ya!"

"Yeah. See ya!"

And off they went, merrily chattering over one another.

Larry had the idea of contacting Mike. He knew Mike well enough for such a call. They'd gotten drunk together. They would have heard the chimes at midnight if there had been chimes around. He pulled out his phone and looked for Mike's number and he found it. A press of a button, and the other line was ringing. Again and again. The voice mail came on, and Larry shut the call. He would try again later.

So, what was going on at ACE? Plenty of incomprehensible messages, in five languages, from the Stockholm HQ.

The time for lunch otherwise known as lunch-time rolled around, and since Larry had barely gotten home the previous night he of course had no food to use to prepare a lunch ahead of time, so he, after giving Mike another try on the phone, and failing to make progress in contacting him, went down to the food court to get a burger and fries.

Seated with his plastic orange tray of burger and fries, he pressed open The New Literary Review to continue reading one of its endless articles about 19th century Russian literature. Pushkin got pushed back, by Dostoevsky. In those days, no Russian could take Russian literature casually. Nineteenth century Russians sucked at music and they sucked at painting, so the only thing they had was literature. Another reason was that those Orthodox were really big on the written word. The Patriarch of Moscow, the Patriarch of, I don't know, Jerusalem, everything was written down. So it was their lifeblood, it was everything these Russians had to occupy themselves. The Court spoke French, but the novel-buying public bought Russian novels, not French ones. At least that's what Larry understood.

Larry looked up for a moment. There were fewer people in the food court than usual, although the week he'd been gone must have been a normal week there in normal-ville. Yet there were clearly to be seen fewer plastic orange seats occupied than there had been on the day he'd last had a burger and fries, which had been a week plus ... four days before.

The Russian journals were full of a half-assed attempt to be both Slavic and European, or more of one or the other. Binaries. Everything's going to try to approach its polar opposite. Why can't I meet someone?

Larry looked up again uncharacteristically soon. He saw heads turn when they saw him looking at them. Some six heads in all, and all the turning heads belonged to women. Larry felt under surveillance.

In the afternoon, for the whole afternoon, Larry evaluated a new machine that could, when properly used, conflate and unite the data from Stockholm and North America. However, the fields didn't quite match up properly, so there would be a hidden expense involved. He took notes about the different language problems, and decided to finalize his whole mess of notes Tuesday morning. For an actuarial scientist, Larry was pretty disorganized. Some ideas were missing from his head, he was sure, but which ones were missing was anybody's guess.

He left the office building of ACE North America, and set out to find a streetcar. Absentmindedly, and for a moment forgetting the street he was crossing was a two-way street, he stepped down off the curb. Just then a horn blasted--from an approaching car--and Larry jumped back. The car went by, its horn still blaring. Golly, that was a fraction of a second. I almost got run down. How could I have forgotten? I've crossed this street many times, and almost daily. He stood there, getting himself back together. No-one saw what had happened except the driver and himself. It would have been so messy, and inconvenient. Who would have taken up his corpse? Who could have identified him?

A close call indeed!

When he got home to his somewhat shabby apartment, nineteenth floor, he put the frozen macaroni which he'd bought some months before into the microwave and then he turned on his computer. What had Jean and Joan told him about? A big boating accident? He started a search, local, for accident. And he got results. A lot of accidents all over the place, construction accidents, electrical accidents, car collisions, malfunctioning hunting rifles, elevators falling all over the place, pianos dropping from high floors onto unsuspecting pedestrians, etc., etc., etc.

He found all this quite strange--impossible to believe, really--so he did what he had to do: he watched a movie on Netflix and forgot about it. Then he climbed into bed and thought about it: he did the math and he realized it wasn't all against probability theory, really. Unusual patterns will finally present themselves, and there was nothing anyone could really do about it after all. So, he thought about Jean and Joan, imagining they were twins, and he had his way with himself, and fell asleep.

In the morning, he recalled the unusual mathematics as he was showering. Surely someone else must have done some crunching somewhere. There had to be an analysis lying about in some newspaper or other. On the streetcar to work he got out his phone to see if anything like that had been done, and he found something which was alarming to him.

All the accidents had happened to men. Every last one, men men men. And all were purely by chance. It causes one to wonder about the nature of reality, doesn't it? Wouldn't it? Larry recalled almost getting hit by a car the previous day, and he wondered how careful he should be. Maybe all the men everywhere would come to the same conclusion. The math was hard to work out, but it appeared somewhere between five and ten percent of the male population had expired due to some mischance, everywhere, all over the place.

He went into work as usual, even though he knew he should be touched by a kind of madness. What kind of a person am I? he wondered. I can take this, and go through my routine, as usual.

He got to his desk and noticed that Mike wasn't in yet. He'd forgotten to try calling him a third time the previous day, so he figured on calling him again. As he was pulling out his phone, he heard two familiar voices.

"Good morning!" in unison.

It was Jean and Joan.

"Good morning," replied Larry in a tone which may have betrayed his impatience.

One of them frowned in concern. "Did you hear all that news?"

"Isn't it strange?"

"Really strange?"

"We've worked out some results, and it's nearly impossible."

"Like, a bazillion to one."

Larry said: "I suppose you're talking about all the freak accidents."

"Yeah! In fact, they started on Friday afternoon."

"Who knew there were so many pianos on the upper floors of apartment buildings?"

"That's just asking for trouble."

Larry said: "Well, I can't explain it either. I believe the numbers finally lined up, like the planets occasionally do, in one line."

One of them sighed. "What a lovely metaphor."

The other one said: "Yes. I like it more than she does."

"No, you don't. Anyway, how could you know?"

"I simply know it, that's all."

Larry interrupted: "So, Tuesday morning, and I bet the actuarials for insurance are all over the place."

"You bet!"

"And it's having an impart on ACE worldwide."

They were in harmony again.

Larry said: "I better get to it. Crazy days!"

"Crazy days indeed!"

"Crazy days indeedy!"

Jean and Joan went away. He'd never seen them disagree before. There were more things in heaven and earth than could have been dreamt of in his philosophy if only he'd had one.

He found MIKE in his phone and called. After a few chirps, a woman answered.

"Yes?"

"Hi, is Mike there?"

"Are you a relative?"

"No, a friend."

"He can't talk now."

"Oh. Can you ask him to call Larry?"

"I'll do that."

She hung up.

Whilst Larry was pondering what that meant, Dubs, the actuary in charge of seven southern states, came staggering into Larry's view. Dubs looked quite a shade of green indeed, and he was greenly moaning. Larry stood up and backed away, saying: "Dubs, are you feeling all right?" Dubs made a very colourful response, that is to say, he puked all over Larry's chair, desk, and computer, including the mouse and the mousepad. Once the heaving had stopped, Dubs said: "I don't feel too good."

Larry cried: "You don't say!" Larry thought this was a funny response, but no-one else did. The others in the office, who were, as he now saw, three-quarters female, were aghast at this award-worthy display of esophagal evacuation. So much for understatement.

Dubs wiped his mouth with his hand and said: "Maybe I should go lie down." Larry, knowing his humour was not for all tastes, did not reply. Dubs went off in search of a couch.

Larry knew of two couches in the vicinity, and decided to avoid them from then on.

The office manager, who was always ready for such an event, and whose name was Helen, came up to Larry. She said: "We'll find you another spot. Why don't you go off for lunch?"

"It's ten something."

"Then go get some coffee. I'll find a place for you."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes. Don and Patrick and Stan called in sick. And, of course, Mike. You can pick yourself up from where you left off using my master password."

"You have one?"

"Yes, I see all, I know all, but I say nothing. Now go!"

Larry amscrayed down to the food court. He was glad he'd gotten up out of his chair in time. It was a close call. He felt sick just thinking about what might have happened if he'd remained seated. Barf!

Was he the only.... That night, he got onto the Internet, and he saw all sorts of reports of men dying from all kinds of obscure diseases that hadn't been heard of since the seventeenth century. God: thank you for not exposing me to Dub's puke. Who knows what it could have caused? Barf!

He went to bed, trying not to worry too much. After all, he had to get some sleep. So, he thought about Jean and Joan, and, curiously enough, they seemed to be fighting for his attentions. He still couldn't tell them apart, but they were contending nonetheless. And he slept peacefully, without a single interesting or apocalyptic thought in his head.

Awakening the next morning, he remembered, after a few minutes of blissful unawareness, the ongoing situation. He checked the news, and he wasn't mistaken: diseases no-one had heard of for one hundred, two hundred, a thousand years had struck down an unknown percentage of men. Some of the diseases even corresponded to mythical diseases of the kinds which could have afflicted Achilles or Hephaestus or Helen of Troy. Larry thought about calling in 'sick' but no. He might actually be sick, in which case it would be better to be among a crowd.

The streetcar was about half-full, and that half was mostly women. He did notice about four men, and like himself they were looking around counting how many of their sex were on the streetcar. The women--the vast majority being women, of course--were keeping quiet, as if nothing was happening at all. Larry couldn't decide which hypothesis he liked more. Were they actually glad all the men were disappearing? Or were they in something of a state of shock? In any case, conversations were not happening. All were in their own worlds, fearful worlds or pleasurable worlds, as the cases might have been.

Finally at work, and nervous about everything: the lobby, the elevator, the hallway, the doorway, the green carpeting, and his desk and computer and mouse and monitor; Larry settled in enough to look around. There were so many women in his surroundings, and so few men. He counted, of his sight, twenty-four women and six men (not including himself). And, yes, as he cast his glance across the room, more than five women looked up at him and smiled shyly. He slouched down at his computer and moved his mouse around even though his machine wasn't on.

He wondered again about Mike. Perhaps it was a co-incidence. Maybe he was only sick in an ordinary sense. Maybe whatever was happening started happening after he had gotten sick, in which case he might be immune to whatever it was.

"Hi, Larry!"

"Yeah, hi, Larry!"

He looked up and, sure enough, Jean and Joan were languidly leaning over the partition and smiling at him. Larry said, "Good morning to both of you."

Jean and Joan sighed, and sighed again, each seeming to be attempting to outdo one another in significance. Larry coughed and tried to turn away.

"Have you heard about all this terrible disease stuff?"

"It's the strangest thing since yesterday."

"I knew about it first."

"No, I knew about it when you mentioned it to me; you only mentioned it first."

"Well, I don't know about that."

The other one rolled her eyes. "Trust me, dear."

"Oh, now it's 'dear'?"

"Larry, I seem to have inherited a couple tickets to something for Saturday night. Maybe you could think about...."

"I doubt you'd be interested. It's probably something pretty ordinary."

"It's not ordinary at all. It's a symphony of songs."

"It's probably cancelled, you know. Larry, I have a nice fireplace. You must like fire."

Someone screamed, somewhere off behind Jean and Joan. Larry stood to see the back of a woman looking out the window. All the other women hurried over, Jean and Joan included. They were all clutching their own hands. Larry followed along.

The screamer, whom Larry had never seen before, was at the window. She said: "I just saw some guy falling! Over there! Near those elm trees!"

The other women around her, who seemed not to know the woman at the window, craned their necks to see.

One of them said: "Wow, I hope he's okay."

Another one of them said: "Maybe they're making a movie."

A third one said: "Wow. I hope he's okay."

Something moved in the streets beyond that caught Larry's attention. He said: "I just saw someone falling. Over there." He pointed vaguely to the west. The heads of all the women turned.

"It's got to be a movie something," said the skeptic.

"Two of them, in two minutes."

"There's another one!"

"You're putting me on."

"I hope they're okay."

Meanwhile, Larry's attention had been caught by the window itself. How difficult would it be to smash? Could he take a run at it, and smash through it? Seventh floor. It would be instantaneous, and mostly painless. Perhaps he could pick up a computer and throw it through. But what if the glass didn't break? He'd look pretty foolish. He would never live it down. He found himself watching himself making these plans, and he thought: What am I thinking? Ridiculous!

Larry and the women waited for five minutes, expecting other bodies to fall, but no more bodies fell. They could see some ambulances arrive, but only two. Probably a triage thing. The view from ACE wasn't the only view, after all. Maybe there was a body or two or four that had fallen from building-sides not visible from ACE. Larry figured, stoically, that it was not the proper time to panic. He had a job to do, and it was actually actuarial. He made some guesstimates about the population losses on Monday and Tuesday and now possibly Wednesday. How would that affect ACE? Did they sell insurance?

He turned to Jean or Joan to ask: "Do we sell insurance?"

She laughed haughtily. "Oh, no, Larry, we make video games!"

"We do?"

"Yes. It's a successful business."

"Why does a video game company employ actuaries?"

"How should I know?"

The other one interrupted quickly. "Larry, friend Larry. There's a lot of probability involved in a video game, especially if it's a role-playing game. You are involved in giving realistic lifespans to a fictional environment. Don't tell me you don't know that!"

Larry was, for the first time in his life, astonished. "You mean that all the tables and graphs we come up with and deliver to meetings are all based on some fictional stories?"

"Of course!" said the other one. "Why else would we be estimating life expectancies for dwarves and elves and wyverns?"

"I thought ... I thought those were cohort code names. You know, privacy policy and everything. It's all a big story-telling thing?"

The other one touched his shoulder so gently it felt like not a touch at all; it felt more like a cat brushing up against oneself. "Don't worry, Larry, it doesn't change the mathematical integrity, not in the least."

The other interrupted: "In fact, it's preferable!"

Larry turned away from the crowd at the window and unobtrusively went back to his desk. He had to look at some of his files. In doing so, he would calm his nerves. As he did this routine work, he was also making up some probability tables in a vacant part of his mind to finally conclude that, no, there was no way to eliminate chance. He recalled that Mallarmé said something similar in a poem. He wondered if he could find the poem somewhere. He took a moment to bring it up on his telescreen. Oh, it was the name of a poem, not part of the text itself. 'Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard'. A handy translation was also presented: A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance. Somehow the poem had come up in some statistics course in the long before.

Larry didn't understand the meaning of the title, then, before, or after. But that was fine, since it appeared no-one else did either.

He kept his head down for almost the entire afternoon. He had a plan for the evening, but he didn't spend any time thinking about it. It was Wednesday, which mean pub quiz night. He didn't have to think about it, because it was part of his weekly routine.

Routinely, he left work and went to a routine restaurant. He ate his routine meal, noticing unroutinely that the place was far emptier than usual. He counted eleven women and two men (including himself). The other man was sitting with two women. The other nine women would look over to them every once in a while, as did Larry. The other man seemed to be having a jolly good time enjoying the attention. Larry was in for his fair share of come-hither glances, but he had plans for the night, and a strange woman would definitely throw off his game, assuming the game took place as planned.

Off he went, to the gaming place. He'd missed the last Wednesday, so it was a home game once again. He figured he'd sit at the same table as always, with Matt to his left and Geraldine to his right. He walked into the bar, which was mostly deserted, and into the back room. And who do you think he saw sitting there?

Geraldine, and no-one else.

Geraldine, who was about a generation older than Larry, and pretty, patted the seat to her left. She said: "Good to see you again! You missed last week. We played really well, considering it was a game on foreign turf. I guess people are later than usual. I wonder about the other team, though. Did they hear we were that good? Is that why they're keeping away?"

Geraldine, Larry recalled, had recently retired from a job as a librarian. She knew enough tech to get by, but just enough. Any questions about the modern world were the ones she was clueless about. So it seemed likely that....

Larry sat down beside her and wondered where to start. He could scarcely believe it himself, but he had done the math, and there were certain inescapable facts involved.

"Geraldine," he began: "I think this game isn't going to happen. See, something has happened to us men."

"Oh? Like what?"

"A lot of them, maybe a tenth of them, got sick on Monday, or shortly before that, and they died."

"What?"

"Then on Tuesday, there were a lot of accidents. We went down another ten percent or so."

"Goodness!"

"And today, well, there's been a lot of suicides. So, I don't think there's that many men left to play trivia. You see?"

She understood. She was sad about it, but ... that's life, I guess. Unexplainable things happen all the time, or so Larry told her then. There was no solution to it; chance; mere chance.

A half-hour passed, and still no-one showed up. Larry and Geraldine walked to their corresponding streetcars.

At home, Larry couldn't help himself. So he got on the Internet and discovered that, yes, a rash of suicides had occurred across the city, and perhaps the province, and country--it was hard to say, since the technology of communications was failing all over the place--and that countless widows and orphans had been therewith created. It was sad, and disturbing, and Larry recalled how he had been considering throwing a computer through a window earlier that day. It seemed he'd just missed becoming another one of the number.

He did his usual bedtime ritual, but this time Jean and Joan wouldn't approach him at the same time. They stayed separate. They'd started hating one another.

In the morning, Larry decided to call in sick. It was simply too dangerous to go out, and besides that, he still hadn't had any free time for nearly two weeks. So at home he stayed, distracting himself with a video game he might have contributed to. Who knew?

However, at eleven, his boss called him. "Larry, can you get in on a meeting somehow? We've got a serious problem."

"Can I do it by phone? My computer's not working."

"Uh, how do I do that? Okay, I'm going to put the phone down, but you'll have to speak really loudly. Is that okay?"

"I suppose it's as good as anything."

"Okay, here goes. Angela, Maddie, Fiona, Anne, I've called this meeting because we've got a crisis on our hands."

(Faintly) "Oh wow." "That's terrible." "I hope it turns out okay." "Can we call someone?"

"What's the problem?"

"In a word, the problem is the printer. I've had a job in the queue for I don't know how long, twenty minutes, an hour, and it's not even started doing anything at all!"

Everyone else on the line was silent for a while. Finally, Larry said: "I suppose it's turned on?"

"Yes, it's turned on. Of course it's on! It's never off."

"Maybe you should check the paper. Open and close the drawers a couple times. And maybe there's too much paper in it? That can cause a problem."

"Well, that's new, I have to say. Sometimes it's the simplest things, things so simple even a man can figure them out!"

The others in the conference call laughed appreciatively but hesitantly.

His boss continued: "Can someone check the printer? See if the drawers are working, and see if there's too much paper in them?"

Larry heard no-one said anything.

"Okay, I'll go check. Be back in a couple mins!"

While the boss was gone, the women talked about their weekend plans. They were all single, and though they lamented all the dead males who had been piling up all over the place, they figured it was just a temporary thing. They would be replaced, surely. Something would happen. The government would take care of it. Some naysayer pointed out that a third of the government administration had been wiped out, but that naysaying Debbie-Downer was met with optimism when someone remarked that there were too many people in government anyway. "Yeah!" "That's right!" They talked about their holiday plans and about who was having good sales and bargains. Finally, after twenty minutes, the boss returned. Larry heard her clear her throat. She said: "It's fixed now."

Larry asked: "What was the problem, by the way?"

"It had run out of paper."

The meeting was adjourned. Larry hung up the phone.

He found himself having himself a day all to his own, which he wasted by making Kraft dinner, with butter instead of margarine, and extra grated cheese, and a latticework of ketchup overtop the filled bowl. He listened to music. He paid close attention to Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony, and he developed some interpretive stances towards it. He slept for a while on the couch, finding the atmosphere to be quieter than usual, with less hubbub out in the streets that lay beyond his windows. For a treat of the evening, seeing as how liberated he was, he went outside to go to a particular licenced diner to read some more of Dhalgren, play some computer trivia, and otherwise get drunk. (It was either that or a laser show.)

Through remarkably quiet streets he made his way staggeringly home, and he climbed into bed, and though he thought of thinking about Jean and Joan, he couldn't get it up.

Next day, Friday, Larry's last day, he fumbled. Clothes on the floor, not quite dirty enough to be ignored. Same clothes as Wednesday, why not? Besides, it was a Friday, and people are supposed to go in their rottenest clothes!

So: half the men in the universe were no longer. Either through disease, or accident, or suicide, they were no more.

On the one hand, he easily got a seat on the streetcar.

But, on the other hand, the driver was a terrible driver.

Plenty of room on the elevator.

Plenty of looks from his fellow office-workers.

Chance. All by chance.

He got right into work, comparing the life expectancies of Dwarves and their cousins the Elves. Did they smoke? Elves did. Did they drink? Dwarves did. So, it was undetermined who outlived who. He had to have more information. He pulled out a manual and checked the tables. The world was still going along. He was a little surprised, but not very.

Jean and Joan showed up together. Their acrimony seemed to have abated. Larry wasn't quite sure why, at least for a couple minutes.

"Larry!"

"Larry!"

He didn't look up, but he said: "Good morning, Jean, good morning, Joan." Then he looked up, having not revealed he couldn't tell them apart. "What did I miss?"

Together they stretched over the partition to let their lovely and identical arms show themselves off. One hand fondled a red stapler, and a second hand toyed with a can of pens. The hands belonged to two different women.

One of them said: "We lost a total of eleven, yesterday and the day before."

"As far as we know, that is; that number only reflects our office, and a couple near to it."

"Who knows how many the maintenance department lost?"

"And what about the shipping department?"

Larry looked lost. "And it's all by ... chance?"

"What else could it be?" (Larry didn't know who asked that; he was looking out into empty space, thinking about how empty space is, when looked at from the a certain granularity.)

Larry returned from his reverie, and asked: "Anybody know anything about Mike?"

"Oh, Mike? We got word. He's still recovering, though he expects to be in on Monday."

"Or Tuesday." She sighed. "He is handsome, come to think of it."

Larry trembled, like a ghost had walked over his grave, or whatever the saying was. Ghost? Goose? He didn't quite know. He said: "I should get back to work on these elves and dwarves."

"The Internet's down," said the one on the left.

"All offline," said the one on the right.

"Someone's working on it, I suppose."

"We'll see what happens."

Just then, a woman walked over to join the conversation. She chose to stand behind Larry's chair, so closely Larry couldn't lean back or swivel. The woman (who was an engineering assistant) asked: "Has anyone seen Billy?"

"Billy?" asked Jean or Joan.

"Billy?" asked Joan or Jean.

"Yeah, you know, the guy with the big hair."

"Ah! No, I haven't seen him all day."

"He was here a bit earlier. I noticed."

The engineering assistant said: "We were talking about some designs in my cubicle, and when he didn't respond to one of my probing and intelligent questions, I turned around, and he was gone."

One said: "How weird!"

The other said: "Maybe he went for coffee."

The engineering assistant said: "Billy's never done that before. He's usually quite attentive."

The two sighed.

Larry wanted to be alone. He said: "Why don't the three of you go off to see if you can find him?"

"That sounds good."

"Let's split up."

"Let's find Big Hair."

The trio fell out of sight, and Larry had a few moments alone. What could he do with those moments, though? The Internet was down, so he couldn't find out anything about the extent of the male depopulation. If something had happened on Thursday (according to the established pattern), he didn't know about it. It was possible that nothing had happened, which was, as they say in logical circles, certainly possible. It was also possible that the world had returned to a stasis, otherwise known an ordinary pattern. Order had been restored, though it was a new order. He thought about it, and stared off into empty space for the second time that Friday. There was something pleasant about the empty space. I don't know if you've ever stared off into empty space, but it can bring on a very relaxing sensation.

But the relaxing sensation was not to last. He heard a voice--it was a woman's voice--and the woman was saying: "Patrick? Patrick? Where'd you go?"

Larry stood up to discreetly-as-possible peer in the direction of the voice. He didn't know the woman, but she was looking exceedingly puzzled. She turned to the left, she turned to the right, she turned around, she looked up, she looked down. And then she did it all again.

Larry returned to his seat and tried to get the Internet working, but it wasn't working. How could he ever know why it wasn't working? Maybe it was only in the office, maybe only in the building. Perhaps across the whole world it was working, i.e. the Internet, just not in his building. How could he know? Hearsay? Chance encounters? Who could he talk to? He knew he was helpless, knowing nothing about the world beyond himself, essentially. He thought: So many men have died, from disease, from suicide, from accidents. Where did they go to?

He thought at that moment about the desire for oblivion. He guessed, educatedly, there was something in Freud somewhere about the desire for nothingness. Plus, he knew enough about Buddhism to know that the ultimate goal was nothingness, the bliss of never having existed, or at least of never having known one ever existed. And then, to top it all off, he thought about some Australian philosopher who'd made his book on the idea that you shouldn't have children because it increased the misery thermometer. Finally, he remembered that in a Borges story someone said that mirrors and copulation are both detestable since they both increase the number of people in the world.

He couldn't argue with himself on those issues. He was too stupid. Fortunately, before he could continue his reverie, Jean and Joan came back.

"Someone else has disappeared!"

"The guy from the mail room!"

"The fat guy!"

"The old fat guy!"

Larry stood up. "We should find out what's going on."

"You're right!"

"What should we do?"

Larry said: "Let's start in the mail room. I suppose he was there last, provably, right?"

"I guess so."

"Seems to follow."

The three of them took the elevator down to level B2, which was where the mail room was. They neared a women's washroom, and one of them said: "I should go in here," pointing to the pink door, "before we continue our investigation."

The other one said: "Yes, I agree! Let's go."

Jean and Joan went into the washroom.

And that's the end of the story.

[P.S. Mike returned to work on Monday.]