At first, he thought he would go mad. Then he took to cleaning.

He woke up and stayed in bed. There was no need to hurry. Through the gap in the curtains, he saw a strip of blackness. Slowly, the sun started to climb, rubbing the black night into a blurry blue dawn, and a little later, the houses stood stark with red in their brick walls, blue on their flat truss roofs, and green in their overgrown gardens.

He yawned, rubbed his eyes, and got up. He went to the sink, washed his face, and brushed his teeth. Good, the water was still running. He again wondered, as he had many times before each morning, how—or who was operating the pumps? Then he shrugged and let the question stroll back into oblivion.

He prepared himself a cup of coffee, put two slices in the toaster, and scrambled two eggs on the stove. Gas. Check. Electricity. Check. Just another day.

After breakfast, he inspected the map he had taken from the tourist shop and tapped it in front of his desk. The map was laminated and riddled with glistening strokes of a marker pen, making circles and crosses. He noticed a circle where he was at yesterday and done with, popped open a pen, and embellished it with a vermillion cross.

He searched for the next unmarked circle. Months ago, the entirety of the map boasted of but circles. Now their number had dwindled, so much so that he had to look hard to find the next one. He felt good about how long it was taking him to find one.

He tapped a spot. There were two pools there. He would need a water rake.

He went outside, closing neither the front door nor the front gate. There was no need for that. There hadn’t been a need for that for months. He first took a detour to a nearby department store.

One early morning, he woke up neither to the crowing of the cock from his neighbour’s backyard pen, nor the chirps of the sparrows and robins perched on the telephone cables, nor the shrill cry of the garbage truck driver’s whistle rousing the neighbourhood to bring out their garbage. That morning, it was all silence.

By nine o’clock, he was vexed at finding nobody in his home. By twelve o’clock, he was panicking. Nobody had come back. By two, he was in hysterics. His whole neighbourhood was empty. By five, he lay as a corpse in the middle of the desolate main road.

He lay there until night tiptoed across the sky and only got up when the streetlights came on. Who was operating those? He thought of going about the city, but the night was so overbearing with not even the noise of insects that he ran back home and shut the door behind him.

He pushed through the glass doors and stepped into the department store, his footsteps echoing. The soda bottles to his left had colourful stickers on them saying stuff like: 50 percent DISCOUNT FOR A SHORT TIME!!! HURRY UP!!! Towards his right, at the end of the rows, was the hardware section, which he had now quite familiarised himself with. He picked a sturdy rod and two black garbage bags and went out, leaving the proper amount at the empty counter.

For the first few days, the loneliness was almost unbearable. He didn’t like the sound of his own breathing. He didn’t like how the air scraped up his nose as it poured into his lungs. The tiny tinnitus that he always had became a torturous siren that never stopped droning. He started paying attention to the wet plop his eyelids made whenever he blinked. Every swallow of saliva was like a large stone falling over a cliff into a lake. Each cough was a slammed door, every sneeze a gunshot. His body haunted him all day and howled him awake all night.

He really thought he would go mad.

He reached the place and surveyed the pools. Plastic packets, plastic bottles, soggy paper, candy wrappers, cigarette nubs—aimless waste floating in the water.

It must have been a week or two or three. He had stopped looking at the calendar, and he didn’t put on his watch. The sun was in the sky, so it was at least daytime. He went around, listlessly, like an undead, dragging his feet, eyes vacant, ears hollow, mouth mute, heart pumping uselessly. Staring at the ground, he came upon an abandoned paper cup. It was lying on its side, a dried dark splotch on the inside. Thoughtlessly, he picked it up and was about to chuck it into the street when he saw a trash can in front of him. He lobbed it. It struck the metal rim, spun, rebounded, and fell on the ground, rotating for fifteen minutes. He lumbered over to it, picked it up again, and dropped it in. He blinked and breathed in. He looked around and saw many other abandoned things. He snorted.

It was around afternoon now. Two heaps of wet trash were darkening the shores beside the two pools. He sat at the edge of one, dangling his legs atop the pristine water. The clouds fled across the surface while the sun lazily watched them pass. When his sweat had dried, he got up and dumped the heaps into the two garbage bags. He went to his refuse dump.

It wasn’t long until the trash cans were chock-full of it. He needed to find another way to store all the waste. He decided to bag them. However, collecting trash was the easy part; hauling it was harder. Finding a place to dump it was less than hard, but it took a while. At first, he decided to prop them against a wall. After one stormy night, he spent the next day searching for all the windswept bags all over the place. One of them was dangling on a power line.

He decided to ditch them. Before, when he used to take his daily walks, he would come upon a deep hollow on the side of the road, excavated to lay the foundation of a new building. He decided that it would be where he would find his landfill. If it rained, the ground would absorb all the moisture, and if it galed, they would be snug inside the pit.

He went all over the city looking for the things people didn’t want to look at, abandoned by people, forgotten by people, lost by people, thrown by people while they walked or stood, from a motorcycle or a bus or a car, out from windows and out of pockets, rags, shreds, litter, rubbish, junk, offal, droppings, scraps, tatters, clippings, bits and pieces, leftovers, castoffs, leavings, discards, shards, splinters, fragments, detrius, debris, husks, remnants, ruin. He picked what he could, swept what he couldn’t.

Nothing was too vile for him, nothing too little. He put his hand out to everything, gathered them all in his dark sack, and deposited them in the pit.

Days passed. Weeks passed. Years passed. Months passed. Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring. Rain. Hail. Thunder. Lightning. Snow. The universe turned its hands around him, slowly, quickly, invisibly. He, at the centre, watched it turn. And he was alright with it.

It was night now. He plopped the two wet bags into the pit and started for home. His arms were leaden, and his clothes were soaked. Ahead, he saw a light, not from the streetlamps but coming out of an alley, almost like daylight. He reached and looked in. The alley was washed with light as if a sun were right around the corner. He heard the romantic trill of a bird. He smelled the sweet smell of flowers. He thought he heard laughter. Sweet, sweet laughter, beckoning him. He imagined a path round the corner leading out of the city to sunny sky and a green garden. He laid down the rod, went in, and never came out.

The next day, the people of the city came out of their homes, shocked. Suddenly, they saw that their streets, their roads, their lanes, their avenues, their boulevards, their parks, their squares, their highways, their footpaths, their alleys, their wards were neat, and clean, and unlittered. There was a huge commotion in the city, the media were called, and the police came to investigate. They found the foundation trench, the garbage bags, and one irate landowner. Five garbage trucks were called. It took a week to empty the pit.

Nobody found out who did it. Who could do it overnight? The people felt a little conscious after that and tried to keep it clean as they had found it. They rather liked it. And they persevered for a while. But then, a little boy threw away a noodle packet as he came back from school. Seeing that, another threw away his chewing gum wrapper. Soon, the city returned to what it was with its rags, shreds, litter, rubbish, junk, offal, droppings, scraps…