Arthur lived in a white cube of an apartment on the 42nd floor of a tower in Midtown Manhattan. The walls were a sterile, blinding white; the furniture was a collection of geometric shapes that served no purpose other than to look expensive. He lived with his mother and two aunts, three women who had become as static and colorless as the walls around them.

Outside, the world was ending. Not with a bang, but with a slow, tedious leak. The global economy had entered a terminal decline, and the city was gradually emptying. People didn't flee in panic; they simply stopped appearing. First, the delivery drivers vanished. Then the taxi cabs. Then the noise.

Arthur watched it all with a profound, clinical boredom.

"The milk is sour, Arthur," his mother said one morning, her voice a flat line.

"Yes," Arthur replied, staring at a single speck of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight. "Everything is sour."

He began to keep a diary of the decay. He recorded the exact date the elevators stopped working. He noted the precise moment the water pressure dropped to a trickle. He described the way his aunts' skin began to resemble parchment, their conversations becoming a series of repetitive loops about a summer in the Hamptons in 1984.

He found it funny. The sheer absurdity of their insistence on maintaining "decorum" while the world dissolved around them was the only thing that gave him pleasure. He would watch his aunt Beatrice arrange dead flowers in a crystal vase, and he would laugh—a dry, hacking sound that echoed in the empty halls.

One day, the power went out. The white cube became a grey tomb.

Arthur sat in the dark, listening to the silence. He realized that he had spent his entire life waiting for something to happen, and now that the end had arrived, it was the most boring event of his existence.

He walked to the window and looked out at the skyline. The lights of the other towers were blinking out, one by one, like dying stars. He felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to sneeze, but he suppressed it. He didn't want to disturb the perfection of the void.

He lay down on the cold floor and waited for the dust to cover him, thinking that, in the end, the only honest thing about humanity was its ability to be completely irrelevant.

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