I looked up, but back over the road, in my new friend’s apartment, the many square windows were reflective and closed. I turned and there he was, the source of the shouting. Two hands gripped the bricked sill of the art deco apartment, the face hidden by darkness up on the second floor. The sun was high and bright, and long white gauzy curtains were billowing on either side of the figure out of the wide window.

‘Hello?’ I called up.

He said nothing back.

Even though the figure was obscured by the glare, I somehow knew from his posture and other absorbed details that it belonged to Vivian, the man from Fitzroy Pool. I had the skin-crawling feeling of this not making sense, before my brain did the correcting work of normalisation that accompanies and smooths over coincidence. How could Vivian live across the road from my new friend, the stranger? But in a way, of course he did, because Melbourne was sometimes small, and of course I would leave the house for the first time all year and instantly run into basically the only other person I knew. It was a busy road, bordered by a million apartments. It would be evidence that we lived in a simulated world if it did not contain coincidences like this one.

I looked across the road to check that my other friend was not back at his window, smoking away, but the sun shone so brightly off the phalanx of windows that anyone could have been watching and I would never know. At least none of them seemed like they were open.

‘Am I meant to go up there?’ I asked.

But I was asking nobody; Vivian was gone.

Even though this was very apparitional and alluring, it also wasn’t actually very helpful at all. I stood there for a long time, examining the brickwork and flexing my shoulders, waiting for further instructions. When none came, I walked the bike over and tried the glass door, which was unlatched, potentially forever, because I hadn’t heard the click of somebody buzzing me up.

I left the bike under the stairs and climbed them. It was not a large building and I could guess the location of Vivian’s apartment door.

‘Hello?’ I called into the door. No answer behind it.

I wondered if I should knock, but you did not need experience to understand the nature of this simple game.

I pushed the door open.

‘Hi,’ he rasped.

Vivian lounged in the far corner in a pair of sweatpants, with his feet kicked up on a coffee table, his back sunk in a couch’s crevices. Just to add more skeeze, he was looking at his phone. The room belied the awesome brightness of the world outside; the curtains had stopped billowing and hung sheet-like out the window, gaining their own grubbiness by settling against the grimy outside wall. Between them was a slit of sky, and just the candy edge of my friend’s apartment block, one of the blue cartoon chunks that topped the silver building.