‘Well, stranger,’ I said, and hesitated. I could not think of the right way to explain my reasoning without it sounding horrifying, which I guess it was. He looked at me expectantly. ‘Okay, my friend,’ I finished.

I held out my hand. He laughed and shook it, exactly like the handshake we’d had earlier. ‘Pleasure to meet you,’ he said. I smiled, because it worked so well; it was our little game.

I saluted him and marched home to the hot beat of this midnight, chance encounters, beer encounters, past a Monday bedtime, a summery encounter that could probably have been worse.

I thought of his strangely shaped arms, for all arms are strange, and the neck that moved so formlessly into his chesty front.

‘goodnight :-P’ he texted.

I did not respond.

The last week before Christmas took place in some future world, where everything that mattered had been hurled into tomorrow and the now was an impediment to accessing this fortune. It was a week in which the smallest things – the news, the web, the food – conspired to stall the natural action of the world, and no attempt to eat at noon, pour wine at three or four, or brush my teeth at bedtime could restore its normal motion.

There was no reason to feel like this! I’d finished classes in November and they would not resume till March, so the Christmas–New-Year’s–public-holiday complex should not have held any particular sway. But summer does sort of take you over. I showered that week because I was bored, I showered because I was sticky. We didn’t have a couch, just a table in the kitchen, so I dragged my mattress downstairs and started sleeping in the lounge, in front of the open courtyard door.

I occasionally responded to text messages from the stranger, saying hey, how are you, where are you, what exactly is the plan, all of which I appreciated, this getting in my way, building a relationship through accretion of contact. ‘Can’t today stud!’ I wrote. ‘Busy, busy, busy!’ I didn’t know which was more horrific: another me living in a many-worlds scenario, spookily compelled to actually do all this business, or the real me, who called strangers studs, who used this kind of language.

It was also kind of great that Vivian had asked for my number and used it to do literally nothing. It was fine? There were so many things that mattered in my life that I didn’t think about until I absolutely had to, my Richmond friend being just one recent example, another being a sense of pride and my strength of character, which the lack of texts from Vivian made me instantly trash. Maybe this was the real solution to the Fermi paradox. Why, when there should be many other civilisations up there in outer space, do we here on our little earth seem to be so alone? Maybe it was just that other civilisations were boring, and Vivian-like societies knew we weren’t worth their time.