Shaky footage circulates online of a group of urban explorers documenting their journey deep into the heart of the quarantine zone. In the streets the wind whistles as it passes through lanes of empty cars, echoing as it bounces off looted storefronts. They scale the stairwell of an office building and shoot a panoramic view of the city from the roof. Pillars of smoke rise high into the sky all around them, and though they call out there isn’t another living soul for miles. Within a week they post a video update. Half of them are sick with the illness. Their faces bloated, their eyes shot red.

In a matter of hours they too will be gone.

XXI

‘I think a lot about that poor boy on the highway,’ Simone says during our next session. She’s not alone. I think about it in the twilight before sleep takes me. His skin as thin as parchment. His furious heart. ‘It’s such a terrible way to die,’ she says.

‘Is that what you think is happening?’ the therapist asks.

Simone fumbles with her hands. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it death, I wonder, or is it a metamorphosis?’

‘A metamorphosis?’

‘Is it truly outside the realm of possibility that the illness is not destroying the mind at all, but rather transmuting the body?’

‘Is that not a kind of death?’ I ask. ‘The end of one existence in exchange for the beginning of another?’

I try to imagine the act of disappearance as a phase transition. That the dead are transmuting their bodies to become part of some shared, communal consciousness. But it feels like science fiction. I think of metempsychosis. The concept of reincarnation. The seemingly endless redistribution of cosmic energies.

‘Saprotrophic nutrition,’ the therapist says. ‘That’s what they call it in nature. The concept of one life nourished by the death of another.’

‘So you do believe it’s a kind of death?’ Simone asks.

‘I believe it depends on your definition of a person.’

‘My father used to say that people were the sum of the choices they made,’ Simone says.

‘Do you agree?’ the therapist asks.

‘I believe that a person is a house occupied by those they have met and loved. That in order to live a person must parcel themselves up and give parts of themselves away. To be carried by others and to live elsewhere, in other houses,’ Simone says.

I close my eyes and wonder, like so many others, where the dead go.

There was a time when I took solace in the belief that our existence would be perpetuated by Phineas’s memory of us. That we would continue to live long after death in his collective past. But now I feel only a terrible burden. Our intimacies seem inextricable. I alone carry parts of him, just as Simone carries her own remembrances. Pieces of him will be lost with us, just as pieces of us were lost with him.

I think for a moment about the day he lost his first tooth.