You begin gulping the iced coffee, stifling the urge to flee the café. There is nowhere you can go. Even if you went to the farthest library, you would still be trapped in your apartment consciousness. Even if you boarded a plane to fly across the country—across the world—you would manage to transform the passenger cabin into your apartment. You experience a fleeting vision of yourself on the moon, sitting crosslegged with your laptop alone in that white wasteland, and it is an image not of escape but of imprisonment. Even there, you understand, you would be in your apartment: the moment you set foot on its lunar surface, it would become an apartment moon, a one-bedroom moon, its cratered landscape carpeted over with your apartment’s carpet. No, you think, finishing the iced coffee and drumming one foot against the deck. The moon is not far enough because nowhere is far enough. There is no minimum physical distance you can travel that will suffice to access an outside. There is no apartness from your apartment now. Everywhere is your apartment. The apartment is involute, endless, all perimeter: a kind of radical closure. Even when you are outside it, you are inside it, because it is inside you. You have internalized its thousand square feet of space, and now, wherever you go, you are there. The bedroom. The living room. The kitchen. Like any ghost, haunted by this space that you died in, you are halfway between a hermit crab and a hologram: the apartment is both the shell you carry around yourself and the spectral image you project onto all your surroundings. Your heart starts pounding at this thought, and you look around you at the café courtyard, at this so-called café courtyard. Darting your eyes from left to right, you survey the scene for any evidence that you have actually left your apartment. There are other patrons sitting at the wrought-iron tables, lifting white demitasses from white dishes; there is a finch perched on the splintered banister, regarding you with an eye as impassive and black as a security camera; there is a grass-green anole crawling across one of the planks of the deck, its head raised as if tracking prey; there are ashtrays; there are palm trees and chairs, dead leaves on the ground, you are to all outward appearances sitting in the courtyard of a neighborhood café, but still, nevertheless, you can just make out—flickering transparently over everything—the image of your bed, your desk, your bookcase. You never left, you think, pushing the empty glass away from you. You never succeeded—not even for a second—in getting out from under the ceiling of your apartment. It will always be like this, you think. It will always be like this. As if in despair, your laptop screen goes dark with sleep, and you do not move a finger to the keyboard to wake it. You stare beyond the dull screen, down to the deck, where the anole is still crawling forward, making slow progress.