e puts down the glass. Thinking back, after the first divorce, wasn't there a night like this? He was sitting in a ten-dollar chair then, a blanket across his lap, an electric fan-heater heater under, blowing air around his thighs. Then he was trying to read Knut Hamsen. One morning he was violently sick.

The apartment is bare, the walls a cheap cream over stains. There was a suicide here—Hemingway style—and the walls are still spotted fawn beneath the yellow. Joe sees a mute fernspray of someone else's despair.

The room is dull and cold, the floor a linoleum he wouldn't want to lift, his chair, and in the corner, the desk, the computer—he hasn't touched a key for two days. On screen, grey European cityscapes swap themselves in and out, bloom and die, float away or pixelate themselves into oblivion, knowing they will be back shortly, their cycle fixed.

Once Joe wrote stories. He'd been almost famous, had a wife, two children, sunlit views from their place in the country. Now he tried not to think of all that. Now he tried to surf the waves of darkness, as if there was a way of skimming things until the daylight. It just required great balance.

Outside, house, apartment blocks. Joe knows this is not a real city of the night, there is no clean well-lit place he can sit. One by one as he watches, lights go out. They are not lights until most are gone. All alight they are simply the city; but when they go, blips not seen to blip—in thousands of lights can you see one go out?—they slip away silently.

But Joe knows tricks now, how to take extra time pouring his scotch, how to be meticulous in the addition of his just-so-much Canada Dry, how to lift the glass and turn it slowly with the bare bulb behind, how to savour that only-this mix of pleasure and pain, golden, perfect.

Then the sip, the theatrical ah, like again he's facing down a spittle-flagged attack, the long slowhate grin—Jack Nicholson in The Shining—and he looks outside.

Joe sees lights go out like other people see children grow. He understands you have to look away for it to happen. Joe has looked away, through the spin of his drink, and now there are fewer yellow squares. Later in the sequence Joe knows there may be patterns. Once, complete with forked hypnotic tongue, the remaining lights were a cobra, once he thought he saw a brilliant exclamation mark, but it was spoiled by some jerk on the thirteenth floor, who went to bed early. Tonight, at least so far, there are just lights, but in the block across the street, top left, is the light he always sees late in his dark mornings, still there if he rises from the computer, when he isn't typing (too often now) or when he rolls out to piss in the awful bathroom. Now he nods towards the light, a mark of respect.

On the floor, something from a take-away, bones, a little skin, a waxed paper tray. Joe sees it as the telephone rings and he prickles with anxiety and hope before he realises, the telephone is not in the next room but the next apartment. He doesn't have a telephone.

He throws off the blanket, gets up, picks up the tray of carrion, goes through to the lit kitchenette. This is one light he never turns off. A week ago Joe turned it on and the stove was black with roaches and he was sick. The roaches were gone before he looked up but he knew certain as death he could never face that shimmer of filth again.

Now, he doesn't know why—maybe it's thinking of the roaches—Joe has the urge to blitzclean the kitchen. He sets to with scouring powder, rags, water, and burnishes, scrapes, with a manic need to make something happen, to be above. Fifty minutes later his hands are red and sore, his face stinging, and deep in his eye a wrong sensation from a splash of something.

Joe has surprised himself. He almost feels good. He thinks maybe he'll have coffee before his last drink. When he sees his reflection in the window, his thin-in-a-year face, eyes which once burned women, for a change he laughs and tosses a screwed up cloth at his transparent self.

He walks back into the other room as the coffee brews. As he passes the PC he flicks the mouse to kill the screen-saver and

sees, in one corner of a staring page, grinds my eyes.

It's now Joe looks out, out at the lights. There are just four! Four! He can't believe it. As he gasps on this new low, four become three, the going now so momentous he imagines the dark resonates. Then he thinks, that window, or was it that one? Suddenly he realises, few windows unlit, leave their mark.

He turns to the computer again. Under the one line he writes, eyes, and under that, lights; grinds my eyes, eyes, lights.

Joe picks up the whisky, looks out at the grinding night, the lights, eyes, hears the splatter of coffee in the kitchen. He is holding the empty whisky glass when he sees two lights go off as if flicked dead with the same switch. Now there is just the one light across the way, top left, the writer's window. He knows it's a writer's window.

It's now that fear and joy hit him. It's as if he is looking into a chimney, down, down, into a crashing, sucking, frothed sea. What if top left switches off? What if?

Joe knows, somehow he knows that there are just two lights left in the city. He breathes, he who once was nearly famous, had a wife, two children. And the writer across the way, she eats and sleeps and shits, has a ten-dollar chair, can't afford to love. How does he know her? He simply does. Joe knows she is the sting and him the wasp, or he is her gut. Either way they need each other, are dead without.

He cannot wait to see her light go out, but she cannot be the last light. He goes into the kitchen, turns the switch, let's the roaches run for a night. Now he goes back and looks out. The yellow of her window still glows, burns, throbs. He stares, imagining. He can feel her deep breathing—she hasn't been looking after herself, she writes poetry he won't understand—and now he knows. She is waiting for his light to go out.

Joe would never do that to her. He stares.

"I would never do that," he says.

But to be the last light, the absolute, one-alone, falling, last light, that he can't face. He chooses bed and will sleep beneath the covers.

Joe leaves his light on. For her—he decides her name is Ann—unless it's something foreign. Tonight he has given Ann his light and slept under cover. Tomorrow he will finish something, then go and find her.

© Alex Keegan