He had to be certain, even though you couldn’t ever be certain of something like this, and so he went searching through the tiny galaxy of his apartment that revolved around a sun about to supernova, and he looked under the bed and through the pile of dirty clothes in the corner, and as talking heads floated across the television screen, he adjusted the antenna to even the balance of the axis of his world, and when the talking heads told him that maybe he ought to try looking in the refrigerator, he did, but all he found there were a few jars of formaldehyde and a strange smell that crawled down his throat and wrapped around his gut in a tight fist, and he recalled that he hadn’t eaten that day, or the day before, or, judging by the boniness of his wrist and the loose skin, in the many days preceding that, but he wasn’t really hungry and hunger didn’t seem to matter because all that mattered was that he would figure out once and for all what he’d been suspecting for a long time now, ever since his roommate moved out anyway, or ever since he found the note behind the radiator, or, no, it was ever since the black hole appeared in his living room, yes, that was it, and when the tree started growing in the hole he was almost sure, and when the tree sprouted buds and flowered and fireflies flew out of the blossoms and nested in his cupboards, laying eggs that eventually hatched into tiny alligators that he flushed down the toilet, and that would somehow make their way back to his plumbing system someday but when they did he would be ready for them with the flame-thrower that he had misplaced a few days ago after dealing with the termites, though he hadn’t caught them in time and they had managed to eat away at the entire outer wall so that the city could now watch him bathe, assuming that he did occasionally bathe, which he didn’t do very often for fear that a few alligators would mature early and climb up through the drain to pull him down into it, yanking him into their dimension and away from the sweet ticking of the clocks lining the walls, which were now out of sync and needed to be fixed soon, because within a few hours of this arrhythmic ticking his heart would get confused and stop, which he didn’t suspect would be a good thing because he really wanted to be certain before it was his time to disappear, and he was so close he could taste it with the tip of his tongue as he periodically licked at the air, and just now he thought he could taste a slight difference in the vicinity of the bedroom and so he ambled toward the pile of trash and dug with his foot until he felt it with his toes, and before he bent down to pick it up and find out for sure if he was right or not, as he happened to glance out the window, the sun exploded.