What is 'commute'?

He opens the door and sits down in the four-wheeled steel-and-plastic conveyance in the driveway. The metal stick feels familiar in his hand and he has the sense that he must insert it in an aperture and turn it. He does so and the field before him blazes to life. All manner of digital numbers and symbols start to glare—rpmx100, mph, mpg, AM, FM, E, F. He gasps at the sudden display, now remembering a distant past when they would have meant something to him.

What to do next? Another atavistic memory surfaces from the mire: He seems to remember executing a pulling action with his right arm on some sort of pole. He pulls the gearshift. But what letter? “R” sounds vaguely familiar, so he chooses that and the car moves backward into the street. From muscle memory, he shifts to “D” and begins to drive.

For the first few blocks, he is comfortable. These are the same streets he would take to run errands to the supermarket or other places during the pandemic. Then he moves into stranger territory. A bit up the highway, he sees a sign saying, “Welcome to” but doesn’t catch the rest of it. Penn-something. Pennslaw? Pennvain?

Regardless of the name, he knows he’s somewhere he only traveled in the dim miasma of memory. The numbers look strange: 202, 1, 926. He has vague memories from the Before Times of crawling up the highway in annoyance behind frequently braking cars under a white sky framed by skeletal tree branches. Now under a blue sky with a pleasant breeze, he drives unimpeded.

Where did everyone go?

Passing the last of the traffic lights, he reaches the highway. It comes back to him: Angry mornings idling behind People Who Can’t. Accidents blocking lanes. Signs telling him how long it would be to get to his destination. People slamming on the brakes for every snowflake or raindrop. They have all gone somewhere else and he drives in bliss.

He reaches the building at 8:03. This seems strange to him, like the numbers are reversed. He vaguely remembers 8:30, stomping through the door in annoyance after being stuck on the road for an hour. Now it’s just 35 minutes.

Out of instinct, he reaches for his key card in the glove compartment. He walks into his office, finding it only by virtue of his name on the door. Aside from pictures of his family, it seems strange to him. Four walls and a beat-up chair. Papers on the wall with important deadlines and phone extensions. Did he really used to sit here editing for eight hours a day? Now few people roam these halls.

He sets up his laptop and monitor, sits down and checks his email. Life is slightly closer to how it used to be.