That morning, due to a power outage, he made his way through his routine in the dark. He relied on the shapes in his mind: his double bed and his dresser, where his wallet and keys and Swiss Army Knife sat in a bowl with random junk from his pockets, the track door closet, his work shirts then his work pants then his casual clothes, his narrow bathroom, toothbrush in a holder on the right, the big plastic bottle of Listerine, the sideboard down the hall that held his cups and dishes, the kitchen counter, the low, wide blown glass bowl with the Fuji and Gala apples he ate for breakfast, the wood stand where he put his soft office Oxfords, his sneakers, his dirty white canvas high-tops, and his almost new hiking boots to keep the street dirt out of his house.

He saw only as much as he could see in the ambient light of the city at night-time as it came through his windows, the sliding porch doors and the kitchen. Outlines, mostly, and lightly colored planes of familiar texture.

The acoustic environment of his apartment was foregrounded in the same way a painting of an orange in a bowl is more interesting than the fruit in a bowl. The bowl, in life, he thought, is often more beautiful and interesting than the fruit. He loved his bowl. He’d spent sixty dollars for it at an antique shop. Thick, heavy blue glass in an amoeba shape. It might outlast him.

There was the thrumming of the refrigerator. The thump, think, thud of a step, one floor up, out of the upstairs neighbor’s unit, and down the apartment building’s central hall. He wondered if that gurgling and whooshing of water through the pipes in the walls was always there. He noticed the tinnitus in his right ear, minor, or maybe it was the sound of something electronic over there, in the living room. This was not always entirely distinguishable.

He noticed the picture he had formed in his mind when he had almost finished his transit out. The way he omitted the windows, and his handful of family photographs, his framed bus stop movie posters. All the colors of things converted to burning, pointillistic green. Was he imagining something other than his apartment without realizing it? He realized he was thinking of things in terms of night vision goggles.

Coffee, he thought next, big coffee.

Two days later, before dawn, he did it again.

Not out of necessity but out of interest, he made his way through.

He kept his eyes closed. The points formed in his mind. The fuzz of light.

He turned off the green, the points of tone.

He tried to make it pure.

He imagined himself bat-like, with a highly cultivated sense removed from the primary human one, sight.

He intentionally suppressed the interior rendering.

It was a form of perception which would mainly engage the mind.

The next day he walked through his apartment to fit the space more vividly into his new mental sense. He tried to make his way through once more, with his eyes closed, and he did.

He stopped.

He saw the amber color of the back of his eyelids in the black of the dark.

He wondered if he was really seeing eyelids, or it was just residual light, fading. He wanted his eyes but he didn’t want to spoil the experiment with true images.

He started again.

He touched the wall as he moved and felt the texture of the beige paint. He remembered, as a kid, swimming to the bottom of the pool, and feeling the paving of the bottom, the brushed texture, and the pride of being all the way at the bottom of the deep end. He felt the pile of the carpet giving, in the direction of his stride, under his dress socks. Like a mirror that functions in all the normal ways a mirror does but also has depth, a y-axis, was how he described it to himself, the new sense.

He turned the doorknob. He felt the underfoot spread of the doormat. It didn't crush like carpet. It was wide, in a way, and scraped at his foot. He opened his eyes.

He laughed.

The next day he woke up. He closed his eyes.

The next morning he smacked his toe.

He’d misjudged the edge of the sideboard, which jutted slightly out of the corner it was pushed into. The toe bothered him all day. The toe pulsed hotly in his shoe when he sat. The toe felt his thin sock when he moved with a kind of rage. His sock was an elastic condom for his toe’s rage.

Later, he looked at the toe in the shower. Bruised. Scabbed.

He leaned over. The shower pounded his shoulders. The water dropped thickly down. There was a bruise, but the nail wasn't broken. He flexed the toe. Pain, but normal movement.

He toweled. The towel smelled musty.

He stopped in the hallway on the way to his bedroom. A drop of water hit the floor. He wasn’t a neat person, he knew. But he lived alone.

He felt the pain in the toe throbbing. Each throbbing had an expansion, like a balloon, that he could picture in his mind. The balloon expanded out, beyond the limit of his toe. In this way he discovered the sense of his own feelings was not fixed to his sense of his body. He thought of remote viewing and telekinesis. The sensations of his body could have no limit. He wondered if this was the source of a ghost—somebody’s sensation exceeding their body and disturbing things, or lingering on, without the personality, or without the sequence of causation that makes them continuous and allows them to conclude.