The Last White Man

by Mohsin Hamid

One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.

Oona was her mother’s mother now, Oona sometimes felt, or maybe mother was not the right word for it, maybe daughter was fine, both words meaning more than she once thought they did, each having two sides to itself, a side of carrying and a side of being carried, each word in the end the same as the other, like a coin, differing only in the order of what face came up first on a toss.

“You’re so beautiful,” her mother said as she was leaving. “You should get a gun.”

Anders was not sure where his sense of threat was coming from, but it was there, it was strong, and once it was obvious to him that he was a stranger to those he could call by name, he did not try to look in their faces, to let his gaze linger in ways that could be misconstrued.

a white man had indeed shot a dark man, but also that the dark man and the white man were the same.

then Anders said that he was not sure he was the same person, he had begun by feeling that under the surface it was still him, who else could it be, but it was not that simple, and the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are,

he just had this sense that it was essential not to be seen as a threat, for to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated.

Anders could perceive how self-righteous they were, how certain that he, Anders, was in the wrong, that he was the bandit here, trying to rob them, they who had been robbed already and had nothing left, just their whiteness, the worth of it, and they would not let him take that, not him nor anyone else.

giant child hugging a tiny parent, reborn into another life, in reverse order, a life where none of the old rules any longer applied.

And in any case the melancholy was fleeting, at least it was fleeting that morning, for the lightness was stronger than the melancholy, the sense that she was escaping a prison she desired to escape, for her life had become fraught, and for so long there had been no way out, there had been that feeling, the feeling that there was no way out, but now it seemed that there might be a way out, that she could shed her skin as a snake sheds its skin, not violently, not even coldly, but rather to abandon the confinement of the past, and, unfettered, again, to grow.

and it was not until Anders took out his phone, a phone he hated in that moment, hating its profanity, the falseness of the distancing it committed against what felt like a sacred immediacy, it was not until he held that slab of glass and metal and its screen lit up and he sought to operate it one-handedly, or one-thumbedly, really, that he started to cry, and he wept so hard and so loud that it surprised him, and made him want to shush himself,

Anders’s pale father was the only pale person present, the only pale person left in the entire town, for there were by that point no others, and then his casket was closed and his burial was occurring and he was committed to the soil, the last white man, and after that, after him, there were none.