It was difficult being dead. Not in the dramatic, ghostly sense - no chains rattling, no unfinished business echoing through the ether. Just difficult in the way being alive had been: a slow, aching kind of monotony. It was strange. He could still be seen by other people. He didn't even look dead. But, of course, he was.

The concrete walls of the bathroom where he’d once screamed himself hoarse were long gone, but the silence remained. And really, death wasn’t all that different. The same stale air. The same gnawing sense of being forgotten. The same need to fill the void with something - anything.

He lit a cigarette with the same cheap lighter he’d been using for years, the plastic casing dulled and scratched. "Oh, what would I do without you?" He snorted. The flame caught, and he drew in the smoke like it owed him something.

The apartment smelled like old pizza boxes and mildew, but the cigarette cut through it, sharp and familiar. He sat on the edge of his unmade bed, ashtray balanced on a stack of unpaid bills, and stared at the wall where a poster of Pitbull Daycare hung crooked, curling at the edges. It had been there before the whole Jigsaw thing. Before the camera gigs dried up. Before he stopped answering calls.

Outside, someone was yelling. Inside, the radiator clanked like it was trying to escape. Adam didn’t care. He blew smoke toward the ceiling and watched it swirl, soft and aimless. The bathroom door creaked open on its own - probably the draft again - and he glanced at it, half-expecting to see a puppet on a tricycle. But there was nothing. Just cracked tiles and a mirror that hadn’t been cleaned in months.

There was a knock at the door - three deliberate raps. Adam froze mid-cigarette, eyeing the door as if it might sprout teeth. He exhaled slowly, smoke curling around his head like a lazy ghost. “If that’s rent,” he muttered, “tell it I’ve moved to China.” He stood up, stretched, and shuffled toward the door with all the enthusiasm of a man about to meet either a bill collector or a cult recruiter.