as you step to the office building, you see that dreadful trio a block off.

Watching you.

The office door swings open. The man who opens it is frazzled, eyes red-edged, scruffed with pale hair that whorls from his cheeks and chin on down his neck. “Come, come,” he says, turning his back to you and stepping deeper inside. He’s so quick that you barely glimpse his face. He holds a phone to his ear and speaks in a frustrated voice—sounds like concerns about a late delivery. “No, no,” he says, “that’s incorrect, I have the tracking number right here, it was insured, I promise you, so if you lost the damned thing—!”

As he barks into the phone, you wait. The room you’ve entered is a messy study of sorts, with greasy windows that peer out onto the avenue, blurring the passing existences. The air is musty in an unpleasantly human way. He leans over a desk, flipping through receipts, arguing numbers and codes. “If this is the cost of business then I tell you I shall not—Aha!” he cries, lifting a slip of paper and triumphantly shaking it in the air as he strides away, passing into a deeper doorway, his angry voice soon fading to dull muffle.

Leaving you alone in his quarters.

The situation stirs a recollection of childhood: once standing in your father’s study, a very rare occasion. He loathed letting you play there amongst his books and his treasures, valuable items you were never to touch; in his absence, you often felt devious and would climb his bookshelf ladder, reaching out to the vast tome on the high shelf, a book that was most off-limits of all, it’s dark leather cover cut with strange symbols like star-signs, constellations. Once you stretched your finger to the cover, tracing the dots and dashes…and just then he came storming back through the office door, sending you, in fright, falling to the floor.

Now you hear a commotion outside and go to the grimy window. Across the street, the girl is playing with a yo-yo, going through a quick series of tricks. The two men whisper to one another, gazing at the office building in which you now stand, both with dark and ominous expressions.

Do they mean to harm the office man? Or … to harm you?

But they’re out there, you’re in here, walls be walls, doors doors, and you’re still a half-step caught in the echo of the memory of your father. Others follow, all those times you lay in the backseat of the car, late at night after the weird cocktail parties. The drive home, after you’d fallen asleep in a stranger’s bedroom. You never recalled your father lifting you from the stranger’s bed and depositing you in the car; you’d awaken to the car’s ship-like sway or as your father braked at a streetlight, so strange, that waking disorientation: to be floating in sleep and to suddenly come to in a small cramped space, in motion, with some bit of dark sky passing above your head. Rumors of constellations. Like a man fallen asleep in a starship. But no, you were only ever you, and you’d sit up and rest your head against the side of the door and gaze up and out the window, the cool night air rushing against your tired eyes. You’d look upon the stars and they would seem to spin there in real time, and the sensation was, if only for a moment, weightless, a floating through the sky.

Until eventually the nauseous quease would come upon you: the stars spinning too fast, the swell of your mind aching, your throat stinging, the turtle-flopping of your stomach.

You’re going to puke again, aren’t you, weasel.

That other voice. In the backseat with you.

Pathetic turd.

Always taunting, always finding satisfaction in your failures. You were helpless to escape, and the voice kept on with its whisperly mocking, the car kept swaying, and you’d try so hard to fight the sick even as it rose up.

Enough with these unsettling memories. Clear your mind of the past: you are here, still, in this odd little office, this strange little town. Look again out the window—in the dock, a ship is sailing off to adventure. Across the street, the suspicious trio has disbanded. And deeper in the building, the office man still yells into the phone.

The desk before is large, wooden, broader than your arms span. Uncapped pens lie about, felt tips withered and cracked. Paperback novels are scattered across it, a selection of so-called classics. Melville, Glaser, McCarthy. Didion, Joyce, Pessoa. Johnson, Borges, Faulkner. Lispector, Beckett. Nabokov, Defoe. Mansfield, Fitzgerald. Several are turned open, or their pages are rippling with dog-ears, many show precise annotations in the margins, little knife-flicks done in a shorthand you can’t possibly decipher. A sole drawer is slightly ajar, and you spy a notebook within. Leather-skinned. Etched designs on the surface.

You glance back—you can still hear the office man arguing into the phone. You pull the drawer and slip out the notebook. The pages teem with whimsical drawings accompanied by that same cutting script. One is an amateurish building design, an old western cabin set out in the desert. Another of a man and a dog on the bow of a ship. A woman sitting on a bus, reading a novel. A couple standing before an enormous tree, the woman’s expression pained. A man at a window, peering out, with a desk behind him that is littered with books–in the corner a telescope points at the floro. A backstage dressing room, tailor at work at a desk, costumes hanging behind him. A galley. A rectangular space dug into earth, two eyes gazing out from its darkness. A man in otherwise darkness outlined by a lit doorway, holding a hand to–or against–the night.

The designs stop, replaced by a series of lists, beginning,

• cardamom (whole)
• coconut cream
• replace outlet box
• cat litter
• unsalted butter
• lotto tix lol
• HR diversity training
• the good flour tortillas
• call about numbness in chest?
• email Tabitha
• pesto
• first pitch at sunset

Page after page of these mundane, random lists. What do they mean? Impossible to know, and happily they too finally end, though what follows is somehow worse: a government report regarding a space exploration program that you’re certain does not exist, followed by a long and detailed résumé for the author of said government report: jobs held, titles of publications you can’t possibly understand, work on nonsensical committees: Liaison to the Subcommittee on Committees. Cross-College Pre-Strategic Planning Guiding Group. Fourth Arm Planning Team, Project Gemini. Acronymic memberships: PAMLA. PEN. PENCIL. Dull hobbies, simply spoken languages, educational background, and of course you speed through this, as well—the office man’s voice has gone silent, but you need to keep going, to understand.

What manner of journal is this? Who would keep such a thing?

The pages thin; the end approaches. A folded paper has been clipped inside one of the final sheets. You unfold it, unfold, unfold—it is surprising in its complex and folded density. Fully opened and spread out, the height and width of the page dwarfs the notebook, covers nearly the entire desk.

It is a map, a map of a world you don’t recognize, inked in many bold colors. At the center an ocean encircles a giant island. The waters are inked blackly, dense with little hashmarks—within the tiny waves lurk dark things. Fins. Sharp teeth. Here Be Monsters. Remnants of a shipwreck upon a rocky shore. A pirate ship sails in the map’s far corner. The detail is tremendous: you can almost see a captain strolling the deck of the ship, can almost hear the plashing waves, feel the ocean pulsing beneath you. On one lonesome beach, a woman seems shipwrecked, perhaps, sitting with her feet in the sand, open book on her knees. She seems at ease, almost calmly looking out from the map, above the pages of the book. Looking at you.

The enormous island stretches nearly to the map’s top and bottom. It is detailed with cities and towns and places of nature, coves and pastures, all flecked with impossible flourishes: in one corner, titled “Hereafter,” a spring lamb suckles at its mother’s teat—you touch your fingertips to the lamb and can almost feel its softly curling wool. Other sections: “Woods.” “Hurricane (Lolita).” “HR Training.” A small town, gloomy and moon-swept, with frightened eyes peering from homes: “American Gothic.” In a cabin in a forest, a woman sits at a desk, staring at a blank sheet of paper, and her reflection in the window stares right back. And more: a bay: “Bay.” “That Train Station.” “Where it All Began,” a coastal forested area, and a path leads from this place to another isolated spot, the path circling narrower and narrower. This one is titled “Where it All Ends.”

The office man reappears in the doorway, phone still pressed to ear. “Leave me be, you wretches!” he shouts into it. You re-fold the map and shove it into the notebook, slide the notebook into drawer. “Of course I don’t want to bundle!” He hurls the phone against teh wall, and it tumbles to floor.

He looks at you, surprised. “Oh. You’re still here? Man, this whole thing. Okay, fine, here we go.” He clears his throat, and now his voice booms.

“Listen to me! We must move quickly! They’re watching every move!”

He steps closer, raising a pocket watch with his right hand—while, you notice, shutting the desk drawer with his left. “See here?” he says, pressing the watch toward your face. “See this hour-hand? When it gets to this spot,” he says, pointing several hours ahead, “all is lost—unless you finish what you came here to do. This is only the beginning. You need to get through this, and there is only way forward.

“Friendo,” he says, “that is, of course, to the left.”

 You look at him, uncertain, and he nods gravely.

“All else leads to death. Though,” he says, “doesn’t life, as well?” He smiles humorlessly. “Do you understand me? Do you know how to follow the rules to the game?” He opens one of the paperbacks, tears out a back page, finds, after several attempts, a pen with fresh ink. He scribbles on the paper, then presses it into your hand. “You will meet many on your quest. But you cannot trust anyone,” he says, “not a single soul. In this world, everything is a lie. Nothing is real.”

He leans close to you, puts his mouth near your ear, and drops his voice to a whisper. “Sorry for the theatrics, it’s all what we’re supposed to say, contractual obligations and what not, of course we say it, plus it heightens the spirit of things.”

He pushes away, pushes you to the doorway, his voice booming once more. “Good luck!” he cries. “And last of all remember, even as you are sensitive to the sufferings of others, even as you try to live a life of truth, to seek equity for all, et cetera, to try at least to enjoy yourself. Have an interesting time! Otherwise, tell me: what is the point? Now go,” he says. And with a firm shove, he pushes you out the door, into the street.

Behind you, a lock falls. Another.

You look around. The sun has set.

Night has come.

You are alone in a strange city.

You can do anything.

What better place to go than back to the beginning?