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 about the edges, 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 into the room. You barely glimpse his face. He holds a phone to his ear and speaks in a frustrated voice—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 is messy, a study of sorts, greasy windows that peer out onto the avenue, blurring the passing existences. The air is musty in an unpleasant human way. He leans over a desk, flipping through receipts, arguing about numbers and codes. “If this is the cost of doing business then I tell you I am not—Aha!” he cries, and he lifts a slip of paper, triumphantly shaking it in the air as he strides away, passing into another deeper doorway, his angry voice 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 rare occasion in which he left you there amongst his books and his treasures, things 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, the book most off-limits of all. The cover dark leather cut with strange symbols like constellations. You stretched your finger to the cover, tracing lines between the dots and dashes…and just then he came storming back through the office door, sending you, in fright, falling to the floor.

You hear a small 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 seem to whisper to one another, gazing at the office building in which you now stand with darkly ominous expressions.

Do they mean to harm the office man?

But they’re out there, you’re in here, still in the echo of that memory of your father. All those times you sat in the backseat of the car, late at night after 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, depositing you in the car; you’d awaken to the car’s driving sway or as your father braked at a streetlight, so strange, that waking disorientation: to be floating in sleep and then to suddenly come to in a small cramped space, and in motion, with some bit of dark sky passing above your head. Rumors of constellations. 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, for a moment, weightless, of floating through the sky.

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.

Another voice. In the backseat with you.

You pathetic turd.

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

Try to clear your mind of the past: you are here, still, in this odd little office, this strange little town. Look—there, in the dock, goes a ship off to adventure. The suspicious trio outside has disbanded. Yet deeper in the building the office man yells into the phone.

The office man’s desk is large, wooden, broader than your arms span. Uncapped pens lie about, felt tips withered and cracked. Paperback novels are scattered across it, an odd smattering. Melville, Glaser, McCarthy. Didion, Joyce, Pessoa. Johnson, Borges, Faulkner. Lispector, Beckett. Nabokov, Crusoe. Mansfield, Fitzgerald. Several are turned open, pages rippling with dog-ears, many with precise annotations in the margins, like little knife-flicks done in a shorthand you can’t possibly decipher.

A sole desk drawer is slightly ajar—you spy a notebook within. Leather-skinned. Etched design 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 features whimsical drawings accompanied by that same cutting and impenetrable 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 man at a window, peering out, with a desk behind him that is littered with books. 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 a doorway, holding a hand to the night.

The designs stop, replaced by a series of mundane lists:

            On one page—

            cardamom (whole)

            coconut milk

            kitty litter

            unsalted butter

            lotto tix lol

            On another—

            HR diversity training

            call about numbness in chest

            email Tabitha

            first pitch at sunset

Page after page. What do the lists mean? Happily they too finally end, but 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 seemingly 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.

Of course you speed through this, as well—the office man’s voice has gone silent, but you need to keep going. 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 density. Fully opened and spread out, the height and width of the page dwarfs the notebook, covers nearly the entire desk.

Consider it carefully.

It is a map, inked in many bold colors, a map of a world you don’t recognize. 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 soft and curling wool. Other sections, as well: “Woods.” “Hurricane (Lolita).” “HR Training.” A small town, gloomy, 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—her reflection in the window stares right back. And more: a bay: “Bay.” “That Train Station.” “Where it All Began,” a coastal forested area.

A path leads from this place to another isolated spot, the path circling narrower and narrower. This one is titled “Where it All Ends.”

Suddenly 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. “Of course I don’t want to bundle TWENTY-FIVE DIFFERENT PACKAGES!” He hurls the phone across the room, and it hits the wall, tumbles to floor.

He looks at you, surprised. “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 the 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. “It’s all just what we’re supposed to say, of course we say it, heightens the spirit of things.”

Then 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. And 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 to than the beginning?