Much later, out of a void passing over itself in silence, there is quietly and surprisingly something small, right there, a little light in the black that soon balloons into a new, weaker cosmos. It is here that Kierk finds himself alone in a strange labyrinth. From a floating aerial viewpoint he watches himself investigate the corridors. How odd that he looks like an animal moving about down there scrounging and foraging for something. Then time passes in jerks and Kierk is suddenly underneath a heavy moving weight, a form. He wrestles it in the dark, something big and horned and bull-faced and huffing as it uses its muscular human body to pin Kierk down as he bats his hands against its wet snout and wide mouth. It breathes onto his face its hot breaths and he feels its human hands searching for his eyes, it wants to jelly his eyes so he cannot see, and then he is running in terror from that center of a labyrinth, running until he emerges into the woods of the city, and there is night coming down now like a great charioteer, whooping as it descends so loudly and then. Kierk can’t find his way out of the city at night like an alien hive looming silent around him until the thing from the maze comes back and it runs him down through the abandoned streets, and it is wrestling him and huffing from its animal nose as it blinds him with its thick thumbs and jellies his eyes and he screams and cannot see and only has the confused tactile sensations of its human limbs and its wet bull face and when Kierk finally awakens he will not remember any of this but will have the feeling that his waking life is only one among his many.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up to the urgent feeling of needing to be somewhere, but not knowing where. How long has it been since he’s woken on a mattress? Then he’s up, remembering the world, rummaging through the shopping bags; he picks out slacks, a belt with matching brown shoes, an olive-green shirt, hesitates over tie color. Swearing because he forgot to buy socks, he uses the ones with huge holes he came with. After dressing and making sure he’s gotten all the tags off he stands in the bathroom trying to wet down his hair. Leaving, he’s careful to blow his cigarette smoke away from the new clothes.

The route to work is from Union Square Park to nearby Washington Square Park and takes him down Broadway. Myriads of smells ride in boats, the sick pine of roasted nuts, the trash blown about, the scent of sweat per-fusing into the air. On Washington Place he finds the blocky brick tower reaching twenty stories, with only small and sparse murder holes for windows. Inside it is dark and cold as a cathedral.