The next morning, office workers on Floor 31 poured out of the lifts and the stair entrance, marching towards the labyrinth, merging from either entrance and diverging to their respective booths. One way or another, every person in the march reached their respective places without a single backtrack. Such were the ways of this corridor. It was said that the labyrinthine corridors of every floor shifted daily, but in the memory of the office worker they had always stayed the same.

Koscez found himself sandwiched between doleful office workers pressing on under unconscious command, with no extra life in their steps. Early mornings were usually tough for him, especially when he had gone on a bar run the night before. But today was a special day. He wondered whether the labyrinth would lead him to where he belonged in this building. Eventually he lost his way, unable to recognize any of the corridors, until he reached one of the confluence points: the glass office of Dimitri himself.

Koscez thought, ‘Dimitri is probably still pissed. But I want to see him now. Set things straight.’

He set foot into the office. The flowers in the vase were freshly set, a few koi gulped audibly in the wavy aquarium, and documents were stacked haphazardly on the right side of the table, in front of a tall assortment of drawers. And yet the central player was absent. Koscez stepped out and resumed his slow crawl through the building.

Eventually he reached the other confluence point of the labyrinth: the steel room. There he found Andrei leaning back in his leather roll-chair, throwing a ball against the wall at moderate speed. Midway through catching the ball, Andrei got up when he heard the doorknob twist, and let the ball pass by.

“Koscez, you are early. That is an admirable quality. What brings you here?”

Koscez, spooked by a green ball ricocheting around the room, didn’t even process the words. After a delay, he blurted out something to cover the silence.

“Hey, Andrei. I want to get these forms in order! I already got one filled and submitted.”

“Aha, which one would that be?”

“The alien recognition form, B256.”

“Oho, that is a good one. And you have three more forms to fill and process: subterranean classification, alien handling, and extraordinary processing. You will get there.”

Something like joy went through Koscez as he gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. “I will get there.”

“I am expecting good things. Now you may leave.”

A few minutes later, Koscez crossed the threshold of his next stop: Subterranean Classification. The SC form had office numbers printed in the bottom left corner. Koscez had simply followed those instructions and the labyrinth had led the way to cubicle number D54.

“Subterranean Classification. I would like to get a specimen recognized.”

Koscez’s words intruded into a musty space where an old man with deep facial wrinkles, a hooked nose and a pointed chin sat in a blue checkered shirt and black pants. He was slightly hunched over his MS-DOS computer, typing madly on the keyboard, his short legs dangling. Koscez tried again. “Subterranean…”

The clerk raised a single finger, stopping Koscez in his tracks. Koscez glanced around the small space. To his left, a metronome ticked away beside a mess of paperwork and a yellow stress ball covered in permanent squeeze marks.

The clerk finally turned away from his monitor, caught the metronome with his hand and raised his head. “Sorry, this keeps me going. Is that the Subterranean Classification form?”

“Yes,” Koscez replied, handing it over.

“Okay, you want to classify some specimen you found. Slime, jelly, found it in a cave. All fits the description of subterranean. Some kind of vision alteration?” After that he was mostly mumbling.

“Yeah.”

“This is no subterranean material.”

“But how? I found it in an underground mining site!” Koscez simply couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“That does not make it a subterranean specimen. It needs a certain set of characteristics.”

“Like?”

“It needs to exhibit rock-boring or ground-digging capabilities, to name a few. As for the polychrome, that just doesn’t fall under subterranean adaptation. You get me?”

“But wait, my supervisor asked me to get both this and the alien form approved.”

“This and the alien form?”

He exhaled in contempt.

“How can it be both? It is either alien or subterranean. Not both.”

“It is just classification.”

“Sorry, I cannot help you with that. This does not qualify as subterranean material.”

Koscez was lost for words, but he couldn’t give up so easily.

“Maybe you could sign here explaining what you said.”

“Nope. Not my job.”

After which he flicked the metronome, pulled in a deep breath, turned towards the monitor, let out a cowboy whoop and began pounding his fat fingers on the keys. Koscez leaned to see what he was typing, and found, to his horror, the same phrase over and over: “Work is good. BEA is the best alien organization.”

As Koscez scanned the repetitions, he felt the allure of their neat structure and rhythm. Soon the horror thinned, giving way to a desire to merge with the glass, to press his eyes against it. A part of his mind rejected the merger, and he came awake with a jolt from the half-dream. He barged out of the cubicle yelling,

“Who the hell is going to do the forms, damn it!?”

X———————————————————————————-X

“Then, you cannot proceed with the alien handling.”

“But why?”

“That is the procedure.”

X ——————————————————————————— X

“I am sorry. This is not subterranean handling.”

……………..

“No, I don’t deal both with subterranean and alien elements.”

“That’s a waste of time.”

x ———————————————————————————-x

“Sir, sir, please listen, you cannot call it both subterranean and alien at the same time.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“No, no, you are filling two different forms. Only one at a time.”

“Not my problem.”

x———————————————————————————–x

The clock hanging against the satin, reflective walls of the locker room read 1:00p.m. Koscez rested with his mouth agape, his back against the locker and his shoulders sagging, worrying at his problem. All morning he had received nothing but rejections and redirections.

To his left was the slanted mirror, showing a man who looked tired and distraught in a terribly sickening white room with no edges. For a moment Koscez wished the world in the mirror were a parallel one, slightly different, slightly more hopeless than his own so the current one seemed redeemable in comparison. But as he reflexively waved his hand, he snapped back. There was no such world.

“What should I do?” he wondered, dropping his head into his hands.

Only a month ago, drunk, he had found himself uttering those words in front of his friends: “I will become the best alien hunter in this land. I will figure out how my father just disappeared out of nowhere with no word, no contact.”

For twenty years he had never said his father’s name in front of anyone, not even as a curse, though whatever lay under the lid went on mauling it. Only a few weeks before that night, Berez’s father returned to his life in Bor and to his hammering, after ten years missing. He had explained it calmly. “Aliens took me and experimented on me. I escaped from them.” Then he went back to his work.

If one man could be brought back, so could another. Koscez could hardly hold himself: Do it. Find the old bugger. Bring the alien that stole him. Now he could no longer imagine being anything other than the “alien hunter.”

His trucking years in Bor ran through his head like a reel of film. All through them he had kept one line: ‘Even a dying truck has one last kilometer in it.’ He felt it throb in him, the resolve of every battered old truck he had left on the roadside, and he stood up. ‘I must give it one last try.’ ‘I must give it one last try.’

He scuttled into the labyrinth, following its walls towards the object of his interest, the steel room of Andrei, and instead found glass. Inside the glass room was the bald man scribbling in his notebook. Koscez imagined Dimitri’s eyes swinging like a pendulum, scanning the page, until, to his dismay, they lifted and locked with his own. Koscez had not wanted any of this. But there was no more room to retreat, so he swung his legs forward across the floor, marching towards the black door and opening it without missing a beat. He stepped into the room and caught a strong whiff of cigarettes.

“Hey, boss.”

“Hmm. Am I even your boss now?”

There was a long silence, in which Dimitri calmly assessed him. It was perhaps a ruse to let some kind of remorse set in. Then Dimitri spoke.

“So did you complete your paperwork?”

“Not even close!” Koscez blurted.

“Oho, is that anger I hear?”

“Sorry. Nothing works.” Koscez recounted his odyssey: the forms, the several rendezvous with bureaucrats, the refusal of any of it to go anywhere.

Dimitri sighed as if he had expected this charade. “That is why you don’t skip the company’s chain of command.”

“But Andrei let me do this myself.”

Dimitri shot back, “Andrei is my boss, so let me say this. Beware of him and his inefficiencies.” The sentence almost made Koscez retreat in confusion.

“Don’t tell me. Cutthroats are everywhere. These are hindrances to being an alien hunter.”

Dimitri went silent for a second. This time his facial muscles hardened, and he spoke stoically,

“Alien hunter? Are you serious? What a juvenile dream.”

This left Koscez baffled for a couple of seconds. Having lost his way to words, he commanded his lips to part.

“What… what are you saying, Dimitri? This is the Bureau of Extraordinary Affairs, founded by the UN to track down alien-like entities. Why can’t I be an alien hunter?”

Dimitri made a face Koscez had never seen in his life. His lips twisted and puckered upwards, throwing dry jabs with his black, sooty tongue.

“Bureau of Extraordinary Affairs? You think we solve the odd problems of the world. What made you think that? What part of your job don’t you understand?”

“The alien downstairs. Forget about that. I have brought so many aliens to your department.”

Dimitri let out a barely audible snicker.

“Okay. You? How many aliens have you really seen?”

Koscez tried to count them and could not. The silhouettes in his memory diffused as he reached for them. The slime, perhaps. That could be an alien.

“Aliens, hmm… I don’t know.”

And out Dimitri came with a quick reply, as if he had been ready for a while.

“Okay, Sherlock. Think about this. How do you know these are aliens?”

“How do I know? Aliens, aren’t they aliens? They look weird… and alien-like.”

Koscez was truly struggling for words, panting harder with each one.

“Oh! So it looks weird, so it’s an alien. I am sure my uncle, who has an ugly face, is an alien too.”

Koscez could no longer bear the sardonic remarks, and blew up.

“God damn it, Dimitri, who do you think you are? Are you playing games with me?”

Dimitri’s demeanor altered in a second or two, after which he heaved a sigh. “Koscez, Koscez, why don’t you get what the BEA is really about?”

Dimitri was speaking to him the way one speaks to a child.

“Of course I know what the BEA is all about. It is about finding aliens, categorizing them, and using them to make a better world. Everyone in the outside world knows this!”

A storm of words left Koscez’s mouth. Dimitri responded with a flat face,

“Not one person in this office understands this place. You are no different.”

And then sound died suddenly. Even the fish refused to fill the pin-drop silence. The office workday died with a whimper in Koscez’s eyes.

x———————————————————————–x

In place of wallpaper, there were rust and damp brown stains on the wall opposite the entrance, partially hidden behind the neon-lit rack of whiskey and mostly vodka. The bartender grunted under his breath, smacked the table and hunched forward, insisting,

“Koscez, you cannot stay here if you don’t buy another drink.”

The moment his workday had ended, he had pressed the accelerator to nowhere, with Jorge howling from the glovebox the way he always did, and found himself gravitating towards the comfort center of Bor, at least the one he knew. The entrance was encircled by a large arch sign that read “Miri’s Booze Snooze,” which promised more than it should. The place had been remodeled from an old factory warehouse, and the enormous space inside made it somewhere to get lost in rather than somewhere to be comfortable. And yet he often came to hear the sickly advice of Mirislav.

“Mirislav, leave me alone. I already had one. I am not in the mood.”

He retreated behind the counter, slanted his eyebrows, and twisted his lips. “You come to a bar and you don’t drink. What the hell is this? It’s like going to a doctor when you are not sick.”

“I am sorry, Mirislav. I am not in the mood for drinking.”

“There is no such thing as a good mood for liquor.”

Koscez hesitated for a while, and with time, he gave in to Mirislav’s unnatural charm.

“Alright, give me a vodka tonic.”

“Vodka tonic?”

Miri’s expression had returned to its natural state, but Koscez had never known what its natural state was.

“Miri, Miri, don’t ask me questions. I am in a crisis right now.”

“Alright, alright.” He relented, holding his hands up.

There was a long pause in the bar. The background was a cacophony of townsfolk shuffling their glasses, chugging from them, dragging their chairs. In the distance the steel beams creaked as the howling wind pressed on them. It was not a welcoming wind; it was the wind from the mines. Mirislav, on the other hand, was in his own world of vodka and tonic water. After squeezing some lime, he passed the glass to Koscez.

“Here you go. Now you may forget your problems.”

“Yeah. I may… eventually.”

“So your day was not okay?”

Koscez hung his head.

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay…. I will let you drink in peace.”

Koscez sipped his drink, his fingers squeezing the dew from the glass. After a couple of sips he broke the enervating silence.

“Do you ever think that your life has been a joke?”

Mirislav, with his back turned, was washing a glass and wiping it with a cloth. Koscez, thinking the question hadn’t reached his ears, refrained from speaking again. With repeated turns of the cloth the glass came sparkling clean, after which Mirislav spun around and cleared his throat.

“What kind of question is that? Your life is not a joke.”

“It is not a joke. But what if you feel it one day?”

“Then you wait for the next day.”

“It is not like that. Some guy at my work said becoming an alien hunter is stupid.”

Mirislav scoffed at the answer.

“This guy must be stupid himself. Where do you work?”

“BEA.”

“That’s right. Oddities and unnatural freaks are what BEA specializes in. What’s wrong with being an alien hunter?”

“Yeah. That’s what I told him. And then he gave me this look.”

“Like what?”

“This look of a parent. Like the man knows something greater than I could imagine. Condescending and revolting!”

Koscez banged the table, fury bubbling up as the memory resurfaced, and sent a few paper cups flying off the slab. He tried to catch them.

“It’s okay, don’t pick them up. Maybe your boss is jealous of you. You got something going?”

“Yeah. I got this new specimen, I didn’t know what the hell it was, and I showed it to him. He was unhappy, and there comes a new boss who says I did a good job. You should have seen his face.”

Miri’s chubby cheeks lit up; he had hit the mark.

“See, I told you.”

Koscez was about to nod, when he remembered the rest of his trip.

“But then, the other boss let me go in an endless trail of forms and procedure. I couldn’t even get the forms done.”

Miri’s cheeks sagged with every passing second.

“Only then I met him, the first boss. You should have seen his face—he was not the least bit surprised. Like he knew everything. Chain of command, as he said. And the thing about the alien hunter being silly threw me completely off. I am starting to feel…”

Miri let go of his washcloth and got close, as if there were something clandestine to hear.

“What are you feeling?”

There was an aura of hesitation about Koscez, and then he watched Mirislav’s expression shift from intrigued to complete shutdown as the man pulled back from the table.

“You have your friend right here.”

Koscez wished for the right friend. As if in answer, he turned around to see Mirek nodding subtly.

“Hello Mirek. What brings you here?”

“Why can’t a man come to a bar?”

“Mirek, you know this is close to the mines. The mine dust comes in through the windows and settles…”

“Stop before you start your harangue. I am a Bor man, no dust is going to scare me. If anything, I find it soothing.”

Miri joined in.

“Bor’s own Buddha welcomes a little bit of cancer. You should investigate this mystery yourself. Why are we Bor men attracted to the mine? You see, my business would not run otherwise.”

Mirek snickered.

“And I came for this too. Some shot after a depressing day.”

Koscez raised his glass and remarked,

“You are quite the ant. You want to follow a depressing line?”

“That is right, Koscez. Still ants lead simple lives, no stress. How is your stressful life going at the bureau.”

“I have nothing more to say.”

The bartender felt the need to fulfill his role.

“Koscez has been trying to make it work at the company. Pass his weird thing through the bureau. Things don’t work out. Long story short, his boss says he is a weirdo for being an alien hunter.”

There was a maniacal ring from the calmest, sanest member of the Bor Four.

“This strange place of yours is even stranger than I thought. So these guys are not the Men in Black, abducting aliens. Oh, I remember the bootleg copy we watched as children. But what do they do, exactly? I cannot even imagine.”

Koscez scoffed, imagining where the thought was leading. The B.E.A. was nothing close to the M.I.B. There was not even a resemblance. If M.I.B.’s objective was to keep everything clandestine, the B.E.A. kept everything in the open.

“Miri, Mirek, what do you think the B.E.A. does?”

It had all been culminating towards this question. Ever since he left Dimitri’s office, this question has stuck to him like a tick.

“Damn, that’s out of the blue. I know what everybody knows: capture aliens, experiment, and create new technology. There is a branch that tries to contact alien life.”

Mirek add his own.

“Yeah. That would be accurate. Something to add: this is a genuine attempt to build super-advanced technology for humans in general to fight the alien threat if it arrives.”

Koscez, after hearing this paradoxical round of answers, drew a deep breath and let it out in one go.

“I hope to God that is all true.”

And continued further as a murmur under his breath.

“God is probably another B.E.A. property.”

x—————————————————————————x