The gigantic, pristine walls of the Bureau were not appealing or mystifying today, only crushing. Koscez trudged along the corridors of the labyrinth, which on a regular day would guide him, but to his chagrin he could not muster a proper mental image today. A hundred morning bells tolled mercilessly inside his skull. The white walls seemed to catch every scrap of energy from the ceiling lamps hung far above and hurl it back at him, flooding his pupils with so much light it almost incapacitated him as he set foot into the office building. His lids fluttered weakly against it, barely keeping him from surrendering to the darkness altogether.

The day before had been one of his worst benders. It had started, as these things always did, with one vodka tonic. Then the quality of the liquor plummeted and the quantity multiplied. He had no memory of when consciousness had slipped away from him, only that somehow he had woken in his own room, safe and sound.

What angels had arranged such a fate?

Despite the nausea churning in his stomach and the heavy torpor weighing down his limbs, he dragged himself toward the bureau doors. One final showdown. One final day at work, he decided.

If it did not work today, it would never work.

He himself didn’t know the source of his nerve; perhaps it was the dulling of his senses. And yet his legs carried on, dragging him from one cubicle to the next as if they had a destination of their own.

“A251. I see it again. Damn. I am going in circles. I should probably take some rest.”

He leaned against the cardboard walls separating him from the strange rhythm of this place. With every bead of perspiration the phantom voices seemed to grow louder: faint whispers leaking from the cubicles, footsteps scraping along the other aisles, and, perhaps, the occasional burst of maniacal laughter. The alcohol still coursing through him dulled the panic, blunting the edges of everything that should have frightened him. Right there and then he gave up on finding answers the hard way. He chose instead to invade cubicle A251 and demand an answer.

“I want an answer! Right now.”

A square-jawed, spectacled man started and got up from his desk. The name tag on his shirt read “Nikolas Sarkowski.”

“What answer?”

“What the heck is going on in BEA?”

“What?”

“Why am I going around in circles? This form, that form.”

“Did you fill out the right forms?”

“Yes, I did. I filled everything that has to be filled. And the offices don’t accept the forms.”

“Can I look at it?”

Koscez slammed down the rolled-up papers he had clutched ever since he stepped out of his truck. His stomach lining was flaming with acid, the vitriol morphing into words. The nausea was setting up for a vigorous expulsion, yet he held it back. The office worker straightened the roll and read the papers closely. He whispered something and let out a deep breath.

“Hmm. I see. There is a confusion here. Is it alien or subterranean? You are at the right spot, the conflict resolution corner.”

“What is it then? I need resolution.”

“That is a tough one. It can be both, or neither.”

Koscez grated his teeth together, ready to turn the cubicle upside down. Sensing this, Nikolas straightened up.

“It is neither.”

“Then, what the hell is it?”

“That I can’t tell… I mean, I don’t know.”

“So where can I go? Which part of the BEA will help me with these stranger things?”

Koscez felt the lamp grow hotter by the minute as Nikolas retreated into thought and muttering. Then the muttering resolved. “I have one. There is one way. But it’s risky.”

“Risky how?”

“It lies outside the Bureau’s jurisdiction. It provides answers, but one cannot expect what it will show. Some don’t even return to the BEA.”

Koscez’s heartbeat raced and he gulped.

“Something even stranger will happen in this office? Stranger than this whole building?”

“Yes.”

Koscez was not sure whether he was ready for a twist in his life. In his drunken stupor, though, the truth would be mercy; the itch had been too strong for too long. He gathered every ounce of courage he had in reserve and declared,

“Yes, I would like to do it.”

Nikolas snuck his hand into one of his drawers and thrust a large red button onto the table. He gave the instructions,

“Close your eyes, think of a question you would like answered, press the button and open your eyes.”

What a strange set of instructions, Koscez thought. He had several questions, how could he press the button without looking? But he reminded himself where he was: thinking was useless, only procedure mattered.

He closed his eyes. A part of his mind that he had kept frozen all through the office thawed and buckled under the number of questions coming up, each one hoping to be the one asked. There were too many. He was about to ask Nikolas whether he could ask more than one, when he remembered his routine on the long drives. Whenever he felt overwhelmed out there, he stopped burning through his brainpower and let his gut work the accelerator, and went wherever the road led him. This felt like one of those roads, amid the frenetic movement of metal and tyres, with too many turnings to choose between.

To his gut, there was one question. A simple one, though it might be a difficult one to answer.

He smashed the button.

His eyes opened onto a world with several components missing. For one, Nikolas was gone. The place had become deader and quieter, with none of the showers of light from overhead. Koscez realized then how the general glare had masked the office, the whole bureau, from showing what a misfit this place really was. He peeked out of the cubicle into the corridors, looking for anything that would keep this place from seeping into him. But there was no one. His teeth began to chatter in the dark, and his skin gained a layer of chill, that send shivers down his bones.

In this low-light grayish world of empty lattices and sparkling clean office floors, there was a surge of reddish brightness in one of the western corners. In the silence, the small things had become dominant – the tick of the bulbs in each cubicle, the whirring of the fans. And worst of all, he felt that there were eyes everywhere. Who was watching him? The office? Or someone else? Naturally, his legs gravitated towards the spot, towards the one smudge of brightness on the dark canvas. Within minutes he found the culprit: an emergency exit light burning above a beryl-green steel door.

The signs couldn’t have been clearer, as if a gameshow host was trying so hard to show him where the answer was. The truth was behind that door. Pushing it gently with anticipation, he peered through. There was a descending, swirling staircase. Koscez felt the urge to leave the office premises immediately, and descended with utter care, since the limited light from the bulbs would not let him see his feet shuffling down the stairs. Soon he reached the bottom and pushed out through the door. He recognized the decorum of the place outside: dull brownish walls, high ceilings even more inaccessible than the office’s. In spite of there being no lamps in sight, he could make out the wavy tiles on the floor. It was the ground floor itself. More conspicuous than the walls was a “door”, two slices of earth thrust agape, fixed to the wall on hinges so gigantic that Koscez could hardly fathom them.

Even though Koscez had grown weary of opening doors and visiting cubicles, this one, he sensed in his gut, might be the last. He gulped, took a deep breath, and set off towards the crevice between the two lips of stone. As he passed the threshold, the world got stranger still. Curtains had fallen from somewhere in front of the contents, leaving visible only the things close to the floor. In these gaps there were tires, hundreds, maybe thousands of tires with a bit of chassis visible.

The presence of trucks in the thousands confounded Koscez at first, and then he connected the dots.

‘These look like the Bureau trucks. Why are they all here? Unless.…’

He was lost in the sheer number of trucks standing in this unnamed place, until he recognized a blood-red body on one of them. Perhaps it was his. Perhaps the lighting was not ideal.

Suddenly a hand fell on his shoulder, and his breath went out of him. As he turned, he found ‘him,’ with a smile on his face, one he would not forget.

“I guess the cat is out of the bag. There is no point in me hiding anymore.”

“Yeah…” Koscez did not understand what cats were out of the bag.

“I was keeping an eye on you from the start, stopping you from getting anywhere. But somehow the office has been helping you. Why do you think?”

“I don’t know. Must be fate.” Koscez thought the aide was his gut.

“I don’t know either. Let’s call it the thousandth mystery, after the nine hundred and ninety-nine mysteries in the office.” Andrei spoke with a jeer rather than confusion.

“A thousand? Is that true? How many have been solved?”

Andrei grew a bit serious when he replied.

“Nobody keeps count. No…., you are focusing on the wrong thing! ”

“Then,… Too many mysteries. Too many mysteries unsolved.”

His attention drifted from the talk to his own memories: the windmill, the monitor, even the button that had led him here. He had been one of the oblivious crowd, and had stayed that way to keep himself sane.

“Nobody keeps count? I had thought someone in the office takes care of this. What if something bad happens?”

Andrei hunched his shoulders.

“Nobody does. If it happens, we accept it. ” The impact of the words still hadn’t landed on Koscez.

Andrei came back with a new set of questions,

“Hmm. What do you think about the thing in front of you?”

“This? It’s all a waste, like a graveyard, all of it sitting here.”

“You cannot be serious. A holding center is necessary after all.”

Koscez let out a gasp. It was not a vault but a holding center, for holding things for processing. At last the stars in the sky had connected, revealing constellations.

“Then this is all being processed. How many… how many applications has this company processed in its lifetime?”

“Don’t think lightly of us. We tried in the beginning. We seriously tried! Scientists working all day long, only to answer one simple question: what are the things we see? What do we call them?”

“And it turned out to be a failure?” Koscez filled in as a reflex. His body had frozen, and then began to thrash with adrenaline as the revelations landed.

“Yeah you guessed it right. How did you know?”

“I know. But I don’t know how to explain how I know it.” Koscez was struggling.

“Fate again? You are truly guided by fate or maybe this office. I feel envious. But anyway, you are right. That was everybody’s hunch.”

“Wait, even the scientists couldn’t come up with better explanations than me? Going with just feelings?”

“That’s simply it. We could not put it into simple words. These things were truly unknowable. Our words are too polluted by common knowledge.”

“Oh Lord! You guys speak like these are monsters out of a story. Do these things play tricks? Hallucinations?” He soon regained himself and scanned the trucks for one that might be carrying something in its bed.

“Hallucinations. What a cheap word. Ever heard what the great Buddha said about reality – that it is all an illusion? No, this is not any cheap illusion. It is an oddity even among illusions.”

“I know what this is all about. You guys couldn’t come up with a better explanation than folklore, ghost stories and Buddha.”

“Haha, you seriously think we copped out. No, quite the contrary. We excelled at some things.”

“Like?”

“For one, we see the standouts and the chameleons. ”

“What?”

“Simply put, the extraordinary comes in two forms. One that is obviously out of this world and everyone knows it is. Aliens, ghosts, monsters, and so on. These things exist more in imagination than in real life. While the second one is the trickier one. This is the one that looks normal within the place it is in, but is strange when isolated. ”

“Does not look strange in the slightest?”

“Yes, very hard to tell. Take this, for instance. There is a small town called Rivez on the coast of England, which had a granite-like orb in the middle of its square. It somehow affected the dreams of its denizens, made them happier. It stood right there for centuries, and nobody suspected a thing. Until one very ill man grew sick of the orb and claimed it was an evil thing. That’s when he called us. We were skeptical at first, but he was right. We took it, and our scientists had good dreams afterwards. They couldn’t explain it.

Another was a statue worshipped for its glowing properties. It was a radioactive material, and it was turning the people infantile. No explanation for that either. All these things kept adding up. So we gave up in the end. For both cases, we had to separate these objects from their surroundings to even understand what was strange.”

“So you guys don’t solve any mysteries?”

“We don’t need to. If we accept it, why do we need to solve?”

Koscez was not ready to accept any of it. Instead, he attempted to rescue the idea of aliens.

“Okay, the things don’t appear strange in those places. Then there can be aliens in the living, in disguise.” Koscez had not digested the words he uttered.

“Think about it. What happens when people think there are aliens living among us?”

An idea flashed in Koscez, which he would soon regret saying. “Yes, everyone would panic. That is why…” There was a long pause. An even more uncomfortable thought took him over, and he unloaded it.

“What if the whole world is a weird place like that? Made normal by an accidental combination?”

He simply didn’t want to pursue this. But the cats were really out of the bag. Andrei clapped his hands. “Voila! You are exactly at the place I am right now. This is what our scientists concluded.”

Then, suddenly Koscez gasped, and yelled

“You guys have been lying to everybody!”

“Lying is a strong word.”

“What a sleazy way to keep the thing going? To say there are aliens outside, so people have to forget the aliens within. ”

Andrei’s face changed into something gruesome, a face Koscez had never seen him make. “Sleazy is a strong word, Koscez. I don’t like it. We like what we do here at BEA. BEA is the reason people don’t panic in the streets. They don’t run from their own towns when they learn there are weird things hiding in the daylight. You see here, we shunt the chaos of the world.”

Koscez cowered. “Okay, I am sorry. I got a bit emotional. What should I do now?”

“You will do the sensible thing.”

“I am not going to reveal any of this.”

“Good choice. Alright, come back once you have seen it. Be careful, though. I cannot guarantee the effects are all benign.”

“Wait. I have a simple question.”

“Alright, be quick. Closing time is in thirty minutes.”

“Okay… hm… why do people disappear suddenly? Anything in these trucks cause that?”

Andrei could not tell where the question came from, but he attempted an answer.

“No… what can I say? People disappear because they want to. You don’t need the Bureau of Extraordinary Affairs to figure that one out. Who disappeared?”

“Nobody. Just asking.”

“Alright. I am leaving now.”

Koscez, after the long-awaited reveal, was out of his hangover already, but plunged into a completely different feeling. Almost that of an allergic reaction, but with ideas. ‘How could it be?’ he thought. ‘The strangeness of truth, how inane it is sometimes. How can things be so simple and yet so strange?’

In the end he sighed, releasing a mist into the musty air of the sarcophagus, and turned back.

“I guess that is it for me. No more mysteries.”

x——————————————————————————— x

The iridescent arms of the clock hung on the north wall were moving at irregular speeds, below which there was a digital one reading 2:00 p.m. From cubicle A350, Koscez could hear the whispers of nearby offices, coffee trolleys passing by, and computers being worked. Seated in a desk chair, he scribbled something on a paper, scanned through it, and threw it in the bin.

Suddenly his walkie-talkie, strapped to his hip, buzzed, and he picked it up.

“Hello, Andrei. What’s up?”

“Koscez, there is a new problem in cubicle number 281.”

“What is the problem?”

“Some problem with the printer.”

“Okay? Printer ink problem? Or something extraord….?” Koscez trailed off.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, that is alright. But let me say this. Those were for your ears only. Not everyone knows what you do.”

“Agreed. Okay, I will go investigate the printer.”

“Good man.”

The walkie-talkie died down. Koscez picked up his leather jacket and put it on. He watched himself meander through the aisles, walking past memories from his old life, until the cubicle tag said “281”. He stepped in and found an almost empty office with a young man in a chair, his hands over his head. To his left was a printer that was repeatedly doing its job. As soon as he saw Koscez, the young man yelped, “Are you the help?”

“Yes I am.”

“Oh thank god!” The young man cried.

“What’s the matter?”

“I am sorry. I came new to this work. I was excited to come here in BEA. Only then I found the printer working by itself. I did everything I could do to stop it. Unplug it, take away its paper. But it keeps on going! I messed up.”

“Calm down. It is not your doing. Printers go like this sometimes.”

“They do?”

“Yes. Now let me take a look at it.”

Koscez found the repeated sliding and printing noise a bit soothing. It had to be turned off. Without looking at the printed sheets, he looked for its socket and found it unplugged. There was no paper in the tray either. As the young man had said.

After messing around with the controls, he spoke as if there was nobody in the cubicle. “I guess I remember what I did to those CRT televisions when they stopped working.” He raised his thick arms and slammed the printer’s side as if he were spanking it. After a few smacks, the printer gave in.

“Thank you!” the young man snorted while speaking.

“No issues. Now you know how to solve this problem.”

He nodded as an answer. Koscez got up and looked over the printed papers. The same thing, an incomprehensible picture made out of symbols and characters, and below it was written, “Are you here?”

Koscez picked one of the sheets, folded it and sneaked it into his jacket pocket. He grabbed the other printouts in bulk and dumped them in the nearest bin.

“You are welcome.”

He waved goodbye and made for his cubicle. The folded paper was poking him from inside the pocket. He took it out and watched it question his decision. Was he really there? He asked himself. Yes he was. He didn’t know why he came back. He chose to chalk up the pull he felt towards the BEA as its 1,001st mystery.

He had strayed without looking forward, his gaze lowered, and found a change in the tiling. It was the end of the corridors and the beginning of the glass office. Inside it, Dimitri was seated in his chair, staring at him without a blink.

There were times when Koscez had struggled to understand that gaze, and had labelled it envious and demeaning. But now the case was different. He pulled his cheeks apart, lifting a smile onto his otherwise stolid face. Dimitri smiled back, although a bit.

x——————————————————————————- x