atch me, I’m going in.” Milan flashes me a grin to taunt a devil, then steps into Zeke’s cubicle. I stand on a chair to watch over the partition. Zeke is in his mesh-backed chair, legs relaxed, arms at his side, black hair in his eyes, and a beatific look on his face.

“Morning, morning, how’s it going Zeke,” says Milan.

Zeke does not answer. He is not awake. His eyes are open, but they don’t track Milan’s hand as he waves it back and forth. Zeke is not awake.

I glance at the clock. Little hand on the nine, big hand on the five, so there’s plenty of time still.

Milan moves closer to Zeke. Zeke again does not respond. Milan gives Zeke’s chair a spin. “Zeke, Zeke,” he says. When you say it twice, it sounds like the noises that the rabid black squirrel makes, the one who lives in the one tree in the parking lot, a solitary maple that shades the president’s spot in the morning, the vice-president’s spot in the afternoon, and, for fifteen wonderful minutes on winter evenings, shades the spot where I park.

“Zeke, Zeke,” Milan says again, “describe to me what you see.”

Zeke smiles and closes his eyes. Milan keeps his hand in position and gives the back of Zeke’s chair another tap on every rotation. Zeke’s chair is a merry-go-round, and Milan’s arm is the grinding motor and the gesturing carny all in one.

“I see you, Milan,” Zeke says, “getting on a motorcycle. You have a long journey ahead of you.” Zeke’s voice sounds like a wind chime, sweet and other-worldly. “You’re riding all the way from Barcelona to Kiev, just a sleeping bag tied to the storage rack, three hundred Euros in your pocket, a compass and a flask of bourbon. At the end of the first day you see the Andalusian sunset over the rippling waves of the Mediterranean, and you think that there would be far worse times in your life to die than right then.”

“Hey Milan,” I say, “wasn’t that the road trip you took, when you dropped out of college for a year?”

“Yeah, but I was telling Zeke about that last week at lunch. Doesn’t prove anything.”

“Are you sure he’s still asleep?”

Milan nudges Zeke’s shoulder. There’s no response. The clock says it’s only 9:30, still half an hour to go.

Zeke has moved on, continuing his narration. “You don’t know where she is or why she left, but something tells her that you’ll find her. Somewhere between the sparkling waters at Playa la Victoria and the broad banks of the Dneiper you know that you’ll find her.”

“Who is he talking about?” I ask Milan.

“No one, some girl I knew in school. We went to Prague together Junior year.”

“What was her name?” I ask. I feel so eager, I’m standing on my tip toes, and not because I have to. My chin digs into the metal frame of the partition.

Milan shakes his head. He has stopped his taps on Zeke’s chair, so the spinning is showing down. I think that I can see twitching under Zeke’s eyelids. Random eye movement, or is it directed? Compelled?

“But things are changing too fast,” says Zeke. “When you were together the first time, they had just taken down the barbed wire, the Velvet Revolution was starting, no one knew what it all meant, and the pictures from Hveizdoslav Square were fresh in the nation’s eyes. Now everyone was talking about breaking it up: the Czechs and the Slovaks, the Bosnians and the Serbs, the men and the women across the continent. It was all breaking, and you were afraid that she would break it off from you just the same.”

Zeke’s chair is spinning faster, though Milan isn’t touching it, and Zeke isn’t touching the ground. Milan backs away from Zeke two steps. I can see beads of sweat on Milan’s forehead, tightness in his jaw, a bunching up of his eyebrows.

“Now, even when you find her, stranded at a truck stop outside of Vienna, you already know you’re falling apart. Even as you clutch her wrist and try to handcuff yourselves together, you know it won’t last. There’s tiny bits of you falling off already, Milan. I can see your little pieces drifting apart. It’s a jigsaw puzzle on a table in an earthquake, pieces flying up and apart, you trying so hard to cling together.”

Milan takes another step towards the door of the cubicle. He is frightened now. I can see veins pressing out from his forehead. He puts his arm out again, wrist trembling, tries to grab on to the wall, misses that, reaches for Zeke’s chair, but misses again.

“Milan, I can see her telling you that she slept with another man. Rocks bursting with fire are falling from the sky, six winged devil bats are clawing you to bits. They’re ripping at her flesh, too, peeling away bits of it to reveal the nothing that is inside. And they’re holding your head, making you watch, as they take her away bit by bit.”

Milan screams. It’s loud enough to turn heads in the break room across the office. There’s cursing where someone spilled coffee across their keyboard.

“Please, Zeke, my friend, Zeke, please stop. Stop,” pleads Milan.

The clock says ten minutes till. Milan’s not going to make it.

“She’s saying something, but you won’t put your ear close enough to her mouth to hear it. The blood and the fire, she’s leaving your her dying words, and you can’t be bothered to come closer, Milan. She wants to tell you something, something that you need to hear but can’t bear to let yourself.”

“No, please, don’t.” Milan is sobbing. His legs are trying so hard to lead him out of the cubicle, away, to the warm and familiar safety of the water cooler, the box of donuts, the artificial potted plants with the brown leaves.

“Do you want me to tell you what it was she said, Milan?” Zeke asks. His chair has stopped moving. He’s facing directly at Milan. I can’t believe he’s still asleep, or I couldn’t if his eyes weren’t still identically closed. Closed, but still pointed at Milan like syringes.

“No, no,” Milan gasps. With a final collapse of resistance, his knees buckle and then pull him away and out of the cubicle, away to the refuge of the men’s restroom, where he will flush the toilet again and again to mask the sound of his tears.

I check the clock once more. Two minutes till. I didn’t think Milan would make it that long.

As the clock strikes ten, Zeke’s eyes open. His body twitches once in violent spasm, and then he is awake. He looks around, not quite surprised by his surroundings.

“Genevieve, what’s up? Good morning, good morning,” he says to me.

“Not much, not much, Zeke. Same old, same old.”

“What are you doing up there?” he asks, motioning to the divider that my head is still parked on top of.

“Oh, just resting. It’s a good spot for it,” I say.

“Well, time to get some work done,” he says. Zeke has to work hard to make up for the hour that he misses every morning. The hour that he never wakes up.

I walk to the bathroom, but don’t go in. I wait for Milan outside. I know that tomorrow it will be my turn to try again, though I will probably not make it either. Every morning someone else has to try, either Milan or I or someone else, try to stay in Zeke’s cubicle for a whole half hour while he’s asleep and preaching his dream truths. Every morning Zeke comes in at nine, sits himself down comfortable in his cube, then falls straight to sleep. While he sleeps, we will try to ask him our questions, to bring back our memories, to reveal our desires, to uncover things that could be helpful, things that only a sleeper could ever know. Once he wakes, Zeke will not remember a thing.

No one expects to stay the whole half hour; probably, none of us ever will. But even when Zeke’s stories make us run and hide, we know we’ll have to return the next day. We have to go, because it’s the only shot we get at knowing, and we have to take it. We have to, always, every morning, because those things are always escaping from us, those things that we can’t bear to keep or stand to lose, things that we chase and lose and chase again, find and then discard, hear in the whisperings of a madman in the morning and then cede away in the afternoon of our waning powers, things that we can’t keep to ourselves any more than we can listen to Zeke’s final revelation, that last and most precious part of us that he pulls out of our dreamworlds, our lost worlds, our hidden minds, like a handful of sand, and then lets dissolve in the red tide of unknowing.

“Coffee,” says Zeke, as always, when my walk back to my desk takes me past his cubicle, as always. “I could use a coffee. Seriously, I need to wake up, get some real work done.” He gets out a pencil, as always, taps it against his forehead, as always.

“Two creams, two sugars, right?” I say, as always, heading for the break room to fetch it for him, as always. As always, the rows of fluorescent lights cast my shadow in three directions at once, and they are partitioning my soul into sections of shadow and un-shadow on the carpet, always splintered, always weakened, always trembling.