With a slow, deliberate movement, Ryan slid the heavy manila envelope beneath a stack of open vendor briefs on his desk, his fingers slightly cold against the paper. The senior manager had already vanished down the carpeted aisle, leaving behind only the ambient hum of the marketing pod and the rising friction in Ryan's chest. Needing a brief reprieve from the accumulating pressure of his workstation, he stood up on the pretext of checking the shared print station near the southern wall, navigating the maze of cubicles until he drifted into a quieter, semi-vacant section of the fourth floor where a row of unassigned hot-desks sat mostly cleared for incoming temporary contractors.
As he bypassed an empty, dust-dusted workspace near the frosted glass windows, a splash of muted ochre and black text on a flat white surface snagged his gaze. Ryan stopped dead in his tracks. Resting squarely in the center of the bare laminate desk was a compact, pocket-sized Japanese paperback with cream pages and familiar vertical kanji running down the spine. His breath caught. It was a well-worn copy of a mid-century novel he had owned back in Tokyo—complete with the distinct, dog-eared bottom corner and the faint blue ink smudge on the back cover from an old fountain pen leak. It was a book he hadn't packed for his corporate transfer three years ago, having deliberately left it behind on the low wooden bookshelf of his old apartment in Nakano.
Ryan stared at the object, the impossible geography of it cutting sharply through the mundane buzz of the afternoon office. The Sydney sunlight filtered horizontally through the tinted windowpanes, casting long shadows across the empty desk, yet the paperback looked entirely real, untouched, and waiting. A sudden, sharp burst of laughter from a nearby conference room shattered the silence, snapping him back to reality. With a cold knot tightening in his stomach, Ryan pulled his eyes away from the ghostly relic, turned on his heel, and hurried back toward his pod as the digital clock in his system tray ticked past one-thirty.