No one else in the room seemed to notice when the clock stopped ticking. Probably because none of them were dead. Or at least, Yusuf reasoned, not recently enough to find it remarkable. He sat in a plastic chair between a woman knitting something enormous and grey and an elderly man asleep with his chin on his chest, and tried to recall the instructions. Bring everything you need, they had told him. You will be called in order. There is no waiting list, exactly, but there is a process. He had brought the map. It had taken him the better part of his life to draw it — hand-lettered, color-coded, every significant moment marked with a small red star. The summer he learned to swim. His mother's hands. The year everything fell apart and then, slowly, didn't. The morning his daughter was born and he had stood in a hospital corridor and understood for the first time what the word vast really meant. All of it, cross-referenced, annotated, rolled carefully and tucked inside his coat. He reached for it now, just to check it was there. It wasn't. He stood up carefully. Patted every pocket. Sat back down. Stood again. The knitting woman glanced at him with mild sympathy, the way you might look at someone who'd spilled something. "They don't keep it," she said, without looking up. "Whatever you brought. It doesn't come through." "The map—" "Nothing comes through," she said. "That's rather the point." His name was called. He walked to the desk on unsteady legs, certain he would have nothing to say, certain he would be turned away or sent back or whatever the mechanism was for people who arrived unprepared. The figure behind the desk looked up. Smiled. Said: Tell me what you remember. And he found, to his great surprise, that he could. All of it. Every red star, every margin note, every name. He hadn't needed the paper at all. All things considered, losing the map was the least permanent consequence.