In the light B.J. recognised the face of a man. He could not at first place the face. The face and its voice combined somewhere in the recesses of memory to produce a name: Daniel.

Who was Daniel?

On this question B.J. mused a moment, his eyes adjusting to the light as the man's fingers twiddled, upright, in some gesture.

The man from the fountain. "Daniel."

The words came in spurts.

"Hanson?"

and

"No, I'm B.J. Swan"

and

"Wow."

and, gaining fluidity as B.J. calmed,

"That was some act at the fountain. You're after him too, arentcha? Who are you with? The Reporter?"

Act at the fountain? Daniel heard. Act? Ah … Daniel thought. If he was acting, then it was a Timothy Leary act played on a surrealistic stage of warped reality. He dropped his hands after giving up any hope that wriggling his fingers would lighten the moment. He looked at B.J. Hanson? I haven't heard of him, surely, he reassured himself.

“After who?” Daniel asked before thinking. “Oh. No, no, no – I mean …” Daniel gave it up. People just tend to think what they think, even if it is unsubstantiated.

“No. I’m not with – what did you call it? The Reporter. In fact, I’m just in the wrong place.”

Ok. He was embarrassed. He really had no idea why he was there.

“Um … look B.J. – Hanson – the Man in the Moon. I …” Daniel attempted, but it wasn’t working.

“I’ll just go,” he decided out loud.

Daniel turned back to the door he had bludgeoned and made for the handle as quickly as possible.

It seemed like an eternity passed before B.J. answered.

This Daniel puzzled him. He seemed an innocent, and yet disturbed. He seemed to have a knack for being in the wrong place - or was it the right place? - at the right time. He seemed to be tangled up in all of this Hanson business somehow, and yet, unaware of it.

"Maybe. Maybe the wrong place."

Hell, Daniel could be the key to the whole story.

"Before you go, why did you come here? Why did you need to get in here so badly?"

Daniel’s hand barely touched the doorknob before he jerked it away. His eyes watered and reality seemed to ripple like waves on a pool. Golden letters, hieroglyphs and images wrote themselves around the circumference of the knob. The writing flowed from left to right, slowing for a word or image, and then continuing. Droplets of sweat bled from his forehead and mingled with powdered sawdust from the broken door. He stared at the doorknob, slowly easing his hand further away.

Deception … Hanson … Murder … Subterfuge … Maya – the words slowed and stopped one after the other. A symbol followed. Daniel peered closer and then jolted when B.J. spoke. Maybe the wrong place. It was always the wrong place, he thought. It was always the place where everything fell apart and the wall between real and unreal turned to translucent lace.

Daniel took a deep almost frantic breath. The flowing letters and words faded away, just as a calm faded in. He turned back to B.J. The man’s questions seemed important, yet Daniel could not place why they should be.

“Ok,” he said. “Mind if I sit?”

Daniel yanked at the back of a wooden high-back chair, the sort that reminded him of High School. He sat transverse and propped his elbows on the back. After a quick swipe with the back of his hand to wipe away some of the sweat, Daniel breathed slowly. Talking made everything less weird.

“But you’ll just have to listen and wait for the end. It’s crazy. I’m crazy. Always have been, I think. So it goes like this. I went back to my room. I heard a sound. The sound. It was everywhere and it brought blue and orange smoke with it. Blue and orange! That significant. So I followed. I went where the words told me to go. Here. This is where. But it’s the wrong place. If it were the right place you’d know what to do. You don’t seem to. The door knows. So I don’t know. Maybe this is the right place.

It’s got to do with Hanson. Some murder and deceit. Lies and illusions. So yes, I came here because I was sent. You could say that. Sent.”

Daniel delivered his rambling speech intensely and with barely more than a couple of breaths while looking mostly at the floor. He raised his head and looked at B.J. The man and the room, the window and the air – they were all there as normal as you please. Daniel smiled. It was a strangely calming moment like he’d just avoided sudden death.

"Your 'nose' for a story, for an event - it led you here! Intuition. Something. You felt it, and you came. I'd do the same, I guess - except for the knocking-down-the door part. But, maybe that was your part. You did it because I didn't. Who knows? Reporter's instinct. Crazy."

B.J. glanced around the room, adrenal and coughing. The dust swirled everywhere, touched everything. It was outside. It was inside. Beneath and atop and settling in darkness and escaping on beams of light from the hallway.

"Good a reason as any, I guess," he concluded.

His head was pounding. Fuzzy. Like someone was pressing on it, from behind his eyes. His gaze passed from radiator to sofa to lampshade to doorway to desk to window then back to desk and the wooden hand, now capsized, finger extended toward him as if to point. A dead zone of clean radiated from the hand, where its fall had blown the dust away - partially erasing what some coarse instrument had...

written

...in it.

B.J. turned ashen. His body stiffened, eyes locked onto the dimly lit canvas of dust.

Daniel crossed his legs and fumbled for a non-existing arm rest. Calm or not, it was an embarrassing situation. But for the transposition of a couple of letters, his name would have been Denial, and he always thought that was a perfectly good shelter and hiding place when it came to sudden, uncomfortable realizations. He had the feeling that one was coming.

B.J. was being damn decent about the whole thing - the crazy staring, the door, the crazy talk about navigation by sonar and pretty lights - pretty much all of it. That is, until B.J. took a good hard look at a wooden hand on the desk that Daniel hadn’t noticed until then, and seemed to dry up on the spot. Daniel leaned forward and the chair creaked as he moved. The light was bad for looking at messages on dust canvasses, and he couldn’t make out what it was that was turning B.J. into a breathing cadaver.

He looked at the hand and then into B.J.’s face - and then back to the hand.

“I owe someone a door,” he said absently, and then stood up. And apparently it’s not you, he thought. It was a sort of random apology, but his attention was on the wooden hand. Some period of time passed. Daniel wasn’t sure how much time it was, but it was enough for him to feel a buzzing in his body and the onset of rainbow paranoia.

“Ah. This is Hanson’s apartment, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. Then he noticed the tape recorder. Suddenly circumstances seemed to make sense, which was not making Daniel feel any more sane. It made him feel like he was in the right very-wrong place.

“So ... why are we here and what’s got you looking like that?”