Sixty beats-per-minute: the rhythm of tick-tocking lullabies, the stuff that dreams are made of. My head; it’s little more than a metronome. If I listen closely I can hear my heartbeat buzzing through the rust in the springs of my mattress. I can feel the steady pulsing beat through my fingertips. Monotony, I have missed you. I am not dead. Not yet.

If only I had opened my eyes, then and there, I would have understood. Everything would have fallen into place in its own pull-out-your-tongue-and-try-to-scream kind of way. I could have died content. Instead I drifted effortlessly back into my labyrinth where the Minotaur and I take it in turns to chase each other into dead ends.

*

That day, like any other day I woke with a start, gasping for air, sucking up the heavy hotchpotch of ochre and the stale remnants of half-eaten freezer meals. The post-mirage fuzz curdled into reality. I was awake. That day, unlike any other day there was a reason for waking like this: someone was banging at the door.

For the past two months I have lived with my life in a rucksack. Buried deep at the bottom, encrypted inside a manila envelope lays everything I have tried so hard to figure out. I am no closer now than I was at the start, no closer to discovering the meaning behind everything: the disappearances, the sotto voce whisperers in the dead of night, the men who would rather see me dead than find out what this all really means.

I always sleep fully clothed, ready to leave at a moments notice. I had lingered there too long. Slinging my belongings over my shoulder I made my way to the door and pressed my eye up against the peephole. There was a man outside dressed in a plain-white delivery uniform holding a package, oblivious to the bulging pupil hovering inches from his face. He was shorter and scrawnier than I was, not the kind of guy someone would send to finish a job, more likely the kind of guy who would be sent to start one.

I have a natural gift. I can read people like playing cards. The ones to look out for are the aces, the kings and the queens. I’m the joker in the pack, I bring disorder to the order. That is my purpose. The deliveryman outside the front door? He was barely even a deuce, a low suited one at that, he’d do what he was told by the jacks and the tens, he was not a threat.

I unlatched the door, keeping the chain on the hook. Better to be safe.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr. Yousef?’
‘No, sorry’ His eyes twitched sporadically, he was nervous, I went to close the door.
‘Could you sign for him?’ He sounded desperate. ‘I’m kind of in a hurry…’
‘Sure.’ I released the chain and scratched a made-up signature next to the X on the electronic strip.
‘Have a good day sir.’ We exchanged the type of smiles reserved for polite one-off meetings as he passed me an in descript package wrapped in brown paper. It was no larger than my fist. I had to leave immediately. Deuces can be made light work of, and there was something in he way he looked over his shoulder as he left, something which told me he’d spill every last detail about me before they’d even begun stretching their surgical gloves.

Rush-hour at Waterloo station; the breading ground of claustrophobia, filled with dead-to-the-world commuters, chewing gum, pigeon shit, “French” pastries. Waterloo station is a vacuum of people, commodities, dead air; the perfect hiding place for the lost.

I have the innate ability to blend into my surroundings: Side parting, five-o-clock shadow, horn-rimmed glasses, suit, Barbour jacket, umbrella in one hand and a newspaper in the other. I had become the people’s schmuck; an identity lost in the sea of indemnity.

As the escalator reached ground level and the sounds of passing sirens lit up like spectres in the rush of the early-evening, it struck me that for the first time in two months I was truly helpless. I was almost out of money, and I dared not return home. My friends, acquaintances, and relatives had all either died or been taken already, and the answers I needed were all in a code that I could not configure on my own. My only lead was stuffed inside a manila envelope: a black-and-white Polaroid of an unknown man wearing a white lab-coat. I didn’t have a name, or even an address for that matter. As far as I knew he could be halfway around the world.