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Early one morning, you wake up with the smell of burnt sheets in your nose, the sheets that you singed in the industrial-strength dryers at the Laundromat, and it takes you a moment to clear your head of the dream you were having Something about a fire   According to your alarm clock, you only slept a few hours, but you feel alert The dream slides away, and you inhale and exhale slowly And again And a third time, and this time you are not simply breathing, but you are aware of your breathing Not shallow and struggling, but steady, relaxed, deep breaths You had been so anxious about About The thought seems so clear when you don’t focus on it, but as soon as you try and grasp it directly, it dissipates In its place, a heavy, foglike calm has settled, your highs and lows clipped to slight hills and shallow depressions reinforced with a rebar of incuriosity   You put away the clean dishes from the drying rack and rinse the large pile of dirty ones; wipe down the kitchen countertops, the stove, the floor; start the coffee maker After mopping the floors, you take a nap When you wake up, you feel the same The coffee is ready   *   By the time you get to the office, Dan is already there You and Dan work together at a long table, which serves as both your desks, in a small, cramped office located three floors below street level of a very large building downtown, where you stamp and highlight and staple together various documents and then file away said documents in manila folders that are stored in the massive, adjoining two-story file room filled with rows and rows of gunmetal grey filing cabinets The nature of the files holds very little interest for you The actual work you do all day is almost completely devoid of context; whatever job satisfaction you receive – outside of a paycheck – comes from the efficient completion of an enormous volume of what amounts to a handful of repetitive tasks that are just taxing enough to