I come back to my room at the hotel after supper. Someone has broken in. My suitcase has been forced open. All my maps have been switched with other, useless ones.

I go downstairs at once and ring for the night manager. "I shall go and notify the authorities immediately," he says. He turns briskly from the counter and walks straight into a wall. "Damn it," he exclaims, rubbing his nose. "They must have broken in here too when I was in back. They've moved the wall. But don't you worry," he declares. He waves a reassuring, admonitory finger. "They won't get away with it!" "I'm over here," I mutter. "What's that?" he asks, looking about. "There you are," he says. He feels his way along the counter toward the alcove which contains the phone.

I thrust my hands in my pockets and wander back upstairs, hearing the laborious conversation behind me. "Police? No, no, I'm not the police, you're the police! PO-LICE, I say. What? Speak up, I can't hear you! I say I can't --" I reach my room finally and close the door on all this uselessness. I sit, mulling over the futile bounty of deliberately wrong charts and topographical renderings pitched around me on the floor. I take one up and try to distract my anxiety with speculations:

Suppose I was indeed bound for this city so elaborately recorded in my hand. Which road would I take? This one, by a river? Or this, along the rim of a mountainside? Where would I stay: here, in this wayside? Or there, in that curiously named village. How would the names of these places pair with the actual look, the experience, the memory of them? What would spring to mind, years on, when such and such a name repeated itself to me? I idle, imagining ... Luckily, I try to reassure myself, I marked things on the real maps in haphazard code. But then one can't be certain -- doesn't know whom one's dealing with in break-ins like this. My ease is now once more spoiled, and I toss the replacement map away and stretch out on the bed, brooding somberly.

Someone comes tapping along the corridor outside. Finally there's a knock on my door. It's the idiot of a night manager. The police will be here shortly, he thinks. He laughs awkwardly. "I'm sorry," he exclaims, "but I can't recall exactly why it was they should be called. Would you mind refreshing my memory!" I look at him. I start to answer, but then I think the better of it. "I have to say I don't know what you're talking about," I tell him. "And if I did, it's slipped my mind. Now I'm very sorry myself, but I'm turning in now," I announce. "I must be off early to resume my journey." I shut the door on his perplexity, and my lies. I'll be off at dawn, that much is true. But it will now be an odd, sham journey, as I have only patently false versions of where I go.
salon.com | April 28, 1999

Excerpted with permission from "Haunted Traveller," by Barry Yourgrau, published by Arcade Publishing, copyright 1999 by Barry Yourgrau.

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