Light from a distant glass atrium loiters passive-aggressively, just on the other side of Adam’s closed eyelids. It’s a hue so warm it must be sunshine, but that implies day, and he really has no idea what time it is. He is parked on a moulded plastic seat, part of an armrest-linked row skirting a quadrangle of hog-bristle walls and patterned grey carpet. Eyes yawning open, Adam, who is sometimes also called Chet, is surprised to find that he is only wearing one of his shoes. The other has been wrapped in a colourless plastic bag and placed neatly on top of his backpack.

A screen nearby alleges that it is 6:16:61:19 and that his flight will commence boarding in three fifths of an hour.

The nearest gate glows puke green, adorned with a symbol that looks like the numeral eight with its scalp removed. Above, an electronic board informations his flight as leaving from Gate ≠. He must have passed that place in his wanderings — he has been up and down this concourse many times, stretching his legs and attempting to condense time — but right at this moment he can’t pick a direction. It’s hard to think, because Adam is sitting under a loudspeaker blasting gangsta rap in a language he hasn’t spoken in years. This is an all-ages space, so the filthiest words have been muted, and the song proceeds in fits and starts.

Standing, Adam embarks on a random heading, but before very long at all, his phone shudders in the pocket of his polo shirt. He withdraws it and reads the text message. It’s from his wayward shoe and it reads pls do not leave me unattended ☹. Adam responds with a quick Soz! and backtracks to retrieve it.

Fully shod, he strides the long strides of a ham trying to work the kinks out of its strings. The interior of the quadrangle is a forest of coffee shops, newsagents, and surfwear vendors, but each merchant has adopted an identical business name (“DEPARTUREZ”) and each proffers jelly bean jars the size of a toddler’s skull. Chet keeps his distance, hugging the outer walls, navigating corners where he must, threading in and out of long lines of fellow travellers waiting to escape to other destinations. A loudspeaker announcement invites Obsidian-level loyalty members in good standing to board their chosen conveyances, in reverse-height order.

Minutes into his search, Adam finds himself in front of a chunder-hued sign bearing a symbol that looks like number eight with a lobotomy. The rumblings he feels are either panic or intestinal gas. There are no clocks but he frets about the consequences if he does not swiftly go to his gate.

This is untenable, he mutters to his shoe, but his shoe ignores him, sulking about the inadequacy of Soz! when a heartfelt apology was clearly called for.

Adam quivers with vertigo, desperate for a different kind of scene. He can’t recall if he is trying to return to his beloved home, or if he’s here to escape it. All he knows is that he has rendered good service to capitalism, both as a producer and consumer. Having overpaid for a seat in the non-thrombosis section of his impending flight, he feels like a rube. He wishes he could travel on a zeppelin.

In the periphery, up two steps and down three, in a sunken, linoleum-encrusted area that seems to have been overlooked in the last redevelopment, he spots a desk labelled “Customer Service”. Behind the counter stands a slim brunette with a neat ponytail, her make-up spoiled by dry riverbeds criss-crossing her cheeks, where tears must once have flowed. She sports fluffy beige ear flaps. Adam reckons she’s probably old enough to be his sexy aunt.

Chet approaches, clears his throat, and asks for directions to Gate ≠, enunciating the symbol with a gulping click he didn’t know his throat could produce. The brunette shakes her head impatiently and strokes one of her flaps. Adam tries again, an octave deeper, but to no avail, before picking up his index finger and using it to draw two parallel horizontals in the air, and a diagonal slash to bisect them. The brunette’s face collapses in understanding. She blurts, You’re in the wrong annexe, little mate. A corridor links us to [#FF00BB] Building, but it’s been flooded as a marketing stunt for a bottled water company. If you don’t mind bending a few rules, I can smuggle you in.

She winks creepily and motions to a hatch set into the wall. Thanks, Adam says, I think I love you, meaning it more than he’s ever meant anything in his life. He jams aside the protective concertina, revealing a dark chute into which he tosses his backpack. Hearing a reassuring absence of breaking glass, he squeezes forward, like a sausage shedding its skin. The chute curves downward, becoming perfectly vertical, and Adam is excreted onto a baggage cart at the end of a long vehicular train. Before he can get his bearings, the train jolts forward along a cylindrical terracotta passageway. Adam assumes the inert form of a baggage, so as not to arouse attention.

Exactly ninety seconds later, the tunnel spills into a cavernous space. The acoustics here are terrible, which is not doing the string quartet any favours as it competes with the blubbing of a magnificent chocolate fountain. Men in dinner jackets chortle and gesticulate at newspapers so broad that three attendants are needed to turn each page. Other men — men only — have lowered their arthritic forms, knees scraping astroturf floor, the better to graze on scattered outcrops of nigiri sushi. Adam knows without knowing that this is the fabled Business Lounge, and for a moment he is tempted to abandon the baggage cart and start a new life as a derivatives trader, but then a bouquet of insipid cab franc engulfs his receptors, and he is nauseated. Onward ho!

The baggage train leaves the Lounge in its wake, as if the train were in fact a boat. Mauve light pulses up and down the tunnel. The train pulls into the middle of a crowded hall and Adam unbaggages, rubbing his shoe to comfort it, or perhaps to comfort himself. There are lots of people here, and many of them are annoyed at having to climb over the baggage cart as they surge towards a narrow pass labelled SCREENING.

We wanted this, an ancient woman howls. We built it, together. If we didn’t want it, we wouldn’t have built it. To everyone else’s relief, she is swiftly arrested.

All travellers are given a questionnaire to fill out and sorted into groups of roughly equal moral culpability. When it is his turn to proceed, Adam is made to step behind a chest-high transparent screen, to remove his trousers and boxer shorts, and to deposit the latter into one of the bins provided. The bin is shunted into a machine and then re-emerges, and when Adam regathers his clothes, he notices that they have warmed by 1.5 degrees. A man behind him yells, hurry up, Chetto, put your pants back on, you’re holding up the line, little mate, and Adam hops and yanks at his waistband, wishing skinny jeans had never been invented.

Stuck behind a murmur of camera-laden twitchers, Adam slogs along a corridor that curls gently leftwards and down, before flattening out. But still leftward it curls, and leftward still, and leftward some more until he arrives at a flight of stairs. Readjusting his backpack, he climbs doggedly. At the summit, he finds himself back in the large hall with the baggage train. The sign above the far wall has changed, though, and now reads, RE-SCREENING. This, supposes Adam, amounts to progress. This time, in the security zone, he is handed a pair of crisp white briefs, which he stuffs into the back pocket of his trousers in case they should come in handy later.

The temperature is dropping and the air is so dry that Adam can feel the moisture leaving his shrivelled form. He wonders whether the airport has commenced wheels-up procedures. A sign ahead teases him: BUILDING [#FF00B… but the right-hand edge is obscured by graffiti praising the wisdom and forbearance of the current regime.

He arrives in a large space, steeped in light from an atrium far, far away. K-pop blasts from every speaker, and hawkers stand out the front of their stores, moaning plaintively that the jelly beans are now fifteen per cent off.

A nearby sign barfs green light.

GATE ȣ.

A whimper escapes from Adam’s lips. A pre-teen turns at the noise and points and laughs and her parents join in the fun. Seeking any kind of refuge, Adam casts about and spots Customer Service.

The brunette is still standing there, listing to port at a ten-degree angle. She must be nearing the end of her shift.

I got lost, cries Adam, I’m so terribly sorry. After you put everything on the line to help me.

For the first time, the brunette smiles. Oh, don’t worry about it. Didn’t you hear? The flight leaving from Gate ≠ has been delayed until “tomorrow”. (Her ear flaps spasm, rendering the air quotes.) Your chosen carrier has developed an aversion to functional aircraft. There is no shortage of time.

Adam flops on the desk. Sorry, he mewls. And then, do you ever get lonely?

How could I be lonely, the brunette says, her riverbeds betraying her. Just look how many people there are.

Of course, of course, Chet replies. You’ll have to excuse me. I am very tired. Or perhaps I’m not. It’s difficult to tell, what with the complete exhaustion.

Fatigue is a common experience for travellers. She says it brusquely, before her face melts, flesh globbing from her chin. Quick, come around here, she says, pointing to the space below the counter.

It is deliciously dark, and the sound of the awful music is dimmed, even if the air is close and smells of tinea. Thank you, says Adam. Do you want to join me down here?

That would hardly be appropriate, rumbles the counter. But slyly, the brunette removes her high heels, and her stockinged feet begin to massage the cheeks and eyebrows of Chet, who is also sometimes called Adam, relieving all the tension he’s been carrying. The feet proceed, brushing lightly down his arms and chest, before a toe tap-tap-taps at his groin, like a news-bearing neighbour knocking at a door. Adam knows how to take a hint and readies himself for a deep and dreamless slumber. Aha, he thinks, as neurons clock off. Aha. Oh no. Yes: I could make a life here.