You set up shop, get your name painted on the door with ‘Adventurer’ written under it in flourishing capitals. You don’t have any training or even a business license, but then you’re not really selling anything or performing any services. You’re not even advertising. You’re just dreaming. Each day after work you ride the cross-town bus to your office and sit at the battered desk and watch night creep up on the city. You’ve never noticed how beautiful your city is, or how strange; even the drunks wandering around your building after dark scream poetry at each other, wave their fingers and cast spells in unknown tongues.

One night near the end of your lease a man walks in, a short bit of nothing, takes his hat off and asks if he can ask you a question. You don’t know who he is, don’t know how he could have heard of you, but you ask him to sit down, offer him a drink of whiskey in a crumpled Dixie cup. He holds it in his fingers like he doesn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t drink it, just looks at it. You let him sit there in silence while the day dies and the city stirs to life, smiling a little bit to yourself. He starts talking suddenly, tells you a long and involved story that might or might not be true, about a car accident he saw that left a woman dying on the street but didn’t get reported in any of the papers. He called the hospital, the morgue, the police, and none of them have heard anything. You humor him, jolly him along, and don’t take any of it seriously until he describes the woman he saw die, a washed out young thing with hair the nothing color of ditchwater. Suddenly you’re all ears, you’re panting excited, ready for action, but that’s as far as he can go. He saw her die, saw the ambulance take her away, but that’s it. He’s worried that it was a mafia thing, that a fat Italian is going to show up at his place one day and take him for a drive in the country, or a drug deal gone wrong, or the untidy removal of a government spook, in short he’s paranoid, jumpy, and uncertain. You don’t believe any of it – he’s too perfectly twitchy – you think he’s an agent of the Two Girls, but it’s the best lead you’ve had.

Weeks go by, and there’s no progress. The detective sends you regular reports, daily at first, then weekly as there’s nothing to report. He combs the streets, grills the busdrivers, the car rental agencies, the cabbies, the airport; finds nothing. He traces the girls backwards, calls their families, their friends, meets their lovers and asks questions until they throw him out, but nothing. You get some good stories out of it, especially from one ex-lover, a wily English soccer player that plays a cat-and-mouse game with the detective for days before he’s finally cornered in a blind alley. The detective’s reports get more speculative, more fanciful, and eventually make the leap into complete fiction. They’re beautifully written, and haunt your dreams.

The detective resigns from the case, returns all your money, says he’s decided to become a writer. Keep the money, you say, you’ve earned it, but he won’t, he’s gotten too much out of the case. He gives you a hug and a Bugs Bunny kiss, pow, right on the lips, wrings your hand until your joints creak, cries on your shoulder, in general carries on like a man in love with a dream. Then he’s gone. You go back to his office the next day, because you’ve noticed an odd pattern in the reports, some characters that appear again and again like flowers in spring, but he’s gone. The door to his office is unlocked and unpainted. You walk in and a real estate agent pokes her head around the corner. She offers to show you the space. It’s a great deal, and a fantastic location, the old tenant broke his lease suddenly, she’s already had three offers on it. You look around: the flies are gone from the windows, the fan doesn’t rock anymore. How much does it cost to rent it, you wonder. The deposit is just exactly the amount of money you have left.

You’ve come into a little bit of money and you’re trying to think about what you can blow it on. You don’t want to keep it, don’t want to save it – it came too easily for that, you wouldn’t be able to feel like you’d earned it. It’d make you feel a little bit hollow. You’ve got scruples. But you can’t spend it on anything too expensive, anything too flashy. It wouldn’t fit it with your style. So you’re not going to buy a new motorcycle, or that painting you’ve had your eye on in the gallery downtown (for all that you know the artist, she’s a friend of yours, she doesn’t need the money), or even some gaudy vacation, the Mediterranean, a world cruise, game hunting in Africa.

You decide to invest in mystery. It’s not a lot of money, in an absolute sense, but the kind of people you need to hire don’t cost much money. You find a couple of college students, two girls that might be twins but aren’t, both washed out and expressionless with hair the nothing color of ditchwater, and pay them to invent an enigma and figure out how to bury it in the fabric of the city. They look at each other and say, give us a couple of days, we’ll let you know. You do, but, of course, in a couple of days they’re nowhere to be found, and your money’s gone, the check’s been cashed, their accounts have been closed, their apartment’s deserted, their seats empty in the lecture halls.

That was half your money. You take the other half and hire a private detective, the kind you’ve always wanted to hire, a grubby little man in a grubby little office, off-balance fan knocking against the ceiling, dead bodies of flies thick on the windowsills. He wants to know why you gave them the money first thing. He tells you it wasn’t smart. You shrug, defeated; you can’t think of how to explain it. Sure, he’ll do it, he tells you, and offers you a drink to seal the deal. You drink the whiskey out of crumpled Dixie cups, and keep your face carefully still as the drink kicks and claws its way down your throat. You kiss the second half of your money goodbye, but figure it’s well spent.