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The following morning, I repeatedly jolted awake at my office corner, my dead gaze drifting between the lines of a report as the monitor’s glow washed over me. Seconds earlier, I had inhabited another body. Standing before the passageway to the park, I stepped in. Every trace of cement, glass, and metal vanished behind trunks, branches, and leaves. Air swollen with oxygen refreshed me. I followed a path that flickered white along its sinuous turns. The voice of the woman echoed in my head, fragments of sentences she might have spoken to me. Her hair, gleaming with water, fell over one shoulder, soaking and darkening her embroidered dress. Even in memory, I refused to look away.

Seated at my computer, hours passed while I remained stuck on the report. The monitor’s glare dulled my mind. I lost track of what I was working on, and before I could focus enough to progress a few lines, my attention plummeted like someone trying to climb a cliff with numb arms.

My skin grew clammy; my armpits and hairline soaked. My vision blurred. I tore my eyes from the screen and swiveled my chair to clear my head. Rows of fluorescent lights striped the ceiling like luminous zebra crossings. The view: a dense mass of desks and workers with black hair and white shirts, the space compressed until every pocket of air was squeezed out.

The remaining hours to surrender to my tasks slipped away, the obligation to finish them pricking like a knife tip at my neck, but the images in my mind chained me. I wanted to belong among those pines, to sit by the lagoon and speak with that woman, while the office echoed with squawking voices and clattering keyboards. When I fought to concentrate, someone fidgeted in their creaking chair. Someone squeezed past desks and chairs. Phones rang insistently until their owners returned. Pairs of employees chatted about news or baseball games.

In my drowsy vigilance, I monitored who stood, who crossed the office to take a call or piss. I spied reflections in the glass partitions, in the framed artwork, in the monitors. The lenses of a pair of glasses burned two white holes into the blurry oval of a face. I recognized a colleague’s tank top and swinging ponytail. Another’s clacking heels to the printer and back. Another’s limping hunch. I had never looked any of them in the eye.

Sometimes, a supervisor’s specter slid across glass. In my mind, I sketched a map of the office, tracking the supervisor’s blip as it weaved between desks and pillars. If they approached, I’d feign fascination with the report filling my screen.

During two or three breaks, I splashed my face in the bathroom and breathed deeply. Back at my desk, my mind retreated into images of the forest, the lagoon, and the woman—spheres of light peeking through fog. A leaden tedium crushed me: day after day of absurd labor. My mind had found a crack and, like a caged animal, it strained to slip through.

At lunch, I devoured my sandwich and rushed back to my computer. I rubbed my eyelids. Exhaustion clung to me like glue. Resisting the next report, I searched online for the Hitachi map. From a bird’s-eye view, I pinpointed the station I’d stopped at, an inch from the coast. I traced the streets I’d wandered until I located the neighborhood with the passageway. The map showed an electronics shop to the right of the path and a cluster of homes and sheds to the left, but the buildings appeared glued together.

I blinked, absorbed. I felt like I was tossing in bed late at night, enduring hypnagogic hallucinations. The office crowd returned after a break, their laughs and shouts snapping me awake. Was the map outdated? To let the passageway open into the clearing, the buildings should’ve been spaced far enough for the forest to nestle in.

Thirty minutes after lunch, an urge seized me to scour the internet for traces of the woman. Without a name or leads, where would I start? I might as well have met her decades ago, when payphones dotted the streets.

Fifteen minutes before the workday ended, I burned them checking my watch every few moments. I fled the office with my head bowed. At the station, I paced the platform a dozen times, striding several meters forward, pivoting on my heels, and retracing my steps. The minutes monitored by my wristwatch seemed frozen.

I approached the ticket machine and hovered my index finger over the button to print my return ticket. What if I bought a ticket to Hitachi? I’d leap the tracks to the opposite platform and return to the forest. I had to go—as if bound by a second job, with a contract so sacred that refusing would summon a lawyer to my apartment by morning.

My heart raced. My mind cycled images: the sinuous path through pines, the woman on a rock in the clearing, wringing a soaked strand of hair. The white blotches on her skin shimmered like watery reflections.

That woman, her figure pulsing with light, breathed the air of this cardboard world. I felt her presence like a second heart grown inside me and forgotten in the clearing, still tethered to my chest by kilometers of vibrant tendon.

She hid from others; I’d trespass her peace. Yet I craved to go like a diabetic needing insulin. I wanted to see her face, speak to her, hear whatever she’d share. I fixated on my desire, but why would she care about me? My life shuttled between apartment and office, trapped in a job that unraveled me. I returned home only to rest and repeat.

I crumpled the handkerchief in my pocket. She’d know I returned for her. Would she call me a stalker, phone the police? That she’d spoken to me felt like betting on a rigged race. My brain deceived itself to survive in a bubble of fantasy, but tomorrow I’d have to blast through two days’ overdue tasks while images of the passageway and woman yanked me like a hook in my cheek. If I retraced my steps and found her, how would I focus? I’d pile up overdue work. The acid of anxiety would corrode my insides.

I pressed the button for a ticket back to my apartment. To quell the nausea rising in my gut, I slumped on a bench, palms pressed to my eyes. Minutes later, the loudspeaker announced my train. The platform trembled. As the train braked, I uncovered my eyes and boarded, head low. Once the train lurched forward, my anxiety spiked. I imagined pulling the emergency brake.

I had met a beautiful woman who intrigued me, who spoke like a person instead of one of the million clones populating this world. Was that enough to make me feel like I’d betray a sacred pact by refusing to run to her side? For today at least, the encounter had shattered my gray routine. A routine I’d drown in for years—yet my survival depended on finishing my tasks.

That evening, and into the night, my mind would recreate her and invent conversations, daydreams swelling my skull until no other thought would fit. No matter how many scenes I conjured, scripting every word, would my stubborn fantasies lead to a radiant present?

How wrong I’d been to linger in the clearing when I spotted that woman. I should’ve abandoned the forest before she finished lifting her hand.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.

Today’s song is “Runaway” by Aurora Aksnes (who apparently, confirmed by her, is a fellow autist).

This is the first story, I believe, in which I tackled autistic obsession, a subject I have struggled with all my life. During my first couple of internships, my brain kept tugging me away from my tasks to the stories I was supposed to be working on instead, or at least to learn more writing techniques (I gobbled up books on writing back then). I ached every time I tried to focus on my job. I won’t get into how insane it feels to me that people who can bring new “things” into life are shackled at menial jobs, which programming websites felt most of the time (these days they’re almost trivial due to artificial intelligence; I doubt many programmers are going to get hired in the future).

I’m going even deeper into autistic obsession in my ongoing novel The Scrap Colossus, whose protagonist Elena is autistic, although I doubt I’ll mention it explicitly.