Free The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball

one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.
    So, one goes out into the world, and then one wanders about.
     
     
    The querist goes out into the world, and wanders about. Perhaps the day is a pleasant one. It has rained while he was still sleeping, and this rain brought with it an attendant coolness that remained after the rain had gone north or east with the wind. The streets are fresh as though a blanket of snow has fallen. Each square of pavement has yet to be trodden upon. All the weight of past footsteps has been lifted. Through it the young man walks, looking up at the tops of buildings and into the boughs of trees. How often in our progress we forget to look up! And how much there is to see. A bird takes off from a branch and lands upon another. His eyes trail this bird, follow the branch, then follow the trunk of the tree back down to the ground. A dog there is running past just at that moment. His eyes perch atop the dog’s standing fur, and are shuttled back and forth along the street, far down and up to the dog’s mistress, who, in a loose pair of trousers and a light jacket, is returning from a morning promenade. Her hair is unkempt and in a morning disarray. Her face is flushed with the pleasure of the day. The young man has approached her with his eyes, in the company of her dog, but he will go no farther himself. She and the dog move off through the streets, and the young man continues.
    He remembers that the pleasure he has in morning comes in part from a time in childhood when he would leave school and wander through the quieted town. Shaded streets were lined with silent houses. The beds of lawns cried out to be lain in. And how then he would go up to the old cemetery on Cedar Hill and lie in the cool space between the graves and sleep while all around him was still, and while, to his great happiness and enduring pleasure, his fellow pupils were seated in rows in a classroom, learning lessons.
    In the city too there is a girl. She is the appropriate girl. But she is still sleeping, having refused sleep for the better of the night, having gone along a path of streetlights until the streetlights themselves went out, and the paling horizon ushered her up to her door and into her small room.
    It is for this girl that the young man is looking. Day after day he wakes in morning and goes searching for her. In his work, and in his life on mornings that are not miraculous and afternoons that are sundry and various, he saves the corners of his eyes for her, and watches at all times the entrances and exits of every establishment to which he comes. For he knows that eventually, in time and given some protracted period of days, weeks, and months, he will come upon her, and know her in an instant for who she is.
     
     
    He pauses sometimes in the rooms that he keeps, looking over the equipment of his chosen profession, the printing press, the lithograph machine, the rolls of butcher paper, and endless space of desks and typewriters. He looks at the stacks of pamphlets he has made that are piled in corners and pinned upon the wall. And he thinks and knows in his heart that there is one glorious pamphlet waiting yet to be made. He calls this pamphlet by its name, World’s Fair 7 June 1978, and he longs for its arrival. Somehow he knows it is tied to the girl he cannot find.
    Oh, the World’s Fair. What wonders will fill its pages? He makes notes towards its construction, building in his head and upon the page schematics of impossible architecture, pathways that stretch out across water, preserving in themselves a flatness of the earth to oppose every roundness, or a house in which all sound is diverted and played both upon and with, moved here and there, at distance and closeness, words sometimes