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over to the corner of the room. He was barefoot.
    In the corner of the room, the tower of finished sheets, piled facedown one on top of another, was up to his chest.
    â€œWhat the fuck is…”
    Joey was walking over to the corner. I just knew that he was going to pull the first sheet off the top of the pile, hold it up in Jack’s face, demand to know what the fuck was going on. And I could hear the creak of the loose floorboards of Jack’s cheap rented room as Joey stamped across them, catching one of the piles of reams as he stepped over it; and I could see the white of his knuckles, the set of his shoulders, and I knew the tower was unsteady. Christ, it was a pile of loose paper up to Jack’s chest and it was in the corner but it wasn’t even leaning on the walls for support. It was a wonder Jack had managed to get it this high without…
    And I watched as the tower of translated Bible quivered with the floorboards under it, and leaned, and fell, pages scattering out into the air and avalanching out and down, sheets sliding across sheets and catching air and flipping and crashing like paper airplanes coming down.
    And Jack was lost to us that day; we were all lost to each other, because Thomas was dead, and Jack was mad, and Joey was closed, and I…all I could think of was the Book of All Hours.
    The Big Picture
    As I turned the pages, taking care not to drip blood from any of my numerous cuts onto its priceless pages, I barely even heard the alarm that had been ringing in my ears ever since the shattering of the glass. I was transfixed by this strange sense of certainty; I just wasn’t sure what I was certain of. A page, another page, and yet another, and Britain lay before me—a Britain without a Glasgow or a London, or any of the major cities I should have been able to point to, or rather with these cities in the wrong places, in the wrong shapes. A map of the past, or of the future, or of an imagined now?
    â€œThe Macromimicon. The Big Picture,” my uncle had said. “Whatever form it takes—and there’s some who say it takes a different form for everyone—I think somehow—I’m not sure how but I think it’s some sort of mirror of the world, or of something greater that includes the world.”

    Another page—Europe—and then another, and the world lay before me, the globe projected and distorted as it had to be to fit the rectangle of the two pages. The cartographer had elected to sacrifice the inhospitable polar regions, showing the coastline of Antarctica split and splayed to run along the bottom of the page, the tops of the northern continents stretched out and skewed in the transformation from three dimensions to two, running along the top of the page so that the Arctic Ocean was reduced to a mere channel bordering Greenland on either side.
    â€œIt’s a fucking good story,” Jack had said, as we sat in the Union. “I’ll give you that,” he said. “Don’t believe a word of it, though.”
    He checked his watch again, glanced at the door.

    I felt feverish, and I knew that it was more than lack of blood. I should have been out of there by now. I should have been getting the hell out of there with the Book, not browsing its pages as if I was just one more student in the university library—in the university library in the dead of night, tooled-up with glass-cutters and toothpicks and all the other implements of burglary, waiting to be caught quite literally red-handed, with fingerprints in my own blood all over the broken case and the wooden desk where I now studied the Book. I couldn’t leave.

    â€œWho’s coming for a drink, then?” Joey had said, one foot up on the wooden bench beside me, leaning on his knee as he looked down at Jack and Puck on the grass.
    â€œFuck that shit,” said Puck. “I’m not moving.”

    The alarm rang on, and no one came, and I found myself