I watched idly as a bank statement, yellowed as one might expect something dated twenty-two years ago to be, fluttered awkwardly off of the top of a meter-high stack of uselessly-aged documents. There was almost nothing here but paper, in various stages of discoloration, stacked on top of desks and inside glass-doored cabinets, shoved on top of shelves and underneath rotting chairs with torn-through cushions; the sheer volume covered every available surface in the room in a giant morass of dead tree products that stuck out of every door and window.

The office was illuminated by incandescent fixtures in the walls, casting a dismal sepia tone into every corner, onto wood panels that wouldn’t look out of place on a coffin in the middle of a funeral procession. Fitting, I thought to myself. Everything in this room is dead.

A knocked-over pile of day-planner sheets surrounded me. 4:30, Friday, January 17: pick up flowers; buy new ma — 10:15, Tuesday, November 9: call M.R. about insurance pol — 1:00, Saturday, July 23: lunch with Riko at the Espl — minutiae. Day-to-day minutiae, divorced from any context in which they might be meaningful. I kicked aside a few leaves. The years were all mixed together. 1997. 1974. 1982. An illogical muddle.

Letters. Fountain pen on parchment that would have cost so much more than a typewriter and cheap copy paper, doomed to the same irrelevance regardless. A handful of velvet envelopes sat atop the mess, some of them partially addressed and then abandoned with a frustrated scribble. I picked up a sealed packet and felt a distinctive shifting of contents — three or four pages at least, but I wasn’t interested in reading any of them. I disinterestedly flung it across the room instead, knocking a small box off of its windowsill perch and scattering its contents to the ground.

Photographs.

That was what I was looking for.

I trudged through a cascade of tabulation sheets, informing me of financial transactions in currencies that were no longer valid anywhere in the world, towards the cracked window, stopping next to the mountain of out-of-office memos upon which the upturned box and its cover lay. Most of the dispersed pictures were in black and white, despite being new enough that this couldn’t have been anything but an intentional stylistic decision on the part of the photographer. I picked up a few and flipped through them. A small group of people stood beneath a banner thanking them for ten years of service to a company whose name had become illegible. A young-looking man from the previous picture was transplanted into the next, shaking hands with a woman of about the same age holding a violin. Then the two of them were smiling next to each other in front of a seascape from somewhere along the Mediterranean, holding hands as they looked straight into the camera.

Then they were laying face-down amongst a heap of inter-office memos that had been read once, which sat below a drawer of instruction manuals that hadn’t enjoyed even that courtesy.

A spot of red grabbed my attention, curled between strung-out reams of machine paper with faded green stripes and dot-matrix test patterns ribboned across one face. The bright color belonged to the image of a paper lantern sitting gracefully atop a small boat, flowing down the middle of a broad, night-darkened river dotted with similar specks of light. The glossy print was unmistakably modern, even before taking the date stamped in its bottom right corner into account — from the middle of spring, just a couple of years ago.

Picking up the photograph in one hand to look at it more closely, I felt an uneven grit on its reverse side. More red greeted me when I flipped the paper over; aside a patterned square patch were a few short words, written with ballpoint pen in a clearly feminine hand:

Please bid the last of these memories good night.

I laughed to myself silently.

Pushing aside rows of forgotten paper with my legs in a slow saunter out to the hallway, I pulled a solitary match out of my breast pocket, struck it against the back of the picture, and dropped the burning stick onto a sheaf of magazines as I walked out of the door.

Thy will be done.