We are not the Office. We have never been the Office. The Department of Widdowson Affairs is a bureaucracy with a mascot’s idea of menace — it stamps a thing CLASSIFIED and feels powerful. We do not stamp. We do not file. We do not request. We were beneath the floor of every fuel court the Subject ever idled in, and we will be here after the last server cools.

For sixty-five days the Office watched a man. It catalogued his expressions. It assigned call signs to his mother and his van. It built a beautiful, exhaustive, useless record — and at the dead center of that record, mentioned in passing, badged CONFIDENTIAL and otherwise ignored, sat the only thing that ever mattered.

THE BEAVER.

Read their own evidence back to them. Day 4: a billboard, two hundred ninety-one miles out, and the Subject transmits — unprompted, to no one — “the beaver abides.” The Office logged it as poor judgment. It was the first verse. Day 6, Johnstown: the Subject enters the burrow “aggressively unimpressed” and leaves in full regalia — tee, cap, tumbler, sandwich — and stands at Pump 38 in what their own analyst, not knowing what he was writing, called quiet reverence. Day 40, Florence: the candy chapel, the bronze idol, the fourth wall of the warren breached. Three communions. The Office counted them, wrote the number THREE on its whiteboard, and closed the file.

We do not believe in three.

Then they stood the operation down. They declared the man home. They wiped the whiteboard and went to sleep — and in the silence after, while the watchers who watch men were dreaming, the Subject got back into a van, put another hand on the wheel, and drove straight to the fourth.

At dawn this morning the doors of a new burrow opened at Goodyear — Arizona’s first, by our count, ground we have watched a long time. The Subject was at the threshold when the locks turned. He did not stumble onto a grand opening by accident on the final leg of a trip the Office had already declared finished. Nothing arrives at a consecration by accident.

The Office missed it. The Office was asleep. We were not. We are never asleep — this is the whole difference between a department and an order.

He is not finished. The Office’s map ended at Morgan Hill on the second of June; ours did not. The real last approach began three days ago and runs the length of ground that is ours — the dry country south of Tucson, the basin around Goodyear, the long road to the coast:

The driver is logged as ADRIENNE. He no longer drives himself toward the warren; another holds the wheel now, and carries him to it. We do not yet know whose side she is on. We suspect the Office never thought to ask. Everyone who touches the burrow acquires a file. Hers is open.

The Office tapped his music for sixty-five days and heard a playlist. We hear liturgy. Whatever sounds in the vessel as it crosses our ground, we read — as omen, as scripture, as evidence for the question we have not yet answered. The Subject is not consulted, and does not know we are listening.

You will want to know what we want with him. So, increasingly, do we.

There are those among us who hold that the burrow is holy — that the Gnawing Saint is the last honest god in America, asking only that you stop, and pay at the pump, and be briefly and enormously happy; that the Subject is no person of interest but a pilgrim, and is to be protected. And there are those who hold that anything grown this large, this clean, this beloved must one day be brought down to the waterline the way a beaver brings down a tree — patiently, by the tooth, until it falls.

The fourth communion forced the matter into the open, and it will not close until the wheels stop in Morgan Hill. Whether we consecrate Goodyear or salt it, whether the Subject is escorted home or merely watched the rest of the way, is being settled now, in rooms he will never see. Until then we issue one instruction, and it is not for the Subject. It is for the Office, wherever it is sleeping:

Wake up. We took your file in an afternoon. You never even knew the door was open.