Lem's body became flesh jelly, bouncing about an esophageal tunnel of inter-dimensional qualities while his mind barely retained sensibility and a semblance of self despite losing its perception of time. That is not to say time stopped. Time never stops, but Lem did lose his appreciation of its passing. His mental faculties, while aware of the whizzing and whooshing and kaleidoscopic colours happening around him, focused essentially on keeping it together, man, where it meant Lem, and the one telling him to keep himself together was also Lem. Or, to put it another way: inter-dimensional travel is a weird bloody process, culminating with Lem's gelatinous body smashing into a kind of existential screen, through which the past—which, after all, is always chasing us—forcefully pressed him like moist dough through a pasta press, creating from a single jelly-ball Lem, numerous strands of human-spaghetti Lem that continued in worm-like undulations on their journey for an undefined period before undergoing the twin processes known to physicists as knotting and weaving, and which finally put our Lem back together again.

Then he saw a rapidly approaching light—

A tear in space-time—

And he was unceremoniously dumped into an alley behind a cobbler's shop.

It was daytime.

His first instinct was to turn around, to see from where he'd come and return, but the space-time tear was gone, and all Lem saw was a solid stone wall. There would be no going back. Next he sensed a certain stench, as of people having recently relieved themselves nearby, the wafting in of fresh animal droppings, rotting vegetables and old beer. Wherever he was, it was earthy and real. And he heard incoming waves of voices, engaged not in one conversation but many, in English, but in an oddly accented English that was at once understandable and completely foreign. Where am I, he thought, Jamaica, Belize, Liberia?

It was all too bizarre, really.

One usually reacts with shock to events that can be foreseen: rare but imaginable situations, like winning the lottery, losing a limb or accidentally swallowing a frog. One does not react with shock to the totally conceptually unimaginable. When was the last time you thought, If I find myself transported to another world, I'll…

Neither had Lem.

To such realities, one reacts with awe, with a profound and open dumbness—which is likely why it took Lem several minutes to realize he was naked.

Unfortunately, the alley offered few options for clothing. The ground was mud peppered with a few bent cobbler's nails, and the only feature was a rotting box on which someone had draped a torn canvas sack. But, like they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and after a few stretches to get the blood pumping and ensure his tendons were still properly attached, Lem grabbed the sack off the box, shook the dust out of it and wrapped it around his body, clamping two corners together over one shoulder with the straightest nail he could find. The result wasn't elegant, but it was better than nothing, and if there's one constant in all the worlds with all their strange dimensions, it's this: everyone looks askance at strangers in the nude.

“Hey! What’s the big idea? We were sleeping!”

Lem jumped.

He didn’t see anyone.

“That's right. Keep pretending you don’t know what you did.”

“Who’s there?” Lem said, a little hoarsely. “I swear I didn’t do anything on purpose.”

“Except steal our rag,” said the box, now hopping toward Lem, who lifted his arms to protect himself. “We find ourselves a cosy spot to have a little nap, and what, not a few weeks go by and you come along and decide you want our rag for yourself?”

The box is talking. The box is—

“Well, aren’t you gonna say anything in your defense?”

“I was naked,” Lem told the box. “I needed something to wear. I just got here, except I don’t know where here is. I didn’t know that boxes could talk. Or nap. I mean, why is a box talking? Why are you talking to me?”

The box eyed him with the uppermost corners of its construction. “Are you real?”

“I think so,” Lem said.

“Yet you’ve never seen a talking box?”

“I haven’t.”

“An adventurer’s box,” the box said a little proudly, expecting a reaction it didn’t get. “One that’s been exploring and conquering and witness to amazing feats of heroism.” Still nothing other than slight bewilderment. “A box that is itself something of a hero. A box especially enchanted to carry more than its volume and weigh less than its contents.”

Listening to the box, Lem felt a bubble rise from the pit of his stomach. It prevented him from speaking. When he said nothing, “Were you sheltered?” the box asked, its tone veering from irritation to genuine curiosity.

Then Lem’s belly bubble burst.

And with it went his expectation that he was in Jamaica, Belize, Liberia, or anywhere else on the planet Earth.

On Earth, boxes neither napped nor spoke. They just were.

“I’m not sheltered,” he said. “I’m just not from around here. And where I’m from, boxes don’t talk or take naps or have rags.”

The box shrugged its lumbers. “If you say so.”

“You can have your rag back,” Lem said. “I certainly didn’t mean to take it from you.”

But when he went to unfasten the cobbler’s nail from above his shoulder, the box said, “Nay, it’s fine. We were just about ready to get up and get on with it anyway.”

“Thank you,” said Lem.

“Don’t you worry yourself about it. It’s not a fine rag by any means. You just startled us is all. We can be grumpy in our old age.”

“How old are you?” Lem asked, both trying to be nice and noticing for the first time how worn and weathered the box looked. The sunlight managing to trickle into the alley from between the various overhanging roofs accentuated the box’s many holes and discolourations.

“We wish we could remember,” the box said. “All we know is that we’ve been retired now for many years.”

“I see. What about a name, do you have one of those?”

The box laughed—a deep, masculine guffaw. “A box with a name! Who could even come up with such an idea?”

“I suppose it would be silly,” said Lem.

“But,” said the box, “supposing such a thing could be, what would you name us?”

Lem thought for a few seconds. “I would name you Oakley.”

The box hopped closer. “We might even like the ring of that. Say, would you mind trying it out on us. Just as a lark, we mean. Nothing serious.”

Because he didn’t see any harm in indulging the box, especially as it had graciously allowed him to keep its rag, Lem said, “I wouldn’t mind that at all, Oakley.”

The box leapt into the air and spun—

And gravity seemed to fail: because instead of falling, the box remained airborne, remained spinning, as behind it arose an illuminated cloud of expanding golden dust.

“Whoa! What the—”

Then, just as suddenly as the box had leapt, it fell back to the ground.

The dust vanished.

The world returned to normal.

“Thank you, young master,” said the box.

“Master?”

“You have named us, which means you have claimed us! And to think we’d been discarded by our past master as useless junk and we thought we’d spend the rest of our life in this dirty alley, just decomposing away until we were no more. Well, let me tell you this, young master: we may be old and creaky, and maybe we’re grumpy and our attitude isn’t the cheeriest, but we have wisdom, we do. This old box has seen sights. Sights you wouldn’t believe.”

“Do you still... hold things?”

“Of course, of course,” said Oakley. “But an adventurer’s companion box is so much more than just a container!”

“What else can you do?” Lem asked.

“Watch this!”

Oakley remained motionless.

Minutes passed.

“Oakley?”

“Quiet, young master,” Oakley whispered. “We’re pondering.”

“Pondering what?”

“Your predicament. You said you didn’t know how you got here, and we will, in our many wisdoms, figure that out for you.”

“Oh—”

“We ponder better in silence.”

So Lem waited. In fact, he waited for almost fifteen minutes, and he was almost sure the box had decided to take another nap when suddenly it piped up: “Young master,” it said, “you most definitely arrived here”—Lem held his breath.—”from that street over there.”

Oakley did his best to point at the only exit from the alley.

“That’s not exactly what I was wondering,” Lem said. “I was thinking more in terms of the greater where.”

“Now, young master. We can’t know what you’re thinking, only what you say, but our wisdoms assure us that greater must first have been lesser, so the only way to know how you came to be here is to follow the same progression. As one of our past masters used to say, All numbers add up to zero! No, wait—was it maybe All numbers have to start somewhere? On second thought, that doesn’t sound right either. Anyway, our point is that you won’t find your answers in an alley.”

Lem looked toward the street.

Oakley wasn’t wrong. The street is where the voices were coming from, and it was where this world of talking boxes would truly begin to reveal itself to him.

He started walking.

Oakley hopped, grumbling repeatedly about old joints, a few steps behind.

“Young master?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Would it be too much too soon if we perhaps referred to this knowledge quest of yours as an adventure?”

“I don’t think....” Lem started to say—

But as he passed mid-sentence from the alley to the street, the view which unfolded before him took his speaking voice away.

The city was—

Well, as I have already said:

To some realities, one reacts exclusively with awe.