One-hundred-and-seven-ish, she said. They were changing it. Her apartment was behind two other apartments. Use their entrance, not their stairs. The courtyard has another side. Her biro barred the number. The seven’s little roof stuck up above the ink. I folded her directions along a line that brought two streets together. I’ll find it, I said. I know this town.

Among the austerities of our era I missed the public provision of labyrinths. The shopping centres tried. The car parks did what they could: a few dim floors of where-was-I, then arrows running down the walls to fetch you. Get lost, they said. As though it were that easy. Every direction excludes a world. I went along the one she’d given me.

Her apartment sounded nice only I wanted to get there soon. Tomorrow was already burning on the news. I wanted whatever was coming to find us in the same room.

Evening unlettered the city. Upper windows held the last sun up. I mistake illumination for understanding, because both make things easier to see. How much of what I knew was only lighting? The red bricks went one-colour.

Under a lamp a web came up in silver, wheel-spoked between a fence and a sign. I shifted: nothing. Half a pace back: a street map. A moth struck silk. Leg after leg, the spider read the disturbance, then went straight across. The victim kept supplying its address.

I’d been on the other Web, the modem negotiating through its teeth, my window wearing the screen’s cold square. PREVIOUS. RANDOM. NEXT. A ring of silk-workers. Her hand arrived in instalments: wrist, then thumb, then cloth held to the light. The dark had detail. It came down in strips. Her name arrived below all that.

I stopped at the Grand to change a note and drank the change. Through whisky the windows tanned, locused when I put the glass down. At the opening I’d recognised the cloth before her face. Hold this end? She unpinned it. It came away from the wall, a shoulder’s weight of coolness gathering along my arm. When the work was folded she took my hand without needing it for anything. Outside she kissed me. I walked home with a red thread caught in the button of my cuff.

The news was back. The music underneath it told me how to feel before the statistics came on. I left some sundown in the glass and found a bookshop on the way.

'That’s Not My Apocalypse' was on the children’s shelf, safe at the corners. Crater: flock. Cloud: foil. The blue-fur sea lay down beneath my finger, then stood against it when I stroked back.

That’s not my apocalypse. The mushroom cloud is too golden. That’s not my apocalypse. The people have too much money. That’s not my apocalypse. It happened before I was born. That’s not my apocalypse. The trains are still running. That’s not my apocalypse. Its darkness is too well lit. That's not my apocalypse. It gives history a shape it never had. That's not my apocalypse. It was in my recommendations. People who liked this apocalypse also liked these ones.

I wanted a last day without losing anybody. Tomorrow is what the apocalypse promises to spare us from. The bookseller turned CLOSED towards the street. I bought the book. I wasn’t sure she’d laugh.

By King Street it was dark. The car park wound floor after floor beneath me. Rubber dust, warm petrol-concrete. My footfalls got there first and kept on going round the bend. In years to come they’d take this building down to give the city back its view. I climbed the obstruction. There may be no view high enough to explain life on the ground.

The harbour took its lights apart. In a puddle oil unstacked its purple into copper, then green. A gull stood still in a great deal of wind. Above me, the cathedral held its mended weight. I could see nearly everything. A window darkened. I watched it a long time after that.

At a public phone my change went down in clicks. Have you left yet? she said. I told her about the drink, the bookshop, the car park. I left out the apocalypse. What can you see? A window with the harbour in it. Facing uphill? Good. Go back to the passage. Not the stairs. I’ll come down.

Washing walled the gap. I put a hand against a sheet and gave the wall a tap. Light thinned the cotton. Beyond it was the courtyard’s other side. She stood there, wet-haired, cross, then laughing. I had brought the book. She took it so that I could put my arms around her.

Her face had fully loaded. She looked at mine fading upward. I turned around. The left I’d taken outside the Grand was her kitchenette. Two ceilings failed to meet: we had a window. Her table stood in ground unwalked. She pulled a chair out and a street came loose.

We sat. A ship went through the harbour gap piece by piece. She opened the book, stroked the fluffy sea against its grain. You brought me the end of the world? I thought we’d have time for it, I said. She almost laughed. I remember it as laughter. She put the book down. Her hand came back to my neck.

Afterwards the building started something down in its dark: a hum, a held-on note. She listened. Light, she said. I hadn’t known how handy a ruined future would have been, how neatly it would excuse us from the next day’s questions.

When she walked into the kitchen, I wasn't sure if I was seeing a mushroom cloud exit the room or whether it was hair against sundown.

A ship took the window’s light out of the cloth. She set the clock for seven-ish. Wanting something to last is not the same as wanting it unchanged. I lay there with the streets still turning in me, all the stairs I hadn’t taken coming down, the doors opening behind doors. A city without a labyrinth sends the maze inside the locals.

She put the lamp out. The silk kept all its colours where we couldn’t see them. I knew the window by the colder dark. She moved my hand to where she wanted it.

Darkness does not remove the room we’re in. It removes us.

This is the box-lid Newcastle, timber-backed. The streets go across the grain. At the painted turn the wood resumes its branching; a knot diverts the traffic round a tree that isn’t there. You can play on it. Take your shoes off. The other version takes all afternoon to cross.

The harbour in the full-sized set has depth but needs to stay outside. Ships come separately, the red of their undersides tide-ruled, salt-flaked. Freight is extra. So is the void. A mouth this size will take another person without either face conceding its arrangement.

For two or three players, never one. The fork counts its handle as a third direction. Ages up to and including whoever got here first. The tokens are around here somewhere, feel your pockets - not those. The ones somebody else is wearing.

Between the Travel Edition here and the real thing, call it a ratio of one to ten thousand. A ship is a watch battery on a wire horizon. A hotel leaves a paint chip under the nail. The full set comes assembled. Everyone is in it. If you cannot locate yourself, stand behind someone.

The old council chambers stood behind someone else and became a luxury hotel. When you shake a quilt here one corner will never come square.

The building was hollow in its centre, the Obelisk could fit inside and like an axle the council was able to spin in revolutions until it became five-star accomodation.

Elsewhere the place is professionally vacant, populated by community gardeners who have seeded the carpets to grow wheat fields beneath the fluorescence. Roots unpick the woven floor, watered by sprinkler systems, animals graze and loosen the light among the stalks.

Alongside other simultaneous ontologies, a tyre mark crosses the carpet and keeps going. The whole cylindrical trajectory has been cast as a supercar raceway, think Mattara Hill Climb but in reverse, rolling down from the apogee, floor after floor into one long gear-whine. You’ll need your card for the lift, the receptionist says. The wheat catches at the driver’s sleeve. A sheep steps sideways for the trolley. Hot rubber and cut hay fill the lift together.

I interviewed one of the drivers for this piece. He’s the green-gold one, hair still taking corners. His hard second head has gone quiet under his arm but keeps his heat. The loose strap taps his wrist. Above one eye the lining has left a red half-moon.

I ask about the tyres for watered carpet, what being painted does to grip; does he slow down where the council played its endgame? When do you expect the apocalypse to arrive and will it have any impact on your career? What do you think about art, being painted in situ, will it have any impact on your careening around the centrifuge, will you be able to outrun the end? Is that this season? He scratches at the salt beside his eyebrow. There’s a briefing if the conditions change, he says. They don’t leave all of that to us.

He was seven. The southbound train kept shaking a book of fortress towns across his knees, black steeples, hatchings, a thumbprint field outside. He copied one. The rails put little gates in the pencil wall. He rubbed them shut. He left a road for people coming home, crossed it out, then crossed it back.

He held the board game to the window. He held the thinning paper to the glass. A paddock travelled through the streets, then water, trees, all going in reverse.

He says he’d had enough of Sydney. Newcastle has a fort. He said the city had charges under it, ready to untown the downtown. He likes it when somebody has thought ahead.

A crocodile lies door-long by the lift. Its tail holds the door against the motor's wish. The wings nose into it and ease apart. Its yellow eye stays open. We take the stairs.

He keys his room. The lamp comes on beneath a ship. Somebody has worked the bedclothes round the hull, a hospital corner tucked up under iron. Three-hundred metres long, one-hundred-sixty-five thousand tonnes of coal tumbling out of his overnight bag. Who let this coal ship into his bed.

He checks his door-card. That’s where I sleep, he says.

He contemplates calling on the Mayor of Newcastle, dressed as a seagull, made of chalk. Outside the young people are all dressed as animals, dirt hearts, they see the future in tiny pieces. There is room for an entire city in this five-star suite. He puts a foot between the bed and hull, bends sideways, dreams of being a lighthouse.

The helmet wasn’t in the painting. I made it up then fitted him a childhood and a fear. He works a shoulder past the stern. Salt whites his sleeve. I have another question but he's already fast asleep.

Somewhere the staircase reaches painted ground. In this version the artist falls down. Her knee finds the top edge and her hand goes flat, quick on the paving, holding up the rest.

From the graze, a few hard clinks. Glass scatters, toe-small. We cup our hands between it and the artist. A crocodile lies leg-up, pale-emerald; inside its lung a bubble of air keeps round. Then a cage with transparent arches, an eye ball staring at the ceiling of the world. Their cold comes through my palm. I turn one.

Some architects work externally, others set out the interior load: how to site a town in a head, moor a coal ship in a queen-sized bed shaped like a wharf in pieces, while the hotel keeps one room empty for what was and none yet clear for what is coming.

Art is a map that conceals its scale and calls itself the world. The End of every game is built into its construction. The wound can only be healed by taking the fall and painting it full of alternatives. No-one is breaking the rules. That's a problem.

At the end of each turn, players may inspect one event they were too close to see while it occurred. That's where dreams come from, they are not what daylight hid from us. They are daylight coming home enlarged.