He was running. Endlessly running. Not on a treadmill, like on a NordicTrack or his career path, not in place like some deranged maniac (he imagined Dwight at his dojo), not in quicksand like he had been in so many of his dreams when he felt like Pam would never care for him (his dreams, when he remembered them, were rarely pleasant and never subtle). No, he was running endlessly, constantly moving but on a landscape so vast that his constant movement seemed to make no impression upon the mighty wastes. He imagined this would be what it would be like to run in the Sahara Desert, or in Hell.

But he knew it was a dream. He knew it was a dream for the simple reason that the only scenery on the endless blank landscape was a series of monuments to his past failures, themselves created on a scale so massive they beggared his imagination and he could only conceive of them as natural features of the desert, not as monuments at all—monuments required will, intention, humanity, and he could not conceive of a vision implemented on this grand a scale. And yet—and such is the logic of dreams—he could see every detail on them plain as day, no matter how far he stood from each, and each one somehow managed to evoke an entire memory, even where the memory itself would have been unreducible to a single symbol even by someone as talented as his little sister the architect. Despite knowing no single structure could express those moments, he nevertheless saw and felt them there on the horizon. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” he thought, then chuckled wryly at the realization that if anyone was going to despair over these works it was going to be him.

There in the distance was the time Larissa fell out of a tree when she was four and he was ten. He’d run—like he was running now—to try and catch her, seeing her slip out of the corner of his eye, and all he’d received in exchange was the opportunity to see her hit the ground a foot in front of his outstretched arms. She hadn’t broken anything—anything but her trust that her big brother would always catch her. It had taken him months to rebuild that trust, and he would never forget the way she’d looked at him when she hit the ground: like the pain of the impact was nothing compared to the pain of knowing he’d failed her.

There beyond it was the day he’d dropped out of college because he couldn’t stand racking up student loans when he had no chance of a job in his chosen field. Print media was dying, everyone said it—all news was national because all stations were national, and the local sports beats he’d grown up wanting to write for were blogs at best and AP bylines at worst, making no one any money, least of all the writer. The scholarships had dried up—there was one he’d been looking at to cover senior year that had a fifty year history, for god’s sake, and they’d announced its termination his junior year—and the loans were building up and he’d decided he needed to look for a job. But he’d never been able to kick the shame. No amount of “Bill Gates was a college dropout” or “you have a steady, full-time job” or “you’re so smart” had fully assuaged the feeling that if he had hung on and gotten that degree he might not be a failing paper salesman at a failing paper company with a broken heart (well, that one was recent, but the other two were longstanding fears). After all, what could be dumber than dropping out of school because print media is dead in order to go sell paper for a living?

There beside the others was the opportunity he’d passed up to get into his friend Tim’s startup on the ground floor. He’d never quite understood what the product was, but Tim had assured him that he didn’t need to worry about it. He just needed to do what he was good at and leave the software guys doing their thing. “We need people like you, Jim! I can’t sell this alone!” But he had said no, he needed something steady, something predictable, and it had turned out that Tim could sell it alone. Not to the general public maybe—he’d never made it profitable—but definitely to Microsoft—or was it IBM? HP?—who’d paid out millions for an idea that, now that he remembered, hadn’t ended up going anywhere. That was Jim’s one chance, he sometimes thought, his one opportunity to be independently wealthy—maybe wealthy enough to support himself writing the blog that covered all the stuff he’d always wanted to cover. This was a comparatively small regret—reflected in its being a comparatively small monument, if “the size of Mercury, not Jupiter” was small—but it still rankled whenever he thought about moving on from Dunder Mifflin. Why hadn’t he done it when the getting was good?

He was still running imperceptibly along the massive landscape, but he could somehow feel himself making progress—and as if the thought were father to the action, he suddenly saw new monuments hove into view in the distance, still miraculously legible from so far away. He knew these monuments, and feared them. They all had to do with Pam, and they were mighty.

There never mentioning to her again the time she kissed him at the Dundies; there never telling her how wrong Roy was for her straight out; there his failed relationship with Katy, who seemed perfectly nice but made the dual mistakes of not being Pam and reminding him of it; there “sometimes I just don’t get Roy” followed by 27 seconds of silence; there the time he’d joked about a date and been shot down; there “you’ve got to take a chance on something sometime, Pam”; there Dwight’s dojo; there telling her he was over his crush on her; there booking tickets to Australia the day of her wedding but not telling her why; there the cowardice of arranging a transfer before telling her how he felt; and there at the end two massive monuments standing in for Casino Night.

Unlike the others, a description of which would have eluded even a Pam or a Larissa, these were easily described even by such an amateur as himself. One was five letters and an apostrophe in massive block type:

I CAN’T

The other was more impressively carved, though no more devastating to his heart. It was a beautiful carving of Pam’s face—alright, he’d think anything with Pam’s face on it was beautiful, but the workmanship was almost lifelike—tears standing in her eyes, and nodding. It was the image burned into his memory at the end of the night, her nodding to tell him she would marry Roy despite everything between them. This was a monument to what had sent him into the spiral from which he was beginning to think he would never emerge, even when this flight (which seemed inordinately long) touched down in Sydney and he could finally wake up.

And then the head of Pam opened its mouth.

This was wrong.

He remembered that night, had lived through that night waking and sleeping for a month, and he knew every detail by heart. At no point after she nodded at him did she say a word to him. She was silent, staring at her feet like he had when he had come up with the idea for her Whitest Sneakers Dundie, only sadder. But she hadn’t spoken.

And now she was.

He couldn’t quite hear; it was like a concert when you stand too close to the speakers and can only feel the sound moving through you, altering your body without doing you the basic courtesy of passing through your eardrums first. He could only catch snippets of her voice—and it sounded like he’d imagined it would have sounded if she had managed to speak that day. It sounded a little rough, and a little teary, and a lot sad, and it tore him up inside to hear it. No matter what he felt about her choices, he never wanted her to feel that way—least of all because of him.

“Really cool guy, kinda lanky, great sense of humor. Maybe you’ve seen him around the office.”

She can’t be talking about me, right? If this is Casino Night, whoever coordinates my dreams, you’re doing a really bad job of it, unless the next words I hear are “best friend.” Because she didn’t compliment me that night. She told me she was going to marry Roy.

“I can’t.”

Come on now, you’re repeating yourself. I demand to speak to the management of this dream. There’s already another whole monolith devoted to that one. Get some new material.

“I was going to marry Roy.”

Now we’re back on track. Wait, was? Can we run that back again? Someone have a VCR remote or something, because I think I heard was.

“And then he left.”

Roy left her? That absolute prick. OK, Jim, but this is your subconscious. Of course in your subconscious she’s not with Roy. This isn’t real. It’s just you tormenting you by making yourself think she’s free.

“I can.”

Can what?

“I have to.”

Come on subconscious, you’re killing me here.

“I can’t not.”

OK, now I’m just confused.

“I love you, Jim.”

That’s just unfair. I want to wake up. Someone help me wake up. I can’t take this. I can’t take dream Pam saying she loves me and Roy left her and she can. It hurts too much. I’ll take the silent mockery of giant monuments over this.

“I need you to be OK.”

I am definitely not OK right now.

“Come back.”

Oh shit. That’s right. I left. All of this could be real—it isn’t, but it could be—and none of it would matter. I’m on a plane to Sydney, Australia right now. When I come back I’m officially moving to Stamford, Connecticut. I left her. I left her. I gave her no time to think, no time to talk, no time for anything. I just left. Oh my god, I need to go back. I need to apologize. Even if she doesn’t want to talk to me, even if this is just my subconscious being a total tease, I can’t leave things the way I did. I threw my heart at her and when she didn’t immediately rip her own out and give it to me I ran away. I’m still running away. I’ve been running this entire time. And I owe her more than that.

“I’m not running away.”

And suddenly he realized he wasn’t either. Somewhere in there he’d stopped running, and the desert had gone on regardless. He was standing there in the desert on his own two feet looking at the monuments—and as he watched, the ground began to rumble. It shook so hard he had difficulty standing in place, but when the rumbling stopped and he looked back up he saw something had changed. He didn’t know if it was the cause or the result of the rumbling, but when he looked back at the first monument to Casino Night two pieces had fallen off.

It read I CAN.