As his ties to the university eroded, Ted frequented the high fidelity boutique "Audio Labs" to conduct research in the listening room. The salesmen never minded; after all, the shop mainly existed as a place for them to hang out.

After some months, Ted was offered a job as an engineer. He accepted, seeing the opportunity to advance his endeavor. Ted's servicing of components went far beyond repair into the realm of radical modification. High-powered amplifiers became electro-magnetic projectors to illuminate the ethereal dimensions of imagination articulated by mutated tuners. After closing, Ted and his colleagues would get high, set up Ted's modified components, and crank the otherworldly oscillation to open the room to the sky, creating a sonic planetarium.

Ted was never again seen around the Department. After several months of intermittently successful field research, he lost interest in professional electronics as well, and drifted back permanently to the sanctity of the attic.

Within the furnished apartment, Ted's construction of surreality became tangible through the forces of psychic accretion unleashed by his experiments. As he sat in the chair generating his notes, negative space began to seep through the attic's tiny windows.

Late at night, Ted would observe a postage-stamp sized reverse-negative image flickering on the white sheetrock before him. Wandering reflections of the film playing at the nearby drive-in—the hidden scenes within the movie. In the night sky outside, prehistoric dirigibles and intergalactic cruisers floated through shadows past elusive lunar apparitions. Metropolitan buses loaded with Austrian space commandoes and chainmailed Turanian mercenaries rumbled roughly down the boulevard. Dungeon-crawling halflings and lizardmen emerged cautiously from manholes and storm sewers. Fleets of subatomic attack craft alighted on the roof. Remnants of lost continents erupted through the lawn in the nearby park. Unknown figures scuffled through the alley before dawn—solitary adventurers in hiding, the men who fell to Earth. Scrawling furiously in his notebook and flashing his Polaroid, Ted captured it all.

This exhaustive documentation of the contours of negative space had the unforeseen side effect of destroying its subject. Diligent erection of a relief map of the unimagined obliterated the space left for wonder. Ted's flash bulb vacuumed the landscape of the fantastic, leaving it sterile and untenable, devoid of the unwritten pages that empowered the written.

Ted was left disabled by his own experiments, trapped in the chair amid the cacophonous din of his screaming shoeboxes. Re-examination of his work product only amplified the cognitive distortion. The games, his most likely solace, became unplayable, trapped within two crude dimensions. His personal space became a deafening megaphone playing back an endless track of thoughts recklessly dredged from the fantast's subsurface fathoms.

In time, Ted re-emerged from the furnished apartment, transformed, crippled by his existential x-ray vision. He could only shuffle around the neighborhood, sitting on a bus stop bench or lying marooned in the middle of a traffic island for long hours, dazed by the continuous film loop of infinite unseen dimensions projecting against the back of his eyelids. Only his feet remained capable of tracking the powdery circuits of reality's sidewalks.

The black mutt would often be seen nearby, chewing on a book.

One evening, recumbent on a berm behind the Qwik Snak, Ted watched the jet contrails etch their lackadaisical cryptograms against the washed-out amber of dusk. Framing the horizon, the vaulting concrete ribbons of the mixmaster demarcated hidden portals to the twilight of perception. Disability metamorphosed into insight as new organs sprouted in the razed savannahs of Ted's frontal lobe. When he modulated the frequency of his metaphysical iris, the contrails and their kin revealed signs and portents—meteorological indicia of the ebb and flow of negative space.

Insulated from February with layers of down and canvas, Ted became the Loper: the lone pedestrian wandering the paths of the endless new suburbs. Their infinite labyrinths of dead-end streets with fanciful names stripped of meaning, constructed over barren, unsurveyed prairie, provided a viable metaphor for his own lonely endeavor and a holistic sedative for his mind's earache. Occasionally, he would find a discreet pocket of undisturbed timber or a hidden alley on the corner of a cul-de-sac. With the passage of time and loss of memory, the persistent sediment of negative space would find new holes and fill them.

Walking the Earth like Caine, the Loper is the silent sentinel of the secret city. Unknown firewatcher of the petrified forests of undiscovered narratives, his perambulations insulate the hidden spheres from misguided strip-mining by exhausted imaginations. Intercepting unencrypted numbers stations through a pocket transistor plugged into his left ear, waiting for the next "test" of the Emergency Broadcast System, the Loper camouflages the B side of reality with subtle arcana of covert landscaping and guerilla chiropractic. Invisible paladin, his work is known only obliquely, in the waking dreams that escape over the lips of cubicle walls.