In retrospect it probably happened shortly before I lost sight of Sophie and Arun. One minute we were browsing shelves of wines together, weaving our ways through aisles and displays, and at some point in the next few minutes they disappeared, but how was I to know?

A bottle of wine, fourth shelf, translucent in the amber glow. The overhead string lights twinkled, dancing hyperbolically across its surface. I want you. I removed it from its perch with a minor cloud of dust. It was a 2015 Serafino Sauvignon Blanc, but more importantly, it was pretty and it was now mine.

Sophie was in charge of the cart, so I set off in search of her. She’d had on a shirtwaist dress of sunny cornflower blue and it should have been impossible to miss her.

Three minutes of retracing my steps around the wine shelves later, I began to doubt myself.

Maybe they just moved on to a different section? I wandered through the all-Italian emporium methodically, section by section. Wines gave way to cheeses and salamis. Bruschetta samples on the counters. I took one with my free hand. Next was fresh produce. They couldn’t have gone far, could they? They would’ve told me. Here was the bakery.

Would they have told me? I knew I was basically their third wheel to-day, but surely they wouldn’t just leave me here?

I finished munching on my bruschetta, pulled out my phone, and texted Sophie.

hey where r u?

im at the bakery

And then I waited. I tried to browse the pastries with interest, but I couldn’t. The tiramisú didn’t make my mouth water like it usually did. I was lost. That was it. Just anxious and scared and confused and coping with the conclusion that I was lost in an Eataly.

That wasn’t surprising, really. It’s such a big place, you almost expect to get lost in it.

The weird part was, the more I scoured Eataly, the less it made sense. At some point I left the bakery section and pushed my way through pastas and pestos into sections of sweets, shelves of chocolates, but then I ended up in wines again. Was Eataly’s floor plan circular? Somehow that possibility had never crossed my mind, but it wouldn’t be unusual. I found the spot where I had removed my bottle of wine from the shelf, so I had definitely looped around somehow.

That felt strange, because I thought I’d been walking in a straight line the whole time.

So I turned back in the direction of the bakery. Past the chocolates, past the pastas, into the salamis? Where was the bakery? I could have sworn it was somewhere along the way, but now the landmark tiramisú displays were no longer to be found. As if a whole section of Eataly had been erased when I wasn’t looking. Or transplanted somewhere else.

Breathe. This is what happens when you’re losing your mind. None of this is real. Stay cool.

No texts from Sophie yet, so I opened my app again to send her another one. And my previous two texts bore a red warning message: Not delivered.

That’s it. I called Sophie, but the call was dropped immediately, without ringing or anything. Call failed. I didn’t have Arun’s number.

And then I noticed I had no signal at all.

Produce section now. I found a middle-aged woman on her phone, her cart stationed in front of the tomatoes. “Excuse me,” I ventured at her, “could I use your phone for a bit? Just a call.”

She glared at me.

“Sorry,” I said, “I know this sounds weird, but somehow my phone has no signal, and—”

She bellowed a string of words at me, in what I assume had to be Italian. I knew not a word of Italian, but I could tell by her tone that she was not predisposed to help me. I also couldn’t read what was on her screen, but something about it seemed … off.

“Um, sorry, do you speak English?”

At this point her eyes flashed a fiery red and a small electrostatic shock coursed through my arms. Not helpful. I took a hint and left her for good.

In the next aisle there was a friendly-looking thirty-ish man. “Excuse me,” I approached him, “do you have a phone I could borrow?”

His friendliness faded and he glared at me the same way the woman did.

“I just need to make one call—”

A torrent of angry Italian, and I backed away. No need to follow this through to its eye-flashing arm-prickling conclusion.

Was everybody like this?

Now I was utterly freaked out. All I knew was I had to find my way out of Eataly.

After a blurry few minutes I stumbled upon what looked like a self-checkout section, shoppers piling up in irregular checkout queues. I still had my Serafino Sauvignon Blanc and couldn’t leave with it unless I paid for it, so I set it down on the floor in the shadows of a shelf of marinara sauces, out of the way of foot traffic. Then I navigated in the direction of the exit sign, pushed my way through the maze of queues to the far side, rounded the corner, stepped through the double doors below the green LED exit sign—

—and found myself surrounded by shelves of wines. This was impossible. Leaving Eataly was impossible. All doors led back into Eataly. All roads lead to Rome.

Then it got freakier. Stairs in odd places, poking out of corners of rooms that didn’t exist before, headed straight into walls. Terra, the supposed rooftop restaurant and lounge, gave way to even higher floors that were definitely not on the map, eldritch vistas that looped around and caved onto themselves in unholy geometries. At some point I descended twenty flights of stairs only to end up in a wine room again.

Curiously small, malformed rooms with nothing but crates and empty shelves. Corridors that became narrower as I traversed them, the painted fruits on the walls distending into unnaturally elongated shapes. Dead ends cobbled from unlikely spaces—the pastel checkerboard floor of an ice cream shop, the concrete slate grey of a high school locker room, the dusty sepia of an underground WWII bunker—all inexplicably part of this Eataly.

Doors too tiny to fit through. Doors that were merely a wooden frame standing in the middle of a room. Doors that revealed nothing but pitch black. Doors that opened into different sections of Eataly, but in strange, physics-defying orientations—a view of the bakery section but from the ceiling, a view of the bottom of a table at La Pizza & La Pasta, right in front of me.

Breathe. This is all just a dream. A phantasmagorical nightmare. You’re having some sort of mind-screw event. Let it pass. Breathe.

I broke down in a pasticceria. I had brushed against one of the Italian shoppers a bit too forcefully this time, she let loose with a barrage of Italian curses, and I lost it.

“Someone!” I cried. “Someone please, please, please just help me, just help me get out of here—”

Now everybody was glaring at me. I could feel the heat of their glares across the room, seething, fraying with electricity, prickling at my fingers, and I ran like hell, knocking rows of Italian shoppers into the shortbread displays, anything to get out of there, my legs convulsing, spasms rocketing through my body, buckling, and with all my feeble might I thrust myself through a door opening into pitch black—

When I came to, I was lying in some sort of corridor. Wooden shelves, stocked floor to ceiling with wines—why was it always wines?—stretched indefinitely into the distance. I couldn’t make out an end to it, only an indistinct vanishing point.

“Oh, you’re awake.” A man’s voice, behind me.

“Who are you? Where am I? What happened?”

“Hey there, take it easy.”

Barely awake, I rolled over to face him. His beard was greying, and I genuinely could not tell if he were closer to forty or to sixty, but he seemed affable enough. And he spoke English.

“I’m Michael.” He extended a hand.

“Um,” I shook his hand. “I’m Jill.”

“Nice to meet you. You seem to have a lot of questions.”

“Please tell me I’m not in Eataly.”

He laughed. “As far as I can tell, this Eataly is not an Eataly. No, this is something far worse. I still have no idea what this place is, and I’ve been here for decades.”

“What?”

“There’s no gentle way to put this. You’re trapped down here with us.”

“In Eataly?”

“Yep. In ‘Eataly’.” Air quotes. “Or as we call it, Hell with Pesto.”

Trapped. In an Eataly. Indefinitely.

“Who’s us?”

“There’s a clan of us. Human survivors. You’re lucky we found you, before the zombie shoppers got you.”

“Zombie shoppers? You mean the ones who shout at you in Italian and flash their eyes and shock you?”

“It’s not Italian. Francesca speaks Italian and she says it’s not. None of us know what language it is. But yes. Rule number one is don’t talk to them.”

“Noted.”

“You ready to walk?”

We took a stroll down the infinite corridor of wine shelves. I noticed that every single bottle was a 2015 Serafino Sauvignon Blanc. After a timeless interval we turned a corner.