Supermarket

Like so many other families, we have to sleep in the supermarket.

We are renting an apartment for the purpose of Time Travel. The apartment is a small living room dominated by a small heated indoor pool. We peel back the cover to find the dishes mostly undone. Underneath the dishwater we find the plug to the deeper chamber. There are some last-minute misgivings but all three of us are committed to the journey. We will dive to the bottom and submerge inside our own small amniotic chambers. Our bodies will rest here while our minds take journeys into the past and future that cannot be predicted. The duration of the journey will be a single afternoon but may feel like a succession of eternities. It's hard to make the leap.

Jascha Hoffman - "Some Hungry Guy"

Jeremy Irons stars in a cyclical biopic about my fate as a framed man. In the first act, I am a rich and powerful man, greeted by Miranda Richardson and Kate Winslet in a convertible, an irresistible mother-daughter team. As I slip into the back seat, with my bodyguard next to me in drag, the ladies in the front seat put on their male wigs and mustaches. The next morning I wake up in captivity. Most of my organs have been stolen, and I am trapped in an unknown high rise, at an unknown time and place, facing trial for deeds that cannot be disclosed to me for security reasons. The trial is a sham, but it is not clear who it is intended to deceive. To cement their case, the prosecution shows footage of my career as a rich and powerful man. For the first time I consider my own guilt—or worse, that I may have colluded in my own framing.

I can't tell whether D is angry or distracted. J turns out to be some fat kid on the street.

After the threat seminar, L guides us around a deep mud trap. We park at her house, which is filled with fine porcelain relics. I can feel an old kinship coming back strong.

Tobin leaps through a large glass window. We are shocked; he was not supposed to fall through. The height is a certain killer. When we find him, hours later, in the shallows of the river, he is lucid, though a little subdued, with a hole in the small of his back that is just beginning to bleed.

Into the harkness with a dungeon.

It turns out the black dog is not dead; they had just told us that to ease the sting that came with giving her away to another owner. Walking her to the beach, we pass a cat's carcass submerged in the wet sand. Two passenger jets are floating on the stormy tide, with two blue plastic helicopters there to rescue them.

Party on the submerged airplane wing.

Hang gliding up through winter crags, I ration eggs.

Let's talk about the shock of losing my grandmother again.

"I am your dog," says the body of a woman as it walks from the wreck of an car accident where the corpse of a retriever lies smoldering. "I am your dog."

When I return from a long early shower, the musicianship class is moving from marketing to promotion.

At the reception, my mother urges me to take a bite of the brisket Courtney Love has on a styrofoam plate.

A rhino named Natalie.

A wake for my grandmother, a month after her death. She lies in a pod, built into a panoramic chamber, her corpse just long flaps of skin. Then the pod closes and I am ushered back in to the party.

She shoots herself. Once for show, and once for real. And after she shoots herself for real, she shoots you.

At the shore, I'm combing the surf for mammals taken in by the tide. First a stray possum, then a few kittens pawing out of the wet sand. And behind a sandbar, submerged in shallow seawater, the possibility of a grandmother.

I walk by a continuing education school where an algebra lesson is underway. The sign outside says: "Regular class: $95. Isaac Asimov, $150." "Might as well spring for the Asimov," I think to myself.