11.28.2005

Epidemic. A man on my subway train starts to laugh. First a trickle, then a fountain, then a flood of good-natured and sincere laughter. The man's laughter has no observable object, no context. He is clearly mad. Passengers around him try on some dirty looks, seeming more confused than annoyed, but soon give up. Then a group of schoolkids starts to snigger at the laughing man and, presumably, at the effect he is having on their fellow passengers. The sight of children ridiculing the insane disquiets more onlookers; one woman lets out a few nervous titters. The man's ringing peals have now subsided for reasons as mysterious as their origins. And taking in the whole situation, I let out a little sigh of recognition. And again, the man begins to laugh.

11.25.2005

Fictions. I'm living inside someone else's story. It all feels real enough to me but I am aware that I am living through a situation invented by someone I don't know. Episode by episode, I adapt this life to the stage. It's not very hard to do so because the story was composed with my adaptation in mind. I spend too much time writing and not enough rehearsing, and in the end I am only able to organize a staged reading of the first few episodes of my play. A film scout is present at my staged reading. He must like it, derivative as it is, because the play is soon turned into a major motion picture. I am delighted to learn that it will be an elaborate period drama. But I am crushed to learn that I did not get called back for the role of myself. In the reviews, a critic dwells on one small feature of the film, a triangle of sexual compulsion between three generations of a single family. He claims that the director has used it to stand in for the sequence of adaptations that led to the film. I chuckle to myself as I read this, noting that the triangle is the only thing that is identical in all three versions of the story.

11.23.2005

Whack-a-mole. I am in an arcade in my hometown. I have a large padded mallet in my right hand, and I am playing the game where small woodland creatures made of plastic resin pop out of little holes, and it is my job is to send them back into their holes one by one. In a moment of ingenuity, I discover that rather than predicting out of which hole the next rodent will pop, a thankless and impossible task, I can more efficiently cover all the holes at once with my chest. And as I do so, a man comes over, seizes my arm, and whispers in my ear: "If I catch you doing that again, I'm going to break your little wrists."

11.22.2005

A wide dark valley. Looking out over it with a number of friends from when I was young. The landscape is like central California in grayscale, hellish, a bit like how I would imagine Dante's Tuscan hills. I am the first one to set off for the other side of the valley, where I can see a huge rickety wood-and-ceramic structure that needs to be scaled. At the base, I find a narrow opening with a steep and uneven staircase of polished wood. I climb inside and upwards with my friends behind me. And after some time I emerge into a chamber, appointed in a kind of futurist high-nautical style -- polished brass, teak, leather upholstery -- with a bank of convex windows through which one can see a complete cityscape. It's dusk in a city that is permanently overcast. To the right there are two identical backlit billboards advertising a service I do not recognize in a script I cannot read. Far below is an empty street. And in every direction there are dozens of distant buildings similar to the one I am in. Men like me are also peering from their convex windows. The air is close; by now a few of my friends have stepped into the chamber with me. And two things become clear at the same time: I have been here before, I have lived here. And I am in an enormous concentration camp, about to witness the great genocide. The last one.

11.18.2005

Shaken. Given a glass of chipped ice and nickels. It gives off a faint aroma of zinc, like the smell of a finger after it touches a paperclip.

11.17.2005

Recon. We are all going about our separate lives in the cities of the North. Then at dusk we get the mobilization call, and without excuse or explanation each one of us drives away. By midnight we are at the staging ground in a forest clearing. This may be the first time we've been together in months. Around 2:30am I am told that we will be striking out before dawn. I decide not to sleep. We are now in groups of three or four, and I don't recognize the others in my group. We set out to explore an office building that appears to have been recently abandoned. The building is composed of over thirty identical floors, each linked by a stairwell to exactly two other floors, neither of which is the floor directly above or below it.

11.16.2005

Driving. Men from town started disappearing to the hills. Sometimes in their own cars, sometimes in cars they had taken from neighbors. It was a short drive and it seemed they drove slow. Fine men, trustworthy men, men with families and jobs. When we started following them it became clear that the men were not driving the cars to the hills. No. The cars were driving themselves to the hills with the men inside. We spent long hours wondering how a car could compel a man to drive. And we followed the cars on foot. For fear of being discovered, we would turn back before the men had reached the top of the hill.

Then four children began to pedal up the hill on their bikes. We followed them instead, and even when a white oil was dripping from the underside of the cars, we followed the children. Their bikes had little tires that became slick with the oil, but they swerved and pedaled on. When we got to the flats at the top of the hill, it became clear that the cars were not driving the men. No. The hill was calling the cars because the men were inside. The cars had stolen the men because the hill was strong. The men were driven by the cars and the cars were driven by the hill.

And when the cars reached the top of the hill, they swerved around the wrecks of the other cars, slowly and steadily. The cars found the holes that the hill had dug for them, and the cars flipped over to fill the holes, burying the men in the hill. We heard them cry.