I have plenty of time and some friends in town, so I decide not to worry about the variety show at which I am to appear with Jessica. When I see it's 7:30pm I get on the subway with the intention of drawing up a short setlist and running through a song or two in my head. But an immigrant father and son on the train need directions, and I spend most of the ride explaining the map to them, missing my transfer. I arrive at the Harlem amphitheater at 11:30pm but am relieved to find that the variety show is running late. Jessica, however, is not pleased at my lateness, and refuses my attempts to introduce an element of improvisation into our 10-minute performance. She is also resentful that I have forgotten the ukulele, mandolin, and fiddle at home. Ultimately it doesn't matter because there are so many acts before us that we don't get a spot. At the after party, I have been asked to get people interested in skateboarding around an enormous and steep track sometimes used for Vertical Roller Derby. With fear in my heart, I plunge off the rim.

Giddens has joined a cult, and she thinks I'm going to join too. The cult is built around a belief in time travel. Her master is an unremarkable man in his forties who, on occasion, causes her to hallucinate feverishly. She is adamant that I will soon have the experience of letting fifty years flow in reverse before me, as at a movie theater. I leave the office and ask a colleague to cover for me.

In the dry foothills, a poolside crowded with kids from my boarding school. We drive to the museum where we are given a semiprivate tour. From the text on the walls of the gilded room holding fossils and animal specimens, we can tell that the collection has been put together by Lutherans. When we confront the docent, asking her to admit to her belief in God's design and the reckoning to come, she summons the curator. I wander off to the next room, which is full of television kiosks and iced water coolers, until some friends just back from soccer practice ask me what I'm doing in the sports lounge. So I walk out to the courtyard and into a morals class in session. We pair off and I'm explaning to the janitor that the book we have been assigned, a weak Lutheran imitation of Gulliver's Travels, is "not just silly, it's stupid." The class hushes; clearly everyone has heard. The headmaster uses the pause to ask whether anyone knows what the word "carapace" means. I resist, but most kids shoot up their hands. "No," the headmaster explains with a condescending attempt at patience, "it means SAD." Later, we are given more semiprivate tours of the museum.

From a roadside motel I see a helicopter, with two large wheels set up like a motorcycle, trying to land. It would be easier without the wheels, I understand, but this is part of the charm of the beast. Later, along a cliff, my horse slips down to a little dusty shelf. And from that shelf, to another lower shelf. This is where I have to leave the horse, which, as it turns out, is more of a mule.

An aerial view of my bus route from New York City to Amherst: a coastal wetland thick with puddles, ditches, and marshes, and a thin wagon trail along it.

A long hike up a hillside built from scrap wood. I follow the village girl knowing that she wants me and that my parents wouldn't mind. But it is only when she arrives at home, a warm enclosed tank of water on the ridge, that I am willing to kiss her. Later I ask my brother, his friend, and Natchez over for band practice. Sarah Darling is practicing Bach cello suites on the viola upstairs. We take turns teaching the band a song. When my brother tries an early Who hit, I attempt to form a horn section by attaching the bari sax mouthpiece to the body of a bassoon while Natchez plays alto. With morale fading, I fall back on an acoustic rendition of "Help Me Make It Through the Night."

In the lobby of a new hotel, I submit to a series of acting exercises that involve approaching strangers and saying embarrassing things. The idea is to inure myself to public shame in order to lose the fear of humiliation that motivates most actors. It occurs to me that I am in a rehearsal dream for an actor's nightmare.

Clinging to a little sheet of scrap metal, myself and three friends soar along the canal towards a monastery on the hill. Before we cross into the next county, two of us are asleep. Losing my strength, I guide us to touch down at a filling station where another group of friends is filling themselves up with air. Later I am waiting to be picked up by my parents with my drug-addled music editor. He watches over my shoulder as I compose, then rearrange, a piece that ends as follows: "...you must be twitterpated."

Watching a small improvistational troupe as they introduce a feature film. They invite the audience to fill in the melody of a song called "12 Days" that could be sung by a young Alexander Herzen: "Twelve days, baby; I'm just twelve days behind..."

At a private function, I bring two wineglasses to the bar on a tray: one intact, and the other broken at the stem.

On a family vacation, I have to lie down and be very still while I am fitted with a large set of padded black headphones that will cure me.

Preparing my consort for her first nighclub shoot, I paint her eyelids a purple that will appear red on film.

It's time to take my elderly boss for a walk. We set out down a muddy path through a winter forest. Soon we are trailed by a pair of brothers who listen in on our conversation. The boss grows a foot taller and a decade younger, and now has a thick mop of curly hair; he has turned into something of an aging Tony Kushner. He refers to a theory that says that it is wrong for nuclear weapons to be legal in big countries and banned in smaller countries; not only wrong, but therefore dangerous. Trying to keep up, I suggest that the same argument could be made for contraception. We push onward. Feeling that we are excluding the brothers, when the boss brings up free trade agreements, I observe that the elder brother has traveled to Central America. No one hears.

In the war of civilizations, my stubborn friend wants to organize a meeting where people can air their grievances. He sets up ten plastic cups on a card table in an abandoned classroom and waits, expecting no one to come. An hour later the room is packed with people asking each other the questions. And without meaning to, I ask a question that gives away the identity of another friend's mother, a square-jawed woman with short hair, who must now go into hiding with her twin sister.

As my lover attempts to engage me in conversation at 4am, I groan without waking, "I Am A Human Being Who Needs to Sleep."

I am hovering along a rocky coastlike with a friend, occasionally touching down on the stones with bare feet. We are searching for the cottage where my family will converge for the holidays. When I arrive I see an empty desk and a rotary telephone. An uncle calls to verify that the next five Saturdays will be considered Sabbaths by the God of the Israelites. I reply that, despite the fact that one is Christmas eve day and the other is New Year's Eve days, I believe they will be observed.

I check into a fading hotel with my aging boss and his middle-aged secretary. We are on deadline for the biweekly Atlas of the World. As he rips through another two-page spread of Central Asia, I go down to the hotel lobby to clean up. I gather a pile of large full-color proofs with suction cups on the back—from the phone booth, the urinal, the check-in desk, and from the stairwell—as a number of families with small children arrive. In the elevator, the secretary asks my boss whether we should mention the films of Robert Frost. He replies that Frost hated film. "Is that in Frost?" she asks meekly.

A gravelly hillside where my Dad is teaching myself and my brother the fine art of BMX. We discover that you can ride from that side over to this side, avoiding the piles of unpacked dirt and the little potholes here and there. Or you can ride from this side over to that side, pushing hard up the hill and making sure not to pop a tire. Dad suggests a little trip across the ravine which has some PVC pipe stretched over it. And I call it like it is: a ballbreaker.

In my hometown there is an eclipse. While it's dark I am the only one who wonders whether the boy with tight lips and fierce eyes has been doing harm. Light returns and I glance down at the four children, each with a tiny hole in the temple that begins to ooze. And as wave of panic spreads through the town square, I am the only one who locks eyes with the tight-lipped boy. His hair is wavy blond and his eyes are fierce.

That night I feel hunted; I am sure that he will come to silence me. I can't tell my friends for fear of endangering them, so I stop going outside. As time passes the feeling is more of being haunted, and eventually all that is left is the guilt I feel for not exposing the murderer. It becomes so general that I wonder whether that might not have been me.

When I am grown there is another eclipse. The man with tight lips pierces the temple of an infant child in his mother's arms. This time the Father sees what has gone wrong and, out of mercy and desperation, draws a revolver and puts the mother and child out of suffering. And immediately the tight-lipped man with fierce eyes has executed the Father.

We park near the train track and wait for the drive-in movie to be projected by our eyes onto the freight cars as they rumble past.

It is the last day of summer camp and we have gathered around the fire to say goodbye. It is all warm until a slow man with a pony tail and sideburns launches into a series of accusations against one of the counselors. We are all unsettled because this man is clearly unhinged but we have to hear him out. As we pack our vehicles, he comes up to me and squeezes my hand.

My grandfather is looking dapper in a tuxedo on the edge of the sea. The water comes up to gently lap his ankles and he turns to smile at me. Then he takes an elegant demi-pas step and shifts his balance in a smooth way as if he were starting a solo dance routing on a soundstage. And as the water seeps into the sand below him, I can see the step become a twist, and the twist become a fall. And slowly, as the water rushes in and his body turns to meet it, he makes eye contact with me. I swim out into deep water to catch him but it takes several minutes before I can see well enough to pull him up from the bottom. I feel no guilt but am aware that my efforts have not been enough to save him from a death that did not have to happen the way it did.

To clean up a mess on the desk, my colleague suggests ripping out a page of a book called Essential Torah. I object, and instead offer an oversized book of New Orleans photographs by Roberto Polidori.

I work up the nerve to play a little carnival game at the hell house. This involves conspiring with a group of strangers to explore the creepy parlor of a custom-designed haunted house. In the first round I stay on the sidelines as an exploratory party goes in, falls silent, then emerges fifteen minutes later with bursts of laughter and weeping. The second time I am in front, and it is my job to pick apart the mantelpiece stone by stone until the shadow of a black robe appears and we all tremble in terror. And a poorly costumed Death appears to tell us all to move on to the annual parade. A flatbed schoolbus is idling in the middle of a wide street and when it takes off I am the only one aboard. It takes me to my next appointment, with a fine-featured and red-haired young guardian I have seen somewhere before. She gives me a large binder labelled "Luddifices" and asks me to select an exercise therein. And I can't choose one without choosing them all.

A fresh egg cracked into a bowl. A fresh egg cracked into a bowl. And then an egg cracked open with the blackest of yolks.

Hovering over a broad feudal landscape, I watch as the daily exchanges of thousands of peasants and merchants and soldiers unfold below me. Then a rift: a mighty black insect has ripped through the sky and in one beating of its leathery wings can send the hills and huts and armies spinning out into cataclysm. I feel the magnitude of the loss, though I do not fear it. And then the real rift, as I am torn from that sky back into my own body and feel the loss, small and personal and terrifying, of the world I had been dreaming.

Out on the town with my friend A, we are kidnapped by three young members of the nihilist youth league who take us to a safe house and engage us in conversation about our core beliefs. The true believer is a young man who looks like me but with longer hair. He has a little pistol. His two accomplices are his older sisters; they seem equivocal and more or less friendly. We remark that it's ironic that we are the only ones wearing all black.

An exploratory fast. In one corner, a kitten wrapped in a wet towel. In the other, the experience of love.

We show up late to the red imperial ballroom on a volcanic island where the first lecture is to be held. The first book under discussion is Laughter at Comedians, a didactic novel by a noted American realist. Everyone has a pristine Vintage paperback edition with matte cover and stylish typography. I steal a seat on the aisle; mid-lecture I am asked to move by a group of young men who say my seat is reserved for gentiles. They seat their grandmother there. One girl in our party can't read; she says she sleeps in the bathroom instead and she likes it. The three-year-old two seats to my left has the board game edition of the novel open on his lap. Later we get a walking tour of a small bamboo treehouse that has been retrofitted for fire safety by the island's closed circuit television station. The show's Australian host guides us through the necessasry steps: first we must build a water tower twenty feet above the highest bamboo room; then a thick bamboo pipe is run down and across the length of the house; whenever smoke rises an elegant leaf-based mechanism curls up to let gallons of water drip down and across the length of the pipe and irrigate the household with thick streams and drops. The woman who lives there says there are fires all the time.

On arriving in graduate school I find that my brother has been there for a year already. My thesis proposal is due immediately and I ask him if he has any ideas. He tells me that as a philsopher he has been trained to think precisely and that he has many ideas. He asks me if I have any ideas. Later, I find that my friend Sheldon Reid has been appointed Vice Provost of the University of Pittsburgh. He is still a very tall black man.

Combing through a large shopping complex that contains a scale model of New York City set on a steep hillside. As I come back over the 57th Street Bridge and head toward Tudor City for a dinner engagement the only option is to scale down a small moving staircase. And a thick guard from the Rockaways yells: "No downsies on the upscalator!"

On the second floor of a large and drafy Victorian house, I am sitting on the sill of a small window and leaning back against a screen. And I realize that every screen in the house has been cut open with one neat and forceful slice.

At a friend's wedding I join in the treasure hunt with a growing band of mischevious friends. By game's end was have accrued in a giant musical pileup, a pyramid formation of revelry and noisemaking that inches toward the end of the room. I myself am hanging upside-down from a wheelchair at the front of the parade, playing an organ which I pump with my head and singing loudly. As I open my eyes I see that we are on a collision course for my maternal grandparents, who are seated and smiling meekly back at the spectacle.

I wake in a large guest room with Jesse and his entourage of wind and water spirits. There is a whining chorus of nymphs and there is also the rambunctious and bearded Beaver Supreme. We are rehearsing the vocal tracks for my next album. Worried that we'll wake the rest of the bed and breakfast I try to convince them to whisper, but they resent this suggestion deeply and grow ever more boisterous. Outside in the dining room I pass by the solitary table of Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's nuclear weapons czar. He is inconsolable, and in a single gesture he peels the entire oily skin off of an enormous roast turkey. Only later do I learn that he has recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. And I think: Butterfield on Giambologna.

After riding through a dark tunnel in a tiny box with my mother and father, I am stranded on a bright and sunny docking island waiting for the next city-owned paddleboat to arrive. As I stare out to the horizon I get too much of the sun in my eyes. Finally a craft pulls in and a couple disembarks with a video of homemade porn so we wait for the next one. And suddenly, sound comes back into my ears.

After a rough day at work, I wake the commuter train home. On board is my old friend Jesse, undercover with his electroacoustic improv troupe. He hands me a self-contained human pickup, a small white electric device which emits a constant whine. Following his lead, I affix it to the wall and twist to its active position. We then start in on a ten-minute work of physical theater and vocal experimentation, at the end of which we make believe we are two passengers on a night train across Europe.

At night we drive up to the hilltop estate where the three royal children are kept by their keepers. The playroom is on the third floor and the only way to it is through a steep Victorian passageway, like a staircase without stairs, that seems to be designed for highly trained animals. When we reach them they have taken the form of two girls, not surprised by us but bemused at our exhaustion. It is clear that they do not need our protection. Realizing this, Rafael descends to the ground floor in a single leap, leaving me to shimmy down over the next fifteen minutes. He later admits that he was driven by a blend of malice and sportsmanship. I go next door to the house of a shy and brilliant editor. Over dinner he reveals that he has separated from his stunning wife and is now raising the child of a girlfriend who is never home. She gets home just as I am leaving.

I arrive at the foot of the mountain to work in the operations center of a large campaign. Base camp is so busy that my presence is barely appreciated.

We ride through the badlands in an army surplus vehicle with tinted windows, wearing tinted sunglasses and braided hair falling over our hard bodies. We are there to trespass, which we do, and to accomplish an elaborate series of armed robberies which somehow never come to pass. Hot on our trail is the crew of a made-for-TV movie about our short careers, filming a reenactment of each leg of our rebel odyssey just as it happens, or sometimes slightly before because of a tight production schedule.

Their overhead shot of our arrival in a small mestizo village in Arizona creates a buzz that is subsiding just as we get there. I dismount and flag down an old friend who was once a built butch dyke but is now a fresh-faced young man. I start in on a long and disingenuous speech about how brave he is to have made a new life for himself as a man. He tells me that lately he has been camping out with a male-to-female transvestite from Alberta who is constantly nagging but really knows how to dance.

A few days later, our vehicle breaks down on the highway and the only path down to the town goes through the stucco stairwell and back patio of a small family away on vacation. The next time we break down we track dust and pine needles through the same stairwell and patio. The third time the family lets my posse pass but stands there to greet me, and I understand that they have been stationed there to extract my debt to society.

There are five bell jars on the kitchen counter, each with a headless chicken that is half alive but subdued. It is my job to chop these chickens into very small pieces and place them into thin plastic bags that will later be donated to a Chinese restaurant. Finding a knife sharp enough for the job, I start with the claws and the beaks but soon am forced to kill and to keep killing. There is no blood. Once, though, I glance down among the feathers and bones to see a tiny black embryonic crow, with a cute little oversize beak like a Japanese cartoon rendering, which I must also cut in half.

Finding myself in a garden of unwanted male attention, I flee to the streets where a thin and stoic girl from work passes by, protected by a cadre of girlfriends. "I am nothing," I try to tell her, "but what you want me to be." She walks on. In desolation I stumble into a steamy tunnel where I wait and wait, stooped. After wandering home to an empty room I find that it was myself that had been hungry, so I have a quesadilla and a hot shower.

Cutting a checkerboard pattern out out of a jumbo cantaloupe and then slotting little squares of alternately dark green and orange honeydew varietal in the negative space.

Intimations of pansexuality.

It is 2010, and I have been enrolled to compete in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The sport—"pisking"—involves a series of physical and mental obstacles along a track that winds around a large house made of packed snow and driftwood. The sole referee and announcer is Penn Jillette. He gathers the competitors, many of whom are equipped with crampons and leather-lined parkas, to lay out the rules of the game. Naked, I creep off to find a towel. The whistle is blown and there is a flurry of activity but I am not sure what to do. When I raise my hand to ask a question, I am called on by Alan Colmes, who appears to be Penn's assistant. And so I wonder: Will it be Hannity and Teller tonight?

I am taken out to a large field where my eyes are covered and I am shown the essence of the color blue.

Called upon to invent the cocktail party. I arrive forty minutes late to find my early childhood friends already grown up and socializing. They might be shooting a radio documentary at my apartment across the river so I leave early. Passing through the UMass campus at Amherst, I pick up a complimentary refurbished iPod from a kiosk. It is loaded with only three songs, one of which is the jingle for a hygienic product. When I arrive at home we sit through the whole rough cut of the radio documentary with the sound off. Then I go to my room to fiddle with the connections between the speakers and the pickups lodged into the chests of the documentary's subjects, who are each four inches tall and illuminated from within. We try again.

Heavy dreamless sweat with objects falling out of my pockets.

On a mission to collect the little white bags that contain the six frozen berries of Christ. There are too many to fit in our pockets. And then, almost without noticing it, we come upon the valley of the other white bags, which have six other berries—or five berries with kiwi chunks, to be precise—all profane.

At an orphanage, I share a bed with a quiet Russian boy about my age. One morning he slits his throat while staring at me; there is no blood. A few hours later I am told that he will survive. Flushed with relief that I will not be accused of his murder, I tell him how much I love him. And immediately I feel hot with my own insincerity.

I am unaware that I have been chosen to assassinate the mayor of Providence. Under the impression that I am a local reporter assigned to cover a speech, I approach the podium of the local Hilton with a microphone in hand. The janitor rushes over to plug in the microphone, but instead pulls off the top to reveal a 35mm pistol which is now aimed at the mayor. On closer inspection it seems that the part of the mayor is being played by someone else—someone willing to put me in a wrist lock with one hand and to pull the pin of a grenade with the other.

A summer potluck at the house in New England where I will be born. My parents have just been married but some of their friends have already had their first babies. It is my job to check the newborns at the door and to plant them like cabbages throughout the front lawn. I come back from a break to find that they have all disappeared. My mother panics. My father reasons that they must have been kidnaped and will be returned unharmed once we pay the ransom, which I know will come out of my allowance.

Det det det det. Det det det det. Suffer the consequences.

Jealous that two friends have locked themselves into my room for dinner, I decide to take a walk, making a note to myself to remember who exactly these people are when I wake. A few minutes later I discover the workshop where that dream was made. It is a round-the-clock affair that involves several of my closest male friends who get together to improvise vocal music. Someone has brought The Collected Works of Sandy Jencks: Ragtime Composer and the feeling is that we should play through it on a bank of four back-to-back upright pianos. But before that I lead the guys in a rousing 14-hand version of "I Got Rhythm," playing the melody with my forefingers two octaves apart. Blanking on the bridge, I slot in the B section from the Flintsones theme song and no one is the wiser.

In a small fiction workshop run by my father, I have been asked to write a thriller. The story I produce, typed out in single-spaced Courier font on a bundle of typewriter paper, makes me proud. But as I compare it to his, I find dozens of typos and a crippling tendency toward the abstract and the prolix. He had started by describing the quality of the light pouring out from a crack in the door of the backroom in the House of Commons where the two protagonists seal their own fates; I started with a plot summary. To atone, I get a haircut. The hotel salon is short-staffed so they have to call in that girl from astronomy class. Her scissorwork on my scalp I can only describe as "soigneuse." As I tip her five dollars—quite generous, I think to myself—I am overcome with a wave of unspeakable desire.

Going through a large-format magazine containing several short films by a queer Asian auteur. They are part of a series of morality tales, each exposing some kind of injustice, called "A Dictionary of Inequality." My boss is alongside me and he is deeply moved.

Still dozing in a red bed at the center of my room, I am aware that one roommate is interviewing someone close by. I wake to find only bare white walls; the other roommate has moved and in so doing has taken back her dresser, desk, and couch. When I stumble out to the kitchen, I find the rhythm section of a little-known smooth jazz band taking a break between rehearsals. They advise me to go back to sleep for however long I can because I have a big day ahead of me. But before I do that, I want to find the contents of my dresser.

I come home to find my roommate's shoes at my door and a crumpled page on my pillow reading: "Epidermal feet in insect morphogenesis." As I file the day's receipts, my peripheral vision catches a thousand-legged skeletal insect retreating to the crevice between my external hard drive and the wall. I crush it with my bare hand.

A large leatherbound book of musical puzzles. I am told that it belonged to my godmother and her godmother before her. Sooner or later, someone will have to destroy it.

Inducted into an ancient battle cult by Ice Cube and his crew, I am unable to master the vocabulary.

At work I must file every last piece of correspondence into a long and full manila folder called "THE FILE OF JOE MCCARTHY."

At a carpeted Swiss compound I am treated to an hour of noise and mayhem by my coworker's favorite experimental band. Throughout I am distracted by my uncle's attempts to divide the family along aesthetic lines. On the hovering public drone back to my armored subdistrict, along the grimy waterfront, I run into my coworker who says he saw the band rehearsing before the show. He convinces me to duck into a massage clinic to steal a factory-sealed pair of Grado headphones from a table on which they have been left out for clients. At home, as I recline to read the collected fictions of a Panamanian socialist realist, I come under sniper fire. As I try to communicate this danger to The Narrator by reading a revealing passage aloud, I see a blood stain leap into of my field of vision. I have been shot in the head. When the shock wears off I go on reading.

I see the Camel man in silhouette, the one whose outline is faintly visible in the front haunch of the pointillist rendering of a dromedary that was on cigarette packs before the Surgeon General's warning. Now he is live and "in the flesh" and ready to star in a solitary pornographic film.

Shuffling down a rickety scaffolding on a cliff face, I look down to see a stretch of rickety scaffoldings stretching for miles below me. I close my eyes as waves of dizziness take me over and I feel that I am already falling. At the gravelly patch at the bottom, I am assigned to a pair of heterosexual lovers. We wander aimlessly through the grassy hills and turrets, searching for our mandate with a growing suspicion of what it must be.

A friend dreams that he is in a well-lit college dormitory sitting in a circle on the floor with some lovely young coeds. He finds himself warning them about a serial killer who has been kidnapping, raping, mutilating and dismembering a series of young women in the area. As he hears himself describe the habits and procedures of the murderer, he realizes that it must be himself. Now he is near a dark doorway into the basement from an unlit kitchen. As he cranes his neck to see the figure at the bottom of the stairs, he finds himself looking down at the devil who is only a dimly lit stick figure, a primitive sketch, but whose power is without limit.

Det-det-det-det-det-det-det-det-det-det—
—Suffer the Consequences.

I am placed inside an action movie built as an abecedary. At the letter N, I defect to the audience.

Some time between the day Lady Day died and the day Lady Di died, I learn to fly.

My friends are carrying large transparent bags full of recyclable bottles, which they feed into large machines in exchange for loose coins. They hand me a bag of catfood tins, with their sharp lids jutting out.

I wander the city with a longing in my heart and a severe fetish for bicycle locks. Those shaped like little U's seem trivial, and the rusty hardware-store chains sealed with a padlock hardly catch my interest. But in a clearing I come upon a long black bike, a two-seater, locked to a tree by way of a massive, pendulous, impregnable, nylon-sheathed, Krypton-tempered golden chain whose links are each as thick as they are wide. It is the chain of chains, and it is there that I kneel down to pray.

In a recurring midnight I follow a trail of young men going to a musical gathering. When we arrive, I see my friends singing a song of desolation. By the time I unpack my neck-bent guitar the song is over, and the one detuned note I am able to play lingers in the air like sweat.

At long last I am able to see the face of my father as he will be in twenty-five years, alive and very very old.

On an afternoon talk show, I am discovered to have the power of prophecy. This manifests itself as the ability to excel at a particular public game which requires me to see a slowly moving grid of textures and identify the two that match. I do so repeatedly, to the mounting excitement of the live studio audience, until even I am not sure it is still a hoax.

Setting out to explore a sparsely inhabited valley with my mother. She drives the open-aired jeep across the savannah. After we pay the toll she exclaims, "I've only got a couple hundred thousand left." Because this puts us at risk of being defrauded by the customs officials this infuriates me, until I realize that she's counting in the hyperinflated local currency. When we arrive at the cool valley floor we are asked to relax in a dark garden. Then a young black man walks up and stands silently beside us. When I try to get rid of him, he pretends not to understand me. I try again in French with no success, and I begin to suspect that his intentions are hostile. Spanish does not work either. But after the first question in Portuguese a wave of recognition breaks over his face and he tells me his whole sad story, which is that he has come here to follow his lover, a virgin who has been cursed to starve and then immolate herself. When we see her we offer her a piece of fruit.

Paid to stake out my first home in New England but soon I am sleeping naked on a blanket stretched over the back seat of my El Camino. I awake at 3:30am to see a flash light from the living room window. My father has come home to an empty house and none of us have noticed.

Aron prints short poems onto the bottlecaps of the future, and they come alive in song.

Given an electric viola da gamba and asked to express with it the following thought: that while the newspapers often quote this number or that, it is also possible to extract numbers from the accumulation of qualitative data in newspapers. When the gamba owner is about to pull out of town in his Model T Ford, we see him asleep across the front seat. Earlier, I check my email in the middle of the night to find a message reading: "These are the traces of the world's love for you."

Sent to a party for routine surveillance operations. Robin Williams has a small trembling seizure, so I move his stiff and weightless body to the other room. I later learn that he was faking it in order to plant a bug on me. Later, I am staking out a television set in a motel-room bed. The rigid bedspread is attached to the mattress by way of a pole such that one can spin the covers like a lazy susan while still in bed. Excited by this technology, a soggy terrier tries to jump in with me. My mission has failed.

In the stairwell of the airport parking garage, I run into a family of four who I don't recognize. Then, with a shock, I see them for who they are: the one who looks like my grandfather as a young man is my uncle, the one who looks like my mother is my aunt, the one who looks like my cousin as a boy is my cousin as a man, and the one who looks like my other cousin's newborn baby is in fact my cousin. I pass them silently.

In another stairwell, I happen to see my obese uncle dragging my grandmother by the hand as he berates her. I wait until he has gone before stealing her.When I bring my grandmother to work, she is frail and supple and wrapped in a brown wax paper shroud. In order to introduce her to three female bosses, I am forced to improvise a ventriloquist act. But after I let her fall to the ground and I am alone, she is reborn as a middle-aged woman.

Later, I find myself leading my brother and his friends on a journey uptown in search of something. They share many words and gestures whose meanings I can't guess, but they tell me in no uncertain terms that they don't trust my sense of direction. By the time we reach the towering and barren overpass at 42nd Street and Sixth avenue, I give up and put them on the subway back downtown to try again without me.

Taking the elevated train at midnight to the outskirts of town with my winter coat and canvas satchel on my back. The job interview is to be held in the brass-and-teak-lined public library. My coworkers and I greet a frail Hindu boy in pull-up socks and his own leather satchel and ask about his schooling. He is meek and deliberate but not dull. When my boss enters, he explains immediately that more than one position may be open, beacuse he'd be glad to fire any one of us if he could find someone else who could give him more help, he always needs more help. Then, without warning, he begins to ask a series of questions, the first of which is to calculate the square root of a small number. The Hindu boy, meanwhile, is wiping the glass bookcase with a look of delight on his face. When he discovers that our attention is on him, he slowly returns to the desk and begins to slowly prod a calculator. Our boss starts slapping him like a girl, trembling with fury, until the little Hindu boy flees to the corner. "That one's not going to work out," a coworker says as my boss cradles his head, gasping.

At work we are asked to watch a film noir starring Luke Miner as a detective. Between reels, the film is interrupted for an announcement: Luke Miner has been involved in a fatal car crash. It is not known if he lived or died. We immediately receive a lengthy accident report in English, which my boss is anxious to have translated into French so it can be sent out to the Francophone press. I volunteer for the job but then realize that my French is nowhere near good enough. But we have no one else. I get to work then to save the life of Luke Miner, word by word.

In a small shack on the side of a canal, I busy myself with a routine repair to the machinery. A tall gentleman asks for directions as if his life depends on it. I poke my head outside and see a hurricane on the horizon. In a personal helicopter, I navigate through the canalfront slums to the deck of a giant slaveship and shackle myself in for the night.

Asked for my resume, I produce a collage of food mascots stationed in a flat evergreen forest. There is the Waffle House boy covered in sap. The Kool-Aid Pitcher under thick pine cover. And the Kraft cheese single. Each zoomed in on and then lost for the next closeup.

Thought circle. I'm sitting next to a teenager whose assignment is to add two abstract fractions. No matter how much his aunt helps him reconcile the denominators, he simply can't keep them straight. As times goes on, his aunt downshifts to an explanation of how best to thaw a frozen turkey by leaving it close to the muffler in the trunk of his car as he drives home. Outside, I am making conversation with the smokers. One girl I don't know asks me an impertinent question that seems to be an opening for a clever remark. I turn to her wildly and plant a hard kiss on my own forearm.

Sent out into stormy seas to shield all the dinghys from the corrupting beam of the great Lighthouse. My rowboat is rocked by towering waves and most of the time I can't remember why I'm there. Drying in the warm hall, I whisper my name while the keynote speaker takes a sip of water. And as I drink thin milky tea straight from the samovar, she privately asks me never to return to the Lighthouse. My neck is then permanently bent.

I wake to find that my roommate has installed glass paneling in our shower. At the drugstore, I flirt with the clerk by asking for candy that doesn't exist, then suggesting she serve me tiny pieces of pineapple and watermelon on the end of toothpicks. She serves one and drops one into a crate of diapers. Exhausted, I ask her to just send the other by email. She does.

I wake to find company in my cluttered living room, which is now open to the elements. After drawing up a plan we scatter to our places: I am sent our with a tape recorder to gather intelligence at the city gate. I leave the tape rolling on a granite surface and stake out a spot to observe the crowd. Soon I'm singing loud enough to be caught on tape behind the dull roar of foot traffic. And I invent songs that depend on the cries of merchants and beggars and the creaking of wagon wheels. I wake up, then flip the tape over and start recording from the middle.

One the eve of her wedding in Ithaca, a friend asks me to get a visa for her Senegalese lover.

Flossing with a screwdriver, I unwittingly pry out my left front tooth. It's larger and heavier than I would have expected, until a mirror reveals that it has come with a sizable chunk of face that includes some upper lip and about a third of my nose.

I walk out of a mother-daughter-incest-themed house party and flag down an old white van in which my friends Abby and Abby are headed up into the hills.

A Brooklyn waterfront at dusk of the first day of spring. As I wait for my car to arrive, I watch a crankhead inducting his two young children into his own tradition of physical theater. The first game is as follows: "If a Black Hat ever tries to cross your path -- beard, coat, big nose: a *black hat* -- you turn to the side and keep walking." I keep waiting.

Emptying the dishwasher as I explain to my ex that I've never been much for games of chance. Or strategy for that matter.

At work, the tech support guy explains the theory of natural selection to me. And finally I really understand it.

A young man's torso, nude, shot three times by self-healing bullets. Once in the belly, once in the ribs, and once just above the heart.

The shower is empty and there is a wraith in it.

My family checks in to a mountaintop hotel where we've stayed before. On the drive there, my cousin points out the steep ascent from the sea that he has made countless times on his motorcycle. But up in the hills the laws of physics are different. The bellhop finds that his elevator key won't unlock the outer doors of the elevator on the ground floor and shuffles off to find another. After waiting half an hour we decide to take the bus into town for dinner. There in the rustic valley town I see a guitar repairman who has set up shop in a small cafeteria and ask him to adjust the neck of my guitar to get rid of a buzzing on the fourth string. To calibrate his electric screwdriver he chips away at a small portion of the upper lefthand corner of the mural behind him. He finds nothing wrong with the guitar. When we get back to the hotel I submit a review of an album that came out four years ago to a website I stopped writing for three years ago. Only after doing so do I find that my review has been up for over five years under someone else's name. In the comments section I notice two self-promoting banner photographs, one for San Francisco lo-fi folk duo Ramon and Jessica, and the other for my own radio debut on April Fools Day.

As I fall asleep in the morning light my roommate tucks me in. Soon I am out walking the streets and looking down at the humid pavement but I sense that there has been no transition. I must be dreaming. Suddenly I wake outside a musicology convention and walk into the service entrance while the plenary session is in full swing. I find a solicitous Southern couple feeding their two teenage children and two young musicologists at their dinner table: it is easy to sit down at my place unnoticed and catch up on eating while the conversation continues. I notice bags of potatoes and carrots stacked behind the sink and wooden trays full of fresh greens and herbs where the implements should be. I say that I am not a musicologist but that I have played music with one, and there is silence as the dishes are washed. Over dessert I overhear that the family has a German shepherd meaning that to understand this dream I must ask: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

We all pile into an old blue sedan where we are joined by my brother who does not know that we are about to experience the illusion of perpetual descent. The fifteen-year old son is driving. We start down a country highway at a gentle grade with woods on both sides. As the car gains momentum the road drops more steeply into what seems like a wooded valley below until it becomes clear that we are snaking our way down a very large mountain. The road twists suddenly left then right during which at no point does the son take his foot off the accelerator and at the moment the car should have flipped if we had tried to keep both wheels on the road my brother and I find ourselves standing on a breezy hilltop cul-de-sac watching the blue sedan hurtle out into the cool valley air and sail on over the treetops without a sound. We turn around to find a large white van idling with the Southern family inside. "Going home?" I ask the mother absently. "Yes indeed."

My father shepherds my brother through a traditional Talmudic education while I wash the dishes. Later, I am woken by squabbling between my boss and my brother.

On my moped again, we are winding through the hills up a narrow road. When we reach the ridge and try to peek over, dusk falls sharply. And I realize that an atrocity is unfolding in the valley below. If we could get down before dawn we could at least stage a defense, but in the dark we would simply plunge off the first of many sharp turns. I dismount, I pace, I curse. And then a friend walks over to a post on the shoulder and flicks a little switch. Daylight.

My office is a train. We are thundering through the endless hours of the predawn on a vast circular track, like atoms in a supercollider. I shuttle between two railway cars. In the first, I work with a clerk to attend to the needs of an eminent man in decline. This involves sharpening the razors, mixing up the shaving cream with a horsehair brush, and filling a large metal bowl with lukewarm water. In the other car, I do my best to study under a hot incandescent light and eventually fall asleep under a large quilt. I am woken by a young nurse.

A camp meeting at dusk. Our symmetrical rows of pine benches are set up to face a small clearing at the edge of a deep grove. Two bearded preachers are leading us in song, one on the left and one on the right. We sing. Quickly, two cleanshaven bandits storm in from the back, shouting threats and knocking over benches. Each sets up among us in lunge pose, his rifle cocked and aimed at a preacher. The congregation is paralyzed by terror, so we wait. After midnight, a holy sniper blows off the ankle of the rightmost bandit, breaking the symmetry with a loud pop. We know he will be shot again before he is tried, if he is tried. So we scurry home to our cabins, each one alone to wait for the dawn.

In the basement apartment of a hillside mansion. It is L-shaped and perfectly symmetrical, down to the views out the window and the furnishing details. I ask you over to the cul-de-sac just yards from our house. You ring but do not come.

At the elementary school reunion, I meet a blonde named India. Later, I am seduced by an alligator.

Flight. Cast as Fortinbras in a Norwegian production of Hamlet. With a dozen friends from junior high school, I enter stage left down a rickety wooden staircase into the Great Hall of Denmark for the final conquest. I have no idea what I am supposed to do, so I grab the first woman I see and pin her down, slowly dribbling saliva into her eyes. She looks back at me, defiant but subdued. As the play goes on, I learn that this woman was my cousin's fiancée, and that she had been playing Ophelia. In shame, we decide to flee in a sturdy Group Land Vehicle along the coast of Lapland. As we cling to the steep shoals of granite that wind along the sea, a black-and-yellow trawler passes us, cutting through the icy water at a speed about twice our own. As we follow a steep mountain pass inland, we see men hanging from the electrical wires along the road, insulated in rubbery black-and-yellow winged bodysuits which clearly do not admit of flight.

Asked to profile the Duchess for the official newspaper. Knowing that my words will be reviewed carefully by the Commissariat, I put off the assignment as long as possible. During the interview itself I misplace my legal yellow pad several times. In the end the profile is not published but I am imprisoned anyway.

Stakes. Out on a motor-driven surfboard without a wetsuit. I paddle away from my family to hop aboard a luxury houseboat maintained by the publisher of a prestigious magazine. His children play with me, and he seems to grow about twenty years younger as he laughs at my tentative jokes, sprouting a thick head of curly hair and sideburns. As I paddle away, a large wave almost overturns their houseboat. And then, in the distance, I see an enormous front of water, maybe fifty feet high. It takes a whole city's worth of amphibious vehicles and sailboats and trawlers and even a few lone swimmers and plunges them all into the depths. And then another, bigger wave topples a larger array of vehicles and homes, this one much closer to us. I can feel myself and everyone around me swelling with a kind of juvenile excitement, one that is heightened by the awareness that we have just seen from the outside something that, from the inside, meant a great loss of human life. We feel deranged, but sense that we cannot be sobered until we know if, or when, our own wave is coming.

Up. Up and up a rickety set of bleacher steps until I reach a platform where a man is waiting to shake my hand.

Cast as the Cowardly Lion in a Sondheim musical. Later, I gain the trust of a hotelkeeper through a series of fabricated confessions. Still he will not tell me his real name, and he will not give me good directions.

Slog. A friend has decided to use the history of intellectual property law as the basis for her next pulp romance. She wants me to look over the thick, thick manuscript for spelling mistakes before she sends it off the the copyright office. Meekly, I accept the task.

Gorgeous. I am stranded in a small cabin in the mountains with my mother's side of the family. My cousin suddenly goes down with a wound to the chest, and everyone but me resigns to losing her; I call 911 on my cell phone then decide to hike out for help. On my way I meet a beautiful stranger and forget my mission. We sneak into a high mountain bakery and she offers me a fresh bagel, stolen and still hot from the oven. I hesitate, then bite into it, muttering, "Gorgeous."

Powder. Turning to my boss with a document, I notice that his arm is covered with a white powder over which a thin layer of blood is spreading. "Are you bleeding?" I ask. "I bleed all the time," he says. "Give me that."

Arturo. Driving through a valley near the coast, I pass through large areas of light and shade as the road winds. I stop at the Centro Contra'arte, an underground cement compound that has been overtaken by vines and bushes. It appears that I am getting back to work from an extended lunch, as is the woman standing next to me. The freight elevator is broken so we have to tap on a window. We are admitted by a colleague who chides me for the length of my lunch hour. "Look at Arturo," he says, gesturing to a Mexican teenager in the corner who has been mouthing the words to whatever is blasting on his headphones. "At least he's been here."

Horseplay. I am playing hide and seek in a carpet-lined compound where all rooms are connected to other rooms by way of steep ladders. In a moment of carelessness I knock two playmates off their own ladders onto a small landing. One of them can't stop laughing about the fall. The other brushes herself off with a hesitant look. At first it seems that her face has been deeply scarred, with blood welling up from five parallel gashes that run the length of her cheek and jaw. As her look turns to one of disgust, I notice that the darkness under her skin is not blood. It is the surface of a mask fitted beneath her flesh and skin, a smooth red mask wrapped tightly around her skull.

Lunacy. In the attic of the house in which I was born, I peer up through a skylight to see the moon. After turning to tell my sister that the moon is full, I glance back to find it grown several times larger and superbly well-defined. The moon now seems to be churning according to its own laws of symmetry, with craters and mists and shadows each appearing, then swelling into fullness, then subsiding very quickly and with an astonishing degree of continuity. I look down and the ground begins to shake, then heave. Seeking shelter on the street, I stumble between falling telephone poles as the house collapses. Minutes then hours pass, and the earthquake does not subside, though it does not get stronger either. After staggering through the night I take refuge in someone's basement until the ground stops moving. He does not want to speak to me but does not ask me to leave. I glance through a high window to see the sun coming up.

Guilt. I am left alone in a room with a brother and sister, each no older than ten. I accidentally kill one of them and am forced to kill the other to maintain silence. No one else is aware of my crime and I wander against the crowds as a fugitive. A young man offers to help me flee, and while I do not trust him I decide to accept his offer. Two whores hear us arguing loudly in the backroom of a bar about what to do next, so we are forced to pull them into the fold too. Every time another stranger becomes aware of our growing band of outcasts, we are faced with a choice: kill or trust. For a long time our little society does nothing but grow. But many of us know that sooner or later we will have no choice but to start shrinking.