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.