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.