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.