Epic with no exit.

What must have been the most beautiful Louis Malle film in the world (until I realize I'm not living it but before I realize I'm dreaming it). The story of a girl stripped from her family by death but then reintroduced as a ghost that could be loved as no living girl could. Then a series of interlocked ghost stories each with a twist—the ghost kills his living sister, or the surviving mother kills the ghost of her unborn husband. And finally proof that it has all been for nothing.

When the old man returns I am cuddling at the belly of my guardian. He has never been so spry, and I feel a pang of shame, but don't lift my head from her belly. Later she convinces me to trade my bike and her bike for a car, at least for the day.

As I enter the community library, I see a light-skinned lanky black man jump down from a high shelf with a pile of books. We lock eyes for a long moment and he braces my arm as if to threaten me, then runs. The librarians comes over knowingly with the paperwork to register a legal complaint. I tell her I'm in a rush but she slowly fills out the mimeographed theft complaint in painstaking cursive as I can tell we're being watched. Finally another black man, darker and with larger eyes, who must be the accomplice and mastermind, reveals himself from behind a stack of books. He says that we've been part of an experiment, he won't say what kind. He abducts the librarian and leaves me alone in the library to discover the thief hiding behind a narrow bookshelf in the corner.

Erroll Louis assigns me to cover a travesty in the heartland. I later discover that he has also assigned the boss's son to the same story. We ride the giant roundhouse elevator up to the journalistic suite but can't get anywhere because it stops on every floor.

Dark thrust of peace.

The aliens send plans for the construction of an antique railway car. When it is airlifted in with armed guards we realize that it must be a surveillance machine. But we don't dare open fire on our own handiwork.

Taxi drive through the Berkeley Hills to a foot path where the driver gets out and carries my luggage into a sweeping predawn panorama, pink and blue.

Cowering under the table, shot in the forehead, in daylight, next to my brother, playing dead until the van comes, the van never comes, the bullet retracts, no one kills me, and the wound heals.

The only alien who wants to take his citizenship test home is me. On the way out I get into an imaginary car accident. This discourages me enough to go back and listen to a dreadlocked man detail his Rasta lexicon. And no matter how many times I ask, he will not explain the meaning of the word "es," which I've never heard before.

The whole table is ordering the tasting menu.

I pop a flat tire on my bike and get turned around in the muddy banks by the roadside. At the edge of a convent the Malaysian nuns pretend to ignore me until I see Gabriel the interpreter. I still can't get home.

The boss is docile. I try meet a friend for a movie in an underground Japanese complex on the Upper East Side. But we don't have reservations.

First, driving home in a domestic Senegal with my mother, we bust a flat and have to knock at the house of Woody Harrelson. He offers to drive us home. His driving is wild and unpredictable but seems to follow a track, even as we collide with multiple cars and come close to igniting our gas tank. Next time (now with a friend) when we bust a flat we know what's coming from Woody: we see the same tattoo, hear the same cheap banter, and with creeping satisfaction accept the same ride which unfolds on exactly the same wild track. The third time (my father is with us now) we drop in like old friends, extend the banter, pushing his cinematic hospitality as far as we can, never asking for help. When he breaks down and offers us a ride, we walk out. Later, Loren is back from England with a hatchback trunk full of piles of used books. We decide to help him sort out the library books for storage, but I'm slowed down by some slim collections of poetry I've never seen before. Even later, what started as a simple baseball toss turns into a kaleidoscope of magic whose only purpose is to prove that there is magic.

Woken by a screech, I crane down out the 10th floor window to see a car crash in miniature from above. A sedan veers onto the sidewalk and crushes at least three people flat. An SUV sideswipes a motorcycle then bursts into flames, causing two parked trucks to burst into flames. A school bus bursts into flames, causing each child to scatter onto the asphalt and burst into flames. Later, buying soup in as Asian mall, we are late for the one-man show about traffic safety which I understand to be a covert counterterrorist training camp.

Instead of an understated three-person playlet we are treated to one of those nausea-inducing centrifugal fairground rides. Back in the field office we are astonished to learn we are no longer needed; our leader has learned to type for himself.

A tornado, a thick cold shoulder, and a toxic stream.

At early morning fire drill my family is sluggish. I leave the home and trudge up the hill to a circle of friends playing a set of homemade cellos built for the occasion. They are tuned strangely, in the pattern C G C G, but I soon learn to pluck a few open jazz chords and even quote Stevie Wonder's Superstition once. There is no fire.

There's a piano on the far bank of the river, and someone is playing it who doesn't know how.

As part of the game I follow a series of white corridors to a room where a bear in a gorilla suit is unleashed. We lure him into the down escalator and take the stairs ourselves; at the bottom just a few bloody scraps of hide get caught in the grate. In the second trial a pale man with a long pointy head looms over me but is subdued by conversation. The third trial is the most elaborate: two friends from school have stocked a full mock convenience store in the basement according to a principle which I and another friend must guess. Doubles? No. Insides? No. But wait, I realize suddenly, half expecting a wall to flip up and offer me a new car. Everything here is a Hybrid.

On a cross-country flight the stewardess explains that passengers have the right to jump at any time from exits located at either side of the cabin, but that the captain expects us to provide our own parachutes and landing equipment. A bespectacled man asks a rather practical question about the civil war which requires a long answer; when he goes to the lavatory the pilot prints in chalk on an old blackboard, slowly, "Impudent Cunard."

In one stroke I untwine the little plastic tubes that had stood upon the table.

Shiftless dreams of blogging without content.

I wake under a pile of cold blankets to stagger out onto a narrow street where the rays of the sun are just beginning to fall on buildings built before the war. Awed as I am at the sight of the sky, and assuming myself among the recently undeceived, I don't even consider the possibility that this is a false dawn.

Reacting badly to a drug meant to improve her short-term memory, my grandmother is seized by a strong memory from thirty years ago when she was living in Long Island and visiting her dying parents in nursing home.

As I rise from the bath I hear the squeal of tires, a muffled thud, a louder crash, then the peal of a car alarm. Someone else's nightmare, I think, and pull on my sleeping mask.

From inside a circle of oversize Balinese gamelan gongs, a give a soulful rendition of "Ain't Too Proud to Beg." But Sarah Darling's straightedge friends don't want to go to Burning Man, even though it's only a short drive and would do them good.

My editor at the Times plays a twelve-string lute and, as I see from a video projected onto the far wall of the cottage behind her house, she sings a mean Welsh ballad. She wants me to write only the last sentence of a book review I haven't read.

Taking the uptown 4 train to an awards ceremony for work. The bathrooms are a fifteen minute walk through the Upper Eastern Gardens so I sit on the inner rim of a large outdoor auditorium. Zoo animals roam the crowd—a mongrel puppy, a baboon-seal, a giant loon covered in yellow Tyvek—each playing its own version of fetch. I wonder out loud how they could possibly have fitted a 30-foot bird with a full-body space suit; as I say this I realize it must be nothing more than a prehensile balloon animal. Over the course of a four-hour ceremony, the host is promoting eight books with oversize inflatable book jackets that velcro to the belt of his jumpsuit. He shows us the cover of Norman Mailer's posthumous soul album. "Looks like Frank Zappa," I whisper to the delight of the two teenage girls on my left. On my right, Nate says, "This is why I started my own label."

Instead of making a smoothie, I jam my right hand into the blender.

Marian is putting sparrows into slingshots.

Clipping my fingernails and revising a single paragraph.

Muslim chocolate.

I have a recurring dream. I pull the mask off my face and drink something red. I get on the train at 7th Ave and stare out the window over the bridge. I get off at 7th Ave and walk up hundreds of stairs. I pass by an open-air cafe with an awning with a pattern of dots that spells DREAM. I walk into a cold tower and take the elevator to the fifth floor, telling myself, "If I can love my dreams, I can love my life." Then I wake up.

On the subway I sit next to a girl with gaping abrasions on her nose, knuckles, and left forearm. Everyone is ignoring me so I feel it's safe to ignore her. She begins to flip through her diary.

My birthday is a Jewish holiday so the gospel choir from college filters into my two-level ranch apartment. Someone brought sweet potato kugel. I kiss a skinny girl because no one is looking and I'm lonely. Out on the street there is a siege: three white police SUVs are stopping a dozen black girls on the corner with a galaxy of red white and blue flashers. But the cops are black women too and they're trading jokes I don't understand. Back at the house the choir is in full song. When the skinny girl smiles at me I look away. Around the corner at the bar I meet a man in a velcro vest who says he is the editorial director of a magazine called Tikkun. Thinking that means "repentance" not "repair" I ask him if he can help me.

On a chill dawn after a dim night, a series of good omens. Little Baby Simon at the airport engages me in an imitative game: his mouth emits a series of pure tones and red, blue and greenish glows, and it's my job to keep up. My first recording vanishes from the shelves of Amoeba music and into the homes of unsuspecting listeners. When I awake my sleeping bag is gone and my pillow is at my feet.

I wake to a note in my own hand: "SLUG TO CASHEK: FIND 32X STEAM BRAT." And underneath: "Frostware."

On a date I stumble into a sunny grove with lots of balloons and little tents, BBQs and a giant trampoline. It's a Meetup of Meetups. A woman with a camera assumes that my SHUT DOWN GUANTANAMO shirt is meant to attract the likeminded and asks for an interview. I tell her I'm the only one of my kind that I know but that it's no wonder because I'm pretty sure they don't allow Meetups in that part of Cuba. She says she works for Ken Wilbur. Across the field the busiest place is the Dream Tent. A man named Kumar is patiently explaining how they bang on Tibetan drums to wake the dreams, guide each other through what they mean, and then act them out in something called "Dream Theater." They are all disciples of a Dream Master named Robert Moss who sounds like a good upstate Jungian to me. We walk on to the lake and lie down in another field as a single white balloon disappears into the sky.

The black iron gate that locks me out of my own house.

A strong rebuke delivered upwards with a twist.

The fridge is an elevator but it fits one and is agonizingly slow. When I walk out I look down at my hands and think, "I'm staring at my hands." As they go in and out of focus I realize that either I'm dreaming or I need new contact lenses, and in so doing seem to have reasoned my way out of a lucid dream. Then I wake into a gravel road with a parked minivan containing the seven members of the black a cappella group I used to sing with. I open the passenger door to take an imitation muted trumpet solo then wave goodbye. And as I hit the campground I hear the strains of a country hook I know is mine to use: "...with Hank Williams hanging in the air."

White sediment on the window pane.

A drawing room of living silhouettes, framed and backlit.

My dental hygienist suspects I think she's racist.

The woman at the next table holds up a checkbook filled in with a series of actions she will take if anyone tries to humiliate her in public. I sound out the whole thing slowly then make eye contact; she smiles. When my family starts chatting with her husband, we learn that they have been contracted to remove the floors of our house to make for a single vaulted space from the basement to the attic. There is some disagreement about when this will happen. What is the what? my mother asks. This isn't the Washington Post, says my brother. So we walk out for some faster food.

That man is all jacket and no pants.

I just want to go to sleep with my honey. First a repairman wants to repair the door. So we go out to sleep on the porch. But the porch is right on the sidewalk and surrounded by a dozen repairmen who want to repair the sidewalk. So se go back indoors. Now there is no one around and I tell her good night and I love you. But it's the first date so we have to talk about that. It was just something I was saying because we can finally go to sleep, I say. I just want to go to sleep with my honey.

An upright wooden man at an upright wooden table.

Some black kids challenge the chess club to a dance in the auditorium. The teachers have set up four tennis nets between the two basketball hoops. After some milling around and paper airplane folding, one kid tosses the ball across the floor and the game is on. It's a passing game since no one can dribble for more than three or four steps before running into a net. Some kids have figured out how to get more distance by flinging themselves back into one of the nets as they hurl the ball.

Secretly FedExing a number of leatherbound graphic novels to my own wife. Under the covers on an unbuilt room on the 36th floor with someone else. Attending the premiere of a play, based on John Bayley's Elegy for Iris, by the author of the graphic novels.

A woman loves me but can't tell me so until the end of the festival when her man leaves for good. Still I get a hasty kiss or two in the weak moments. At services I leave my friends waiting fifty yards away and get a close seat under the awning next to a beautiful girl who doesn't know me. But the rabbi is a new age narcissist and I wander off before the second half begins. More hasty kisses.

The boss is onto me. He asks me to reorient my desk in our little open plan beach front cabin; I comply to deflect suspicion from my time theft. On a break in the living room, I see a jazz pianist from Maine who thinks it's tacky to host Yom Kippur at home; he's going to temple thank you very much. When I return there is a midterm exam in progress. On stage the cast and crew of our excellent variety show fail in their attempts to build a giant human pyramid. Outside the beach is incredibly steep and the tide is in, making a sort of vicious halfpipe for surfers. For those who are brave enough to catch a wave, the real ride comes when the wave drains back out into the sea. Most people are wiping out severely when they're swept back out, but least they don't have to paddle through the break again.

Just before the bishop is murdered, I'm trapped in the back seat of a parked stolen car with Steve Buscemi in the driver's seat and Woody Harrelson in the passenger's seat. Someone shoots Woody in the back with a pellet, causing him to lock a blade into Steve, which means Steve has to climb out onto the hood and hang on to the rear view mirror and promise to blow the whole garage to smithereens within fifteen minutes if no one is willing to say he's sorry. There is a tense silence. I step out to sleep in a large aseptic waiting room with a hundred of my mother's friends and about twenty roaming cats.

Chris Farley and David Spade are playing ping-pong out the window of my hotel room with some kids in the courtyard. Not waking me is part of the game, evidently, but they're not very good at it. So I push the buzzer next to my bed. When the nurse arrives she tells me there has been no ping pong — maybe I was dreaming it? — and offers to close the windows. When I wake in my own cold bed the windows are open and the fan is on.

My father sustains an outdoor operation at the field hospital under rolling grassy hills. On an overlooking plateau there is a reunion I will have to miss for now. I have to join my best friend's little brother to accompany a puppet show with a half-filled bottle of soda and a little plastic stick. Later I see a Mexican hurl a package into the empanada cart near my father's operating table. When someone inside draws a kitchen knife I start to run away but before I can take three steps the Mexican has drawn a pistol and shot my chest wide awake.

At the marble estate of a great family in decline. The grandfather takes my friends for a swim but I stay behind to sleep. It takes me a while to notice that two of three grown sons are deaf. The younger is a graphic artist whose work about an abducted Balkan princess we published in 1982. (Don't bring it up, I'm told, or he'll suggest another project.) The older one is deafer: once he came home with two Chinese guys and two big bags of Chinese food, and only three plates. In the end he shared, but we all knew he had forgotten.

I can read the bright filigreed bands around my wrists: there is no sequel.

Taking turns keeping watch as my father recovers at a mountain retreat. It takes me a moment to realize that the clear and red fluid dripping from his hand means he has accidentally sliced his thumb. For a while I play under the covers with a nymphet who won't let me touch her. Then a bearded Arthur and his three grown sons arrive in a jeep and we know something is going to happen.

As the Mexican says: hunger, like anger, has an egde; and love is like a stomach ache in your heart.

Swept up into a frenzy pushing lonely coco-acorns on the campus lawn, I almost miss the closing of the legendary Prepared Mansion by world-renowned performance artist Pauline. Each room its own custom installation with its own period furniture and psychotropic effects. Before I go, though, I have to sleep in a bare and brightly lit attic with no bath.

On the way to a party I put on my bodysuit. There is too much smoke in the hangout room. I sneak off to the bedroom thinking it's the bath. The real bathroom has an enormous crystal garden in a vast clear bowl with slots on the bottom, hanging directly over a fountain in the palatial hotel lobby. This, I'm later told, is the next generation of composting toilets, for which we have Guiliani to thank. I can't bring myself to use it.

My uncle calls to ask me to remove a reference to donuts from my grandfather's autobiography. I can't find it.

Paying by the hour, I learn how to pretend to bicycle while suspended from the ceiling by fishing line. When the attendant tries to convince me to buy half a pound of raw squid to patch up a hole in the wall, I know enough to call her bluff. Later, I'm entering a drug and music store laid out like Urban Outfitters. After passing through an aisle of greeting cards and framed posters from a company called "Grids n' Titties," I see some space age organic liquid deodorant bottles which flare up at the top like letter openers.

All my friends are starting a new business. I've been hired but it's not clear what my job will be. As I enter the black marble tower I am handed a mash note from one of my female friends. Was it her job to write it? Another friend is the floor supervisor. I accidentally get her in trouble. Rather than worry about it, I respond to the mash note.

In a two-story opera house, we sing a two-act opera on a two-tiered stage, pairing off in twos to sing each role by relay, overlapping and leaving gaps, and waiting patiently until the two rows of people in the audience figure out we only have one score.

Squeezing four SUVs into a three-car garage is fine on the way in but there is necessary crunching on the way out. We go next door to light candles for both shabbat and Yom Kippur, without a prayerbook. Earlier, there had been moments of flight over the blue-lit abandoned city, in silence.

The public library opens up a China Room on a busy street. Twenty floors up there is a private reading room that has, according to Gabe who works security, a "Larry Summers vibe." But down at the storefront, for a fee of 70¢, you can get a foil bag of Chinese flavored popcorn on permanent loan.

Building trackbound rides for our love. Hers has many layers but mine is stable.

I eat a broiled chicken leg and two root vegetables before realizing that the cafeteria works on a pay-by-weight basis only. Later, the people who moved into my parents' old house have lined the facade with bookshelves holding mostly thrillers and young adult fiction. My eyes rest on a self-help book called "The Bedless Bedroom."

A tasting of strawberry ice cream with a side of nougat balls.

Meatless sausage patties on the windowsill.

A one-room drama where the audience stands and recriminates with deli-thin slices of flesh. Then a full-campus bicycle-mounted scavenger hunt that ends with pooping into an antique chair with a false bottom.

Urine tests for the whole family on the suspension bridge. The results can be read from left to right as an anagram of a famous quotation.

Climbing up the sheer dirt cliff with an argument about polling practices among the Jews, I come upon the last forsaken family. Father rushes off to kill a land shark; it must be real because it has the rare books it ate inside its head and neck. Mother takes photographs and the kids wander off.

The hospital is under siege; we stay silent and keep away from the windows.

We drop off him at the mountain retreat. When I return he is rude and not yet ready for me. So I wait in the yard where an arc of water forms an ice bridge from the tree to the shed. He is still not ready and all my friends' rooms upstairs are vacant. But I get a three-minute alignment from a dancer before I'm on my way again.

To the tune of "Wonderful Tonight," I overhear someone singing, "Marvin, you're a penny-pinching man..."

Because the Jewish consulate's elevator is slow and does not stop at the 13th floor, I am late for the quiz that would qualify me for a Jews in Latin America scholarship. We have half an hour to give twenty-five answers but the first few questions take the form of elliptical statements. I express my bafflement to the graduate students running the quiz, and they react warmly if dimly with apologies and clues. Later, when I have two out of twenty-five answers down, I learn that no one else had any trouble deciphering the questions. When my parents pick me up we the stairs down to avoid a wait. There is no garden outside so I eat at the mall with some friends of my father and explain to them the anxiety dream I had tonight.

He would be making a fine recovery were it not for the clumps of hair he pulls out at the base of his neck. Later a Cambodian man accuses me of "tragedy" but walks away without explaining.

Jon-Jon is making a concept album. It's a tribute to all the male literary figures who have been important to him, and it uses hundreds of riffs and quotes from well-known popular music of the last fifty years. The track dedicated to Lionel Trilling alone quotes Biggie, Jay-Z, Queen, and the Steve Miller Band. I stop by the studio where a South Indian woman is mixing down one of the tracks. I ask her how they deal with copyright: are they just tweaking the material a little bit and hoping it will be considered fair use? No, she says: they just go ahead and finish the track, and if they have any problems with rights, they go back and edit out the forbidden material. My friend Wayne is recording the conversation with a handheld DAT machine. As he looks back at her, we discover that she is also recording the conversation, with a huge reel-to-reel tape recorder and an eight-foot boom mike with several foam cones. These people are onto something, I think, as I drive back to the hotel with a duffel bag containing three tuna fish sandwich halves and an unfinished beet smoothie.

We decide to take a road trip across a foreign North America. All we have is a camper van and an abbreviated atlas so we stop for provisions at a small supermarket. There are three pygmy lynxes making their nests among the aisles. I give thick steaks to the first two and a helping of ground beef from the butcher to the third. Later at the trailhead the natives have staged a culture clash. They speak in code and scrawl their greetings but we know their first language is the same as ours. And I am asked to wait in the sitting room of the inn while my fellow travelers are shown their rooms.

I spontaneously pose to be drawn from life on my own birthday. Then I bring the pound cake to my own party despite the death threat.

Cast as the only naked human in the largest performance ever planned. In the room above there are a hundred men in cow suits; to the left there are a hundred men in bunny suits; next door are men in tree suits; and a roomful of fox suits; and soldier suits; and robots; and beetles; and sheep; and so on, stretching as far as it is possible to imagine. The script is that I must have a one-on-one conversation with each of them. It is not a melodrama.

Flying lessons on the shoulder of the superhighway.

At a party a biologist tells me he is measuring the time it takes for a rumor to evolve into an argument online.

It's voting day again but since a certain Virginia company is having a party my charming married friends postpone their own until Thursday. Seeing that my review is slated to run in the next issue, a coworker who had submitted a piece a year ago turns over a chair in disgust. I approach my boss to tell him I'd feel terrible if one should run before the other; the phone rings.

I dreamed, I tell my friends, that there was a freak hailstorm in Chelsea. A black Camaro ran a red at about twice the speed limit right in front of me. When a heavy Chevron tanker saw me in the crosswalk I heard the squeal of brakes and a slow and beautiful rollover unfolded before me, hurtling slowly westward. As the tumbling truck began to catch fire I ran toward the water as fast as I could until I reached the Javits Center. Avoiding the exhibits I climbed into the ceiling ventilation to catch the subway uptown for another first date. Train delays meant that I had two unintentional dates on the subway proper before arriving at 72nd St. It turned out she was a single mother. Her baby was ten months old and had not yet begun to speak, she told me, because she was half neandertal. Wasn't she worried that the baby would be taken away from her, I asked? That's why she was looking for a boyfriend, she told me.

Sleeping at her parents' house I agree to an undercover cooling system in lieu of my custom of sleeping naked. Later, I join the local capoeira circle. The uniforms are cheap but the terms are severe, like therapy.

After a long road trip, the English professor forgets that she is not my grandmother and takes me in. I have to sleep on the unmade divan.

As she turns around I see that there is a baby in her arms, and that the baby's left leg is entirely without skin.

If I want to date her I must revise that travel piece on the fate of feral trains after the 2012 subway renovation.

At camp this summer they are teaching us how to concentrate.

As I lie in bed I'm told that there is a rapist on the plane. I nod as if I didn't know.

I walk up to a stranger on the sidewalk and whisper, "I missed you." She says, "I know."

As I fall asleep on a friend's loveseat I am awoken by a high strung voice telling me the story of a vaudeville magician who would cut a deep hole in his armchair and hide his body inside it. Evidently pretending to be no more than a torso was the most popular part of his act. I know, I say, but I'm trying to sleep around here.

Ethan is a junkhead. It comes to him as a gang of teenage boys who kidnap his little sister then promise to dehead him if she makes a scene. I enter into protracted negotiations with these little terrormongers but it takes another band of stronger but cleanhearted rogues to get him free. Now I have the smack and he tells me he'd rather eat a throat sandwich than let me throw it away. He'd rather climb the ladder to oblivion than give up his four-a-day habit. So I leave him with it.

An unreasonably fast series of ideas for dreams, half dreamed.

After the cocktail party I am the first to climb a series of stairways leading to a quick succession of claustrophobic doorways which are ever smaller and harder to push open. At the roof level, I win a raffle for a year's subscription to Harper's Magazine.

In a car climbing a hill with my Dad, I look out over a wide dark sea with shimmering lights on the shore. It's beautiful. Later in bed, there is a girl and two black-and-white cats.

In a cathedral there is a small square hole through which I see a scene of judgment. Everything is dark, but I can see the outline of a wax figure in a robe who stands without guilt but with head bowed, waiting for it.

A deeply green and tiny turtle, crushed.

We owe him a full rewrite.

Our house guest comes with a two year old daughter and a handgun. We lure him out into a field in an effort to knock him unconscious with the butt of his own pistol. But we come back drinking and forget our mission. The squirrels remember.

The family sets out on a kayak adventure on a narrow and steep canal. The downhill stretch is the easiest. At the end there is a high school math teacher politely waiting. Later my family is moving to New York but the plane lets us off in a toy version of Boston. City Hall is run by mannequins. As the first to check into the hotel, I discover that our room is next to a suite of three girls, all of whom seem to want to set me up with one of the others.

A child is two patterns on the vibraphone.

People who live in ice cube houses shouldn't melt.

My brother moves to town to record an epic radio documentary. He retrofits an old black suitcase with a mixer and holes for microphone cables. His plan is to take the subway to a secluded part of Bronx. The raw sound material will be real but he will use it to tell a story of ninjas. We lose the suitcase on the platform and ride the trains for a few hours. We run into Asbury Jones, who kneels and teaches my brother to sing. A young woman watches us from across the train. This is the consort come too soon. Brother decides to return home without the suitcase but we find it where we left it on the platform.

We are released from the field trip into an underground luncheon complex. My friend waits on line with everyone else at the macrobiotic stall, but when he attempts to make small talk with the attendant he is booed out of the sector. As she threatens a self-immolation if the rudeness continues, I recognize her as the boss's daughter. I forget how to get back up to the open-air concourse where there is a South Indian thali stand, which I am pretty sure is gluten-free. So I go back to the welcoming party in the basement. There I find a young reporter who, in interviewing me, reveals that she is actually the daughter of the enemy emir on a reconnaissance mission. I take her into my confidence and show her the monkey bars, but she falls off, and when someone tries to leap down to help, she suffers a blow to the head which knocks her half-conscious.

At work, all the surfaces are clean. Someone refers to "Thomas Fried-barn" and I have to be told it is a joke.

A spider under the skin of my forearm. It pricks where he burrowed in and it stings where he crawls. I try to crush him and hit a pressure point by mistake. He plays dead but he won't go out the way he came.

The Youth Zionist Dating League convenes at an apartment on the Upper North Side. I stare through the orientation and training. When it lets out I give three women long hugs in front of their boyfriends. Later at the pantomime, we are three of the last to leave. Before the show is over an old woman hurls mango pulp at whoever is left. We shake our heads but our faith is strong.

Treading dark water off the coast, we try to stay directly above an Apple logo on the sea floor.

We see a small plane circle and then go down into the lake. I think I may be involved. I am the first to arrive at the pilot hatch but am hesitant to go in. When a searcher arrives I stand watch and keep his oxygen tube unkinked. But there is nothing but polyester stuff sacks and cinches underwater. Maybe the pilot escaped before the plane went down, or maybe it never had one. Later, we are moving into a new fraternity house on top of the hill. It is dark and humid when I get a chance to see my room. Back in the house where I was born, there is an old time song circle outside. I start to sing and play mandolin but have to go back inside to clean up a can of orange juice concentrate that gooped through three drawers when I went on vacation. The kitchen understands.

On the side of a mountain a nuclear reactor is built from tin and caulk. Predictably it misfires, killing all crew and taking out half of the mountainside. The mother nations are on high alert; they have no choice but to assume the blast was an act of war. This is the smell of progress in a benighted land, I say to the ambassador, who is an orphan.

Two older cousins gone missing.

At a shoreline equilibrium, a friend is pushed back by the current to the mouth of the river. We tell her to cross next time in ignorance.

The house on Valley Lane has a steel plate in the ceiling that has been eaten away by rust.

My boss escapes to a castle with his lady companion. They scour the basement for a bottle of vodka. It all lasts two hours.

The same damn predicament.

At her 70th birthday party, my mentor, a nutritionist who went back to Africa to work with the poor, tells me that she is retiring to write a book on how African children adapt when they leave the country and are confronted with a world of private property. Her nephew, who has been trying to start a string of business ventures in Senegal—starting with a chicken coop, growing now to car import-export, in order to leverage some real estate speculation—makes the obvious point that children in Africa do learn that some objects are off-limits. But her adopted son, who was once an orphan in Africa and is now an investment banker and venture capitalist, disagrees. He says that his own two-year-old son has no idea what private property is, because he doesn't have to share. The baby takes it all in.

My driver takes me to the address I give her. But my family is eating on 34th Street.

I am killed in the outback for free. I wake up snowing.

Pressure on my eyes.

At the lunchroom the fish sandwich is forty dollars a pound as I suspect. I whisper "usurious" to the cashier and storm off into the day hungry. There is no other meal. In an antique dormitory I find my friends but I have to leave them without a key into another dorm room with two sheetlike fountains: one going up and the other going down. They switch directions. At the bar I meet my my date but we are expected to join a large group in a small private dining room. I have to switch with someone to sit next to her at the corner. Look, I'm told, at the wall. There is a hundred-year-old photo of Jim Carrey on the streets of Little Italy with two long Malian prostheses: one to hold the tambourine, and the other to smack it.

The shiver in the trees when the bird leaves.

Grandma lives in an old folks home and her final days are wracked by the conviction that her recipe for chicken soup with matzah balls violates another grandma's copyright. I venture out into the wetlands where my new brown shoes are spattered with mud. On my way I am joined by my old friend Sam and his little brother George who once cracked my jaw with a baseball bat. I try to tell them about another little brother who was arrested but they don't care to understand. I am heading to the house of my other grandparents to see the slide show once again. When we arrive it is already over so I sleep in the barn. There I discover a doomsday device, which is like a Roomba vacuum cleaner with helicopter blades. It hovers and cuts. Hovers and cuts. And as I climb aboard I think, the world doesn't deserve this.

A rock garden and artificial lake at the edge of the abyss. From inside the plate glass my father and I can watch a jazz trio perform outside in the rain, spaced like ornamental plants. And the camera flies overhead.

The supervisor of my therapist is my therapist.

Grandpa is vibrating at such a rate that we have to turn him off.

Bill.

In the office at a Bloomsbury country estate. We're publishing an essay on the Supreme Court and an essay on a war movie. I print one essay on the label of an apple juice bottle filled with urine. But I discover that part of it has been cut off.

On a bricks-and-mortar aircraft with one thousand twenty three of my fellow-travelers. It's like the Spruce Goose of public elementary schools. I peer into the scratched and darkened safety glass that separates me from the flight deck, where the pilot and the four vice pilots are busy navigating the cloudscape. When I get home there is a visit from a Kenyan soul singer. I show him out in a towel as the schoolchildren come home.

My father helps me clean the shower and write a song.

I fly even though where I'm going is closer than the airport. At the airport I have to rent a car, which is on the tenth floor. Where I'm going is underground.

A boy who was my friend as a child, then went mad, moves into a loft near the abandoned mental hospital.

Neil Young shot his sister where she worked in Iowa: at Denny's.

Flying over the dry hills of Syria with a winged mouse who, with a laser from his eyes, crumbles everything to the left of a dotted line to the dust. Later I find that Burt Bacharach, Terrence Howard, and Mark Ruffalo are on the same branch of the Tunisian family tree because they have all sported pencil-thin mustaches.

Three mock horseshoecrab skeletons to choose from: Some kind of democracy.

Sleeping on cold concrete in the room behind the platform, waiting for the train to come. At 4:30am I miss it by a few seconds, so I wait another hour in sleepless limbo. In other words: Get another blanket.

At a cigarette-style vending machine I buy a bottle of water for twenty five cents. When it comes out I see that the water is faintly discolored because two miniature chocolate chip cookies and a slice of apple are floating inside. The typesetter was smart when he pulled the lever for the New York Times instead.

When the Armies of the Air win the ground war, the resistance goes underground. Our primary strategy is to be affectionate at parties with Solo cups and soft music. Those who don't have what it takes tend to venture above ground and not return. My commander is at the bar and I am without a mission. I sit at the feet of a girl with black hair and get my scalp stroked for an hour. Then she gets up. Later I am the only one to notice that she is installing what look like lightbulbs in the windows and walls of our dugout. They are small spheres of nothing that grow very slowly into larger spheres. When pierced these spheres will unleash a thin yellow nothing into the air which will kill the resistance. She is a traitor. Searching for a way to communicate this to my commander by an act of affection, I follow the girl into the bar. She raises a pistol at my commander and fires before he can shoot himself. Then she swallows the last orb of nothing. The glow comes out her nose and eyes until her neck is a stump suspended and she crumples. The treachery went to the highest levels, we realize. And we are free to leave.

At a hilltop sketching class, my pad is too wide. So I decide to build an aquaduct from plastic blocks. I go down into the flats to get a permit from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Despite the best intentions of my escort, we arrive after closing hours and the policeman there invites us to come back later. On the way back up the hill, I take a shortcut through the aquaduct that I have built. When I arrive at the top the preparations are underway for a showdown. I prepare the watermelon. As I cut slivers of melon on the rind, then slice some off for tasting, I reinvent the fruit salad: watermelon, then blackberries, then pineapple, then little chunks of an enormous jumbo shrimp the size of a baseball bat. When I arrive at the end of the shrimp I find that most of the inside is rotten.

After looking both ways I pocket a waxy red seahorse and a thick blue anemone from a kiosk drawer full of spiny objects. I will use them in my own projections. Then I sneak out of the private theme park while the cement is still being laid down. I run into my best friend's mother and her two-year-old daughter, who responds to me like a twelve-year-old son. (It does not occur to me that my best friend may be trapped in the body of his little sister.) It becomes clear that she wants to make love to me. But I must leave to serve as valet to an elderly gentleman who is returning by plane to his wife. He makes it clear that he wants me to arrange an affair with my best friend's mother. But our attempt to change flights in mid-air fails due to the nature of civilian air travel. And on the ground our attempt to change vans in mid-road fails when the target van crashes one block ahead of us, splitting in two.

Three blueberry pies on a pole that fit exactly into the holes in the floor of my apartment and the two apartments below. And that blueberry filling is piping hot!

Watching a silent documentary, with lots of after-the-fact interviews, about a polyamourous multilingual compound. Then I find a sheath of blank paper near the printer, which turns out to have notes from the year I learned to write poetry on the other side. I arrive just as the previews are ending for a screening of a burlesque Glass Elevator. And afterwards the director wants me to score his documentary about a deaf-mute celibate compound. Hum me how it goes, I tell him.

At the gallery of modern art there is a stage show that repeats every fifteen minutes. The uninitiated file up a set of black stairs to a sort of mezzanine where we wait in silence. Then a set of noble and melancholy bulldogs are led past us to an exposed chamber up another set of stairs. A canned narration begins with a recording of Fyodr Dostoevsky, then Gabriel Garcia Marquez, stating one full sentence each chosen at random from their complete works. Then there are a series of lines delivered by planted actors in suits of black lace. The theme is the alienation of the bride. I am asked to adapt this spectacle for the page.

I mumble in my sleep, then say, with no emotion, "Let's just gas 'em."

My boss wants to revise a paper I wrote on Slavic nationalism fifteen years ago. I have no memory of it but he has a marked up copy in his hands.

One dream for Mexicans, one for blacks, and one for the Jews: no dreaming in Asian.

In some sort of Africa, I discover that the pygmy guitar can be taken apart in mid-song. The other expatriates leave me alone.

At the University Club, my father and I are seated in a booth in the atrium and asked to watch a film which consists in a series of Fame-like dance numbers. When it is over, I explain to one of the dancers that, while each of the scenes had movements that were interesting in themselves, I had trouble grasping the story they were trying to tell. As we check out, my father makes a point of tipping the doorman, who happens to be one of my favorite poets, Charles Simic. He undertips.

At a busy intesection I notice two young men flattened against the asphalt. Their eyes are moving but they seem to be stuck there. One is in the sidewalk and the other is splayed across the road; their arms and legs seem to have shriveled into what looks like the stubs of a fetus. I wonder whether this is their defense against the weight of the tires.

Gathering little shards of glass from the kitchen floor, I notice the sting of one or two in my finger. Then I look down and find that the tip of my right finger is on the floor. There is no pain or blood. And I stay intact because the five second rule still holds.

In my shorts and boxer briefs at the high school lunch line. Since I moved away ten years ago many people are noticing me and I don't mind becuase I'm looking good. All that I get is a solid chunk of warm fish, so I go to the vegetarian line in the small amphitheater next door. After waiting for close to an hour, I give up to take a walk with my friends. When I return lunch service is over, but I pick up some fruit with the permission of the Mexicans who are closing up. Later, we drive over to the house of my old friend Nate, who I haven't seen in ten years. He is wiry, legally blind, and somewhat shy in public, perhaps because he still lives with his parents, all of which make it more surprising to learn that he has in fact become a kind of silent god on the plane of hip-hop. Without speaking he graces me with some of his knowledge, and immediately I understand why rappers like Raekwon and Naz would become anxious if he did not appear to watch over their recording studios.

My Mom drives me down from the hills and through the lush deciduous countryside of Virginia. This is where she grew up, she explains, until she was my age. We arrive at a large farmhouse at the side of the highway. Inside there are about twenty young and ambitious people from Brazil, Palestine, Africa, Mexico, Brooklyn, China. We are seated at tables of four, and as we talk and the odor of comfort food drifts from the kitchen, we discover that we must be at some posh retreat for human rights activists. I walk over to a computer kiosk and invite all the Portuguese-speaking people to get together after dinner. After dark, I take a walk in the woods out back. Near the barn there is a thong with the stars and stripes on it. I hurl it out into the woods, but an eagle catches it in mid-air. I take this to mean that I no longer envy the prodigy.

The bathroom is locked, so I pee in a bottle.

Preparing for a trip across the ocean, I am told that Steven Wright is leading an alignment workshop at the yoga studio. I want to stop in, but am held up by packing. I am invited to take a test drive at the Vespa dealership. With the tacit approval of the salesman I saddle up and head out across the drizzling street and toward the ocean. A last minute stop at the breakfast cereal depot leads to a bout of indecision. Passing over Frosted Wheaties and a variety of flakes, I settle on quinoa. After quick stop at the office to drop off the quinoa, during which I discover a half-shelled walnut, I'm headed across the ocean on my motorbike. On the other shore, I come upon a zebra in the tall grass. And I am given the flashback: an elephant seal swims under the breakfast cereal factory and swallows a brass toy mean for a child; it escapes the underwater gears to swim out into the open sea, only to be eaten by a large dragonfish; the dragonfish swims towards land but is ultimately defeated by the zebra, which, with the brass toy intact in its third stomach, is spotted by a hunter in the tall grass. The zebra is shot. From above I can hear a slow insistent moaning as the breath goes out.

At the spy compound, I'm trying to find a place to sleep. In despair I creep into a shower stall. Woken again, I sneak off to visit my family, who happen to be spending the weekend at a beachfront hotel nearby. One of the security guards there looks suspiciously familiar: he must be a double agent. On the way back from dinner, we crane our necks at two vintage Chryslers by the side of the road. The first one is a glossy white, and contains about twenty young black males waiting while a policeman inspects the entirely open chassis where the glass used to be before it shattered. The second car, with black enamel, contains no fewer than thirty black males, mostly teenagers, with a single shard of windshield dangling perilously from where the rear window used to be. No one seems hurt.

There are two armies working in Iraq: the National Guard, and the Film Crew. I am in the National Guard. Each morning we wake up before dawn and board passenger planes to commute to Baghdad. On arrival we guard a variety of posts wearing camouflage and holding semiautomatic weapons. We are mostly ignored and feel helpless. After our shifts, when we are weary and stir-crazy, we must board the same passenger airplanes and take the red-eye flight home, only to return on the next flight at dawn. The Film Crew is much smaller and is staying at the Baghdad City Westin Ambassador hotel. They do not have to wake up early to make the commute and they do not have to fly home afterwards. Their jobs carry prestige, they are smug, and we envy them. I stray from my post to gawk at a hallway where Abe and Will, friends who have been recruited to the Film Crew, are working as production assistants. The scene is a suicide. They brush me away.