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.