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.