From the high cliff we see the whole school swimming out to sea. My brother leaves for the airport with a cassette mix I made him, grumpy. Earlier, grandma doesn't grasp that the hotel banquet is her own 90th birthday.

A traveling love affair with Audrey, from which I wake to tell the betrayal to my ex, who takes it hard, from which I wake again to a hillside bus with Alicia, with whom I must perform in an hour, after the driver takes my coin on exit, with no preparation, only a setlist and a settling calm.

We cannot pack our baby wallabee, I am told, although on inspection he looks more like a baby lemur. So myself and my brother, and my best friend and his brother, we prepare to roll out in a rented minivan. I invite crazy Andrew but it is clear he is scared to leave home. Earlier, restless sleep beside the father as the brother waits outside.

I will my way through a sequence of book covers, each with misspellings more egregious than the last.

My lover dreams that, in the deli aisle, we see a die-cut hash mark made of beef, shrink-wrapped. "Meat trivet," she tells me urgently. Then she seems to wake and tell me, once again, "Meat trivet". When she really wakes up, she decides to tell me everything.

Through an old-fashioned front-loading washing machine's glass door there stretched TIDE-like capitals pronouncing: DETERGENT JOURNALISM. Just another foul-mouthed anthology from the folks at Harper's, I assume.

A gaunt Nordic man pulls me aside in a strange mix of begging and robbery. Later, my lover tells me she is trying to be tender now because it will hurt less later.

Woken by a wash of light, I squint my way to the underwear drawer to dig out a red sleeping mask, then stoop back to bed. Woken by light, and realizing I had been dreaming, I dig out a red sleeping mask and fall asleep. Woken by light, dig the mask, fall asleep. Light, mask, sleep. Light, mask, sleep. Until finally I just bury my head under the pillow and try not to dream.

At my Sunday School class, which is now all grown up, I have forgotten how to plug in my keyboard, and don't know the songs, so I never start the set.

A sea voyage in fragments.

My mother tells me that her father died. "When?" I ask. Twenty minutes ago. She didn't know she was supposed to tell me. Later, I notice that the fall issue of the New York Review of Books has a full-page ad for candy on the cover. "I know exactly how this happened," I announce. No one asks.

My father convinces me to postpone my trip to travel with him on Sunday. This allows me to put on a fashion preview for my grandmother.