She shoots herself. Once for show, and once for real. And after she shoots herself for real, she shoots you.

At the shore, I'm combing the surf for mammals taken in by the tide. First a stray possum, then a few kittens pawing out of the wet sand. And behind a sandbar, submerged in shallow seawater, the possibility of a grandmother.

I walk by a continuing education school where an algebra lesson is underway. The sign outside says: "Regular class: $95. Isaac Asimov, $150." "Might as well spring for the Asimov," I think to myself.

A red-headed friend sings an anthemic folk song. "It sounds so simple," I say, "but it's nuance all the way down." Most of the songs on her album have faux-naif redundant titles like I WAS A SRIROCCO AT THE ROCKY ROCOCO BAR BEFORE COCO CHANEL WENT CUCKOO FOR COCOA PUFFS. The demos have already been animated with fast bright talking woodland animals. She leaves for the Obama speech but sends a handwritten note inviting me to learn the songs so I can tour with the band.

A classmate bikes by and yells, "Truce!" I give him the finger and walk into a poetry seminar. The professor is at the blackboard. I dictate a stanza that ends, "Together we could rule the world."

At the high school assembly a hippie-looking man steps up to the mic to ask a question. "I am Cheeseburger Jesus!" he begins. I move on to the next symposium.

Grandma got pregnant again.

In the first of man investments he must believe to be recoupable, a San Francisco tycoon has rented me a rehearsal studio across from the Dudley Co-op, complete with railroad kitchen and upright piano. So I begin to gather some instruments for my first double bill: Jascha vs Jascha.

Before I can load out my music gear on the steps of the public library, I am drafted into service on a Soviet passenger train. At each stop I switch cars, but the scenarios of compulsory service are unlimited.

As my hair grows long, I try to recall the term for thinking two things at once.

Loren shows me a little box on the floor that serves as a sort of AutoTune for the baroque musician. After setting the key and pitch, one can chose from a dozen kinds of tuning: just intonation, Pythagorean intonation, equal temperament, wolf temperament, etc. Then when you plug your electric viol into the box, he explains, no matter how out of tune you play, what comes out is purely consonant. Brilliant, I say.

At the art cult, which I assure my friend Jesse we are just visiting for the evening, everyone is paired up and made to look identical, then set loose on the dinner party. Jesse drives back up the hill to his recording studio, while I am swept up in the action. I stay for several weeks, becoming more and more curious about the ultimate aims of this band of gypsies, and worrying that my straight demeanor will cause the the others to assume I am planning to betray them to the public. When Jesse returns, restless to get back to his final mix on the hill, I can tell that I have already been converted.

Hiking back out with my parents and brother, who explains his theory of natural selection in meticulous detail, until I get it. Wearing only my undershirt in the trailhead parking lot, I spot a cop car.

Driving a city bus home along mountain roads. I'm the only passenger, sitting about halfway back on the left, but I'm also the driver. It's an exhausting task, this backseat driving. After taking the wrong fork I am forced to stop at a steep rest area. That's where I see a long and knobby beaver, exhausted, splayed out in front of the coach. He fidgets, not quite dead from exhaustion. This is my pack animal, I think, as the other buses gather below.

Step away from a marathon art party to join my brother at a well-lighted ATM. It's actually more of a slot machine, with a deck of old cards stashed where the deposit envelopes should be. As he locks in a solid win, I wander past a storefront that has been rented to promote a forthcoming novel by a Salvadoran writer. I pay it the highest tribute I can muster at that moment: urine.

The only passenger in a silent jet that must circle around the block hundreds of times to burn off fuel before it lands. On each circuit we pass through the breezeway of a white mansion where a conference is underway. I have been invited to speak.

Sitting on a top bunk listening to the desert stories of a group of travelers who seem to know one another. I stay silent for lack of context. During a lull, I finally squeeze out a question about the terms of engagement in this group. And the red-haired leader, a married woman just a few years older than me, climbs on top of me so that her hair brushes my lips. Our eyes locked, she tells the group to take a short break.

An exhaustive self-inventory, muttered into the eternal dictaphone.

Man leaps down from the balcony of the theater, climbs over rows and rows of occupied seats, to bring an accusation to the stage. But the ceremony is already breaking up. Repeat.

After a harrowing walk on the seaside hills, I don't want to venture out again, even in the armored terrain vehicle. But someone has to go foraging for provisions. The next morning I want to play keys with the full summer camp band. But to truly feel rhythm, I'm told by Bjorn, I must learn to breastfeed a child—or at least a piglet. Convinced I'm working at a disadvantage, I resolve to suck an egg—or at least a kiwi.

Perched on the roof of our barn, working through a twelve-course tasting menu, slightly worried about the fall, while the chef's children deliberately perch on the gutter and slip themselves down.

Visiting my old elementary school, I tell a ten-year-old girl that her method of inquiry is much like mine. She seems bored. We are marched into the hall and lined up single file to watch a group of children eat their lunches. Evidently our own needs have been neglected. On the way to the bathroom, which is nothing more than a ceramic urinal, I complain about the headmistress to my mother.

Perched on a billboard, the editor and the intern perform a one-act riddle about homemade explosives at the hospice. It ends with not one bang but two: BANG, BOOM.

Ramon and Jessica ask me to play a short solo on a many-colored glockenspiel. My heart lifts.

Stepping off the company plane, I must park a Volkswagen Golf.

There are two ways to use a crowbar. You can use the bent side to knock a person out, and you can use the forked side to puncture the skin and even the guts. To my horror, which I suppress, the man in the gray suit selects a homeless man and, behind his double-parked luxury car, does both.

On the airplane, we turn back just after liftoff. I blame the two young black men seated behind me, inexplicably and shamelessly.

Flashing back through the last thirty years of my life in five-year increments, until I vanish at the moment of birth. Then flashing forward through the rest of my life in five-year increments, until, at the great age of 85, I give up.

A red rubber ball moving through an invisible Rube Goldberg machine.

As a rookie fact-checker for the Brown alumni magazine, it takes me forty-five minutes to discover that the name of the university president has been misspelled. But I do get some respect for it.

We sneak into the rotunda to catch a few seconds of the film, which is a Victorian farce. On the way out we see dozens of keystone cops and button-down nurses preparing for their entrance. The theater manager whispers, "Some sort of a ruse." Later, after crossing a street that turns out to be a highway, I come upon a stranded tanker trailer and police car. Each are hoisted and dragged by its own swarm of half-naked partygoers who have worked their way underneath, like ants under a banana. It seems to be a movement. Not wanting to get involved, especially after seeing a real tank around the corner, I climb in a large wicker basket headed for the roof. A few moments of high-definition lucidity as I float aimlessly up, sinking from time to time, powered only by commitment to the dream, in what must be a tenement alleyway at dawn.

After I swipe my farecard in the subway, but before I can get through the turnstile, two black teens push past me coming the other direction. I am intimidated so I sneak in through the gate and ask the Arab attendant to let me pass. Since he ignores me I tell him a folktale in French, which pleases him. It's a few minutes before I realize that he doesn't want anything from me, that I am free to go.

During the ice storm Loren and I wait over an hour for a table at the rickety thirty-story hotel. When the music is almost over we are led up the stairs to an elevator which opens on a tiny balcony with a table for two which opens on a musty twenty-nine-story atrium. The food never comes, and when it does there is only bacon and potatoes, no eggs. So I strike out into the storm with a mechanized sled that has a weedwacker attachment to smooth down the ice in front. At the coast I ditch it for a sort of waterbound snowboard which, as a favor to the owner, I ride along the frigid coast to the depository. No choice but to walk back.

Young Indian couple in separate cardboard boxes on the highway at night. As I haul them to the median it becomes clear that they are speaking perfect English on their cell phones. They are grateful for the service. Later, I find that dream-reading is a reliable source of typos.

Target practice from the chairlift.

As my family waits in bulkhead seats on an interplanetary flight, I take the next shuttle to their craft, but am stuck in the pod with a man who must be some kind of spy. I ignore him.