Asked to profile the Duchess for the official newspaper. Knowing that my words will be reviewed carefully by the Commissariat, I put off the assignment as long as possible. During the interview itself I misplace my legal yellow pad several times. In the end the profile is not published but I am imprisoned anyway.

Stakes. Out on a motor-driven surfboard without a wetsuit. I paddle away from my family to hop aboard a luxury houseboat maintained by the publisher of a prestigious magazine. His children play with me, and he seems to grow about twenty years younger as he laughs at my tentative jokes, sprouting a thick head of curly hair and sideburns. As I paddle away, a large wave almost overturns their houseboat. And then, in the distance, I see an enormous front of water, maybe fifty feet high. It takes a whole city's worth of amphibious vehicles and sailboats and trawlers and even a few lone swimmers and plunges them all into the depths. And then another, bigger wave topples a larger array of vehicles and homes, this one much closer to us. I can feel myself and everyone around me swelling with a kind of juvenile excitement, one that is heightened by the awareness that we have just seen from the outside something that, from the inside, meant a great loss of human life. We feel deranged, but sense that we cannot be sobered until we know if, or when, our own wave is coming.

Up. Up and up a rickety set of bleacher steps until I reach a platform where a man is waiting to shake my hand.

Cast as the Cowardly Lion in a Sondheim musical. Later, I gain the trust of a hotelkeeper through a series of fabricated confessions. Still he will not tell me his real name, and he will not give me good directions.

Slog. A friend has decided to use the history of intellectual property law as the basis for her next pulp romance. She wants me to look over the thick, thick manuscript for spelling mistakes before she sends it off the the copyright office. Meekly, I accept the task.

Gorgeous. I am stranded in a small cabin in the mountains with my mother's side of the family. My cousin suddenly goes down with a wound to the chest, and everyone but me resigns to losing her; I call 911 on my cell phone then decide to hike out for help. On my way I meet a beautiful stranger and forget my mission. We sneak into a high mountain bakery and she offers me a fresh bagel, stolen and still hot from the oven. I hesitate, then bite into it, muttering, "Gorgeous."

Powder. Turning to my boss with a document, I notice that his arm is covered with a white powder over which a thin layer of blood is spreading. "Are you bleeding?" I ask. "I bleed all the time," he says. "Give me that."

Arturo. Driving through a valley near the coast, I pass through large areas of light and shade as the road winds. I stop at the Centro Contra'arte, an underground cement compound that has been overtaken by vines and bushes. It appears that I am getting back to work from an extended lunch, as is the woman standing next to me. The freight elevator is broken so we have to tap on a window. We are admitted by a colleague who chides me for the length of my lunch hour. "Look at Arturo," he says, gesturing to a Mexican teenager in the corner who has been mouthing the words to whatever is blasting on his headphones. "At least he's been here."

Horseplay. I am playing hide and seek in a carpet-lined compound where all rooms are connected to other rooms by way of steep ladders. In a moment of carelessness I knock two playmates off their own ladders onto a small landing. One of them can't stop laughing about the fall. The other brushes herself off with a hesitant look. At first it seems that her face has been deeply scarred, with blood welling up from five parallel gashes that run the length of her cheek and jaw. As her look turns to one of disgust, I notice that the darkness under her skin is not blood. It is the surface of a mask fitted beneath her flesh and skin, a smooth red mask wrapped tightly around her skull.

Lunacy. In the attic of the house in which I was born, I peer up through a skylight to see the moon. After turning to tell my sister that the moon is full, I glance back to find it grown several times larger and superbly well-defined. The moon now seems to be churning according to its own laws of symmetry, with craters and mists and shadows each appearing, then swelling into fullness, then subsiding very quickly and with an astonishing degree of continuity. I look down and the ground begins to shake, then heave. Seeking shelter on the street, I stumble between falling telephone poles as the house collapses. Minutes then hours pass, and the earthquake does not subside, though it does not get stronger either. After staggering through the night I take refuge in someone's basement until the ground stops moving. He does not want to speak to me but does not ask me to leave. I glance through a high window to see the sun coming up.

Guilt. I am left alone in a room with a brother and sister, each no older than ten. I accidentally kill one of them and am forced to kill the other to maintain silence. No one else is aware of my crime and I wander against the crowds as a fugitive. A young man offers to help me flee, and while I do not trust him I decide to accept his offer. Two whores hear us arguing loudly in the backroom of a bar about what to do next, so we are forced to pull them into the fold too. Every time another stranger becomes aware of our growing band of outcasts, we are faced with a choice: kill or trust. For a long time our little society does nothing but grow. But many of us know that sooner or later we will have no choice but to start shrinking.

Ingenuity. I am at a plain wooden bench staring at a non-circulating copy of the Complete Works of Richard Pryor. It is a set of tapes and there is no VCR in sight. A black teenager walks up to me and flicks my temple with his finger. He waits for a response and does it again. Later at the movies, I am watching a gothic tale in which Men have made a Spectacle of Death. They have thrown a Sumptuous Ball in the Palace, which is also a Cathedral. Death is played by a Tall man with a Head that has been Rotting. He is Chained to a Coat Rack that Moves about on Wheels, but he Breaks Free to Spread a Mortal Terror in the Hearts of Men by Thrusting his Face in Theirs and Looking All Huge and Decayed. He does it well, but it gets tedious.

Storm. It rains indoors, not out, and it rains all night. The cloudbursts are sporadic, relentless, and highly local. I am up all night trying to dodge the water but by dawn I am drenched many times over. At work the next day a woman offers me two buckets, each containing a different lard-like substance with which she suggests I waterproof myself. I accept them knowing I will not be able to use them.

Ice age. During a natural catastrophe that appears to be permanent, I take refuge in my midtown office building. Many of my coworkers decide to do the same. Over many weeks and months of confinement, a small society develops with its own customs, division of labor, and taboos. We use the bathroom as a health clinic and the shelving to grow vegetables and herbs. Several years later the catastrophe subsides and we are given the opportunity to live elsewhere, but few of us leave the building. I have a child. Years later I die, content in the knowledge that my offspring will never venture outside the building as I once did. That given the opportunity they will invent a society even smaller than the one I had devised, and they will keep to it.

Salt. Trying to explain death to my grandmother. It's something you need that will never be there again, I say. Like salt water. I refer to my best friend who died two months ago, just two months after he had lost his own best friend. That's death, I say. She interrupts me with a nonsequitur. She understands. Later at the airport, I insist on mating with the furniture.

Beans. Lying across the width of my love seat with the Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch open to a poem called "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" on my lap, I drift off to sleep repeatedly. And as I do, I have variations on a dream in which my roommate has sorted a large packet of Goya 16-Bean Soup Mix into small piles of dried beans. The number, size, and color of the piles varies slightly from dream to dream.

Prep. A genial tea service in the canalfront palace of the youngest son of the Emir. I soon recognize him to be none other than the fastidious and laconic drummer of my high school rock band. He tells me that he will stage a small but brutal coup against the Protestant gentry. I hear him out but politely decline to participate.

Wolf. I am on a very short road trip with my brother, my best friend, and his brother. We are climbing a muddy hill and very close to home when we spot a fox on the road, and then a wolf. The two seem to be headed for a deathmatch, but the wolf is distracted by our presence and begins to stalk the car. We lock the doors as quickly as possible but still we are are chilled by fear. Safety glass is not enough.

Gore. I have taken my lover on a family vacation. We are lounging about idly but something feels wrong. I excuse myself and drive home to take a shit. Later, I meet the family and fiancee for a private screening of a new film. We lie on a plastic floor and watch a square screen on which is projected the story of a boy who has taken his lover on a family vacation. Some of his friends are in a scooter gang and are cruel to an old Chinese vendor. In the climax of the film, we look back from the finacee's vehicle at the vendor's Chinese family, who ride together in the cab of a large pickup truck. They throw the old vendor sidelong into the road in the path of the scooter gang, who they know will attempt to run him over. As I turn my head from the screen, I see the rapt face of my beloved as it is spattered in blood. Spattered first by the the blood of the Chinese vendor as he is split in two by an oncoming scooter. Then the blood of the leader of the scooter gang as he is spun out. And finally the darker blood of the boy, looked on by his beloved as his body is blown to vapor by the pavement.

Overtime. A steady succesion of tedious errands at work. One after the other, each one brief and specific, the whole chain of tasks stetching out to infinity.