At work we are asked to watch a film noir starring Luke Miner as a detective. Between reels, the film is interrupted for an announcement: Luke Miner has been involved in a fatal car crash. It is not known if he lived or died. We immediately receive a lengthy accident report in English, which my boss is anxious to have translated into French so it can be sent out to the Francophone press. I volunteer for the job but then realize that my French is nowhere near good enough. But we have no one else. I get to work then to save the life of Luke Miner, word by word.

In a small shack on the side of a canal, I busy myself with a routine repair to the machinery. A tall gentleman asks for directions as if his life depends on it. I poke my head outside and see a hurricane on the horizon. In a personal helicopter, I navigate through the canalfront slums to the deck of a giant slaveship and shackle myself in for the night.

Asked for my resume, I produce a collage of food mascots stationed in a flat evergreen forest. There is the Waffle House boy covered in sap. The Kool-Aid Pitcher under thick pine cover. And the Kraft cheese single. Each zoomed in on and then lost for the next closeup.

Thought circle. I'm sitting next to a teenager whose assignment is to add two abstract fractions. No matter how much his aunt helps him reconcile the denominators, he simply can't keep them straight. As times goes on, his aunt downshifts to an explanation of how best to thaw a frozen turkey by leaving it close to the muffler in the trunk of his car as he drives home. Outside, I am making conversation with the smokers. One girl I don't know asks me an impertinent question that seems to be an opening for a clever remark. I turn to her wildly and plant a hard kiss on my own forearm.

Sent out into stormy seas to shield all the dinghys from the corrupting beam of the great Lighthouse. My rowboat is rocked by towering waves and most of the time I can't remember why I'm there. Drying in the warm hall, I whisper my name while the keynote speaker takes a sip of water. And as I drink thin milky tea straight from the samovar, she privately asks me never to return to the Lighthouse. My neck is then permanently bent.

I wake to find that my roommate has installed glass paneling in our shower. At the drugstore, I flirt with the clerk by asking for candy that doesn't exist, then suggesting she serve me tiny pieces of pineapple and watermelon on the end of toothpicks. She serves one and drops one into a crate of diapers. Exhausted, I ask her to just send the other by email. She does.

I wake to find company in my cluttered living room, which is now open to the elements. After drawing up a plan we scatter to our places: I am sent our with a tape recorder to gather intelligence at the city gate. I leave the tape rolling on a granite surface and stake out a spot to observe the crowd. Soon I'm singing loud enough to be caught on tape behind the dull roar of foot traffic. And I invent songs that depend on the cries of merchants and beggars and the creaking of wagon wheels. I wake up, then flip the tape over and start recording from the middle.

One the eve of her wedding in Ithaca, a friend asks me to get a visa for her Senegalese lover.

Flossing with a screwdriver, I unwittingly pry out my left front tooth. It's larger and heavier than I would have expected, until a mirror reveals that it has come with a sizable chunk of face that includes some upper lip and about a third of my nose.

I walk out of a mother-daughter-incest-themed house party and flag down an old white van in which my friends Abby and Abby are headed up into the hills.

A Brooklyn waterfront at dusk of the first day of spring. As I wait for my car to arrive, I watch a crankhead inducting his two young children into his own tradition of physical theater. The first game is as follows: "If a Black Hat ever tries to cross your path -- beard, coat, big nose: a *black hat* -- you turn to the side and keep walking." I keep waiting.

Emptying the dishwasher as I explain to my ex that I've never been much for games of chance. Or strategy for that matter.

At work, the tech support guy explains the theory of natural selection to me. And finally I really understand it.

A young man's torso, nude, shot three times by self-healing bullets. Once in the belly, once in the ribs, and once just above the heart.

The shower is empty and there is a wraith in it.

My family checks in to a mountaintop hotel where we've stayed before. On the drive there, my cousin points out the steep ascent from the sea that he has made countless times on his motorcycle. But up in the hills the laws of physics are different. The bellhop finds that his elevator key won't unlock the outer doors of the elevator on the ground floor and shuffles off to find another. After waiting half an hour we decide to take the bus into town for dinner. There in the rustic valley town I see a guitar repairman who has set up shop in a small cafeteria and ask him to adjust the neck of my guitar to get rid of a buzzing on the fourth string. To calibrate his electric screwdriver he chips away at a small portion of the upper lefthand corner of the mural behind him. He finds nothing wrong with the guitar. When we get back to the hotel I submit a review of an album that came out four years ago to a website I stopped writing for three years ago. Only after doing so do I find that my review has been up for over five years under someone else's name. In the comments section I notice two self-promoting banner photographs, one for San Francisco lo-fi folk duo Ramon and Jessica, and the other for my own radio debut on April Fools Day.

As I fall asleep in the morning light my roommate tucks me in. Soon I am out walking the streets and looking down at the humid pavement but I sense that there has been no transition. I must be dreaming. Suddenly I wake outside a musicology convention and walk into the service entrance while the plenary session is in full swing. I find a solicitous Southern couple feeding their two teenage children and two young musicologists at their dinner table: it is easy to sit down at my place unnoticed and catch up on eating while the conversation continues. I notice bags of potatoes and carrots stacked behind the sink and wooden trays full of fresh greens and herbs where the implements should be. I say that I am not a musicologist but that I have played music with one, and there is silence as the dishes are washed. Over dessert I overhear that the family has a German shepherd meaning that to understand this dream I must ask: "Am I my brother's keeper?"

We all pile into an old blue sedan where we are joined by my brother who does not know that we are about to experience the illusion of perpetual descent. The fifteen-year old son is driving. We start down a country highway at a gentle grade with woods on both sides. As the car gains momentum the road drops more steeply into what seems like a wooded valley below until it becomes clear that we are snaking our way down a very large mountain. The road twists suddenly left then right during which at no point does the son take his foot off the accelerator and at the moment the car should have flipped if we had tried to keep both wheels on the road my brother and I find ourselves standing on a breezy hilltop cul-de-sac watching the blue sedan hurtle out into the cool valley air and sail on over the treetops without a sound. We turn around to find a large white van idling with the Southern family inside. "Going home?" I ask the mother absently. "Yes indeed."

My father shepherds my brother through a traditional Talmudic education while I wash the dishes. Later, I am woken by squabbling between my boss and my brother.

On my moped again, we are winding through the hills up a narrow road. When we reach the ridge and try to peek over, dusk falls sharply. And I realize that an atrocity is unfolding in the valley below. If we could get down before dawn we could at least stage a defense, but in the dark we would simply plunge off the first of many sharp turns. I dismount, I pace, I curse. And then a friend walks over to a post on the shoulder and flicks a little switch. Daylight.

My office is a train. We are thundering through the endless hours of the predawn on a vast circular track, like atoms in a supercollider. I shuttle between two railway cars. In the first, I work with a clerk to attend to the needs of an eminent man in decline. This involves sharpening the razors, mixing up the shaving cream with a horsehair brush, and filling a large metal bowl with lukewarm water. In the other car, I do my best to study under a hot incandescent light and eventually fall asleep under a large quilt. I am woken by a young nurse.