Just before the bishop is murdered, I'm trapped in the back seat of a parked stolen car with Steve Buscemi in the driver's seat and Woody Harrelson in the passenger's seat. Someone shoots Woody in the back with a pellet, causing him to lock a blade into Steve, which means Steve has to climb out onto the hood and hang on to the rear view mirror and promise to blow the whole garage to smithereens within fifteen minutes if no one is willing to say he's sorry. There is a tense silence. I step out to sleep in a large aseptic waiting room with a hundred of my mother's friends and about twenty roaming cats.

Chris Farley and David Spade are playing ping-pong out the window of my hotel room with some kids in the courtyard. Not waking me is part of the game, evidently, but they're not very good at it. So I push the buzzer next to my bed. When the nurse arrives she tells me there has been no ping pong — maybe I was dreaming it? — and offers to close the windows. When I wake in my own cold bed the windows are open and the fan is on.

My father sustains an outdoor operation at the field hospital under rolling grassy hills. On an overlooking plateau there is a reunion I will have to miss for now. I have to join my best friend's little brother to accompany a puppet show with a half-filled bottle of soda and a little plastic stick. Later I see a Mexican hurl a package into the empanada cart near my father's operating table. When someone inside draws a kitchen knife I start to run away but before I can take three steps the Mexican has drawn a pistol and shot my chest wide awake.

At the marble estate of a great family in decline. The grandfather takes my friends for a swim but I stay behind to sleep. It takes me a while to notice that two of three grown sons are deaf. The younger is a graphic artist whose work about an abducted Balkan princess we published in 1982. (Don't bring it up, I'm told, or he'll suggest another project.) The older one is deafer: once he came home with two Chinese guys and two big bags of Chinese food, and only three plates. In the end he shared, but we all knew he had forgotten.

I can read the bright filigreed bands around my wrists: there is no sequel.

Taking turns keeping watch as my father recovers at a mountain retreat. It takes me a moment to realize that the clear and red fluid dripping from his hand means he has accidentally sliced his thumb. For a while I play under the covers with a nymphet who won't let me touch her. Then a bearded Arthur and his three grown sons arrive in a jeep and we know something is going to happen.

As the Mexican says: hunger, like anger, has an egde; and love is like a stomach ache in your heart.

Swept up into a frenzy pushing lonely coco-acorns on the campus lawn, I almost miss the closing of the legendary Prepared Mansion by world-renowned performance artist Pauline. Each room its own custom installation with its own period furniture and psychotropic effects. Before I go, though, I have to sleep in a bare and brightly lit attic with no bath.

On the way to a party I put on my bodysuit. There is too much smoke in the hangout room. I sneak off to the bedroom thinking it's the bath. The real bathroom has an enormous crystal garden in a vast clear bowl with slots on the bottom, hanging directly over a fountain in the palatial hotel lobby. This, I'm later told, is the next generation of composting toilets, for which we have Guiliani to thank. I can't bring myself to use it.

My uncle calls to ask me to remove a reference to donuts from my grandfather's autobiography. I can't find it.

Paying by the hour, I learn how to pretend to bicycle while suspended from the ceiling by fishing line. When the attendant tries to convince me to buy half a pound of raw squid to patch up a hole in the wall, I know enough to call her bluff. Later, I'm entering a drug and music store laid out like Urban Outfitters. After passing through an aisle of greeting cards and framed posters from a company called "Grids n' Titties," I see some space age organic liquid deodorant bottles which flare up at the top like letter openers.

All my friends are starting a new business. I've been hired but it's not clear what my job will be. As I enter the black marble tower I am handed a mash note from one of my female friends. Was it her job to write it? Another friend is the floor supervisor. I accidentally get her in trouble. Rather than worry about it, I respond to the mash note.

In a two-story opera house, we sing a two-act opera on a two-tiered stage, pairing off in twos to sing each role by relay, overlapping and leaving gaps, and waiting patiently until the two rows of people in the audience figure out we only have one score.

Squeezing four SUVs into a three-car garage is fine on the way in but there is necessary crunching on the way out. We go next door to light candles for both shabbat and Yom Kippur, without a prayerbook. Earlier, there had been moments of flight over the blue-lit abandoned city, in silence.

The public library opens up a China Room on a busy street. Twenty floors up there is a private reading room that has, according to Gabe who works security, a "Larry Summers vibe." But down at the storefront, for a fee of 70¢, you can get a foil bag of Chinese flavored popcorn on permanent loan.

Building trackbound rides for our love. Hers has many layers but mine is stable.

I eat a broiled chicken leg and two root vegetables before realizing that the cafeteria works on a pay-by-weight basis only. Later, the people who moved into my parents' old house have lined the facade with bookshelves holding mostly thrillers and young adult fiction. My eyes rest on a self-help book called "The Bedless Bedroom."

A tasting of strawberry ice cream with a side of nougat balls.

Meatless sausage patties on the windowsill.

A one-room drama where the audience stands and recriminates with deli-thin slices of flesh. Then a full-campus bicycle-mounted scavenger hunt that ends with pooping into an antique chair with a false bottom.