Washing the light-skinned infant messiah in a basin in the men's room. He pisses all over me but it's infant piss. When he's twelve, of course, he runs away from me.

Dina, Derek, Jesse, and Greg on the lawn with matching technicolor bicycles. Mom is baking pies to raise bail but we sit down to thin slices of a surplus pumpkin pie with the awareness of some dim sibling drama in someone else's family.

I pass a flustered aunt and uncle returning from the annual meeting. At the play, I am drafted at the last minute into the ensemble, which is performing a silent walk-through. Each actor has an small ovular touchscreen which shows the desired location of all four actors on stage with little colored dots. But I don't know which way to orient my own screen, so I'm lost on stage. Afterwards I help my father read the Yiddish inscriptions on the back of the clayware until I notice there is a small bright transliteration in the bottom righthand corner of each one. I don't let on.

On an all expenses paid trip with my grandmother in a luxury hotel halfway around the world. We must leave the cool and easy lobby for the burning sun to complete some kind of quest. By the industrial skyline and the series of period gunners marching from the water it must be Egypt on the eve of the First World War. We play along with the headscarves and squalor. And after a coastal stroll my grandmother takes the wheel of the rental car and insists on navigating, poorly, through a maze of railway switches. My kingdom for GPS.

Up and up the stairs. With a lady who might be my friend. Til I go on half flight too many into the sky. And she's waiting at the ticket taker. Later with my father at the one at a time dilating upside down centrifugal ride. He tries to speak to the attendants in French but I'm the one who has to get strapped in.

The flood in a Honda.

Epic with no exit.

What must have been the most beautiful Louis Malle film in the world (until I realize I'm not living it but before I realize I'm dreaming it). The story of a girl stripped from her family by death but then reintroduced as a ghost that could be loved as no living girl could. Then a series of interlocked ghost stories each with a twist—the ghost kills his living sister, or the surviving mother kills the ghost of her unborn husband. And finally proof that it has all been for nothing.

When the old man returns I am cuddling at the belly of my guardian. He has never been so spry, and I feel a pang of shame, but don't lift my head from her belly. Later she convinces me to trade my bike and her bike for a car, at least for the day.

As I enter the community library, I see a light-skinned lanky black man jump down from a high shelf with a pile of books. We lock eyes for a long moment and he braces my arm as if to threaten me, then runs. The librarians comes over knowingly with the paperwork to register a legal complaint. I tell her I'm in a rush but she slowly fills out the mimeographed theft complaint in painstaking cursive as I can tell we're being watched. Finally another black man, darker and with larger eyes, who must be the accomplice and mastermind, reveals himself from behind a stack of books. He says that we've been part of an experiment, he won't say what kind. He abducts the librarian and leaves me alone in the library to discover the thief hiding behind a narrow bookshelf in the corner.

Erroll Louis assigns me to cover a travesty in the heartland. I later discover that he has also assigned the boss's son to the same story. We ride the giant roundhouse elevator up to the journalistic suite but can't get anywhere because it stops on every floor.

Dark thrust of peace.

The aliens send plans for the construction of an antique railway car. When it is airlifted in with armed guards we realize that it must be a surveillance machine. But we don't dare open fire on our own handiwork.

Taxi drive through the Berkeley Hills to a foot path where the driver gets out and carries my luggage into a sweeping predawn panorama, pink and blue.

Cowering under the table, shot in the forehead, in daylight, next to my brother, playing dead until the van comes, the van never comes, the bullet retracts, no one kills me, and the wound heals.

The only alien who wants to take his citizenship test home is me. On the way out I get into an imaginary car accident. This discourages me enough to go back and listen to a dreadlocked man detail his Rasta lexicon. And no matter how many times I ask, he will not explain the meaning of the word "es," which I've never heard before.

The whole table is ordering the tasting menu.

I pop a flat tire on my bike and get turned around in the muddy banks by the roadside. At the edge of a convent the Malaysian nuns pretend to ignore me until I see Gabriel the interpreter. I still can't get home.

The boss is docile. I try meet a friend for a movie in an underground Japanese complex on the Upper East Side. But we don't have reservations.

First, driving home in a domestic Senegal with my mother, we bust a flat and have to knock at the house of Woody Harrelson. He offers to drive us home. His driving is wild and unpredictable but seems to follow a track, even as we collide with multiple cars and come close to igniting our gas tank. Next time (now with a friend) when we bust a flat we know what's coming from Woody: we see the same tattoo, hear the same cheap banter, and with creeping satisfaction accept the same ride which unfolds on exactly the same wild track. The third time (my father is with us now) we drop in like old friends, extend the banter, pushing his cinematic hospitality as far as we can, never asking for help. When he breaks down and offers us a ride, we walk out. Later, Loren is back from England with a hatchback trunk full of piles of used books. We decide to help him sort out the library books for storage, but I'm slowed down by some slim collections of poetry I've never seen before. Even later, what started as a simple baseball toss turns into a kaleidoscope of magic whose only purpose is to prove that there is magic.