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.

Epidemic. A man on my subway train starts to laugh. First a trickle, then a fountain, then a flood of good-natured and sincere laughter. The man's laughter has no observable object, no context. He is clearly mad. Passengers around him try on some dirty looks, seeming more confused than annoyed, but soon give up. Then a group of schoolkids starts to snigger at the laughing man and, presumably, at the effect he is having on their fellow passengers. The sight of children ridiculing the insane disquiets more onlookers; one woman lets out a few nervous titters. The man's ringing peals have now subsided for reasons as mysterious as their origins. And taking in the whole situation, I let out a little sigh of recognition. And again, the man begins to laugh.

Fictions. I'm living inside someone else's story. It all feels real enough to me but I am aware that I am living through a situation invented by someone I don't know. Episode by episode, I adapt this life to the stage. It's not very hard to do so because the story was composed with my adaptation in mind. I spend too much time writing and not enough rehearsing, and in the end I am only able to organize a staged reading of the first few episodes of my play. A film scout is present at my staged reading. He must like it, derivative as it is, because the play is soon turned into a major motion picture. I am delighted to learn that it will be an elaborate period drama. But I am crushed to learn that I did not get called back for the role of myself. In the reviews, a critic dwells on one small feature of the film, a triangle of sexual compulsion between three generations of a single family. He claims that the director has used it to stand in for the sequence of adaptations that led to the film. I chuckle to myself as I read this, noting that the triangle is the only thing that is identical in all three versions of the story.

Whack-a-mole. I am in an arcade in my hometown. I have a large padded mallet in my right hand, and I am playing the game where small woodland creatures made of plastic resin pop out of little holes, and it is my job is to send them back into their holes one by one. In a moment of ingenuity, I discover that rather than predicting out of which hole the next rodent will pop, a thankless and impossible task, I can more efficiently cover all the holes at once with my chest. And as I do so, a man comes over, seizes my arm, and whispers in my ear: "If I catch you doing that again, I'm going to break your little wrists."

A wide dark valley. Looking out over it with a number of friends from when I was young. The landscape is like central California in grayscale, hellish, a bit like how I would imagine Dante's Tuscan hills. I am the first one to set off for the other side of the valley, where I can see a huge rickety wood-and-ceramic structure that needs to be scaled. At the base, I find a narrow opening with a steep and uneven staircase of polished wood. I climb inside and upwards with my friends behind me. And after some time I emerge into a chamber, appointed in a kind of futurist high-nautical style -- polished brass, teak, leather upholstery -- with a bank of convex windows through which one can see a complete cityscape. It's dusk in a city that is permanently overcast. To the right there are two identical backlit billboards advertising a service I do not recognize in a script I cannot read. Far below is an empty street. And in every direction there are dozens of distant buildings similar to the one I am in. Men like me are also peering from their convex windows. The air is close; by now a few of my friends have stepped into the chamber with me. And two things become clear at the same time: I have been here before, I have lived here. And I am in an enormous concentration camp, about to witness the great genocide. The last one.

Shaken. Given a glass of chipped ice and nickels. It gives off a faint aroma of zinc, like the smell of a finger after it touches a paperclip.

Recon. We are all going about our separate lives in the cities of the North. Then at dusk we get the mobilization call, and without excuse or explanation each one of us drives away. By midnight we are at the staging ground in a forest clearing. This may be the first time we've been together in months. Around 2:30am I am told that we will be striking out before dawn. I decide not to sleep. We are now in groups of three or four, and I don't recognize the others in my group. We set out to explore an office building that appears to have been recently abandoned. The building is composed of over thirty identical floors, each linked by a stairwell to exactly two other floors, neither of which is the floor directly above or below it.

Driving. Men from town started disappearing to the hills. Sometimes in their own cars, sometimes in cars they had taken from neighbors. It was a short drive and it seemed they drove slow. Fine men, trustworthy men, men with families and jobs. When we started following them it became clear that the men were not driving the cars to the hills. No. The cars were driving themselves to the hills with the men inside. We spent long hours wondering how a car could compel a man to drive. And we followed the cars on foot. For fear of being discovered, we would turn back before the men had reached the top of the hill.

Then four children began to pedal up the hill on their bikes. We followed them instead, and even when a white oil was dripping from the underside of the cars, we followed the children. Their bikes had little tires that became slick with the oil, but they swerved and pedaled on. When we got to the flats at the top of the hill, it became clear that the cars were not driving the men. No. The hill was calling the cars because the men were inside. The cars had stolen the men because the hill was strong. The men were driven by the cars and the cars were driven by the hill.

And when the cars reached the top of the hill, they swerved around the wrecks of the other cars, slowly and steadily. The cars found the holes that the hill had dug for them, and the cars flipped over to fill the holes, burying the men in the hill. We heard them cry.