It is the last day of summer camp and we have gathered around the fire to say goodbye. It is all warm until a slow man with a pony tail and sideburns launches into a series of accusations against one of the counselors. We are all unsettled because this man is clearly unhinged but we have to hear him out. As we pack our vehicles, he comes up to me and squeezes my hand.

My grandfather is looking dapper in a tuxedo on the edge of the sea. The water comes up to gently lap his ankles and he turns to smile at me. Then he takes an elegant demi-pas step and shifts his balance in a smooth way as if he were starting a solo dance routing on a soundstage. And as the water seeps into the sand below him, I can see the step become a twist, and the twist become a fall. And slowly, as the water rushes in and his body turns to meet it, he makes eye contact with me. I swim out into deep water to catch him but it takes several minutes before I can see well enough to pull him up from the bottom. I feel no guilt but am aware that my efforts have not been enough to save him from a death that did not have to happen the way it did.

To clean up a mess on the desk, my colleague suggests ripping out a page of a book called Essential Torah. I object, and instead offer an oversized book of New Orleans photographs by Roberto Polidori.

I work up the nerve to play a little carnival game at the hell house. This involves conspiring with a group of strangers to explore the creepy parlor of a custom-designed haunted house. In the first round I stay on the sidelines as an exploratory party goes in, falls silent, then emerges fifteen minutes later with bursts of laughter and weeping. The second time I am in front, and it is my job to pick apart the mantelpiece stone by stone until the shadow of a black robe appears and we all tremble in terror. And a poorly costumed Death appears to tell us all to move on to the annual parade. A flatbed schoolbus is idling in the middle of a wide street and when it takes off I am the only one aboard. It takes me to my next appointment, with a fine-featured and red-haired young guardian I have seen somewhere before. She gives me a large binder labelled "Luddifices" and asks me to select an exercise therein. And I can't choose one without choosing them all.

A fresh egg cracked into a bowl. A fresh egg cracked into a bowl. And then an egg cracked open with the blackest of yolks.

Hovering over a broad feudal landscape, I watch as the daily exchanges of thousands of peasants and merchants and soldiers unfold below me. Then a rift: a mighty black insect has ripped through the sky and in one beating of its leathery wings can send the hills and huts and armies spinning out into cataclysm. I feel the magnitude of the loss, though I do not fear it. And then the real rift, as I am torn from that sky back into my own body and feel the loss, small and personal and terrifying, of the world I had been dreaming.