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.

Urine tests for the whole family on the suspension bridge. The results can be read from left to right as an anagram of a famous quotation.

Climbing up the sheer dirt cliff with an argument about polling practices among the Jews, I come upon the last forsaken family. Father rushes off to kill a land shark; it must be real because it has the rare books it ate inside its head and neck. Mother takes photographs and the kids wander off.

The hospital is under siege; we stay silent and keep away from the windows.

We drop off him at the mountain retreat. When I return he is rude and not yet ready for me. So I wait in the yard where an arc of water forms an ice bridge from the tree to the shed. He is still not ready and all my friends' rooms upstairs are vacant. But I get a three-minute alignment from a dancer before I'm on my way again.