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.