A gravelly hillside where my Dad is teaching myself and my brother the fine art of BMX. We discover that you can ride from that side over to this side, avoiding the piles of unpacked dirt and the little potholes here and there. Or you can ride from this side over to that side, pushing hard up the hill and making sure not to pop a tire. Dad suggests a little trip across the ravine which has some PVC pipe stretched over it. And I call it like it is: a ballbreaker.

In my hometown there is an eclipse. While it's dark I am the only one who wonders whether the boy with tight lips and fierce eyes has been doing harm. Light returns and I glance down at the four children, each with a tiny hole in the temple that begins to ooze. And as wave of panic spreads through the town square, I am the only one who locks eyes with the tight-lipped boy. His hair is wavy blond and his eyes are fierce.

That night I feel hunted; I am sure that he will come to silence me. I can't tell my friends for fear of endangering them, so I stop going outside. As time passes the feeling is more of being haunted, and eventually all that is left is the guilt I feel for not exposing the murderer. It becomes so general that I wonder whether that might not have been me.

When I am grown there is another eclipse. The man with tight lips pierces the temple of an infant child in his mother's arms. This time the Father sees what has gone wrong and, out of mercy and desperation, draws a revolver and puts the mother and child out of suffering. And immediately the tight-lipped man with fierce eyes has executed the Father.

We park near the train track and wait for the drive-in movie to be projected by our eyes onto the freight cars as they rumble past.

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.

Out on the town with my friend A, we are kidnapped by three young members of the nihilist youth league who take us to a safe house and engage us in conversation about our core beliefs. The true believer is a young man who looks like me but with longer hair. He has a little pistol. His two accomplices are his older sisters; they seem equivocal and more or less friendly. We remark that it's ironic that we are the only ones wearing all black.

An exploratory fast. In one corner, a kitten wrapped in a wet towel. In the other, the experience of love.

We show up late to the red imperial ballroom on a volcanic island where the first lecture is to be held. The first book under discussion is Laughter at Comedians, a didactic novel by a noted American realist. Everyone has a pristine Vintage paperback edition with matte cover and stylish typography. I steal a seat on the aisle; mid-lecture I am asked to move by a group of young men who say my seat is reserved for gentiles. They seat their grandmother there. One girl in our party can't read; she says she sleeps in the bathroom instead and she likes it. The three-year-old two seats to my left has the board game edition of the novel open on his lap. Later we get a walking tour of a small bamboo treehouse that has been retrofitted for fire safety by the island's closed circuit television station. The show's Australian host guides us through the necessasry steps: first we must build a water tower twenty feet above the highest bamboo room; then a thick bamboo pipe is run down and across the length of the house; whenever smoke rises an elegant leaf-based mechanism curls up to let gallons of water drip down and across the length of the pipe and irrigate the household with thick streams and drops. The woman who lives there says there are fires all the time.

On arriving in graduate school I find that my brother has been there for a year already. My thesis proposal is due immediately and I ask him if he has any ideas. He tells me that as a philsopher he has been trained to think precisely and that he has many ideas. He asks me if I have any ideas. Later, I find that my friend Sheldon Reid has been appointed Vice Provost of the University of Pittsburgh. He is still a very tall black man.

Combing through a large shopping complex that contains a scale model of New York City set on a steep hillside. As I come back over the 57th Street Bridge and head toward Tudor City for a dinner engagement the only option is to scale down a small moving staircase. And a thick guard from the Rockaways yells: "No downsies on the upscalator!"

On the second floor of a large and drafy Victorian house, I am sitting on the sill of a small window and leaning back against a screen. And I realize that every screen in the house has been cut open with one neat and forceful slice.

At a friend's wedding I join in the treasure hunt with a growing band of mischevious friends. By game's end was have accrued in a giant musical pileup, a pyramid formation of revelry and noisemaking that inches toward the end of the room. I myself am hanging upside-down from a wheelchair at the front of the parade, playing an organ which I pump with my head and singing loudly. As I open my eyes I see that we are on a collision course for my maternal grandparents, who are seated and smiling meekly back at the spectacle.

I wake in a large guest room with Jesse and his entourage of wind and water spirits. There is a whining chorus of nymphs and there is also the rambunctious and bearded Beaver Supreme. We are rehearsing the vocal tracks for my next album. Worried that we'll wake the rest of the bed and breakfast I try to convince them to whisper, but they resent this suggestion deeply and grow ever more boisterous. Outside in the dining room I pass by the solitary table of Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's nuclear weapons czar. He is inconsolable, and in a single gesture he peels the entire oily skin off of an enormous roast turkey. Only later do I learn that he has recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer. And I think: Butterfield on Giambologna.

After riding through a dark tunnel in a tiny box with my mother and father, I am stranded on a bright and sunny docking island waiting for the next city-owned paddleboat to arrive. As I stare out to the horizon I get too much of the sun in my eyes. Finally a craft pulls in and a couple disembarks with a video of homemade porn so we wait for the next one. And suddenly, sound comes back into my ears.

After a rough day at work, I wake the commuter train home. On board is my old friend Jesse, undercover with his electroacoustic improv troupe. He hands me a self-contained human pickup, a small white electric device which emits a constant whine. Following his lead, I affix it to the wall and twist to its active position. We then start in on a ten-minute work of physical theater and vocal experimentation, at the end of which we make believe we are two passengers on a night train across Europe.

At night we drive up to the hilltop estate where the three royal children are kept by their keepers. The playroom is on the third floor and the only way to it is through a steep Victorian passageway, like a staircase without stairs, that seems to be designed for highly trained animals. When we reach them they have taken the form of two girls, not surprised by us but bemused at our exhaustion. It is clear that they do not need our protection. Realizing this, Rafael descends to the ground floor in a single leap, leaving me to shimmy down over the next fifteen minutes. He later admits that he was driven by a blend of malice and sportsmanship. I go next door to the house of a shy and brilliant editor. Over dinner he reveals that he has separated from his stunning wife and is now raising the child of a girlfriend who is never home. She gets home just as I am leaving.