In the lobby of a new hotel, I submit to a series of acting exercises that involve approaching strangers and saying embarrassing things. The idea is to inure myself to public shame in order to lose the fear of humiliation that motivates most actors. It occurs to me that I am in a rehearsal dream for an actor's nightmare.

Clinging to a little sheet of scrap metal, myself and three friends soar along the canal towards a monastery on the hill. Before we cross into the next county, two of us are asleep. Losing my strength, I guide us to touch down at a filling station where another group of friends is filling themselves up with air. Later I am waiting to be picked up by my parents with my drug-addled music editor. He watches over my shoulder as I compose, then rearrange, a piece that ends as follows: "...you must be twitterpated."

Watching a small improvistational troupe as they introduce a feature film. They invite the audience to fill in the melody of a song called "12 Days" that could be sung by a young Alexander Herzen: "Twelve days, baby; I'm just twelve days behind..."

At a private function, I bring two wineglasses to the bar on a tray: one intact, and the other broken at the stem.

On a family vacation, I have to lie down and be very still while I am fitted with a large set of padded black headphones that will cure me.

Preparing my consort for her first nighclub shoot, I paint her eyelids a purple that will appear red on film.

It's time to take my elderly boss for a walk. We set out down a muddy path through a winter forest. Soon we are trailed by a pair of brothers who listen in on our conversation. The boss grows a foot taller and a decade younger, and now has a thick mop of curly hair; he has turned into something of an aging Tony Kushner. He refers to a theory that says that it is wrong for nuclear weapons to be legal in big countries and banned in smaller countries; not only wrong, but therefore dangerous. Trying to keep up, I suggest that the same argument could be made for contraception. We push onward. Feeling that we are excluding the brothers, when the boss brings up free trade agreements, I observe that the elder brother has traveled to Central America. No one hears.

In the war of civilizations, my stubborn friend wants to organize a meeting where people can air their grievances. He sets up ten plastic cups on a card table in an abandoned classroom and waits, expecting no one to come. An hour later the room is packed with people asking each other the questions. And without meaning to, I ask a question that gives away the identity of another friend's mother, a square-jawed woman with short hair, who must now go into hiding with her twin sister.

As my lover attempts to engage me in conversation at 4am, I groan without waking, "I Am A Human Being Who Needs to Sleep."

I am hovering along a rocky coastlike with a friend, occasionally touching down on the stones with bare feet. We are searching for the cottage where my family will converge for the holidays. When I arrive I see an empty desk and a rotary telephone. An uncle calls to verify that the next five Saturdays will be considered Sabbaths by the God of the Israelites. I reply that, despite the fact that one is Christmas eve day and the other is New Year's Eve days, I believe they will be observed.

I check into a fading hotel with my aging boss and his middle-aged secretary. We are on deadline for the biweekly Atlas of the World. As he rips through another two-page spread of Central Asia, I go down to the hotel lobby to clean up. I gather a pile of large full-color proofs with suction cups on the back—from the phone booth, the urinal, the check-in desk, and from the stairwell—as a number of families with small children arrive. In the elevator, the secretary asks my boss whether we should mention the films of Robert Frost. He replies that Frost hated film. "Is that in Frost?" she asks meekly.

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.