At a cigarette-style vending machine I buy a bottle of water for twenty five cents. When it comes out I see that the water is faintly discolored because two miniature chocolate chip cookies and a slice of apple are floating inside. The typesetter was smart when he pulled the lever for the New York Times instead.

When the Armies of the Air win the ground war, the resistance goes underground. Our primary strategy is to be affectionate at parties with Solo cups and soft music. Those who don't have what it takes tend to venture above ground and not return. My commander is at the bar and I am without a mission. I sit at the feet of a girl with black hair and get my scalp stroked for an hour. Then she gets up. Later I am the only one to notice that she is installing what look like lightbulbs in the windows and walls of our dugout. They are small spheres of nothing that grow very slowly into larger spheres. When pierced these spheres will unleash a thin yellow nothing into the air which will kill the resistance. She is a traitor. Searching for a way to communicate this to my commander by an act of affection, I follow the girl into the bar. She raises a pistol at my commander and fires before he can shoot himself. Then she swallows the last orb of nothing. The glow comes out her nose and eyes until her neck is a stump suspended and she crumples. The treachery went to the highest levels, we realize. And we are free to leave.

At a hilltop sketching class, my pad is too wide. So I decide to build an aquaduct from plastic blocks. I go down into the flats to get a permit from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Despite the best intentions of my escort, we arrive after closing hours and the policeman there invites us to come back later. On the way back up the hill, I take a shortcut through the aquaduct that I have built. When I arrive at the top the preparations are underway for a showdown. I prepare the watermelon. As I cut slivers of melon on the rind, then slice some off for tasting, I reinvent the fruit salad: watermelon, then blackberries, then pineapple, then little chunks of an enormous jumbo shrimp the size of a baseball bat. When I arrive at the end of the shrimp I find that most of the inside is rotten.

After looking both ways I pocket a waxy red seahorse and a thick blue anemone from a kiosk drawer full of spiny objects. I will use them in my own projections. Then I sneak out of the private theme park while the cement is still being laid down. I run into my best friend's mother and her two-year-old daughter, who responds to me like a twelve-year-old son. (It does not occur to me that my best friend may be trapped in the body of his little sister.) It becomes clear that she wants to make love to me. But I must leave to serve as valet to an elderly gentleman who is returning by plane to his wife. He makes it clear that he wants me to arrange an affair with my best friend's mother. But our attempt to change flights in mid-air fails due to the nature of civilian air travel. And on the ground our attempt to change vans in mid-road fails when the target van crashes one block ahead of us, splitting in two.

Three blueberry pies on a pole that fit exactly into the holes in the floor of my apartment and the two apartments below. And that blueberry filling is piping hot!

Watching a silent documentary, with lots of after-the-fact interviews, about a polyamourous multilingual compound. Then I find a sheath of blank paper near the printer, which turns out to have notes from the year I learned to write poetry on the other side. I arrive just as the previews are ending for a screening of a burlesque Glass Elevator. And afterwards the director wants me to score his documentary about a deaf-mute celibate compound. Hum me how it goes, I tell him.

At the gallery of modern art there is a stage show that repeats every fifteen minutes. The uninitiated file up a set of black stairs to a sort of mezzanine where we wait in silence. Then a set of noble and melancholy bulldogs are led past us to an exposed chamber up another set of stairs. A canned narration begins with a recording of Fyodr Dostoevsky, then Gabriel Garcia Marquez, stating one full sentence each chosen at random from their complete works. Then there are a series of lines delivered by planted actors in suits of black lace. The theme is the alienation of the bride. I am asked to adapt this spectacle for the page.

I mumble in my sleep, then say, with no emotion, "Let's just gas 'em."

My boss wants to revise a paper I wrote on Slavic nationalism fifteen years ago. I have no memory of it but he has a marked up copy in his hands.

One dream for Mexicans, one for blacks, and one for the Jews: no dreaming in Asian.

In some sort of Africa, I discover that the pygmy guitar can be taken apart in mid-song. The other expatriates leave me alone.

At the University Club, my father and I are seated in a booth in the atrium and asked to watch a film which consists in a series of Fame-like dance numbers. When it is over, I explain to one of the dancers that, while each of the scenes had movements that were interesting in themselves, I had trouble grasping the story they were trying to tell. As we check out, my father makes a point of tipping the doorman, who happens to be one of my favorite poets, Charles Simic. He undertips.

At a busy intesection I notice two young men flattened against the asphalt. Their eyes are moving but they seem to be stuck there. One is in the sidewalk and the other is splayed across the road; their arms and legs seem to have shriveled into what looks like the stubs of a fetus. I wonder whether this is their defense against the weight of the tires.

Gathering little shards of glass from the kitchen floor, I notice the sting of one or two in my finger. Then I look down and find that the tip of my right finger is on the floor. There is no pain or blood. And I stay intact because the five second rule still holds.

In my shorts and boxer briefs at the high school lunch line. Since I moved away ten years ago many people are noticing me and I don't mind becuase I'm looking good. All that I get is a solid chunk of warm fish, so I go to the vegetarian line in the small amphitheater next door. After waiting for close to an hour, I give up to take a walk with my friends. When I return lunch service is over, but I pick up some fruit with the permission of the Mexicans who are closing up. Later, we drive over to the house of my old friend Nate, who I haven't seen in ten years. He is wiry, legally blind, and somewhat shy in public, perhaps because he still lives with his parents, all of which make it more surprising to learn that he has in fact become a kind of silent god on the plane of hip-hop. Without speaking he graces me with some of his knowledge, and immediately I understand why rappers like Raekwon and Naz would become anxious if he did not appear to watch over their recording studios.

My Mom drives me down from the hills and through the lush deciduous countryside of Virginia. This is where she grew up, she explains, until she was my age. We arrive at a large farmhouse at the side of the highway. Inside there are about twenty young and ambitious people from Brazil, Palestine, Africa, Mexico, Brooklyn, China. We are seated at tables of four, and as we talk and the odor of comfort food drifts from the kitchen, we discover that we must be at some posh retreat for human rights activists. I walk over to a computer kiosk and invite all the Portuguese-speaking people to get together after dinner. After dark, I take a walk in the woods out back. Near the barn there is a thong with the stars and stripes on it. I hurl it out into the woods, but an eagle catches it in mid-air. I take this to mean that I no longer envy the prodigy.

The bathroom is locked, so I pee in a bottle.

Preparing for a trip across the ocean, I am told that Steven Wright is leading an alignment workshop at the yoga studio. I want to stop in, but am held up by packing. I am invited to take a test drive at the Vespa dealership. With the tacit approval of the salesman I saddle up and head out across the drizzling street and toward the ocean. A last minute stop at the breakfast cereal depot leads to a bout of indecision. Passing over Frosted Wheaties and a variety of flakes, I settle on quinoa. After quick stop at the office to drop off the quinoa, during which I discover a half-shelled walnut, I'm headed across the ocean on my motorbike. On the other shore, I come upon a zebra in the tall grass. And I am given the flashback: an elephant seal swims under the breakfast cereal factory and swallows a brass toy mean for a child; it escapes the underwater gears to swim out into the open sea, only to be eaten by a large dragonfish; the dragonfish swims towards land but is ultimately defeated by the zebra, which, with the brass toy intact in its third stomach, is spotted by a hunter in the tall grass. The zebra is shot. From above I can hear a slow insistent moaning as the breath goes out.

At the spy compound, I'm trying to find a place to sleep. In despair I creep into a shower stall. Woken again, I sneak off to visit my family, who happen to be spending the weekend at a beachfront hotel nearby. One of the security guards there looks suspiciously familiar: he must be a double agent. On the way back from dinner, we crane our necks at two vintage Chryslers by the side of the road. The first one is a glossy white, and contains about twenty young black males waiting while a policeman inspects the entirely open chassis where the glass used to be before it shattered. The second car, with black enamel, contains no fewer than thirty black males, mostly teenagers, with a single shard of windshield dangling perilously from where the rear window used to be. No one seems hurt.

There are two armies working in Iraq: the National Guard, and the Film Crew. I am in the National Guard. Each morning we wake up before dawn and board passenger planes to commute to Baghdad. On arrival we guard a variety of posts wearing camouflage and holding semiautomatic weapons. We are mostly ignored and feel helpless. After our shifts, when we are weary and stir-crazy, we must board the same passenger airplanes and take the red-eye flight home, only to return on the next flight at dawn. The Film Crew is much smaller and is staying at the Baghdad City Westin Ambassador hotel. They do not have to wake up early to make the commute and they do not have to fly home afterwards. Their jobs carry prestige, they are smug, and we envy them. I stray from my post to gawk at a hallway where Abe and Will, friends who have been recruited to the Film Crew, are working as production assistants. The scene is a suicide. They brush me away.