My brother moves to town to record an epic radio documentary. He retrofits an old black suitcase with a mixer and holes for microphone cables. His plan is to take the subway to a secluded part of Bronx. The raw sound material will be real but he will use it to tell a story of ninjas. We lose the suitcase on the platform and ride the trains for a few hours. We run into Asbury Jones, who kneels and teaches my brother to sing. A young woman watches us from across the train. This is the consort come too soon. Brother decides to return home without the suitcase but we find it where we left it on the platform.

We are released from the field trip into an underground luncheon complex. My friend waits on line with everyone else at the macrobiotic stall, but when he attempts to make small talk with the attendant he is booed out of the sector. As she threatens a self-immolation if the rudeness continues, I recognize her as the boss's daughter. I forget how to get back up to the open-air concourse where there is a South Indian thali stand, which I am pretty sure is gluten-free. So I go back to the welcoming party in the basement. There I find a young reporter who, in interviewing me, reveals that she is actually the daughter of the enemy emir on a reconnaissance mission. I take her into my confidence and show her the monkey bars, but she falls off, and when someone tries to leap down to help, she suffers a blow to the head which knocks her half-conscious.

At work, all the surfaces are clean. Someone refers to "Thomas Fried-barn" and I have to be told it is a joke.

A spider under the skin of my forearm. It pricks where he burrowed in and it stings where he crawls. I try to crush him and hit a pressure point by mistake. He plays dead but he won't go out the way he came.

The Youth Zionist Dating League convenes at an apartment on the Upper North Side. I stare through the orientation and training. When it lets out I give three women long hugs in front of their boyfriends. Later at the pantomime, we are three of the last to leave. Before the show is over an old woman hurls mango pulp at whoever is left. We shake our heads but our faith is strong.

Treading dark water off the coast, we try to stay directly above an Apple logo on the sea floor.

We see a small plane circle and then go down into the lake. I think I may be involved. I am the first to arrive at the pilot hatch but am hesitant to go in. When a searcher arrives I stand watch and keep his oxygen tube unkinked. But there is nothing but polyester stuff sacks and cinches underwater. Maybe the pilot escaped before the plane went down, or maybe it never had one. Later, we are moving into a new fraternity house on top of the hill. It is dark and humid when I get a chance to see my room. Back in the house where I was born, there is an old time song circle outside. I start to sing and play mandolin but have to go back inside to clean up a can of orange juice concentrate that gooped through three drawers when I went on vacation. The kitchen understands.

On the side of a mountain a nuclear reactor is built from tin and caulk. Predictably it misfires, killing all crew and taking out half of the mountainside. The mother nations are on high alert; they have no choice but to assume the blast was an act of war. This is the smell of progress in a benighted land, I say to the ambassador, who is an orphan.

Two older cousins gone missing.

At a shoreline equilibrium, a friend is pushed back by the current to the mouth of the river. We tell her to cross next time in ignorance.

The house on Valley Lane has a steel plate in the ceiling that has been eaten away by rust.

My boss escapes to a castle with his lady companion. They scour the basement for a bottle of vodka. It all lasts two hours.

The same damn predicament.

At her 70th birthday party, my mentor, a nutritionist who went back to Africa to work with the poor, tells me that she is retiring to write a book on how African children adapt when they leave the country and are confronted with a world of private property. Her nephew, who has been trying to start a string of business ventures in Senegal—starting with a chicken coop, growing now to car import-export, in order to leverage some real estate speculation—makes the obvious point that children in Africa do learn that some objects are off-limits. But her adopted son, who was once an orphan in Africa and is now an investment banker and venture capitalist, disagrees. He says that his own two-year-old son has no idea what private property is, because he doesn't have to share. The baby takes it all in.

My driver takes me to the address I give her. But my family is eating on 34th Street.

I am killed in the outback for free. I wake up snowing.

Pressure on my eyes.

At the lunchroom the fish sandwich is forty dollars a pound as I suspect. I whisper "usurious" to the cashier and storm off into the day hungry. There is no other meal. In an antique dormitory I find my friends but I have to leave them without a key into another dorm room with two sheetlike fountains: one going up and the other going down. They switch directions. At the bar I meet my my date but we are expected to join a large group in a small private dining room. I have to switch with someone to sit next to her at the corner. Look, I'm told, at the wall. There is a hundred-year-old photo of Jim Carrey on the streets of Little Italy with two long Malian prostheses: one to hold the tambourine, and the other to smack it.

The shiver in the trees when the bird leaves.

Grandma lives in an old folks home and her final days are wracked by the conviction that her recipe for chicken soup with matzah balls violates another grandma's copyright. I venture out into the wetlands where my new brown shoes are spattered with mud. On my way I am joined by my old friend Sam and his little brother George who once cracked my jaw with a baseball bat. I try to tell them about another little brother who was arrested but they don't care to understand. I am heading to the house of my other grandparents to see the slide show once again. When we arrive it is already over so I sleep in the barn. There I discover a doomsday device, which is like a Roomba vacuum cleaner with helicopter blades. It hovers and cuts. Hovers and cuts. And as I climb aboard I think, the world doesn't deserve this.