Hiking back out with my parents and brother, who explains his theory of natural selection in meticulous detail, until I get it. Wearing only my undershirt in the trailhead parking lot, I spot a cop car.

Driving a city bus home along mountain roads. I'm the only passenger, sitting about halfway back on the left, but I'm also the driver. It's an exhausting task, this backseat driving. After taking the wrong fork I am forced to stop at a steep rest area. That's where I see a long and knobby beaver, exhausted, splayed out in front of the coach. He fidgets, not quite dead from exhaustion. This is my pack animal, I think, as the other buses gather below.

Step away from a marathon art party to join my brother at a well-lighted ATM. It's actually more of a slot machine, with a deck of old cards stashed where the deposit envelopes should be. As he locks in a solid win, I wander past a storefront that has been rented to promote a forthcoming novel by a Salvadoran writer. I pay it the highest tribute I can muster at that moment: urine.

The only passenger in a silent jet that must circle around the block hundreds of times to burn off fuel before it lands. On each circuit we pass through the breezeway of a white mansion where a conference is underway. I have been invited to speak.

Sitting on a top bunk listening to the desert stories of a group of travelers who seem to know one another. I stay silent for lack of context. During a lull, I finally squeeze out a question about the terms of engagement in this group. And the red-haired leader, a married woman just a few years older than me, climbs on top of me so that her hair brushes my lips. Our eyes locked, she tells the group to take a short break.

An exhaustive self-inventory, muttered into the eternal dictaphone.

Man leaps down from the balcony of the theater, climbs over rows and rows of occupied seats, to bring an accusation to the stage. But the ceremony is already breaking up. Repeat.

After a harrowing walk on the seaside hills, I don't want to venture out again, even in the armored terrain vehicle. But someone has to go foraging for provisions. The next morning I want to play keys with the full summer camp band. But to truly feel rhythm, I'm told by Bjorn, I must learn to breastfeed a child—or at least a piglet. Convinced I'm working at a disadvantage, I resolve to suck an egg—or at least a kiwi.

Perched on the roof of our barn, working through a twelve-course tasting menu, slightly worried about the fall, while the chef's children deliberately perch on the gutter and slip themselves down.

Visiting my old elementary school, I tell a ten-year-old girl that her method of inquiry is much like mine. She seems bored. We are marched into the hall and lined up single file to watch a group of children eat their lunches. Evidently our own needs have been neglected. On the way to the bathroom, which is nothing more than a ceramic urinal, I complain about the headmistress to my mother.

Perched on a billboard, the editor and the intern perform a one-act riddle about homemade explosives at the hospice. It ends with not one bang but two: BANG, BOOM.

Ramon and Jessica ask me to play a short solo on a many-colored glockenspiel. My heart lifts.

Stepping off the company plane, I must park a Volkswagen Golf.

There are two ways to use a crowbar. You can use the bent side to knock a person out, and you can use the forked side to puncture the skin and even the guts. To my horror, which I suppress, the man in the gray suit selects a homeless man and, behind his double-parked luxury car, does both.

On the airplane, we turn back just after liftoff. I blame the two young black men seated behind me, inexplicably and shamelessly.

Flashing back through the last thirty years of my life in five-year increments, until I vanish at the moment of birth. Then flashing forward through the rest of my life in five-year increments, until, at the great age of 85, I give up.

A red rubber ball moving through an invisible Rube Goldberg machine.

As a rookie fact-checker for the Brown alumni magazine, it takes me forty-five minutes to discover that the name of the university president has been misspelled. But I do get some respect for it.

We sneak into the rotunda to catch a few seconds of the film, which is a Victorian farce. On the way out we see dozens of keystone cops and button-down nurses preparing for their entrance. The theater manager whispers, "Some sort of a ruse." Later, after crossing a street that turns out to be a highway, I come upon a stranded tanker trailer and police car. Each are hoisted and dragged by its own swarm of half-naked partygoers who have worked their way underneath, like ants under a banana. It seems to be a movement. Not wanting to get involved, especially after seeing a real tank around the corner, I climb in a large wicker basket headed for the roof. A few moments of high-definition lucidity as I float aimlessly up, sinking from time to time, powered only by commitment to the dream, in what must be a tenement alleyway at dawn.

After I swipe my farecard in the subway, but before I can get through the turnstile, two black teens push past me coming the other direction. I am intimidated so I sneak in through the gate and ask the Arab attendant to let me pass. Since he ignores me I tell him a folktale in French, which pleases him. It's a few minutes before I realize that he doesn't want anything from me, that I am free to go.