I have plenty of time and some friends in town, so I decide not to worry about the variety show at which I am to appear with Jessica. When I see it's 7:30pm I get on the subway with the intention of drawing up a short setlist and running through a song or two in my head. But an immigrant father and son on the train need directions, and I spend most of the ride explaining the map to them, missing my transfer. I arrive at the Harlem amphitheater at 11:30pm but am relieved to find that the variety show is running late. Jessica, however, is not pleased at my lateness, and refuses my attempts to introduce an element of improvisation into our 10-minute performance. She is also resentful that I have forgotten the ukulele, mandolin, and fiddle at home. Ultimately it doesn't matter because there are so many acts before us that we don't get a spot. At the after party, I have been asked to get people interested in skateboarding around an enormous and steep track sometimes used for Vertical Roller Derby. With fear in my heart, I plunge off the rim.

Giddens has joined a cult, and she thinks I'm going to join too. The cult is built around a belief in time travel. Her master is an unremarkable man in his forties who, on occasion, causes her to hallucinate feverishly. She is adamant that I will soon have the experience of letting fifty years flow in reverse before me, as at a movie theater. I leave the office and ask a colleague to cover for me.

In the dry foothills, a poolside crowded with kids from my boarding school. We drive to the museum where we are given a semiprivate tour. From the text on the walls of the gilded room holding fossils and animal specimens, we can tell that the collection has been put together by Lutherans. When we confront the docent, asking her to admit to her belief in God's design and the reckoning to come, she summons the curator. I wander off to the next room, which is full of television kiosks and iced water coolers, until some friends just back from soccer practice ask me what I'm doing in the sports lounge. So I walk out to the courtyard and into a morals class in session. We pair off and I'm explaning to the janitor that the book we have been assigned, a weak Lutheran imitation of Gulliver's Travels, is "not just silly, it's stupid." The class hushes; clearly everyone has heard. The headmaster uses the pause to ask whether anyone knows what the word "carapace" means. I resist, but most kids shoot up their hands. "No," the headmaster explains with a condescending attempt at patience, "it means SAD." Later, we are given more semiprivate tours of the museum.

From a roadside motel I see a helicopter, with two large wheels set up like a motorcycle, trying to land. It would be easier without the wheels, I understand, but this is part of the charm of the beast. Later, along a cliff, my horse slips down to a little dusty shelf. And from that shelf, to another lower shelf. This is where I have to leave the horse, which, as it turns out, is more of a mule.

An aerial view of my bus route from New York City to Amherst: a coastal wetland thick with puddles, ditches, and marshes, and a thin wagon trail along it.

A long hike up a hillside built from scrap wood. I follow the village girl knowing that she wants me and that my parents wouldn't mind. But it is only when she arrives at home, a warm enclosed tank of water on the ridge, that I am willing to kiss her. Later I ask my brother, his friend, and Natchez over for band practice. Sarah Darling is practicing Bach cello suites on the viola upstairs. We take turns teaching the band a song. When my brother tries an early Who hit, I attempt to form a horn section by attaching the bari sax mouthpiece to the body of a bassoon while Natchez plays alto. With morale fading, I fall back on an acoustic rendition of "Help Me Make It Through the Night."

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.