First they strip you of your name and dignity and your sight and give you a common language: "Edo filiam ilu filiam." You march blindly through stairwells and halls chanting to the chamber whenre you are lifted to the sky. Then they seek your trust: sliding over outstretched arms in a game of imitation. Then they teach you how to draw blood, and how to give it. And finally a grain of speech: "This is the very painting of your fear, this is the air drawn dagger..." repeated like a sickness, each time with fresh motives and inflections. Then they make a beggar of you, a meal served at the hands of the others, and a shrill stomp and song. Before the real initiation, where we are painted with ash and drawn into the fire, I blow a kiss to the believers, and trudge under my pack onto the street.

A stand of spindly trees whose topmost branches are lit by a ring of cold pink flame against the sky.

A ferocious Bengal tiger who eats only squid ink linguini but gets so wrapped up in it that he is entirely neutralized.

Brad Pitt, Brad Mehldau and my cousin Brad, all clenched and floating together like a skiff in the rising tide. It's just a movie, but that doesn't stop my brother and I from taking the elevated train out to the Polish ghetto to wade out from the docks and find them.

Daddy takes me to the Ultra Speedboat Showcase.

Steve has set up a distance learning arm of his electric funk band for wayward boys. It uses bulky studio headphones and long stretches of electrical cord he unfurls from his second floor window. I stroll through town with my headphones still attached by yards of slinking cord to his stereo. I get caught on an overhang but miraculously work free without taking off the headphones. In a music store I ask for something small and percussive, preferably with tines. There is a folk violin that can be bowed through a small slit in its cloth case, but it is priced at $150. There are a variety of mallet instruments, and, just now, a pair of Central American sisters, the younger of whom is dating my brother. They take off their shirts.

That girl loves me but it's only because she was stolen away from her man by a degenerative neural condition.

At an outdoor picnic table with Ben and Peter and their two-year-old daughter discussing the merits of Grado headphones, which deliver superior sound quality as long as you're not on the subway. Later, we're watching the security tape of all three of us driving our new Camry into the evergladed capital city to reclaim our adopted daughter, now ten years old, who we had forfeited back in a triple sting operation intended to unveil the secret workings of the surveillance state in which we live.

At a small Rolling Stones concert in a riverside courtyard, the guitarist squeals the N-word without provocation, as if it were part of the rhythm and blues tradition he was imitating. My friend Jesse, lying on his back in the nighttime grass, channels our pure confusion by belting out a loud and involuntary "What the fuck?" The music stops and a burly Brian Jones knocks over a ride cymbal as he comes to confront Jesse. We try to run interference and leave as quickly as we can, taking most of the small crowd with us. The Stones turn their amps around and start up again, facing the river.

Washing the light-skinned infant messiah in a basin in the men's room. He pisses all over me but it's infant piss. When he's twelve, of course, he runs away from me.

Dina, Derek, Jesse, and Greg on the lawn with matching technicolor bicycles. Mom is baking pies to raise bail but we sit down to thin slices of a surplus pumpkin pie with the awareness of some dim sibling drama in someone else's family.

I pass a flustered aunt and uncle returning from the annual meeting. At the play, I am drafted at the last minute into the ensemble, which is performing a silent walk-through. Each actor has an small ovular touchscreen which shows the desired location of all four actors on stage with little colored dots. But I don't know which way to orient my own screen, so I'm lost on stage. Afterwards I help my father read the Yiddish inscriptions on the back of the clayware until I notice there is a small bright transliteration in the bottom righthand corner of each one. I don't let on.

On an all expenses paid trip with my grandmother in a luxury hotel halfway around the world. We must leave the cool and easy lobby for the burning sun to complete some kind of quest. By the industrial skyline and the series of period gunners marching from the water it must be Egypt on the eve of the First World War. We play along with the headscarves and squalor. And after a coastal stroll my grandmother takes the wheel of the rental car and insists on navigating, poorly, through a maze of railway switches. My kingdom for GPS.

Up and up the stairs. With a lady who might be my friend. Til I go on half flight too many into the sky. And she's waiting at the ticket taker. Later with my father at the one at a time dilating upside down centrifugal ride. He tries to speak to the attendants in French but I'm the one who has to get strapped in.

The flood in a Honda.

Epic with no exit.

What must have been the most beautiful Louis Malle film in the world (until I realize I'm not living it but before I realize I'm dreaming it). The story of a girl stripped from her family by death but then reintroduced as a ghost that could be loved as no living girl could. Then a series of interlocked ghost stories each with a twist—the ghost kills his living sister, or the surviving mother kills the ghost of her unborn husband. And finally proof that it has all been for nothing.

When the old man returns I am cuddling at the belly of my guardian. He has never been so spry, and I feel a pang of shame, but don't lift my head from her belly. Later she convinces me to trade my bike and her bike for a car, at least for the day.

As I enter the community library, I see a light-skinned lanky black man jump down from a high shelf with a pile of books. We lock eyes for a long moment and he braces my arm as if to threaten me, then runs. The librarians comes over knowingly with the paperwork to register a legal complaint. I tell her I'm in a rush but she slowly fills out the mimeographed theft complaint in painstaking cursive as I can tell we're being watched. Finally another black man, darker and with larger eyes, who must be the accomplice and mastermind, reveals himself from behind a stack of books. He says that we've been part of an experiment, he won't say what kind. He abducts the librarian and leaves me alone in the library to discover the thief hiding behind a narrow bookshelf in the corner.

Erroll Louis assigns me to cover a travesty in the heartland. I later discover that he has also assigned the boss's son to the same story. We ride the giant roundhouse elevator up to the journalistic suite but can't get anywhere because it stops on every floor.