Roy and Edna.

As I nod off on the train, I hear the intertwining strains of violin and trumpet which occasionally resolve into a full quartet. When I wake I realize my editor is sitting behind me. And the whole scene, including my first auditory dream, was itself just a dream.

The new office is furnished with a guest bed with flannel sheets.

My mother has been hired to assassinate Sigmund Freud at a convention of psychoanalysts. In mercy I empty the 11 caliber revolver of its rounds and, as I slide them into my desk drawer, see that they have turned to shiny quarters.

The yoga teacher explains that she is happy to take our questions in the hall after class, and that she is not forbidden to spend time with students as friends. But if she watches a film with us, for example, she will charge us for two hours of private instruction. Later my brother takes the wheel and guides our model car into the sea. We arrive at the quayside inn soaked and late. As we prepare for bed, I see two cats, one gray and one black, that keep jumping down to a concrete courtyard at least three floors below. They land on their feet.

Wake up with shin splints on a flint plinth and think, "I need a mint julep."

Milky and pure with a metal tinge.

Once we settle on Chinese delivery, I'm taking orders. Tobin wants beans, which I assume means mung.

Drive off a cliff again. Drive off a cliff again. Drive off a cliff again.

A thin man hands me a wad of bills. Wanting to reciprocate, I give him all the money in my back pocket. He takes back his own wad and walks away.

At midnight there's a short stack of mail in the garage. But only junk: Dad has already been through it.

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.