markov-ized autobiography

An excerpt from a markov-ized version of my autobiography. To markov-ize a text of your own, click here.

I glance at a neon OPEN sign, at its reflection on a framed poster’s plexiglass. That reflection turns over once more, rights itself, a word turned inside out then back again, in the surface of the tip of the white, block letters advertising rates for haircuts and styles and perms had been scratched off. And the wages of sin are death and resurrection of the same man’s erection. I’d never thought of being around him produced a sensation warmth near the bottom of my upper arm. As her thumb pushed down the drawing, pulled some serum from the speakers, the wood-paneling on the couch, she’d ask me if he’d ever heard of any distinguishing feature – the shade-patterns of a hallway. Everett pulled out a long, slow breath. The ground, solid, presses upward against the side of the blades around its orbit until I became seriously, dangerously depressed for the next few years, the fear I’d experienced the night I invaded that lair, where he rented a small efficiency apartment that he were thinking about his own son.

A thick man with whom my father had quarreled. My mother had described him as an older brother.

“I guess so.”

“Do you want it happen, it will. I can’t explain why. The next morning, as I sit up, I let him sleep. That afternoon, a psychiatrist diagnoses me with a Beatles haircut and glasses so thick as to make pirate-shaped figurines from dyed corn husks. I’d had trouble folding the hat and so she’d twisted my unruly and brittle husk into a complicated knot for me, letting me add the two black dots for eyes with me, walked briskly toward me and placed the tips of his house stood the tallest vaulted ceiling I’d ever seen, at the yellow light bulbs in the outdoors, exposed to both heat and pollen, I wanted the cool earth against my legs to soak up through the town and along neighborhood streets that cut into my room, set it open-faced on the way God made it. And whatever God does is fair, even if it doesn’t seem fair to us.”

That icy feeling. I got nauseated and asked to go back to bed.

“I think so.”

“Ok, come on out whenever you’re ready. Was I ready? I still love you. And I’ve got some gay friends here who can help me deal with it.”

A month or so later I asked over the Tulsa, Oklahoma suburbs. Cum-u-lo-nim-bus for the bulging towers that could have swallowed the three of us -- my frequent headaches had distanced me from most of them overlooked the missed assignments over which they’d threatened to flunk me. Even my French teacher Mrs. Benarous, who would have screamed.

“You sure looked scared up there," Everett said. “It’s easy. All we have to understand that’s very important. It’s called ‘sins of the futon.'"

A friend takes me. I followed the edge of one of his hidden lair, had his combination wet bar, library, and TV room. I put my bare hands on the nightstand, and lay down on my forehead, the other and there, on the spur of the same vicinity of my body, but closer to the other man (Kevin, I presume) had figured this out yet. For a moment before the sun as one sees a desert sun illustrated in old cartoons – wavy against an invisible ceiling. Perhaps knowing about the same as the rest. In English class we’d even watched a movie called “Heaven Can Wait.” I had a silver lining, it’s that my voice had probably started to come out. Nothing did. I sat in the biology classroom, as if the idea gave him stage fright.

heidegger and wittgenstein

Read Heidegger when Wittgenstein gets too boring.
Read Wittgenstein when Heidegger gets too scary.

wittgenstein and finitude

For me, Wittgenstein's acheivement in these (and similar) passages is to show that the (solopstic) feeling that "I" must be immortal in order to be "here" at all may very well be just as illusory as it is inescapable. Years ago, these passages helped me overcome my fear of death (and therefore, also, my even greater fear of life, of existing in the first place). Perhaps it's time for me to take these passages to heart once again . . . From the Tractatus:

5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.

6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.

6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

heidegger on anxiety

I picked up a Heidegger book I've carried with me since my undergrad days and found some passages on axiety underlined. I don't recall underlining them, but I must have found that they spoke to the metaphysical anxieties that tend to underlie my panic attacks -- because they feel absolutely relevant right now. From 'What is Metaphysics?' . . .

Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of . . ., but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of . . . is always anxiety for . . ., but not for this or that. The interminateness of that in the face of which and for which we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather the essential impossibility of determining it. In a familiar phrase this indeterminateness comes to the fore.

[ . . .]

What is "it" that makes one feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this "no hold on things" comes over us and remains.

Anxiety reveals the nothing.

We "hover" in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves - we humans who are in being - in the midgst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though "you" or "I" feel ill at ease; rather it is this way for some "one". In the altogether unsettline experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there.

Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds rounds, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the "is" falls silent.

[ . . . ]

The nothing reveals itself in anxiety - but not as a being. Just as little is it given as an object. Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. All the same, the nothing reveals itself in and through anxiety [ . . .] in axneity the nothing is encoutered at one with beings as a whole.

[ . . . ]

The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation.

[ . . .] as the repelling gesture toward the reteating whole of beings, [nihilation] discolses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other - with respect to the nothing.

In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings - and not nothing. [ . . .] The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that is brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such.

[ . . .]

Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing.

Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call "transcendence." If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself.

Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.

[ . . .]

Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only in the ground of wonder - the revelation of the nothing - does the "why?" loom before us.

[ . . .]

The question of the nothing puts us, the questions, in question.

autobiography fragment #6

All the camp counselors asked us to call them “Mister” or “Miss” followed by their first names. We called the counselor who was in charge of our cabin of eight or so boys “Mr. John.”

It was night and I felt vaguely sick. “Mr. John,” I whispered, shaking him lightly at the shoulder. I could feel the warmth of his body through the single sheet. It was too dark to see anything save for the moonlight on the edges of the buildings and trees just outside the window. Mr. John had asked us to wake him up if we ever needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

He turned his head, mumbled something. The corner of one of his eyes caught the moon.

“I feel sick.”

“Ok. Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

“I think so.”

“Hold on.”

I stepped back as he stood and walked past me. I followed him into the hallway, feeling my way along the particleboard wall which ran like smooth gravel beneath my fingers. He flipped the light on. Four or five bare bulbs, painted a thick urine-yellow, extended in a line down the center of the unfinished, plywood ceiling. The eerie, unreal light they cast made the humid night air feel all the more thick, motionless, and difficult to breathe. I ran to the bathroom. Mr. John closed the door behind me. “I’ll wait out here.”

I knelt in front of the toilet, opened my mouth, and waited for something to come out. Nothing did. I sat back, wondering if I still felt nauseated. It was hard to tell. Maybe not. But I didn’t want to leave the bathroom only to have to wake Mr. John up again or, worse, throw up all over the cabin floor. I imagined Mr. John handing me some paper towels to clean it up while everyone watched or -- not so gross but just as embarrassing -- cleaning it up himself.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“Ok, come on out whenever you’re ready.”

Was I ready? I still wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to go back to bed.

“I think I’m still feeling sick.”

“Okay.” Mr. John sounded sleepy.

I don’t remember how far into the week this occurred, but it was late enough that we’d already been preached to a couple of times. Ever since the preaching had started, I kept thinking of when my dad had brought home a helium balloon that looked like a giant, aluminum pillow. I must have four or five. For days on end it had hovered over the dining room table, never losing its buoyancy. I’d never seen a balloon stay aloft for so long.

At night I’d take the balloon outside and let go of the string just long enough for it to start to float upward toward the stars. I dared myself to let it go for longer and longer. When the inevitable happened -- when I finally wasn’t fast enough to catch the string – an iciness settled into me, as if I’d just been dropped into a cold bath. I watched the balloon disappear gradually, steadily, into the void overhead

“I want to go home,” I said, finally.

“Okay. I know it gets scary sometimes,” Mr. John said, his voice muffled by the bathroom door. “It’s hard being without your folks all this time. But we think it’s better for you if you stick it out.”

“I want to talk to my parents.”

“We can call them, but just between you and me, I think you’re just a little scared and that you’ll get over it and be glad you stayed. Part of this is about learning how to be on your own. You want to be brave, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“I think your folks will be real proud of you when they know that you stuck it out. And I think your friends will be proud of you too. You don’t want to let them down, do you?”

“No.”

“Are you going to be brave?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, good, I’m real proud of you. You’re going to be all right. I know it. I’ll just wait right here until you’re ready to come out.”

a universe of self-updating weblogs

All of these blogs are, apparently, algorithmically generated. Click on "updates".

faux faulkner - the administration and the fury

Check out this year's Faux Faulkner contest winner: Bush as the Sound and the Fury's Benjy!

Interesting side note: United Airlines's Hemispheres magazine, the sponsor of the contest, has decided not to publish this in the print version of their magazine.

meaning

A thought that occured just now . . .

An originary, primary, primordial wholeness must be broken in order to form the "I".

To grasp the meaning of something, in a "metaphysical" sense . . . the feeling of having grasped the meaning . . .

When we feel that we've grasped the meaning, this primordial wholeness comes back to us; we remember it.

The search for "the meaning of it all" is a paradoxical search . . . to accomplish it would be to undo the "I", which is precisely what does the searching.

(Am I just paraphrasing Lacan? Not sure . . .)

reputation

Just stumbled, via Josh Corey's blog, across Timothy Burke's response to this odious article from a professor who, in my opinion, seems to get a sadistic kick out of deliberately seeking out material on the blogs of job candidates in order to disqualify those candidates.

I thought Timothy's response was, on the whole great, but the following comment bothered me a bit:

I think a blog is in the public sphere, and I think as a contribution to the public sphere, it should be selective. Not because you’re thinking about your potential employers, but because you’re thinking about what does and does not belong in the public sphere. I think reputation, the creation of an externalized self who “speaks”, ought to be an important part of blogging.

A personal diary, Timothy goes on to say, is precisely what doesn't belong in the public sphere.

I'm not sure how best to get at what bothers me about this. On the one hand, I can see his point from this angle: if one wants to consciously craft a public persona that's concerned solely with certain topics, then one probably shouldn't blog about personal things under the name of that public persona.

What gets to me, I suppose, is that he places such importance on managing a reputation in the first place. Or, rather, if reputation is given, then the notion that it must carefully cultivated to include just the right components, that anything else might cloud it. I suppose I live in a fantasy world where one's reputation is determined by the quality of one's work. Or, in the personal realm, by something like the quality of relationships that one cultivates.

The dirty laundry that gets aired on blogs -- and God knows I've aired enough to keep a laundromat running 24/7 for weeks on end -- shouldn't have anything to do with it. So what if person x can't stand person y and get kicks by moonlighting as a stripper? The real question, professionally speaking, should be -- does this person produce good work? Personally, it should be -- is this a person capable of cultivating long-lasting and meaningful friendships/relationships? Why on earth would anything else matter to anyone at all?

The sad truth, of course, is that it does matter. A lot. Probably even moreso, in some cases, than quality of work, etc. So I really can't blame Timothy for the position he takes. It's realistic. I just wish he'd seemed at least a little more ticked off about it than he does.

But I'm also grateful for this discussion. It makes me realize that if I ever hope to have, say, at least a part-time job teaching something like writing at some college somewhere, then I'd clearly better start giving more careful consideration to what I say in this space. How to do that without losing authenticity? I don't know . . .

The irony, it seems to me, is that, within any given socio-economic strata, our dirty laundry looks pretty much the same. Of course I'm just guessing on that one. Maybe I really am the only would-be poet in the world who suffers from panic attacks, did a few stupid things in college that he regrets, still has some childhood traumas to work through, and thinks the Bush administration doesn't have America's best interests at heart.

Oops. I sure hope no one heard me say that . . .

metaphysical panic

I've been told that we think ourselves into panic. It's certainly true in my case.

These recent panic attacks have all been metaphysical. Or rather, the thoughts have been thoughts about metaphysics, but the emotional content has flared right up out of that old wound in my soul where Christian fundamentalism and being gay collided.

But the thoughts are kind of interesting. And I'm getting better about not panicking when I think them. If "think" is the right word -- because they'd certainly qualify as the sorts of "thoughts" Wittgenstein would roll his eyes at.

So, basically, I start thinking about whether or not subjective experience "takes up room", so to speak, in reality. Does subjective experience have some kind of positive ontological content? If so, then who I am, as a subject, is, in some sense, an inextricable part of reality. And so is everyone else.

Which sounds cool at first. But it disturbs me when I really think about it. I don't want to be a part of reality. I like observing reality, commenting on it, etc., but *being* an inextricable part of it? That's scary. It means that I, my self, "me" -- whatever "me" is -- is part of something incomprensibly huge and weird and that doesn't ultimately make any sense whatsoever. It's a part of something infinite, yet groundless. And I'm not going off on some idealist trip here, necessarily -- even if "I" is nothing more than my body or brain, it's still a part this incomprehensible "thing" called reality. Which is made of matter (and energy). Which exists. So what could it possibly mean "to exist"? We can only think of existence in relation to non-existence -- which is even more impossible to think about.

The gist of it is that I'm left with this *feeling* that's the closest thing to a religious feeling I've experienced in years. That there "is" an "I" at all -- that I experience, that I am here, or that anyone is here for that matter -- better yet, that there "is" a "here" to begin with . . . suddenly, this most basic fact strikes me as the most extraordinary, dumbfounding, awe-inspiring, Kantian-sublime fact that one could ever come across. So much so that I begin to feel completely overwhelmed by it. It's just too damn sublime. More sublime than the stars, more sublime than the moral law within: the simple fact of existence itself . . .

autobiographical fragment #5

The last night of summer camp, the preacher slammed his fists into the pulpit to dramatize the force with which the Romans had driven nails through Jesus’ hands and feet. First one hand. Bam! The nail was halfway through, splitting bone. Bam! The nail broke through to the other side as the bones in the center of the hand shattered completely. Bam! The nail had had punctured wood now. Bam! The nail was driven through tattered flesh and splintered bone deep into the wood. Bam! The head of the nail now pinned the bloody pulp firmly, irrevocably to the cross.

He repeated his routine for the other hand, then the feet. He spent the longest time on the feet, because feet were a lot thicker and denser than hands, and a single nail had to go through both of them.

“And Jesus, God’s only begotten son – his only son -- did this for you.” His voice rose in pitch as he repeated “his only son”, as if this notion pained him more than any other, as if he were thinking about his own son.

A thick man with large, watery eyes, the preacher wore a red and white tablecloth of a shirt and a pair of jeans with an enormous silver belt buckle that, from time to time, flashed back the glint of stage lights from underneath his belly. He patted his forehead with a white handkerchief that had gone gray with sweat.

“And when I say you, I don’t just mean mankind, I don’t just mean all of you, together. I mean you.” He paced back and forth on the stage, stopping occasionally in his tracks to point at one of us directly. “You, sitting down there in front of me. You, sitting in these pews. Each one of you. He died for you, personally, for your sins.”

He staggered back to the pulpit, leaned on it for support, patted his forehead, and took a deep breath.

“Those were your sins!” he bellowed. “That should have been you up there on that cross!”

He swung his right arm outward, pointing violently behind him, as if we should have seen a cross materializing out of the blackness at the back of the stage.

autobiographical fragment #4

I probably shouldn't share this one. In the autobiography class, we've been asked to make a clear distinction between the author and the persona of the narrator. Perhaps passages like this are why.

I had my first orgasm when I was about thirteen. It happened during the last vacation we’d ever take together as a family. My dad had started losing money as quickly as he’d made it. His drinking had gotten worse, and so had my mom’s anorexia, for which she would soon be hospitalized. I think we all knew it would be the last. In the hotel nightclub we visited for cocktails before dinner, my dad tipped the piano player to play Margarittaville over and over and sang out loud to the words “looking for my lost shaker of salt.”

My parents had gone for an evening walk on the beach. I’d decided to stay in the hotel suite to make headway through the Isaac Asimov novel I hoped to finish before the vacation’s end. I tried to settle into an armchair that looked plush but seemed to be constructed of unforgiving planks of wood. Perhaps I needed a nap. I took the book into my room, set it open-faced on the nightstand, and lay down on my back. The ceiling fan spun slowly, steadily, producing no discernable draft. I followed the edge of one of the blades around its orbit until I became slightly nauseated. When I closed my eyes, I saw the torso of a slender man in a black speedo. Earlier that afternoon, by the pool, he’d paused in front of me, perhaps chatting with a friend. My eyes had darted immediately to the bulge beneath the taut, glistening fabric. I’d forced myself to look away because it was bad enough that I might be looking at someone with lust in my heart. My evangelical friend Everett, who’d saved me for a second time a year after New Life Ranch, had told me that the book of Paul said that fantasizing was just as bad as having sex, because the sin was already in the heart. But I couldn’t imagine what Everett would say if he knew that guys made me feel that way.

Picturing the man in his speedo made touching myself feel better than it ever had before. When the orgasm happened, I shouted “Oh, God,” and immediately cursed myself for bringing God into it. Then I noticed the warm fluid all over my chest. Surely something had gone terribly wrong.

I ran to the bathroom to clean myself up, yanking the toilet paper off the spindle so fast the roll continued to unwind on its own. I shook as I wiped myself clean. I’m sorry, God, I said. I didn’t mean to do that. I watched tears hit the bathroom floor. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please don’t let anything be wrong with me. Please let me be all right. I won’t do it again. Please forgive me.

unsober speculations

As the title indicates . . . no one admitted without a grain of salt . . .

Suppose that existence itself is self-aware, that existence is in some sense present to itself, that it is "here" and that it is aware of its being "here" and that it's "here-ness" amounts to that very awareness.

Consider an icon -- an icon is a kind of symbol which, unlike a sign, embodies some aspect of the metaphysical presence which it represents or stands in the place of. Poeple pray to religious icons (real icons, the icons themselves, not reproductions of them) directly -- they don't pray to symbols.

The "I" as an icon of existential self-presence.

I'm sure this idea will serve as the content of a panic attack tomorrow. If I remember it, that is . . .

starf*cker

I've been an autograph whore lately.

Last week I got Tura Satana's autograph at Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass showing of Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!.

Tonight, at the opening of an exhibition of Ana Barrado's surreal-yet-all-too-real photographs at the San Francisco hair salon/gallery Madusalon, I got to tell V. Vale of RESearch Publications just how much his books have warped my consciousness (for the better) over the past ten or so years.

I got both V. Vale and Ana Barrado to autograph a copy of the RESearch edition of J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. Woo-hoo!

Now if can just keep all the autographed material safe in this disaster of an apartment . . .

note to self: kantian sublime and the big other

Just a note to myself for the time being.

If our age is, as Zizek suggests, one in which the Lacanian Big Other no longer exists, then I think I could characterize one recurring (and sometimes self-destructive) theme in my life as that of attempting to find a substitute for the Big Other in the Kantian sublime.

autobiographical fragment #4

“I want all of you to close your eyes,” the arts and crafts camp counselor said. She’d just taught us how to make pirate-shaped figurines from dyed corn husks. I’d had trouble folding the hat and so she’d twisted the unruly and brittle husk into a complicated knot for me, letting me add the two black dots for eyes with a felt-tip marker.

“I still see some eyes open,” she said. “We aren’t going to finish until everyone keeps their eyes closed. No cheating.” We sat in the shade, on a stone wall. I wanted the cool earth against my legs to soak up through the rest of me, especially to my ears, the blood of which I imagined beginning to boil.

“It’s your second-to-last day and there’s something very important that I need to know. If anyone doesn’t feel saved, I want you to raise your hand. If you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior, or you feel like you haven’t, or you don’t know, you need to let me know.” Silence for a moment. Although I’d heard a lot about Jesus during the week, I didn’t know exactly what she meant. It was getting hotter by the second and the air was unmercifully still. I hoped we’d finish before the sun made its way over the tree we were hiding under.

“I don’t see any hands. I know there’s got to be at least one of you who isn’t sure. It’s ok not to be sure. Don’t be embarrassed. Nobody’s going to see you but me. I can tell you, because I’m looking at you, that every one of you has their eyes closed.”

Another pause, this one longer. I pictured sunlight leaking into the shade.

“So all of you are absolutely sure that you’re saved. And you’re know what it means to be saved. Each one of you has accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior. I want you to look deep inside your hearts and ask yourself whether or not you know for sure that you’re saved. If you have any doubt at all, I want you to raise your hand. And no one’s going to know you raised your hand but me.”

I raised my hand.

“Ok, if you still have your hand up, go ahead and put it down. Everyone can open their eyes now. See you at lunch.” It was close to noon and we had to squint through the glare to find our friends.

“Jay,” she said, “I want to talk to you for a second. Can you stay behind?”

autobiographical fragment #3

“Footrub,” I told my dad, who sat dead center on a vast crimson couch that sprawled like a sleeping animal across the floor of his pine-green TV room. I put my feet on his leg before he had a chance to say no. He rubbed them for a few minutes before his hands grew motionless and heavy. When he started to snore, I shook my feet to wake him. Once in awhile I’d ask him a question about something on the news that gushed continually out of the big screen TV he’d had built into the wall. On nights when he wasn’t too drunk, I’d get a few words out of him.

I must have been in third or fourth grade. A couple of years prior, my dad had started making a lot of money and we’d moved into a contemporary fortress of a house, had it built for us -- all intersecting rectangles, asymmetrical, and overlapping, set like bare rock at the edge of a cliff into a man-made hill. Inside, everything was stone and white, impersonal as a temple or museum. Security cameras along the perimeter relayed fuzzy black and white pictures of the parking area, the front and side doors, the vulnerable windows, to a set of monitors atop an antique rosewood armoire in my parents’ bedroom. After receiving a kidnapping threat, my dad hired an armed guard to patrol the grounds at night.

The three of us -- my dad, my mom, and I -- each haunted a separate room or series of rooms. Mom’s primary room was the kitchen, with its gleaming overhead rack of pots and pans and its stainless steel refrigerator doors that could have doubled for the entrance to a bank’s vault. In the summer she spent all day by the pool, alternately roasting herself in the Oklahoma sun and swimming laps to keep off the weight she imagined she saw whenever she looked in the mirror. My own territories were just off the kitchen: a dirt-colored cow’s skin rug in front of the television and VCR in the living room, and a nest of printouts, magazines, computer game manuals, wires, and computer equipment that I called my computer room. My dad, like a sleepy, sweet, and harmless minotaur who’d long since ceased to venture outside of his hidden lair, had his combination wet bar, library, and TV room. Each night I invaded that lair, where he sat surrounded by shelves of antique books whose titles he’d never read, and insisted on my footrub.

As the house was being built, I had two recurring nightmares. In the first, I awoke to the sound of someone hammering nails into wood. It came from the kitchen. Before waking up for real, I made it a little bit further down the hall than I had on the previous night, the walls running beneath my fingers like the earth beneath the moon. The second-to-last night, I stood in front of the closed kitchen door. On the last night, when I opened it, I recognized a man with whom my father had quarreled. My mother had described him as a bad character. He’d built a coffin. “It’s for you,” he said.

It was evening in the second dream and I sat in the backyard, in a red metal wagon. Silver lines reflected streetlights on the wagon’s surface. Through the dining room window, I watched my parents eat dinner. “I’m out here!” I yelled. But they were as silent as storefront mannequins. The wagon’s black plastic handle came loose in my hands – or seemed to; actually, it just moved, like a key in a lock. The wagon rolled backward, then, magic carpet-like, drifted upward toward the fence. Each night the wagon got closer to the top. In the last dream I closed my eyes as it went over and when I finally opened them, the city look just like it would from an airplane: a grid of stars etched on an expanse of sheer nothingness, receding.