How to Go to Outer Space

It is time for the launch, and everybody is heading over to the observation deck. I've never seen the observation deck but apparently they have a dress code. A while ago an unpleasant work-interpersonal thing happened and I flounced, left the work area, changed out of work clothes into shorts and have since been napping in a corridor away from the team's busywork. Now the entire team is filing past me to go see the launch; big- and middlewigs exert vague authority to get me to go along; lesserwigs give me guilt and try to share their own excitement.

The cajoling works and I tell them I will be there; but I need to change first. My mind wanders through the immediate future: what will the actual view be like? Have native geek engineers made the observation deck look like a Star Trek bridge? Will I feel the final moments of anticipation in my chest? By what chimaeric grafting of language will I balance pride and humility when recounting the moment to family and friends?

But first: where the hell are my pants? I have to change before heading to the observation deck, and I bleeb I left my work clothes in a closet all the way on the other side of this vast operations building. (We must be on Kennedy Space Center, though neither that name nor "NASA" is never spoken.) When I get back to the lounge area—exterior windowed wall running 70 feet along cozy conglomerations of comfy chairs and dining tables—Jaeger and maybe five other folks are sitting around a table rehearsing Pitoni's Cantate Dominum. I breeze past and open the closet. Here are my clothes, but the trousers I wanted are not here.

No matter: since the launch represents the actual end of this project, I need to get my shit out of here anyway, so I grab all the clothes of the hangers and drape them across an arm. Jaeger's group takes a break so Jaeger chats me up about how they sound.

I never make it to the launch, of course. The next thing I remember I am in the house I grew up in, in the master bedroom, or what passed for a master bedroom, by virtue of it being the largest room on the second floor. I'm sitting on the bed talking to Adam. The conversation is convivial but ominous notes are creeping in, suggesting that all is not well. I am relaying a recipe, and when I mention adding water, Adam interrupts, 'Well, water's off limits now.' 

Apparently I'm behind on the news and all the water is contaminated. 'Huh, they were still drinking it in Florida,' I say, but now I wonder if it was safe even back then. And now everything is disaster or portent thereof: I watch Adam talking and laughing but I think his eyes look sunken; and a casual, minor cough means he's gravely ill. It's clearly time to wake up.

Scenes from the Glass Struggle in Gourdes Brain

Scene 1. I am lying in a bed with many people, Eskimo style. Next to me is Donald Trump. We are talking about trivialities, not politics; it is not even evident that Donald is President, or a celebrity, or a sociopath—he's just some guy. Our conversation is friendly. (I believe Brain is trying to tell me it cannot possibly be as bad as all that. Brain lies. But shame on me for waxing editorial so early.)

I roll over to go to sleep, but Donald is in teasing mode: he says, "Why are your hips doing that?" which doesn't make much sense until he starts slapping my upper thigh rhythmically, which causes my leg to go into a sort of vibrating stasis, like a tuning fork. It doesn't tickle exactly, but it feels and looks so weird it makes me laugh out loud. This gets other people looking and they start slapping each other's thighs to achieve the same effect. The entire bed ends up laughing at what their legs are doing.

Scene 2. I am drinking with two guys who simultaneously are and are not Joe and Bill. The evening of drinking is built on a combination of supplies that I had in the house and some additional beer that the boys brought over. It's getting late and Joe has gone downstairs, presumably to scrounge up more bev. I am looking at what I have left upstairs: two beers. They are arranged on a tray with that I take to be empties but really the space next to the beers is itself empty—no content, just a rectangular form. Depending on what Joe has found downstairs (we had thought there was enough wine left for maybe two glasses) we each have either 1 or 2 drinks left (Bill is not drinking for some reason). I wonder what's keeping Joe and I head downstairs to check on him. 

There is a large duffel the lowest riser of the stairs, which Joe keeps moving so as to corral a pet—I realize I have been assuming a dog, but I am not sure whether it's a dog or cat or something else entirely. I step over the duffel and take my clothes off on a whim—I believe Joe is in the easy chair over yonder watching TV and my thought is to surprise him by jumping naked into his lap. But he is not in the chair. I look around and cannot find him. The space is now my grandparents' trailer (Lot 8, Mullica Mobile Manor) from the 1970s and '80s, and I realize Joe is in the main bathroom (his chair and the TV are in what was my grandparents' dining room). 

My drink is now an outsize cocktail glass, like one of those Margarita monstrosities from chain Mexican places. I have set it down on the coffee table; and as I hear Joe finishing up in the bathroom—running water shut off and so forth—for some reason it is important that I have that cocktail glass in my hand when he sees me. I rush back over to the coffee table and barely manage to pick up the glass by its side, with two fingers, as I hear Joe outen the light and slide the pocket door open. There follows an acrobatic flip of the glass, which I catch in my other hand, spilling none of its contents: an amazing cinematic effect that results in my standing there casually with glass in hand when Joe sees me. Presumably I'm still naked but that detail is forgotten. We talk about the liquor situation and about television and movies.

Scene 3. I am in a friend's kitchen (familiar territory in context of the scene but Brain made up the layout and details) and I have been prepping some sort of pesto or tapenade. I am unsatisfied with the result and I decide it needs to be turned into a mousse or meringue or souffle or something. I add dairy or eggs (I say this because it makes sense, but really it's not at all clear what I actually add) and begin whisking. The concoction is really slow to hold together—whatever I have added seriously means to reject the previous pesto ingredients. I have to step the whisking up a notch or twelve. It turns out I can turn up my wrist like an electric mixer to the point where I am whisking maybe 50 strokes per second—and my wrist makes the same sound as an electric mixer, too. This immediately has the desired effect, and maybe 30 seconds later I have the mousse consistency I was aiming for. When I stop beating, my wrist takes a few seconds to gear down. This is clearly a superpower and I had completely forgotten I had it. I go boasting and demonstrating to my friends in the butler's pantry and living room. Who cares whether the foodstuff I just made is edible—look at what my wrist does!

Scene 4. More talk of tv and movies, this time with two people are simultaneously are and are not Roze and Keith. One of us is sharing a DVD case of some recent adventure tale; on the cover is a completely forgettable male protagonist all in black and Judi Dench in radiant pastels. The advert text includes something like "...and Judi Dench from 'Captains Courageous: Idolatry'" (ok, probably not "idolatry" but it did begin with an "I"... insurrection? Insipidness?). Roze and Keith and I lament the epidemic of theft of literary brands by making up wholesale plots and adding ": [Unrelated thingummy]" to the title. 

I mention Helen Mirren (because if you talk about Judi Dench you then have to talk about Helen Mirren and vice versa) and ask R&K whether they have seen the incredible litany of stuff Ms. Mirren has been in lately? I have a whole list of movies and BBC series roles she has done—really good work, I tell them. 

And indeed, here she is now! We actually appear to be watching a live performance all of a sudden, with Ms. Mirren performing the opening of, perhaps, a one-woman show: my thought is of Beckett's Happy Days but in retrospect it is more akin to the opening of The Skriker by Caryl Churchill. And she is singing her performance, at which I realize (a) I know the text better than I thought I did; (b) the musical setting of the text is brand new and contrasts with a much more well-known and celebrated setting; and (c) Ms. Mirren set the text herself. It's not spontaneous musical invention, though it rather sounds like it might be. Rather it is clever and rhythmic, actually kind of cool-jazzy without being overt jazz singing. Ah! We loves her!

A Day at the Rences

I could swear to have seen this spectacle with actual dogs, but maybe it's just déjà vu. This morning, the the entire parking lot, as far as the eye can see along the rolling hills, is filled with people pantomiming holding dogs up to the windows of their vehicles so as to lick them. Everyone looks remarkably silly doing this.

Perhaps this is just a practice run and all the dogs are still in their cars: or perhaps management has banned dogs, which would rather defeat the purpose of this group exercise, which celebrates "Dog Days" (or some such), during which human companions attempt to reciprocate their canines' unquestioning love and fierce loyalty. And hey—subjecting themselves to silly mimery is a start. 

In any case, enough of this parking lot. I go into the actual Renfest, where, through the miracle of editing, some unspecified time later I find the sort of musical act I always want to see—always vainly want to see—at Faire: folks playing actual Renaissance music on period instruments. Think Baltimore Consort or Julian Bream. Jenn and I settle in to listen and, given our comprising the entire audience, sing along. The singer (a curious young girl) delivers a ballad of a curious young girl (the forerunner of Ogden Nash's Isabel, no doubt) who encounters an ogre or some such on the road; as the verse proper ends she is sorely menaced until, at the burthen, she produces a feather and tickles the monster into giggles. 

I realize I've heard this song before and join in on the burthen to sing about the feather. I recall that all the verses similarly set up some kind of predicament that the burthen then makes simple work of. But I cannot remember the "solution" of the second verse, which is all about NASA. Yes, that NASA. Renaissance NASA. The singer takes a few steps away from the stage and lifts what looks like a manhole cover, though she makes easy work of it with one hand; underneath is the NASA logo and some flag icons (the U.S. flag is not among them). Somehow the verse's predicament has to do with the arrangement of these specific flags—perhaps it's a détente thing. I cannot remember how this verse comes out but I venture a guess that one of the flags isn't a flag at all but a random conglomerate of bits of colored cloth that the wind blew into the dissemblance of the flag. My guess is wrong. 

The band and Jenn and I chat between songs. As expected, this enormously talented (and musically authentic) consort are always ill attended at Faire; all the audiences accrue to five-a-penny bawds belting out, with barely governed voices, drinking songs from the late 19th century that they have festooned with "thou"s, or filks of even more recent music. We commiserate. The band has moved from under a tent out into the thoroughfare to try to attract more attention. Surely they perform much more music but I don't remember any of it; if waking history holds, this is because I am increasingly drunk.

I know the cutest little Italian place...

It is the end of the work day and my colleague and I are talking about dinner. There's a solid Italian restaurant not far from where I'm staying which I have recently discovered and which I now suggest. But then we get to talking about the cafeteria style place adjacent to my lodgings; it has clear advantages (convenience, cost—maybe it's even included as board in my rent) but she and I agree the food is underwhelming.

When there's a break in conversation I move to make actual plans: Why don't you meet me at Pikram Point and we'll go from there? 'No', she objects: 'As I said, I have no interest in' the blechy cafeteria. I assure her I meant the Italian place—to be honest I'm not sure what I meant but I certainly mean the Italian place now. She agrees and we go our several ways.

I head home—rooms I am renting from a guy; echoes of my Cape Canaveral beachfront condo—which for some reason is now *not* over yonder by the cafeteria and the Italian place but instead is quite close to the classroom where we have been working. (Doing what? No clue. Educating, presumably.) I hunt for a particular green shirt to wear to dinner. It is hiding. I have only recently assigned clothing to drawers and haven't quite memorized my own arrangement. The bedroom is laid out essentially as the back room in my grandparents' trailer (excuse me: mobile home: Nanny would insist) where I used to stay as a child, nearly every weekend of the 1970s. In the dresser on the southern wall I find shirts in the middle drawer but they are crammed in with socks on top. What was I thinking? I start picking up the socks and piling them in the crook of my right arm. The shirt I'm looking for still isn't in evidence, but I need to find a new place for the socks. I check the drawers under the bed but they are filled with my landlord's things. I notice an object that resembles a gun at first, but it's just an eyeglass case. I amuse myself thinking that the eyeglass case must now, without fail, go off in the third act. Finally I find an empty drawer to serve as sock drawer.

I suppose I am running out of time so, green shirt or no, I head toward Pikram Point. Somehow part of this travel involves a boat. The restaurants are in the neighborhood immediately east of Pikram Point, and the place itself is well signed. Still, the whole surrounding area is not anything like a grid: it very much resembles a hybrid theme park/shopping district, all laid out in spidery geometry for pedestrian traffic only. I have to follow the signs and remind myself of landmarks I think I remember from last time and hope to remember next time. A sign directs me through an arcade, on the end of which is a stage, maybe a foot off the ground, covered but open-air on two sides, on which a group of some five or six people are singing in an Eastern European language. They are all wearing black tunics with gold hems and wee heraldic motifs embroidered in matching gold. I cannot tell what language or where the musical tradition is from. It is not Georgian but I guess that it is geographically and ethnically close. I naturally stop to observe.

Between songs one of the male choristers explains to the audience they're listening to really bawdy stuff: the song may sound respectable, he says, but it's even more fun in the original language. Some guy at the front of the audience drunkenly says 'I know!' and the singer (good-naturedly) says 'How do you know? Do you speak [dream-obscured language]?' Drunk dude shuts up and does a pantomime version of hemming and hawing. But the singers want to drive the point home, so one of the women proposes to give a translation of the song they most recently finished singing. It's a first-person register of sins, compiled from every wastrel and dissolute youth featured in Carmina Burana. Stuff like: 'I ransom fellow criminals so I can drink the bounty'... While she's reciting the English translation, the smokin'est guy onstage (think Jaro Bouchac) acts out each listed transgression, including: 'I open up a bottle and I pour it down my pants'. The point of this is not quite clear; presumably the author hopes to induce someone to go diving in after the spilt liquor. And it's true: I really want to volunteer in any case.

But that appears to be the whole song, and the group moves on to their next number, and I head off to Pikram Point to find my friend, who turns out to be a cat running around like a crazy person.

All the Useful Uses of My Cell Phone

Maybe it was Laura mentioning her autistic grandchild at dinner last night but something prompted Brain to tell me stories redolent of all the autism-spectrum aspects of my childlife. Everything is cabinets and index cards and plinths. No mimosa seeds, but still.

Like all of us, I share my locker with one other person. Over the course of many months I begin to suspect that my lockermate, whom I have never met, has disappeared: that his possessions, on the top shelf, right above mine, have not moved for a long time. There are vague bits of sporting equipment and some souvenirs. No books or media. Dude is a jock.

I have access to some sort of computer record showing that the authorities believe my lockermate to be missing and presumed dead; still, I am not 100% convinced. I suspect he may be sneaking into his locker and visiting his possessions but putting everything back in the same position. Why he would do this is not clear. I resolve to test this suspicion: I will photograph his possessions with my phone and compare the exact positions of the objects over time.

I suppose that would have been a fun project but I seem to get distracted by another cell phone functionality, one that's shiny and new: there is a new app that turns any cell phone into a projector, all by itself. In the board room I download the app and try it out. Even with the lights on the image projected is sharp and vivid. "Look!" I tell random humans. They look. They are not impressed.

I am checking all the cabinets in the bank lobby to find out their contents. Apparently I am at work and tasked with setting up or replenishing a rack of forms for the public to use. One cabinet is full of empty index cards, stacks and stacks of them. I want them all. I must have all the index cards. So that I can have them. But I get a hold of myself and calmly explain to me that I have plenty of index cards at home already and Paul would not want me coming home with scores of thousands more.

Across the lobby a young man is working on a musical installation consisting of piles of plinths or tiles of some sort—rectangular cuboids in any case—about the same length and width of index cards but each one is maybe 1/2" thick (the thickness is, I think, subject to change). It is not clear what they are made of. The guy is arranging them in piles and the piles themselves describe a rectangle of the same aspect ratio, 3:5, but maybe it's 6 feet by 10 feet. Some of the stacks are dozens high; others are just a single cuboid; no spots are completely empty.

A tiny light or spark plays through the whole arrangement, going top-to-bottom of a stack of cuboids, then moving onto the next stack, anticlockwise. As the spark moves through each cuboid a musical note plays. Over the course of a few minutes the whole installation plays through a rather ambient-sounding musical piece—it sounds to me like a marimba or wind chimes, which I suppose is appropriate given the shape of the cuboids. The arrangements of the whole thing is its musical composition, so the guy is trying to get it "right".

I am fascinated and delighted by the music, and I have a fabulous idea: I will record it with my phone! Despite the musical piece being completely cyclical, I have already determined where I think the most natural Start/Finish point is. I call up the audio recording app on my phone (which I never ever use so it takes a bit of hunting to even find it) and I take my phone over to the installation, which is now also a garden in the back courtyard of a mansion of some sort. The composer has been joined by an older man whom I know to be "the caretaker".

I am prostrate next to the installation and I have extended my arm into its center with my phone; for some reason I am waiting for the piece to "come around" to the starting point that I like before I click "Record". But I realize with increasing frustration as we get closer to that point that it's not going to be a clean recording, because the caretaker is moving about and talking and making noise. And some of the noise he's making entails his dropping a dead body into the garden.

"As instructed I have killed the master," he the caretaker tells me flatly. "I stove his head in with my shovel." The corpse of the master now lies at the edge of the garden just beyond the "front" row of musical plinths. The master is John Waters.

"And now we are going to kidnap you and kill you, as well," the caretaker tells me. "Shhh!" I respond. I am personally still focused on getting a good recording, even as it becomes clear that the garden patch is really an enormous box whose lid the caretaker now closes overtop of me. After all, the guy has to be kidding, right?

No, he is not kidding. I am being kidnapped and killed. They are going to haul me out of town into the country in a big box along with the corpse of John Waters, where no one will find me and I will die of... oxygen deprivation? Yes, if they elect to bury me alive in the box. Otherwise it's thirst. Unless it rains a lot. Then it's starvation. One way or another I run out of the essentials and expire. That sinks in and I am left contemplating my own eventual, horrible death.

What is the point of this? The malice is completely random; which, I suppose with some appreciation, is always the scariest kind in stories real and fictional. The composer has played no part other than passive accomplice, but the caretaker certainly turned out to be a creepy villain: detached, homicidal, and droll. How droll? This droll:

"Please commence hollering, although it will not avail you," the caretaker says calmly, and demonstrates the sort of thing he means: "Help! I am being kidnapped and killed! Please help me! I am being kidnapped!"

I do commence hollering, very much along his helpfully suggestive lines. He continues his own prompting, but after a while it is an autonomic behavior, like whistling to himself. I vary my cadences like Susan Vance, so as not to sound like an echo:

"Please help!" "Help me!"
"I am being kidnapped and killed!" "I am being kidnapped and taken to be killed!"
"Nice George!" "George!"

While the lid of the box is secured with a cage of case iron, there are lots of holes—e.g., missing wooden slats?—through which I can still see the outside world. I can see through a fence onto a city street (the bank lobby-courtyard garden is now apparently a parking garage) and I spy random passers-by standing on the opposite corner waiting for the hand to turn into a person. "You! On the street!" I holler, snagging the attention of a young Asian woman. The caretaker realizes I have successfully gotten the attention of a potential homicide-spoiling passer-by and so hastens his efforts to haul the box away from the opening in the fence. But the young woman has definitely heard a note of true distress in my voice and follows my progress to the next gap in the fence. I holler as loudly as I can to be heard over traffic noise: "I am being kidnapped!" 

Except I am not hollering: I am stage whispering, and the only person who hears it is Paul, who puts a comforting, no-you're-not-being-kidnapped hand on my shoulder.

AND NOW THE PUNCHLINE...

The entire time I was being kidnapped it never once occurred to me what must certainly have been true: that I was still carrying my cell phone.

The Ill-Tempered Clavicle

PRELUDE
I am bequeathed what I gather is partial ownership of the Long House—not the shabby, shady one Daniel B—é lives in on the edge of civilization; rather the well-lived-in multi-tenant property in town. As always, the house is three rooms wide across the front and all the way back. As always, it is two storeys tall and inside the front door, past the entryway, is a broad, slow staircase leading up to a sort of ballroom on the second storey, which is as wide as the house; three doors against the back of the ballroom lead into three separate rooms, and so on, all the way back; there are no hallways. As always, it's not clear how far back it goes; in fact, at one point I say to someone else who lives there, "I have a tendency to imagine this house just goes on and on without ever coming to the back, but I know that's not true."

As always, I love this house. But I notice for the first time what sad shape it's in—at least aspects of it. There are water stains and cracks in its front face, between the roof and the second-storey windows. Some of the interior walls have cracks, and some floorboard are loose.

As always, there are sneaky back stairs, curvy Dr. Seuss servant stairs leading from one apartment to another. I take one such stair from the ground floor to the first storey and wend my way through someone else's apartment. Seeing as how I have been left partial ownership of this house, I wonder whether or how many residents still live here. Some rooms are completely bare but others are full of the stuff of somebody else's daily life. Eventually some of the owners of these things show up. They are all women. I am put out because I wanted a houseful of hot gay men who own no clothes.

Eventually I leave the Long House and go visiting. After some forgotten partyish encounters at a friend's country villa—I think it may be Rob & Joe's place, but with significant modifications, e.g., a sliding back door on ground level—J.D. shows up as a hobo: in rags, grimy, just off the train apparently but still absolutely J.D.—razor-sharp, perceptive, deferential but quietly opinionated. He is wearing a funny hat. I lead him down the hill into the yard where an oil-drum fire still burns from earlier festivities. None of the other houseguests are still around. J.D. finds some discarded meat and reclaims it. There is no other context to this story.

FUG YOU
A scene unfolds on the deck of a ship. Apparently pirates have taken over and they are exceedingly unpleasant characters. They are currently molesting a young woman whose hands are lashed to a mast, above her head—except when she needs to move around, in which case not. The head pirate in charge of intimidation is hollering at her, all sorts of cliché script business about how she will beg for death if she doesn't tell them [where the treasure is, or whatever the fuck]. She is not so easily broken, however, and withstands a good deal of operatic or silent-film slapping with aplomb, or possibly with sang-froid.

The pirates go away by means unknown and the deck of the ship is now a deck on top of a tall, rude wooden structure, maybe 40 feet off the ground. A dozen or a score strangers and I are prisoners up here, presumably of the pirates. Looking down over the railing is also the tiniest bit like looking over the back of the bleachers at a ball game. There are a few humans below going about whatever business. I'm not sure what any of them are actually doing there vis-à-vis pirate and prisoner—collaborators? passer-by?—but one of them is engaged in the business of hectoring the lot of us up above. She is a young and enormously attractive woman of indeterminate but gorgeous color. ("Historians agree so it's not lewd in us to say that she's phenomenally pulchritudinous.") Think Sonya Braga circa Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985).

Anyway, Sonya's swearing like a sailor who swears a lot. She's unleashing such torrents of abuse and threats against the lot of us up on our deck that she's effectively pissing everyone off, driving us to despair. She knows what buttons to push, and at length, some of us start hollering back abuse and threats. Then one of our number, another young woman, jumps off the deck and goes splat on the muddy ground. She does not move. Everyone is silent for a long moment. It's the first death in our little drama and people are truly taken aback: it's all fun and games until...

It is now clear that this is exactly what the voluptuous young woman on the ground intends: to verbally berate us into committing suicide. Sure enough, another woman soon sits on the railing and sort of nudges herself off; the plummets straight down without changing position so that she lands on her feet and her ass. A horrible sound accompanies this landing, causing another silence among the crowd.

Much as I'd love to stay and relate more gruesome suicides—I know from the movies each one will be worse than the last—it turns out I have a doctor's appointment. My doctor is almost but not quite Gena Rowlands circa Playing by Heart (1998). She is treating me for some sort of ailment of the throat. I can still speak, but she assures me that three out of four thingummies in my throat are completely paralyzed. The good news is, treatment is easy and effective. If I will just follow her to the operating room... 

Which I do. For a long, long time. She's striding briskly along corridors, turning here and there, taking flights of stairs (always down) and leading me through a veritable maze. Furthermore she seems to be speeding up, especially going down stairs—she's remarkably spry for a woman seemingly in her 60s! I wonder if she is purposely trying to lose me, or just showing off. Fortunately I am unnaturally spry too, and I follow close behind her, nearly flying down the stairs, taking 6, 8 steps at a time, finally bounding whole flights, doing airborne turns with only my left hand on the corner posts.

Which is clearly the point of this medical episode, since we never actually get to the "operating room" for her to fix my throat. Instead I am in a sort of group therapy session where people are opening up about their feelings. Everyone is in the spirit of the thing, including the attractive young woman from two scenes back who so effective lobbed taunts and vituperation at us captives. Now, however, she is soft-spoken and pleasant, though she did apparently carry from our previous pirate encounter a vivid scrape on the side of her nose. We are talking in such vague terms we could be talking about anything: "There must be one," says a young man, who may be the group leader. "That cannot be avoided. There must be one"; to which not-quite-Sonya Braga replies, "Yes, there must be one, but it cannot be that one."

It occurs to me: we will never be cured at this rate.

CODETTA 
I visit Vidéo Américain in Newark, Delaware. The store is in the mini-mall, across from Days of Knights. The check-out counter is in a new place and looks like the front desk in the most run-down Somerset Maugham-scripted hotel in the tropics. I recognize the clerk on duty but he doesn't seem to know me. I remind him that I used to work here, which doesn't help. All the videos on the shelf are somehow linked with individual bones. They are meant to be human bones but are reproductions thereof. There is no obvious bone type = genre code going on; in fact it's not at all clear the associations aren't just random. Which might as well be a dream's thesis statement.

Three Little Oddities

Impromtu
There's this guy, right? He's part Yeshua of Nazareth, part Matthew of McConaughey, and he is a movie star and he has been flitting around all day stressed about his public image. We're in what appears to be an industrial basement, mazelike but tidy, and through a series of rooms a series of issues has plagued McJesuhey. The most recent problem is his being linked in the subversive online press to pedophilia. (Pizzagate and Comet Ping Pong are not mentioned by name, but it is obvious what's on Brain's mind.) So here's the stripper messiah, wearing shiny pants (oldsters: think BeeGees) and a sort of vest-thing designed to obscure from view not one single square decimeter of his tan, ripped, lightly furry torso (oldsters: think Andy Gibb).

With this latest scandal brewing, McX is fretful and pacing, positively outgribing with anxiety. It falls to me to calm him down and map out his rehabilitation strategy. So I put a hand on his shoulder and speak quietly and reassuringly—'Look, this is nonsense and everybody knows it and we have to deal with it head-on and blah blah blah'—like a diva whisperer, and I talk him down to the point where we can go see The Guy, some media nabob or representative thereof who is suddenly standing behind a service counter (actually, he has just re-purposed an institutional 3' x 8' folding table). And I say, 'We have a problem here: the adoring public may start lumping my client in with John Wayne Gacy.' 

Both guys look at me blankly. They've never heard of Gacy. I have my work cut out for me.

Romanza 

I'm with a bunch of friends in a restaurant in California. We're drinking cocktails and engaged in lively conversation, but what's really on my mind is a bit of geographical detail re the city we are in: it's a sort of sunken table land in the middle of the city, with a lake on one side and a highly storied neighborhood on the other. It has an instantly, universally recognizable name, like Hollywood, which waking Brain can't recall; for our purposes, let's call it Wallyhood. Wallyhood has the unique feature of extending across the table land and other parts of the city which sit in a vast earth-structural overhang, somehow naturally cantilevered, such that much of Wallyhood is basically in a cave.

I've never actually been to this area of the city but I've seen—we've all seen—so very many movies set there. What's on my mind right now, since we're just a few miles away, is how the reality of the place compares with the mythos. So at one point I avail myself of the presumed expertise of the restaurant's manager. He is mid-30s, Latinate, rotund yet spry, neatly bearded and mustachioed, dapper in a dark red suit over black shirt, and absolutely adorable. Yes, sir? How may I be of service? he asks. 

My words run away and hide. 

I want to ask him what is the real story of Wallyhood. It's not really all glamorous and sexy and Sunset-Strippy, right? But I can't remember the name Wallyhood, or the name "Sunset Strip", or any names or attributes of anything I set out to ask. It suddenly occurs to me that I am very drunk: so drunk that things I thought mere seconds ago are being irretrievably misplaced. And the manager, without his professional smile diminishing one iota, is becoming more and more impatient. I finally give up the battle to make words and deflate into a blancmange before him; he leaves with a masterfully snide quip about how it is absolutely his duty and his pleasure to assist me.

Yep, I'm drunk. But Heather is totaled. She is lying facedown on the tiny cocktail table. She is still awake, though, and responsive in conversation; she just can't get up. It's because we've been drinking stiff cocktails for hours and we ordered food ages ago (some huge shrimp preparation for a dozen people to share—perhaps because in this world there is only shrimp) and after all this time the food hasn't arrived. I become mortified that it is my fault the food hasn't arrived, since I distracted the manager so pointlessly from his actual labors.

Novelette
It's the basement of Morris Library and I still don't know where anything is, since they completely overhauled it (years after I left my employment there). I try to think back, and I believe I can safely say that where I am sitting right now, in the midst of an Technolollapalooza, used to be the Government documentation stacks. (Actually, while I was there Brain came up with "Reference Section" but I am correcting Brain because Brain was wrong.) Anyway, I tell Marya, by phone—and then by writing the same message in red crayon on the wall with my foot—that where I am right now used to be Government docs, back when they actually had information printed on paper stored on shelves. Progress must progress! Indeed, the red crayon is really a stylus and the wall is a screen that accepts my writing and lights it up all Christmasy.

I set out to see what else has become of my old stomping grounds; and I've stomped almost out of range when I hear some appealing, old-timey music coming from where the Medicine and Technology stacks used to be. I turn around and head back toward the music. It is a group of guys performing a patter-song, but somehow it is one they are creating on the spot by reading the words of a technical journal to an existing tune, something awfully Arthur Sullivany, rather like Tom Lehrer's listing the chemical elements to the tune of "I am the very model of a modern Major General". Only this song, or at least the rendition, is more distinctly ragtimey or dixielandish. It's an intriguing performance, and for the infraction of being intrigued I am summarily called out to do the next such filk. 

Well, actually, Cramer and I are both called out to come up with something. We get to choose the tune and the source material to be sung to that tune; but I can't for the life of me come up with any good ideas. Brain tries out things like Moby-Dick sung to the tune of "I Am a Rock" by Simon and Garfunkle; whereas Cramer, clearly an art masochist, goes for the yellow pages and Buddhist chant.

We are not a hit.