I am giving a tour to a fairly rich couple who have bought a house, roughly in Powelton Village, on which I probably did some renovations. He is older than me, his name is Sam, friendly, unassuming but somewhat ungainly. We are close to being friends. She is young, fairly sexy, dark to black hair, wearing a short, bright yellow caftan-type dress. I show them around the neighborhood, formerly a tumbledown mess that has been or is still being renovated.

I show them a lovely lot where a house used to stand. We go through their house, which is not yet in good condition, with peeling paint and/or paper. Sam and I look out the window at a house close by and I admire the frosted, figured glass of its bay window. I think somehow that my couple’s house is not one of the more interesting ones in the neighborhood.

We go for a walk or tour somehow down by the Delaware River. In the old streets, construction is underway everywhere, cutting through and under the streets and buttresses of bridges and old roadways or railways on  multiple levels. The sidewalks and streets are incredibly crowded with workers, shoppers, and walkers. Sam occasionally wanders off and finally I can’t find him, but the woman seems unconcerned.

She also wanders off and I have difficulty tracking her down, but find her high in the air, lying on a mattress or thick cloth enclosed in a clamshell-like bucket of a piece of what I take to be construction machinery. It has something to do with a pleasure or massage treatment with oil. I don’t understand it at all. (This may be a misplaced element in the dream.)

I’m late to going home to my wife but don’t know how to get there by public transportation, and I realize that I am dirty from wandering through the construction areas. I’m also not wearing a shirt and am probably in shorts, embarrassed to think of getting on an elevated line or a bus. My wife seems a distant consideration. I’m very attracted to the woman from the couple and think we may end up having an affair. At one point she leans back against me while we wait to find Sam but there’s nothing intense. My desire for her is muted, perhaps not desire for a woman as such.

We get temporarily lost trying to find their house but it doesn’t make much difference. We pass and go around piles of bricks and dirt under archways, through busy storerooms, past friendly construction workers. I mention to her that these changes they have made, the mishmash of old and new, is exciting and vital. She agrees. Earlier, I had taken her through a renovated courtyard complex that had once been a slum but was now lined with flower-edged brick walkways. She had largely ignored it. She is much more interested in this old-new mix, the chaotic.

She continually radiates a privileged lack of concern that is not in any way haughty. Instead, she seems a liberated soul with intense involvement and curiosity. At one point I tell her how the whole district used to be deserted in the evenings when I was a child, that it was all businesses that closed at 5 pm.

At some point her dress changed from the bright yellow one to an even shorter reddish-tan, earth-color one. From the back I see that it only reaches half way down her ass and wonder why/how she can walk around like that, though no one pays much attention. She doesn’t have especially good legs.

It’s getting late, we have not seen Sam for some time, and I ask her if she is going to stay over at their house (they seem to be on a visit, not yet moving in). I consider asking her if they would like to stay over at our place, but I realize that I shouldn’t bring home to my wife a woman I want to have an affair with. There is no answer or resolution to this and I wake up.

The dream was pleasant, friendly, but I wake deeply depressed, on the verge of tears. The woman and the chaos of the city under construction may represent something I’ve lost; maybe something (my writing?) that I lost once, found and am afraid of losing again. The woman with dark hair and only a shirt/short dress, me with light hair and only trousers or shorts, may be two halves of one person. Yellow is also a color I usually see with my eyes closed or in dreams, under psychedelics or intense emotion, though I felt nothing intense while in the dream. The intensity lay in the world outside “me,” in the city, the woman. I think I never heard her name.

The first time I read anything about TikTok was someone saying they were mystified by the sudden re-popularity on that platform of Patience and Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong to Me,” a song from 1956.

Now, anybody who has been around me for more than 15 seconds knows that I waste no time on the ’50s, the decade when I was growing up – a fearful, repressive time of war-escapist deadness. I looked on much of its vaunted music as crap even as I listened to it while washing the family dishes, my house duty.

But there were certain songs that reverberate – or should reverberate – through the decades. I mean, did none of these puzzled musers about Patience and Prudence have a sense of romance in their teen years?

Checking out its history, I was puzzled to find that “Tonight You Belong to Me” was first recorded in 1926 and became a big hit the following year in a version by Gene Austin. I haven’t heard Austin’s version and so have no idea how he presented it, but as done by Patience and Prudence, it may be the most perfect teen-romance song ever –  “I know, by the dawn, that you will be gone, but tonight you belong to me” – yes, presented as a dream, but holy shit!

They were real sisters, P&P (using their real names), daughters of a pianist and songwriter who worked with Sinatra. They were aged 11 and 14 when they recorded, promoted by their father, which now might be considered a subtle form of child abuse. But what a delightful piece of work, championing the sensually emancipated teens that we all wanted to be – but that none of us (that I knew) were.

*   *   *   *

“Average sperm counts worldwide have declined by half over the past 50 years, and more steeply still in the past 20.”

Whooppee! So there’s some slim chance for human survival through sustained population collapse? But, assuming this account is statistically true, can anyone tell me why the sub-Saharan Africa population is predicted to explode over the next few decades, with Nigeria alone said to reach 750 million? Maybe they count their sperm differently there?

*   *   *   *

Yet another celebrity I never heard of has died. Let us all mourn this otherwise inconsequential individual for having lasted as long as they did.

*   *   *   *

Two Russianswere walking down the road. One had feelthy pictures, the other did not. The one who had feelthy pictures asked the one who did not: “Would you like to see my feelthy pictures?” The other replied sternly, “No!” The first, taken aback, exclaimed, “But you must want to see my feelthy pictures.” The other repeated, “No I am a pure-minded soul and would not let such things pass my sight.” The first reiterated: “When I say must, I mean must” and sat on the pure-minded one’s head, forcing him to look at the feelthy pictures. The pure-minded one, immediately enflamed with feelthy thoughts, assaulted the holder of the pictures, then rampaged through the town and countryside, ravishing farmyard animals, hired hands, and innocent barflies. He laid low 4 hunters, 13 farmers’ daughters, 32 cows, 47 sheep, and a shock of wheat that he mistook for Steve McQueen. At last he found himself at the junction where the borders of Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic met. One foot was held in Czech, while the other was impaled upon a Pole. The owner of the feelthy pictures, having recovered from his defilement, wrenched the feelthy pictures from the other’s hand, bellowing: “Vile criminal, if there is one thing I cannot stand, it is a thief.” No longer enthralled by the feelthy pictures, the other Russian reverted to his pure-mined state and retired to a nearby border town, lending free legal advice to villagers who had been bilked by a fraudulent Fuller Brush salesman. The first Russian left his pea-sorting job to establish Podgorny’s Porn Parlor, where he makes great quantities of feelthy lucre.

*   *   *   *

I’m delighted to see Kim Jung Un firing more missiles into the ocean. I guess it’s supposed to scare the bejesus out of us, but I look at it as a win for our side – he’s going to run out of missiles soon at this rate. (Actually, I think the real reason is that the damned things just don’t work, so he’s firing them into the middle of nowhere to get rid of the trash.)

Christian Contemporary has to be the worst religious music ever – not just in the West, but anywhere in the world, a bloated, slushy pile of reeking sentiment, the only harmonic glop I’ve heard that makes elevator music sound upscale. And it’s not just because I don’t consider myself a Christian (please, no!); I love both the Gregorian Chant I grew up with in my Catholic choir, and the Black Gospel music of Clara Ward and the Staples Singers.

Considering Gospel music, I’ve wondered how Black slaves managed to absorb the rancid religion of their oppressors – often stuffed down their throats – and revolve it into its opposite, a vision of beauty. After all, one of those same white Christians wrote the book-length “The Negro, a Beast,” in the year 1900, fiddling through the bible to prove that Negroes were not human beings – an approach that hasn’t changed that much today. 

(As an aside, it’s a damned shame that the white replacement conspiracy theory is a crock of shit. If there’s any hope for the country, it should take place as soon as possible.)

*   *   *   *

A plane that crashed on a Floria highway a couple weeks back, killing 2, was a Bombardier Challenger 600. Why would anyone in their right mind chance a ride in something called a Bombardier Challenger 600?

*   *   *   *

I’m puzzled by the number of international leaders of apparent good intention who have lost their minds once in power.

Here’s a current brief list of reformer heads of government who remain in power in their respective countries as election-manipulating dictators just like those they replaced:

Yoweri Museveni of Uganda

Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua

Paul Kagame of Rwanda

(Laurent Kabila deposed decades-long dictatorship in the Congo with his own authoritarian regime, but was removed through assassination.)

And it isn’t just heads of state who have performed a similar switcheroo.

Dmitri Medvedev served briefly as president of Russia before Putin snatched back the position he felt was rightly his. Medvedev dealt well with the West during his short term, but these days his unrestrained rants against anyone outside Russia have taken on a lunatic quality. 

And of course in the U.S. there’s Senator Lindsay Graham, who matured from a centric, sensible politician to the raving asshole of today.

So how does this happen? And with little hope, I’d love to have someone send me examples of those who have moved in the opposite direction, from dipshit to decency.

*   *   *   *

Can’t figure how anyone came up with the inspiration to drop carrots into a cake. It’s sort of like saying, “Let’s whip us up some possum ice cream.”

*   *   *   *

I was looking up how to pronounce “taoiseach,” the supplied English transliteration of the Irish Gaelic word for “prime mister.” As usual, this train-wreck of vowels does not lead to any vaguely English noises. Instead, the proper Irish pronunciation is “tee-shuh.” In much the same way, Cú Chulainn, the windpipe-choking Anglification of Ireland’s great warrior of legend, is pronounced, roughly, “Cahoulin.” It all reinforces my belief that such supposed transliterations from Irish were another practical joke the Irish pulled on the dopey English. Check out the words ending in “dhl.” Try pronouncing that on an empty stomach.

*   *   *   *

Most of the angst around the social media is misplaced. For now, they serve primarily as the voices for stupidity, but they’re still in their infancy, ironing the juvenile kinks out (and I stoutly refuse to pretend that “media” is a singular noun; I’ve retained at least that much from my three years of high-school Latin).

All media, social or otherwise, swing with the times and the social weather, as has always been the case. The ranting newspapers of the yellow journalism era were overwhelming portrayers of disinformation – deliberately so – yet we now bless our finest reporting with the Pulitzer Prize, named for Joseph Pulitzer, along with William Randolph Hearst, a chief purveyor of the “yellow” era.

And the halcyon nostalgia for “honest reporting” looks back to WWII and post-WWII figures like Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas, who were no more definitive than any other members of a national information-processing movement. So let’s forget the nonsense of the “good old days.” Mostly, they were just “old.” 

*   *   *   *

Terminology: “Trump is a dingleberry on America’s butt.”

After he made his first million, Henry Fletter quit his indifferent executive position and established a quiet existence. He drifted from here to there on various means of transportation, but without hurry or ostentation. He was not photographed by the press and considered too boring by those who set the tone of social trends. He often had his nose in a book and his feet up. He refused to be ruffled by externals or attempt to achieve emotional highs through drugs or hectic activity. He threw occasional small-scale gatherings for friends who actually liked Henry, but he did not attend public bashes.

Then one day he noticed that most of the million was gone. How? He had done little that seemed to him rash or extravagant. But the figures from his accounts and investments were plain: He had frittered – he imagined a great green pancake on a greased griddle – had frittered it away, just as though he had bounced about laughing and screaming and buying useless antiques.

With this change in situation Henry had a sudden urge to take tai chi classes – to “find his center.” His million had built up through solid, unspectacular investment of his mid-level salary at a company that designed computer software. He had been an expert programmer, a natural talent, but by the age of 26 found himself shuffling staff arrangements on a chalkboard and overseeing tortuous meetings. Now, out on his own, his organizational ability had betrayed him when it came to financial management.

Perhaps a million is simply not enough these days, he mused. “A millionaire!” Though the high gloss had worn off that catchword of the Horatio Alger era, what thin sheen it retained had inflated his mind’s expectant vision. But the million had fled as though it were any paltry sum. 

In a narrow store stacked with counter-culture tidbits, he bought a pair of slight, black Chinese shoes and a loose-fitting top for his first tai chi class. The instructor, a young American, led everyone in that uncomfortable sprung-knees stance that Henry recalled from Japanese samurai movies. He was told to let tension and desire flee, and in their place find latency, the upcoursing of potential energy.

His thighs ached.

As the session progressed, his arms and swaying body learned to execute motions of such slow exaggeration that he felt like a dog straining against an invisible leash. But at the same time, an internal vision arose. While he hung suspended, a marionette whose pivot lay somewhere below his hams, he saw, set within a yellow-green plane of light, the profile of a medieval Japanese warrior – it, like Henry, hunched in the position of potential. It wore the strange padded-cloth armor of that age.

The lesson dew to a close with the seven initiates manipulating a ball of energy between their hands through excruciatingly restrained twisting of the forearms.

Henry’s arms also ached.

At each succeeding lesson, the envisioned samurai held that same position, the stance of becoming. Yet as Henry neared completion of the 22 primary moves of tai chi, the restraint holding both warrior and viewer in strained contention dissolved. They could relax now, together – into eternity if need be.

By then, Henry’s million had fully absconded. He owed amounts on his credit cards of which he would not, previously, have taken note. He put his large house on the market but could find no buyer, and so moved into a small apartment whose rent (along with food and clothing) was covered by leasing the large house to a communal group that paid good money but did a fair amount of damage to the walls and woodwork. Yet when he visited these former precincts, he was strangely untouched by their disarray. The warrior’s active passivity had taught him well.

In the classroom – a second-floor loft cleared of partitions, leaving small holes in the floor that snagged the smooth slide of the narrow black shoes – he became interested in a slim, fey woman who was returning to the lessons after some absence. He learned from her that she had mastered the full regimen, including a second tier that encompassed 105 further movements, but had let her concentration slide.

The  instructor adopted her as a model, or demonstration dummy. Her hands Mia Farrowed the air, trailing ether from the fingertips, but Henry found them somehow graceless and imprecise Why did the instructor hold her up for emulation when she failed the exactitude he championed? Possibly she alone of the students knew all the forms? Equally possibly, they were romantically or sexually involved. Her restrained adoration could be seen as a statement of personal attraction, or as appreciation of a higher-level exponent of the art.

Henry was initially repulsed by her weak, yielding mouth, yet his sexual fantasies became increasingly graphic, even to pushing the visionary warrior from his perch. He considered inviting her for an after-class indulgence at the Chinese restaurant on the street floor, below the classroom. But what could they talk about? Surely, she was deep into mystical things and must find the material world a necessary evil. Certainly she would not eat meat; no one with such an unengaging mouth ate meat or discussed society pragmatically.

As he slipped back into his street shoes, he noticed that their meagre piles of belongings had snuggled side by side in a lonely corner of the room. When she stooped to pick up her coat, he said, for no clear reason, “I’ve lost a million dollars.”

“Oh. Goodness. Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could I help you look for it?”

Henry’s laugh rose like the minor precursor to a volcanic eruption, then overflowed into orange-red lava. Together they would scour the world in search of his squandered cash. They would visit Singapore, Nairobi, Cape Town, Inner Magnolia, Haberdashistan, then return to discover a pot of gold behind a boulder in Kansas. Throwing back his head, he closed his eyes and was amazed to see the warrior likewise wracked with mirth.

He shook himself loose from both vision and hilarity to explain that the million had not been casually mislaid, but scattered by time to the financial winds. She listened in Bambi seriousness, her mouth releasing an occasional lopsided smile not shared by her eyes. Henry’s erotic fantasy, wallowing beneath the surface, disgusted him. This  stripped-down model of unadorned Woman, wraithlike and insubstantial, was a Munch scream tamed to an urban mew.

What had gotten into his loins?

In the Chinese restaurant, she ordered the predicted vegetable dish, a Szechuan tongue-sizzler that he sampled tentatively but could not imagine fully ingesting. Famished, as always, from 45 minutes of aped asceticism, he ordered shrimp egg fu yung and a plate of wor shu duck, dispatching both in non-stop slurps. The woman, Carole, masticated her fried hot peppers without comment or apparent discomfort. He did not attempt to pay her bill – the proper, liberated approach to equality.

They were headed in opposite directions that night, both by means of public transportation (Henry had put his various wheeled extravagances on the block long ago), so he could dredge up no reason to prolong their evening. He watched her walk down the street, straight-shanked and minimalist, and felt the visual perspective torque, sucking her into the distance where she might, truly, merge into the vanishing point.

For the first time in his life, he had an erection in a public place.

“Would you want it back?” she asked of his evaporated million following their next session.

“Of course.”

This evening he offered no Chinese enticement. Their steps led in the same direction from the simple expedient of Henry lying about his directional intentions. Do tai chi masters lie? he inquired of his half-squatting warrior. It may have shaken its head, but that was difficult to ascertain in profile.

“Doesn’t that feel, oh, materialistic?” she asked.

“To want it back? It seems realistic. I’m going to tai chi and practicing twice a day at home, reading Eastern philosophy and trying to understand unfamiliar diets, and that’s only possible for me to do because I have a pittance-plus left from renting my house and selling everything I can get my hands on. When that’s gone, the pittance, I’ll find some damned stupid job and stop reading and practicing and, eventually, coming to class.”

“You don’t have to.” Her mouth drooped as though the last restraint had fled the resiliency of her lips. He wanted to bite holes in her face, do her limp visage immense sexual damage.

“I don’t have to, but I will. That’s how I’m put together. I left being an executive because, whatever I am at any moment, I’m just that, no time left over to be anything else. Making money was an extension of being an executive, because an executive always thinks and talks work and money. Now I think only about mystical moves and spiritual expansion, no mental opening left for money. So I’ll be dead broke in about a month unless I can sell the damned house, in which case I’ll be dead broke in six months. The rent I got for the house the other day I’ve already spent at the bookstore on yoga treatises. And they all read exactly the same – you can speed-read down the middle of any page, absorb the mystical buzz words in passing, and you’ll know everything the books have to say. When I’ve read them all and spent it all, then my mind will flip back to money. The cycle will repeat.” (The warrior nodded agreement, or was perhaps shooing a fly.)

Carole’s fawn eyes widened. “You couldn’t have spent the whole rent money at a bookstore.”

“And Indian music. Thirteen CDs by people like Ravi Shankar, the one the Beatles liked. So far, they hurt my ears.” He did not look at her, would not again embarrass himself below the belt. No other woman, ever, had so directly excited him. Yet he could not envision her naked. And penetrating her through her loose black pantaloons… he dare not imagine it.

In bed with her, at last naked beside him, he tried to remember her clothed, swerving to the tai chi movements, her thin knees more nimble than his. No erection answered. So he told her he was mortally tired, on the rim of a magnificent exhaustion. Perhaps she accepted this as true, more likely not. Either way, she did not call him on it. As he fell beside her into pseudo-sleep, his mind focused on how to retrieve that lost million, not a thought of her body remaining, clothed or naked. 

His lost million.

Awake to a gloomy day, he played a morning raga by Ali Akbar Khan while she gazed as though he were something vaguely familiar if not quite comprehensible. He knew he had made a mistake. How major a mistake?

Was there no way out of it that would not include self-betrayal? “Should I kill myself?” he asked.

“My goodness! Why would you consider that?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you talking about it?”

“It’s exploratory.”

“I should leave.”

“Yes.”

She grabbed haphazardly for her clothes. “You are a disgrace, a peculiar disgrace.”

“That’s a good way to see it. I wouldn’t have thought of it in those, in that term. You won’t, then, trek the world with me to recover my lost million?”

“I would not now go to the street-corner with you to buy a newspaper.”

“Ah.” He stood, strangely dejected. He had made breakfast for them both, toast mostly, with things to put on the toast. “And tai chi?”

“One of us must leave the class. I would rather it wasn’t me.”

“I’d rather that too. You belong there. I’m somewhere else – not the place where the million dollars went. I’m just making noise, I have no centered being. Get some toast before you leave. I’ll be quiet, silent if you want, inconsequential otherwise.”

She dressed quickly, mis-setting buttons and having to redo them, glancing at him and quickly away. He wondered if she would cry or spit or… no, she would not scream imprecations or cry or spit. Her center – her pretend center? – would hold.

“Stay,” he said.

“You asked me to leave.”

“I acquiesced to your desire to leave.”

“Why are you talking like a thesaurus?”

He laughed, confused. “Maybe because it would take too long to talk like an encyclopedia.”

She waved her Chinese slipper, the last item yet to adorn her leaving-taking body. “You’re either a nobody or everybody who ever lived.”

“I’m the third son, the folktale failed son of a late-proliferating couple.”

“I could like you. I wish I did.” She inserted her foot in the slipper. “I almost do.”

There was no comeback to that. Had she made an offer of hope only to assure him it would be abandoned?

As she reached the door, he placed a hand on her shoulder, not in restraint or affection.

“We couldn’t have found it, searching for it together, what I lost. It’s not the kind of thing you put down somewhere and pick up again. It’s lost in dribs and drabs. You have to recreate it, to multiply it for the next time, so that when it’s lost again it’s just part of something larger and doesn’t really matter. It can stay gone that second time yet be replaced again. And again. And again. That’s an assumption. Some people’s assumption. And it works for them. An investor’s assumption. I think it could work for me. If I continue to care. I care about this first loss, but not sure I could care the second time or a third. First loss, first love? I didn’t love that million, I just lost it. I’m pissed at my carelessness. Wouldn’t you be, to lose a million of anything? That much money is intangible anyway, so why should it become more important if it’s more money or more often or a longer time that it’s lost? Whatever we might have done together, the looking wouldn’t be pointed just to that, to retrieving the lost million, maybe not to that at all. Hard to say, wouldn’t you say?. Eh?”

Carole spun the doorknob a quarter turn. “How big a load of manure is that?”

“Half a ton. About. No more than that.”

She released the knob. “So if we weren’t to look for it directly, the money itself, we could perhaps replace the million? Together?”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“Likely?”

“That would be stretching it unreasonably.”

In time, the million came back, not invading as a big gruff bear, but softly as a thousand skittering mice that nested in a questioning cosiness. Henry has his house again (still), and Carole shares it with him. Would they want a second million to keep the first company? Unlikely, because they were not looking for the million while they found it, they were following the ages-dead warrior, unskilled in the battles of today, but a giant at finding. Pennies he scoured from under couch cushions, dimes from decommissioned parking meters, quarters from the ghosts of pay phones. Dollars that floated in the breeze, unremarked by common mammon hunters, the warrior sliced into his armor with his samurai sword, leaving no stray change.

The house has antiques now, not those of great fashion, but grubby leftovers from deserted alleys, gifts from sympathetic tai chi classmates, misaligned thrift-shop oddities that rest on slanting shelves. Are they happy, Carole and Henry, Henry and Carole? If happiness is things, things such as piles of bills and coins, they are likely neither joyous or sad. If it is a state of being, a space where questions lie without seeking easy answers, they may be happy. They very well could be.

Knock on their door and ask them.

[I have no recollection of having written this, but I don’t think some strange being inserted it into my “finished stories” folder]

The road stopped but the car did not. It went on. I often feel that the car is the one who drives. I say, “Go, car,” and I get somewhere. This time I got lost.

I should provide some background. For a while, I believed I was an investment banker. For a period of perhaps 17 weeks, I shifted great amounts of money around, but then one day I saw that I was still working in a direct-mail office, pasting labels on letters. It’s strange the lives your mind can occupy.

I also believed, now and then, that I was married and the father of two children, a boy age 13 and a girl age seven. This is the composition of the ideal American family, though not the mean age distribution  – I thought myself 12 years older than my wife. But then I found myself living, as usual, in a small apartment with my cat, who is illegal according to the lease. My cat says “Meow” and I say “Shush,” because the cat should be seen, not heard, or I will be put out of my apartment. I tell the cat that if it cannot be quiet it will be homeless and have to live on refuse.

This may sound like a sad life to live, but it is (was) not, by any means. It was full, since my imagination took me to so many places and circumstances. I once climbed to the top of the Eiffel tower stairs unaided and shouted my glee so loudly that it was heard two miles away, in the center of Paris. That is, if the center of Paris is two miles away from the Eiffel Tower.

At the moment, I have no idea exactly where I am, and my car won’t say. My car is a Honda, a Japanese car, and it becomes smug if it thinks it has the upper hand. Possibly it does not know where we are either, but it would hardly admit as much to me. I wouldn’t if I were in its position.

Last April, when the tulips had just begun to bloom (but before the cherry trees had come out), we went (the car and I) to a small state park noted for its display of bulbs. They had been planted originally by a group of Dutch settlers, then maintained by their descendants for over 200 years. We drew off to the side and admired the view, but when I got out of the car to walk in amongst the plantings, the car tried to follow me. I was severely reprimanded by a park ranger, who said I had no regard for growing things and should never come back to the park. After that, I gave the car its head more often, thinking that if it planned the route, it would be less apt to cause me problems once we had reached our destination. Instead, I think it simply became spoiled.

We are somewhere in a pine forest, or perhaps hemlock, large feathery coniferous trees (I’ve never been good at tree identification). I very much enjoy the feel of the bed of needles under my feet, the sinking-yet-supporting of semi-resistance. I have gone far enough into the trees that my car cannot follow, but if I go much farther I will lose sight of it (the car) and perhaps never find my way out.

You may wonder, If this man does not know what job he is performing or whether he is or is not the head of a family, isn’t it possible that he may, in fact, be not in a forest, but rather in the small company lunch room?

As it happens, I have been considering this myself. Normally, I simply look up and notice that where I have been is not actually where I am. The change comes without warning but is not, as you might expect, disorienting. I find it almost refreshing, even though, almost invariably, where I have been was preferable to where I find myself actually to be.

This is the one reason that the question of where I am at this moment may be of importance. I feel somewhat frightened, mildly afraid that I will not be able to return to my small apartment and my cat. Yet if this woodland is not where I truly am, and if it is preferable to where I will find myself when I return to where I truly am, my condition when I return may turn out to be far worse than in the past. I can’t understand why that should be the case, why any sort of catastrophe should suddenly strike my contained life. Nonetheless, the possibility is unsettling.

You might think that if I could turn the car around (or ask the car to turn itself around), I should be able to retrace our path and find the end of that road that gave way so abruptly to woodland. But there are two problems with that approach. First, the trees and shrubs hem us so thoroughly that I don’t believe the car has maneuvering room. Second, when the car stopped and I looked back, I could see no continuity of trail, no specific ruts, no straight line that we had traveled.

Of course, it’s difficult to get completely lost in the modern world. Hunters in the wildest spots imaginable find bodies left by rapists and serial killers; it happens all the time. So though I see ourselves (the car and me) as lost, it may only be a matter of relative displacement, not true concealment. If we sit perfectly still, in time someone will come across us. I might starve, I suppose, but the car would not. A good lube job would have it back on the road in no time.

Shortly after I was an investment banker, I delivered secret documents for an undercover agency dedicated to finding and exterminating terrorist organizations. One time I delivered a bomb which was used to obliterate the headquarters of a fanatical Libyan faction. Strangely, when I returned to my pasting of labels, I read about the bombing incident in the morning paper. Somehow, my worlds had tended to spill over into one another.

I hear the beep of a horn. Perhaps my car has relented – I’ve felt all along that it knew the way out. In one sense I feel relieved, but in another, disappointed. The possibility that I might move forward into nowhere, trek into the great beyond and be swallowed by time and space, is exhilarating. I might eventually reach the point where all the lives I have inhabited merge into the single sparkling entity that supports my existence.

Far more likely, though, I would come to the overpass of a superhighway and be pinned in place by the realities of modern transportation, the inescapability of external connectedness.

So I expect I will get in the car, say, “Go, car,” and return to my apartment. And feed the cat.