Time stretched out in my early morning dreams to the point that I was sure I was oversleeping by hours; it had to be past noon. But I opened my eyes and it was seven something. When I opened them again it was a little past nine.

It was a day of mundane tasks: head shaving, box opening, taking out the trash. The take a book leave a book. I perused the titles and opened up an anthology by school kids called “Growing Up in Park Slope.” In the middle of the page was a sort of prose poem about Grandma having a stroke. I superstitiously thought of reading something else before closing the book, something happy, but I didn’t. I left Raggedy Ann and Andy and Grisham and something else, taking nothing.

We didn’t talk too long about it. S. thinks a woman can’t win in America. Maybe but we have to try. 

It occurred to me while reading by the pool today that I never realized womb rhymes with tomb. Am I the last English speaker on planet earth to discover this?

I fell asleep very briefly and woke up breathing fast, adrenaline flowing, fight or flight. I examined my surroundings. Sun, attendants in polo shirts and khakis. The looming concrete facade of the hotel building set against a partly cloudy sky. All was as I’d left it a minute or two before. I picked back up the book.

Day 1

I marveled at the blue sky, mouth agape like an idiot. Two birds thrashed in a nearby palm. Were they special birds, I wondered? Special Jamaica birds you don’t see back home. Are they somehow aware of their own identity as such, their splendor? I watched them dart around the fronds. Just a couple of birds.

I decided to roll off the floatie face down as though someone were trying to dispose of my corpse. To cast me adrift hoping I’d never wash ashore. I fell gently below the surface.

At poolside I took pains not to drip on my book. I lay on the chaise and read and drifted off to sleep and read again. At one point I remained conscious just long enough to read two words: the game.

I ate a small bag of hot and spicy banana chips and turned the edges of the pages crimson.

Music blared from the bar over the fence. Footloose, Night Nurse. You could hear the DJ’s patter but nothing else, no giddy, drunken crowd. 

I had to fashion a bookmark from a corner of paper towel.

 I detected some pale beige fragments as I cleaned the dining table. Some crumbs, I thought. As I inspected them more closely I realized they were pieces of book. Little woody chips from the spine of an old paperback, the residue at the bottom of every box of books and the back of every bookshelf. This is what every book turns into in the end. Dust jacket to dust.

When did I have that dream about being in a bookstore, where there was no ceiling but just a wooden frame, above which there were more shelves with more books, and the place was lit by bare, incandescent bulbs, hanging on wires from out of the darkness? Was it more than one dream? In the dream we were looking for some book, a magical book of some kind. Who were we?

When I was a little kid I’d ride with my dad as he drove to used bookstores around Connecticut to satisfy his, what do you call it, addiction to collecting. His collecting addiction. When you search “collecting addiction” you come across something someone wrote called “How Collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me Into an Opium Addict,” which is funny, damn funny, right down to the letters all properly capitalized in the title—I don’t know that I’ve ever felt the proper use of title case to be funny and I do not know why I feel that it is now—of that thing, whatever it is, an essay or a memoir or just some desperate cry into the void. Anyway maybe it’s bibliophilia. Except he also had it with records and I don’t know what the word is for that.

We’d drive for a while on the back roads, through towns like Thompson, Manchester, Eastford, Scotland. Little fucking towns where there’s nothing going on church suppers and 4-H fairs, no one hanging out but scarecrows and jack-o-lanterns. Sometimes he’d let me grab the steering wheel. In the few seconds that I gripped it in my sweaty left hand I saw everything more clearly: the trees, the lawns, the houses, the cracked and crumbling tar where the road met the ditch.

We’d arrive at some dusty little bookstore and while he scanned the first few pages of dozens of books, hoping to find a first edition, I sat morosely, utterly oblivious of the book-bound universes around me. It’s not that I couldn’t read. I just didn’t want to.