Adeline the AirBnB manager showed us around briskly, garbage is through that door over there, someone left a popsicle in the freezer and you can have it. Keys, shower, towels. The washer’s here and the dryer’s there. She said a woman thought the dryer was the washer and put in soap, wide eye roll, what a disaster that was. Try to clean soap from a dryer, I am telling you. I’m here for you entirely, je suis entièrement à votre disposition, she said before leaving in that way French people say things and you know they don’t mean it.

We ate at our favorite place that night, the two sisters, and clumsily I asked if they have ice when there was ice obviously in the drinks so the younger sister looked at me and smiled and said of course we have ice, exclamation mark.

The air conditioner appeared to work and then it didn’t and I stood below it for half an hour, working the remote, putting it on fan only and back again, turning it off, turning it on, dialing the temperature down in desperation, Googling the force reset and the meaning of a blinking green light. I futzed with the vent by hand, knowing it was a bad idea. Finally I gave up and went to bed. In the early morning I had a happy dream I was somewhere that an AC worked. When I awoke Sara told me she got up at two o’clock when it was way too hot to sleep and pressed the button and it worked and it never stopped working after that.

I was inattentive and unadventurous for most of the trip, losing at online chess, leaving the freezer door wide open. I tended toward the uncolorful gelatos, the salted caramels, the chocolate family, though I knew the fruity ones were better, the mango and the passion fruit. But maybe this is what vacation is. A respite from trying.

Just like every day I’m sitting here wondering what’s going to happen soon when I fall helplessly into the powerful and vivid psychedelic space of dreams. The only difference between it and dropping acid is that there’s no recovery time. And we’re so used to it. But what sadness or longing or ecstasy will I drift through tonight? Or maybe just a headachy nightmare about work.

I awoke haunted by a dream I couldn’t remember. It was too abstract, or it was about something most dreams are not about. But I know it’s there.

The water main break a block away has diverted traffic and caused a jam all down the street. Honks and shouts rang out all day and into the night.

I fell into a half-sleep while reading a paragraph in Delillo’s “The Names” and the text suddenly revealed elaborate, deeper meanings, as though the words on the page pointed to another world or dimension. I woke back up and reread. There wasn’t anything remarkable about the paragraph after all—though it was good writing, it was literature, with whatever that entails. The experience left me with the feeling that all text inherently has that power and mystery.

Couldn’t remember the remarkable dreams I had last night. The dreams of another person. If I had to guess right now I’d say I was carrying around a colorful object, like maybe a painter’s palette. But I know that wasn’t it.

Had a dream last night about hockey, about the Flyers playing someone, the Rangers I think, and M. R. was in it, he being a Flyers fan. When I awoke I tried to remember the score, wondering if by some magic the news report on the morning radio, WBGO in Newark, would mirror it. I thought maybe the Flyers had won 5-3, or 5-0, but that didn’t seem quite right. Doug Doyle was prattling on about something Governor Murphy said, something about vaccines, this, that, the other thing. Soon he’d sign off with weather and sports. There was something unusual about the score in my dream, I was sure of it. And then at the end he announced that the Rangers had beaten the Flyers 9-0.

 

It’s always a shock to wake from lunatic dreams to find the world as it was: clothes where you left them, dishes done, cars and trees and the white sky outside.

Sideways rain gave way to hail, rattling angrily off the windows and air conditioners. They were marble-sized or less—not like the ones upstate someone had posted pictures of, which were the size of a man’s balls and dented the roofs of cars. Still I beheld them with awe. They had come from so far away to land on our planting terrace. I imagined they were fragments of meteorites, or a warning from God. Frogs and locusts next.

Then the sun shone again and I tried to remember what it felt like, two or three minutes before, to be in the storm, and I barely could, the way you sometimes remember a dream.

Awoke to someone using the whole keyboard at the end of a tune, rumbling bass notes. I had been dreaming about moving out of a house and writing songs at the same time. The songs, two of them, were turning out well except I was having trouble rhyming “morning.” The line was something like, “And if we’re still together come the morning,” and I wanted to avoid rhyming it with “warning” ‘cause I’ve done that already in another song. Can’t have two morning-warning songs. But what else? All I could think of was “adjourning.”

The plane from the tail cam looked Christlike in the rain in the morning.

Outside you couldn’t see anything but the wing. The instructions regarding step here, don’t step there. For maintenance personnel and monsters from the Twilight Zone.

Charles de Gaulle smells of piss and perfume in equal measure. The piss has gotten more pronounced over the years, renovations deferred, maintenance budgets cut. Rate your experience with a sad face or a smile.

The jetlag dreams were difficult. An enormous project at work, as big as the sky, impossible to complete. But I had to try.

I awoke with a groan from the dreadful dreams I’d had, not nightmares, but dreams about work—a colleague staying at our apartment for some reason. Urgent work that needed to get done, that wasn’t getting done, that couldn’t get done. That I had to do.

Drag

When I awoke I had a fleeting feeling that I wasn’t me. Or I wished I wasn’t me. Then it came back to me in a rush. The shame. The pleasure. The bemused expression on the bouncer’s face. Finally Dan and Terry, each taking me by an arm. The violence of it.

And I knew this: I would do it again.

My phone was all lit up with texts and calls. I knew what they’d be asking. I turned off the screen but put it in my pocket anyway. By reflex.

At the coffee shop later. Same thing. Felt the chair against my back, the wood. Not comfortable but did not care. Not care. My ass on the seat. That’s more comfortable. That little concave part. That nod to the human body.

I crossed my legs sometimes. Uncrossed them after a while. The hours passed.

“Sir, it’s closing time.”

I heard these words.

“Sir? Sir?”

I heard the man speak.

“Sir.” He was leaning over me now, peering into my face with some concern. “Are you OK? You have to leave. I’m leaving. I’m closing up.”

Then he figured I was deaf. He said it all again a little louder, in front of me this time so maybe I could read his lips or gestures.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said finally. I made the words sound flat and dull, so they could be heard any way you wanted. Defiant. Resigned. Reassuring.

A tense quiet ensued. Then he disappeared out back.

Through the picture window I watched the sidewalk and the street, people passing by. A woman in a long dark coat. A woman wearing a flowered backpack. Running for some reason. Ordinary life in its perfect unpredictability. Two police officers walked past, one black, one white. Now they were inside the café. And they were walking toward me. The black one leaned down into my face while the white one consulted with the employee.

“Sir, it’s time to go. Time to leave,” he declared, thumbing in the direction of the door.

I watched him blankly. Crossed my arms. His tag said Harrison. The other one said Wirth.

“What the fuck did I just say, huh? You have to go,” Harrison continued.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The employee produced a worried sigh. I stared at them all. Finally the cops glanced at each other. Wirth gave a little nod.

“Sure you aren’t,” said Harrison as he took me by an arm and Wirth took me by the other. They heaved me up and the chair fell backwards with a clatter. I hung limply, heavily between them now. As they dragged me toward the door I felt that sweet, hot pain in my shoulders again. Daydreamed that my arms would pull out of their sockets and let my body pour onto the floor.

Outside they tried to get me on my feet but I refused.

“You fucked up? Huh? Huh?” Wirth yelled in my face.

They conferred with each other as though I wasn’t there suspended in the space between them.

“He don’t actually seem fucked up to me,” Wirth told his partner.

“Nope. Can’t smell nothin’ on his breath.”

“He don’t seem high.”

They put me on the sidewalk, propped against the wall.

“What’s your name? You’re not gonna tell us your name?” asked Wirth.

I stared at the sign above a laundromat across the street. Lucky Laundry the letters read. The letters were red. The red letters read.

“My name is Lucky,” I declared.

Wirth made a dark little chuckle.

“Where do you live, asshole?”

And so I found myself again staring down, my dragging feet bent out of view below my knees. Shoes getting scuffed and scraped. I did not care. Ankles banging on curbs. I did not care. My body pulling down, down, down from my arms, each in the grip of a cop on either side of me muttering curses and jerking me up now and again in spite and frustration at his absurd burden.

Harrison rang the super’s bell. He emerged from his ground floor apartment and stared at me, stupefied. At Wirth’s direction he found my keys in my pocket and went on ahead up to the second floor. The cops carried me upstairs head to tail like a corpse.

I awoke on the kitchen floor.

The wall clock proceeded through the minutes and the hours, sometimes quick and sometimes slow.

Light reflected off the cars below and shone on the ceiling by the windows. Little shapeless entities drifting by to nowhere.

Shouts from the street. A jackhammer. A woman laughing.

My phone buzzed in my pocket now and then. Texts, calls. From concerned friends and family and automated scam operations. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Day turned into night. Headlights now shone from the street, amid the ambient glow of lamps and signs.

I was hungry. I did not care.

Deep in that second night the street grew still and quiet. That’s when I began my incantation.

You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.

I startled myself when I first said it. What a dumb, weird thing to pierce this holy silence with. And yet I said it again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.
You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.
You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.

I think the sun was rising. Maybe that’s what woke me up. I wasn’t even sure I’d been asleep. My body ached everywhere, inside and out.

I rolled over on my side and wondered if my free arm was strong enough to steady me. I remained there a few minutes. Then I bent my other arm at the elbow and braced against the floor, lifting myself up so my upper body was finally off the ground. I felt a wave of dizziness and was just about to collapse back down. But I didn’t. I held steady for a while and then sat up, leaning forward with my hands flat on the floor. I was stunned at how difficult this was. But finally I got up on my knees, and then on one foot and, steadying myself on a dining chair, on the other. I stood all the way up now, still leaning my head down so my blood wouldn’t rush away.

The floor before me was dark and blurry. I did not quite know where my foot would land. Or if it ever would. But still I took a step.

The Enterprise - 55

In my dream Bill was still in charge of the office out west, all these years later. The place was dilapidated now, the chairs ratty, computer parts and cables disordered everywhere.

But he was still running the Product. And some of the French guys were still around, tweaking the algorithms. Their determination was poignant—heroic, even. Still there was no plan. No viable path to profitability. But there was hope.

And I wanted to help. I wished I could help.

I had a very intense dream last night that I had driven a car into someone’s house—maybe backed it into their house. And the way they reacted, and the way I did, and everything that happened next—which was unclear—formed the basis of a great novel, beautiful and meaningful and profound.

When I awoke in the middle of the night I thought I should take notes about it for the morning, to make sure I didn’t forget. But I lazily tried to fix it in my mind instead. I still thought it would be something beautiful that I could carry into the world.

And now this is all I have. Or is it?

Did I dream that I saw the tallest man I'd ever seen the other day? Or did it really happen? I honestly can't remember. He seemed to be a foot taller than anyone else I'd seen. I was with someone—Sara?—and I said something about him, but she didn't seem to notice, or didn't hear me.

Today I saw the very tall man on Carmine Street, smiling under an umbrella. He had a neck tattoo and his daughter trailed behind. At least I thought it was him.

What am I about to dream about?

Naked in the supermarket, didn’t study for the test?

Something erotic?

A familiar city, but strange? Driving in a car without a steering wheel?

What am I about to dream about?

Notes Written Upon Waking Up About a Dream I Can No Longer Remember 2

I took acid with Steve and someone else, a friend of his but no one that I know in real life. I wanted to have enough left over to sell. I really felt high when I took it. Felt high in my dream.

The neighbors upstairs.

A bus ride.

Dragging a suitcase through the mud.

Notes Written Upon Waking Up About a Dream I Can No Longer Remember

Dad restaurant on the road in France, other people (young), hospital with severely depressed person?

In the middle of the night I awoke from a dream about football that had turned into a dream about soccer; a pleasant dream, about a ball lofted through the air into a net, and felt so sick, so miserable. I figured it was because I’d had too much to drink. But I hadn’t been out—couldn’t have been that much, could it? Just a whiskey or two, or maybe three, on top of the wine of course, as the quiet night wore on. Still I felt that pang of guilt that readily accompanies the pain.

I got up to take two naproxens. Just that effort accentuated my misery. Waking up Sara, inevitably, reassuring her I was OK. Feeling a little unsteady on my feet, in the dark. And of course there’s no immediate payoff to the drugs. Just doubt on top of the agony.

I thrashed about, unable to find a tolerable position. I flipped the pillow to the cool side and noted dismally that the cool sensation, normally blissful, universally recognized as such in fact, was now a taunt, a reproach. I was in desperate need of relief and it gave me none. It mocked me with cold, awful truth. I thought I could vomit. I thought maybe I should.

And then after some fitful sleep, as I lay in a reverie, I felt the painkillers kick in. The very moment they kicked in. It was like my head opened up—it felt good, almost too good. All the wretchedness flowed away. I felt a kind of wonderful void, exhilarating and a little scary. And then I slept a few more hours.

I’ve had dreams about an idyllic space, a flowery hill, with a path down it, maybe a little too steep in places. A path that turns into steps, or steps that straighten into a steep path. I’m walking down it, or running down it. I’m not alone. We’re descending the hill, us, as a group. Not too many—just a few. At the bottom there’s a stone wall, and the steps cut through it, and then there’s flat terrain but I never seem to get there. I’m just coming down that hill. We’re coming down that hill. The sun is shining. And it’s the most beautiful goddamn thing you can imagine.