Sandbars. I don't know about sandbars. Where they are like so many mines in a minefield, lapping water hiding their inert shapes just under the surface.

We shouldn't be out in this water on this boat.

The currents are killing us, pulling us backward, sideways; I'm trying to go on.

Mom's not getting this whole thing about the backstay. It's a wire that runs from the stern up to the mast to yank it back when lee helm threatens to pull the boat off course, and to keep it from pitching in rough seas.

I start to explain.

My eyes leave the horizon.

I'm not watching the water. I'm not watching where we're going.

I suddenly realize nobody is steering.

We run aground.

We're slammed forward, my guts drop out of me, realizing what's happened. I'm sick with fear.

But the boat doesn't stop. It tears ahead, on fast-forward, we're flying through tributaries, slamming through roads, tearing by houses, sideswiping cars. We crash a bridge, we carve a slice out of an office building - the boat careens through every patch of water it can find, picking up speed. It is impossible, the movement we are feeling under our feet. The boat has a mind of its own, and we are rocketing toward something we can't see, can't understand, under the power of this vessel.

It's coming up. It's huge, a huge garage, an underbelly of a massive freeway system; the boat is going to come to a stop under a freeway, in a concrete drydock. The bow swings hard, we slam into the retaining wall and are thrown out. The noise is massive, the feeling is horrible.

At last, we've stopped. I raise my eyes from the ground, I'm shaken, but unhurt. I finally see the boat from the outside. It's little more than a torn fiberglass shard, crumpled like a throwaway letter.

It wasn't even my boat. If it was my boat, I could deal with it. But now I have a bigger responsibility, a bigger challenge, the most frightening, most embarassing thing I've had to do in my life.

Hi, I say, struggling to say the words into the cell phone, I'm afraid I've gotten your boat into an accident...

I wake up. My heartbeat is heavy. I'm covered in sweat. I feel horrible. I feel guilty for something I haven't even done. I don't know what to do. I can't sleep. My skin is crawling. I ache.

What if I had wrecked the boat?

What if?

They're pumping gas into the elevator shaft.

That's the first thing I remember of that night. I'm always an observer when it's out of my league. I'm not there to tell them their business, just there to see. And now I'm putting away the groceries and remembering the gas.

I had breakfast with those two, and they tried to get past security, and now they're pumping gas into the elevator shaft.

"I want a child," she says.

The gas was cold. The hose had ice crystals on it.

"Sure you want a child," I say, putting away the onions. "We kiss, then you want to to touch. We touch, then you want to have sex. We have sex, now you want a child." When's the party? Do I have enough space? Suddenly, I can't remember what my house looks like anymore.

You can't get past security, because they have an alarm. The couple I had breakfast with is racing past the security checkpoint. The alarm is going off.

I'm walking around my house, opening the doors I never remembered opening before. Hardwood here, carpet there, windows - I'm in the city, I guess. She's nowhere around. Maybe she's thinking about having a kid.

The alarm is going off, all the fat white shirts with epaullets are scrambling out of their seats. The couple heads for the elevator shaft. Someone's already preparing the hose.

I open a door.

The couple is up the shaft, climbing the rungs.

I see the city.

The hose is behind them like a frozen pit viper, coiled, with crystals; icy scales. Two men are holding it up. A man on the throw-lever.

It's a beautiful balcony, twice as big as the house itself.

The noise is deafening when they release the gas. I ask someone what the gas is. They tell me it's liquid xenon.

Trees, bushes, seating, beautiful tile all cut out of a terraced office building. It's a gray sunset against the concrete. I sit down in a chair. My place is a castle. More than enough room.

I hear coughing, choking sounds from inside the elevator, louder than the sound of the gas. White clouds billow from out of the doors. They keep feeding in the gas.

More than enough room for my party.

The couple is wet, on their knees now, throwing up. They have been poisoned by the gas. We had noodles for breakfast. They're throwing up noodles. The sick couple are half-frozen, with crystals of ice on their clothing. I don't know what will happen to them.

I sit back and lounge in the chalky sunset.

Among other things that stick out less in my mind, I dreamt that there were forest green stitches in my ankles going all around like bracelets.

They were there because doctors had amputated my feet, then amputated my legs several inches above where my feet had been attached, to remove some height, then had sewn my feet back on the new, shorter stumps.

I was effectively made shorter by this procedure.

I didn't feel gypped or otherwise victimized by it, but I made a point to tell everyone I saw in the dream that it had happened.

I know what this one's about. This one's about work.

"You don't like my pictures?" I ask.

She tries to explain. She is not happy with pictures I have taken. I think they are beautiful.

We are going to leave the house. We are going to go to the city, shopping, which is what makes her happy.

As we leave, a gurgling sound behind us in the foyer. I turn and see a large opening, a hole in the wall set in by design that seems to go forever. From this hole, Water shoots out, along with two huge orange fish that swim in this water. We open the front door and the water goes out the door and down the stairs to the street. The stairs are very wide across, but shallow in height, almost like the stairs to a palace. It is a long stairway and it is all awash from this water.

We decide to still go to the city. We go down the stairs. At the bottom. I realize I have left my cell phone. The house may fill up with water. I need to recover it.

As I start to go up the stairs, from the left huge cascades of water flow again, covering the stairs, I am up to my ankles in water.

At the top I hear a sound, turn around, a helicopter is dropping a big box with a red cross into the cul-de-sac, and others like it line the street heading away.

We are in a convenience store suddenly - I sense it is near the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the stairs. People are moving around quickly. A team is getting the supplies from the box. A policeman is explaining something.

"We've all just experienced a break in the local AdderNet," he says, referring to where the water comes from. "We need to make sure people don't get sick. Forty percent of people are susceptible to the virus in the water."

A worker has readied a syrup from the medical box, and has poured a cup of it for me. It will fight the disease. I drink it.

I am in the backyard of a house bordering the Texas badlands. There's a dusty red haze to everything, and it feels like the people around me are the only people for miles. I sense that there are snakes around.

There's something nearby - wood planks. I've been shooting them with a .22 rifle but it's nowhere to be found. An old, grizzled man is examining the wood planks with regret. Apparently they've rotted.

"You need to get yourself a King Rooster target trap," the grizzled man says.

"Would that fit in a car?" I ask.

The old man just shakes his head - I know what he'll say. It has to be a truck. I need a truck. I interrupt before he can say anything. "Fine, I can get a U-Haul."
The old man looks even more disappointed. "There's a sonofabitch comes every year, selling a U-Haul truck for twenty-four grand," he says.

A husband and wife are also in the backyard; they're listening. The husband chimes in, "Wow, I wish I could make that kind of money."

2:06 AM, and my body's wired wrong. It's supposed to be sleeping, but sickness is keeping me up and unable to shut down properly.

Dreams of the classroom. A kid banging breadsticks on the table. The teacher's got no guts to throw him out. She's trying to read from a book but his breadstick banging keeps the classroom out of order. The kid has a ponytail - I grab it, and with it in my hands, I whip him out of class like a shotput on his ponytail - he flips through giant church doors that I lock behind him.

I'm floating as I do this, in low-G. This happens every once in a while, usually when I have some type of charge or powerful belief.

The rest of the classes' kids are delighted. So is the teacher. Everyone's happy. I did a wonderful thing. Nobody cares what happened to the kid outside the church doors.

Last night wasn't particularly restful. When the pressure shifts, the head shifts. There were huge changes in the sky last night.

I dream. I don't really remember my dreams. But I remember this one, from last night. I am trying to remember more of them.

I am walking on a railroad track and holding a wooden spoon. The track looks like the Los Angeles MTA. The train cars look like buses.

I prod an empty bus with my wooden spoon. It moves along the track. It's fun, until a second bus-train (the 535 Express) barrels through and smashes my bus. People die. I am responsible. I shed my spoon, and my coat, and I run away.

I am in school. A girl I have a crush on is in front of me. Someone comes up to me with my coat. They found it. I am scared they know what I did. They hand it to me and the girl is scolding. She asks me if the coat is used for playing "reindeer games". It sounds political. I tell her it isn't. I come closer to her. I can see the vellous hair on her cheeks. I lean in to ask her if there's anything else she wants. She runs away. I feel triumphant. Nobody knows what I have done.

We are in class. They are talking about things I do at my job. There are study questions, I get several wrong. We are suddenly in the street. A cicada is buzzing madly on a girl's shirt. The teacher of our class plucks off the cicada and tells us to be sure to teach the cicada tricks before hair grows on its legs.

A Japanese man suddenly takes me aside, and into his home. He recognizes my coat. He shows me a movie on TV. It shows two men in a bus-train, one of them who looks like me. I realize someone has made a movie about the accident. I am horrified, but I wonder who the actor is that is playing me. I wasn't in the train, but someone thinks I was. The actors talk. There is a collision. They are thrown.

We are in a corporate lobby for a research and development firm. Everything is white or silver. Glass is everywhere. A demonstration of a large photo lens is in front of me, as is the Japanese man. I take off the lens cap of this lens, and put it back on. Repeat. I am nervous. I am trying to convince him that less accidents would happen if train trestles were built out of brittle beams that broke off if they were collided with.

"The rest of the beams would hold the track up," I suggest. "Everybody will need them soon, you could make a lot of money." The Japanese man nods in an agreeable fashion; the friendly, non-commital Japanese way of saying, "I'll consider it."

Wake.