I am in a cafeteria with classmates, and I'm not doing well in school. There was a special session in a class, a requirement for the course, and I missed it. There were two special make-ups and I missed all three. I was in confinement somewhere. I'm not abashed; it's understood, I'm able to do the work, but I'm not doing it. I have the attitude of one who has chosen not to participate with consequences I'm willing to bear.

We leave the cafeteria. My classmates are sypathetic, but it's all as if they understand I'm not cut out to go through this course.

I am now chopping on great long beams of madrone. In a yard somewhere, there are boards which are rough four-corner logs with a diameter of five feet at least. I'm pounding on one with a maul. I will continue to do this, although I know there will be no effect from it. I can barely force the blade to bite. Just long streams of red wood, and I'm pounding on it, but I'll stop soon.

But before that, there is a new order. Over here is - a band of copper. It is the same size as the other logs, same shape, only a darker rust. I can now make progress. I slam it and it begins to sag. (The logs are all horizontal, and I stand beside each to pound away.) This is easier. I may make this work.

There is a U-shaped, single level red building out near where the old radio station KFYN used to be in our home town. This may be the model, but, again, the surroundings are indistinct, plus, I've never been inside those offices.

I am as a guest who wonders about his welcome, an expatriate returned. There is business discussed around desks and tables. Brother Reloj is there, and he ignores me. (In life, he was one who considered trying to assist one in social engagements generally unavailing; he was in that sense a Social Darwinist. He paid no attention to me in groups where he was well known and I wasn't.)

So I watch as strangers point out charts on tables they seat themselves around, and then they move on to other tables; it's a peripatetic exercise. I go away and come back again and no one seems to notice. I must find somewhere to sleep. I must go home.

It is difficult, I know, because home is where the parents lived, but they're all gone now. I know there is a house, however, and it's in another community I am unaware of. Reloj tells me it's in Hartford, or Messina, and he gives very little detail and I have no idea where the home of our parents is, but I don't dare ask for more answer than he's ready to give. I have come from miles away, and I must find sleep I know not where.

I approach a seat around a table again, and the lady to my left reaches up and raps me on the head with her knuckles like kids do. This is a signal; I'm happy to be recognized, though she offers no more than that.

Now, Chico is around the table. He's the pal of Reloj's and mine since childhood. He doesn't seem to notice me. I make no move to attract his attention. He is just sitting, vacantly gazing at the diagram before them all. I stand up, move around directly opposite his position, across the table and behind those sitting there facing him. He doesn't look at me.

Completely ignored on my long trip home, that's what this one is about.

I wonder if I'm deceased.

In a common preamble to dreams, I am at shortstop. My games at shortstop were very few and over forty five years ago. I never was good at it. It's the ground balls. They kept going through my legs. If you're a shortstop, your main order of business is ground balls. I wasn't a very good shortstop.

But that's where I am in that somnolent cusp come nightime. There are runners at the corners and none out. Maybe sometimes there is one out. But the ball is hit to me most often, of course, else why would it be in my predream?

I can start the old double play. But I'm reluctant to allow a run to score. The ball is hit sharply always, to give us time to figure. The runner off third is not well under way when I have the ball.

The keystone corner. The second baseman pivots. He steps on the bag after I toss to him and fires the ball, most often, home. We want two outs with a man on first. That's the best result.

In a variation, the ball is hit to second. When that happens, I take it on the toss and fire it to the catcher.

I think I know why I lapse back into the old ballpark. It's movement, without words. I am beginning to talk to myself, more and more, throughout the day, to write in my head, to act out my reveries. Words, all the day long, and into the night. Reading, writing, talking to myself. There is no talk in a double play.

"My busy heart, who shudders as she talks,
sheds the syllabic blood and drain her words"

as Dylan Thomas says. I only want to stop the words so I can sleep, perhaps to dream, is what I say.

I suppose were I a dancer ever, that's what I would dream. So the only dance I know which can be slowed and involves no violence is that hard hit grounder to short, bouncing in slo-mo on an infield long gone to weed...

We are moving now, up high. It's like a mountain, but more the sort created indoors for rock climbing out of papier mache. But it's high, and I must work close to the faux rock on a narrow ledge. I am afraid.

I make it, though, and here I am at table in a large indistinct room. There is an arrangement. My stepfather stand-in (often my dreams are like a long-running series where parts be played by new actors, like the canine just ahead) says we'll need to split the front rooms. Which half do you want? I say, maybe I could move to the cabin. There is a village and he has many holdings within it.

We are cruising about, and I see the cabin is unavailable, but something may be. We also must split use of the typewriter. It's a typewriter, but not like I remember. There is a flaw with it and I have to show him how to bypass the problem, but then I note you can turn an internal wheel which will bring up the red sector, marked with a red plug. (This is similar to the old typewriter ribbons which include a red lower band.) I turn and turn and the red knob is up. This is how we can do it.

I can bring my pup home now. I don't know why he's been staying somewhere else, but here he is. (He's smallish and reddish and like no hound I've ever been close to.) I have to figure how his habits will work in the new environment.

But first I must go topside again. I'm ready, and the waitress is on the phone. She is the reason I must go. I wait. Then we start up, and at the first level bend, she pauses. She's on the phone still, you see. I think, maybe the reception is better here. I wait. On she talks.

I finally call it off. I reach for coins, which I had brought to some purpose, and lay them out. I guess that means she can go on when she's ready.


In a fragment from another night...

Punky Duff comes past me, and I'm talking to him. We go from one room to another in what is maybe a store, or a school. He has the same cynical dour expression as always. I'm telling him about the Scots-Irish. We're over here because James I relocated us Scots in Ireland early in his reign to displace the plagued Irish and after a time our sort grew weary of the bickering so came on over here to fill up the Appalachians and the south with rednecks. (I had just read something similar; a clue to schizophrenics in I Never Promised You A Rose Garden was that the phantasm never knows more than the dreamer.)

Punky is not even acknowledging. He never smiles. I wake up, and I think, I don't ever remember him smiling. Some have default smiles. Punky was default dour.

He committed suicide soon after high school.

I am following someone in authority. Reloj is with me. Inside a store, dimly lit, the detective lays down beside a counter, and he moves somehow...

...a woman is pushed out on the other side. I think `corpse' but she just lies there, one arm shielding her brow. The detective stands, and moves away. Towards us, and away from her.

"What now?" she asks.

"It's an arrest," he says.

"Oh, brother..." she says, more like, here we go again.

Reloj and I at the entrance of another store. He points out I have on two hats. I'm wearing two hats. I remove both, replace one, try and make it sound ordinary. Like lots of guys have on two baseball caps. Like, you try and deal a single card and two hit the table together.

Inside, there are some cute little guys, and dressed. They are toddlers in tuxes, and they are on a stage above a counter. One of them is walking by, and he greets me, and he seems so absolutely glad to see me, is so unbearably kind, I'm utterly charmed. Just a little guy who has that rare capacity to be glad in someone else's existence.

Another of them comes forward. His buddies take notice. He is studying, preparing, and he launches with all his might...a marble.

It hits a table just beyond the counter after a low slow arc. Very softly. There is no damage. It hardly rolls. A misspent attempt at vandalism.