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.