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.