The Frenchwoman may have imagined not only that my father’s café was still there, in that town in the industrial heartland of South Africa where she and her husband lived for a while, but that it looked much the same, or much as I recall it, a small building designed, like the rest of that town center, in a functional version of art deco…

It takes Little Bill and his girlfriend, Crystal, exactly eleven minutes and twenty-six seconds to lose all their money at Caesar’s Palace. It takes eleven minutes instead of seven minutes because Crystal weaves down the jangling aisles for four minutes rolling her last three quarters between her thumb and forefinger, testing the machines for a lucky slot.

I had an opponent assigned to me. His name was Cory. He was big and fast and that’s how he talked, too. “I’ll carve you up,” he said. “I’ll make you wish you were never born.”

“Somebody's laying out in the field,” my little brother came to tell us. It was eight o'clock in the morning and already so hot that the weeds were steaming and the locusts calling. For a few days there had been word of a hurricane coming.

Adelle is my wife and I ache to be with her. I know I’m the man-of-her-dreams because she tells me so in the daytime and because she shows me when it’s night. We get into a car and drive to a restaurant, where we have dinner people with people we mistook as friends.

Finally the Internet will be populated almost entirely by ghosts. It will be impossible to do anything online, check one’s bank statement, watch a movie, check e-mail, etc., without running into some piece of script still functioning years after its author’s death.

The off season is a kind of war between you and corrosion. You sit in the boardwalk bar and you wait for some kind of revelation and when that doesn’t come you ask the old woman in the tube top at the end of the bar what she’s drinking and she tells you. You’ll have that.

I’ve run out of dreams. For the past four nights all that’s been in my head, the entire time I slept, was a dial tone. I tell my friends about this. Everyone congratulates me.

My girlfriend has been depressed most of the winter. She claims that this is because our bed frame creaks. In fairness to my girlfriend, creaks is too gentle a word for what this bed frame does.