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AT BARASSINI’S, THE annoying, overbearingly concerned Tsai hovers and clucks on and on about my poor head. It’s unbearable. No, I don’t need an ice pack. No, I don’t need her to take me to the emergency room. No, I don’t need two aspirin. Or some tea. Or water. No, I like the cheese in my beard. …

There was a lovely woman with whom, as a young man, I was smitten. She seemed to have similar feelings for me. We flirted in a harmless way at work (we were concierges at a well-known upscale New York boutique hotel, I won’t say the name but you’d have heard of it). I was married at the time, too y…

[...] I theorize Rush had experienced some sort of transfer of information from my brain to his. I am not clear on the science of this, but there is no other explanation. I notice he received his PhD from Columbia, where I am often on campus carrying my ally mattress. The thought transfer could’ve …

NOT MUCH OF note in my waking life. People get sick or don’t, people die or don’t, I watch TV or don’t. Sometimes I smoke without remembering lighting up. I continue to go to a deranged hypnotist and try to recall a film by a deceased African American gentleman. I sell collapsible clown shoes. I ea…

She is the kind of woman whose absence in my waking life as the novelizer—if I the novelizer were to be waking from a dream in the dreams—leaves me in despair. She looks at me the way lovers in movies look at each other. That beautiful fake way I desperately crave. I know this is a lie that movies …