Our electrician was also a bookie for NFL games. He carried around big cards with each game and its point spread written on them. He pointed out my Eagles hat and asked how they were doing, as though he didn’t know. So-so, I said. Still have a decent shot at the wildcard. They need to beat Washington tomorrow. And the Cowboys and the Giants. He charged $460 for whatever he had done. My pockets were full of crumpled-up foreign money, euros and Caribbean dollars and shit. I wondered whether I’d have to go to the ATM.

J.D. was opening a restaurant. The first day didn’t go great. It wasn’t in the best neighborhood but I told him that shouldn’t matter. Plenty of great restaurants are in shitty neighborhoods. What he needed was a lighting design consultant. “Spend ten thousand dollars on one,” I suggested. That sum seemed about right. High but worth it considering. “You need warm, low lights,” I said. “It needs to be cozy.” I hadn’t seen the dining area but I supposed it was marred by high, bright, inhospitable light. Then I went through a door and looked around it. In fact the lights were pretty nice. But there was something off about the place. The decor didn’t hang together right somehow. I told him he needed to spend twenty thousand dollars on an interior design consultant. His eyes widened at the price. Now I felt like I might be exaggerating. But I said tens of thousands of dollars is worth it if it means the survival of his restaurant.

I was visiting Paris. Mom was there, Dad too. There were big stacks of big, old French money, those Francs the color of turned leaves. Mom wanted to dance.

It was the last day of high school. I felt melancholy of knowing I’d never see it all again.

The band got involved in flying. It started when J. T. began playing a flight simulator video game I guess, and everyone else did too. But then again C. D. did pilot small planes for a long time, didn’t he? Got his license pretty early and flew when he could. But then he got a gig flying commercial jets, first in short trips and then in longer and longer ones. I knew I wasn’t going to be a part of it. And now C. D. would be gone for three to six months flying around the world. He took all this cash he’d saved up out of a book where he kept it and was gone. Could the rest of the band play some gigs during that time, I wondered? I hoped so. There was nothing else to do.

B. B. at work needed help with his résumé. He gathered me and two others in a room within a café and described to us what he wanted the first paragraph to express. I scanned the original he’d given us and found that he was from Canada and had trained Air Force pilots. Later he asked me for money. I told him I was very reluctant to make loans. I warned him not to be a fuckface; he had to pay it back. Eventually I asked him how much he wanted. Twenty thousand dollars, he said. I’ll give you forty, I replied, and he accepted with a sigh of disappointment. Then I continued on to school, annoyed that he’d made me an hour late—here it was 9:30 already. I didn’t even know what class I’d missed. Was it possible I had free period to start the day, and it wouldn’t matter? Not likely. I tried to remember where my locker was. I thought I found it, but couldn’t remember the combination. Somehow the lock opened anyway and the locker opened. It was full of locks.

S. K. convened us all and presented us with checks. Apparently some part of the company had just been sold and we were all entitled to payouts. At first I misread mine, thinking it was just over $1,000. I was vaguely disappointed. Then I realized it was for $174,000. J. P. asked how much it was and I showed him. He said that it made sense; I was supposed to get the biggest share. I felt guilty, thinking I didn’t really deserve it. Still, I began to fantasize about what this might mean for my family—we could afford some luxuries, go on more vacations, maybe even buy a better home. S. then led us to a bar for a celebratory drink. I wondered if it should be on me but I let it be on him.

There was a party for me at a bar, for my birthday, or maybe because I was going away. H. C. and P. C. were there, and others. When it came time to pay the tab I found that we had collected hundreds of dollars. I had a devil of a time counting it. Finally I paid up with one dollar to spare.

I was at a sort of family reunion. A couple who were rich friends of my parents—one of the was I. D., but he was divorced from Morny and remarried to some other woman. They had a business buying and selling luxury antiques. She described to me a transaction they were undertaking and I asked her how much they’d laid out to buy these goods. She bristled and refused to tell me, shaming me that it was taboo to talk about numbers like that.

The party was going on outside on the lawn. She pointed out to me a distant relative, a young man, who was a dangerous drug dealer. Music played that sounded like the Rolling Stones. A man was whistling into two empty bottles, playing along. I marveled at how he was able to sound so good, to play a blues scale in key with the recording.

We were on vacation in an unfamiliar American city. I went out on my own on some kind of errand. First I had to get cash. I went across the street to find an ATM, which in fact was a guy on the corner making change for people. I gave him two hundred-dollar bills and he gave me back the equivalent in personal checks he’d collected from people in odd sums—thirty here, fifty there. I wondered if I’d just gotten fucked. How would my bank accept these weird checks? Was I supposed to forge the endorsements? What if they bounced? I saw that one was written by my former coworker S. F. and I thought, that’s funny, she must live near here. Another had some creepy, violent messages scrawled on it. I definitely thought that one wouldn’t get cashed.

Later J. and I got on a bus. At one stop she got out to ride her bike alongside, and for a while I watched her from the window but my attention drifted and after a minute I realized I’d lost her. I got off, carrying various bags and things, and went to look for her. There were other little blond girls here and there but not her. I wondered if she’d know to go back to the apartment where we were staying. I panicked. Realizing it was a dream, I forced myself awake—back into the realm where she was safe and sound.

We had big piles of cash for some reason. We wanted to show it to Jackie, have her feel 3,000 dollars in her hands. I tried to count up the necessary hundreds and twenties. I had the kind difficulty you often have in dreams—losing count, dropping bills, starting over again. The apartment door was open. We lived on street level, on a corner. I was afraid the money would blow out the door, or that someone would see it and come take it.

A repairman arrived to fix two things in the house: the fridge and something else. I looked in the money drawer but there wasn’t enough to pay him. I examined the back of the fridge while he was doing the other thing. There was a complicated network of valves and tubes, water dripping from different places, some of it falling into an old jam jar, some of it falling onto a patch of floor that had blackened from neglect.

A rich political operative was being investigated for corruption. He went on the run. We saw him surveilled from above, from a spy drone, as he enjoyed undeserved luxury. He bathed in the shallow surf of a pristine beach at dusk. The Saudi government had provided his towels. They were visible in a motorboat parked in the sand, big, soft, blue towels folded and lined up on their sides.

We ordered two ice cream cones, and they were soon delivered by a man I recognized as the owner of the nearby ice cream shop (in real life, he was my ex-colleague H.). I realized we had ice cream in the freezer, so I was a bit annoyed at the extra expense, but there was nothing to do about it now. The man presented me a box and I asked him how much. Forty dollars. I told him that was outrageous. He stammered and corrected himself: twenty dollars. I thought about it. Seemed like a lot for two ice cream cones in a box, even if they were delivered to our door. I could see him becoming very upset, hurt that I’d question his ethics. I paid him the money to appease him and make him go away.

I impulsively bought lots of tickets for things. A late-season Yankee game with them already out of the running. A Talking Heads reunion tour minus David Byrne. Lou Reed, not yet dead in my dream. There might have been something else, too. Something where Dr. John was the opening act. The Grateful Dead were doing a reunion tour and I was thinking about going to that. It occurred to me that lots of these things would not be very good, and that I’d spent a lot of money on them, so I went to try to sell my tickets. I arrived at a sort of entertainment complex, with an outdoor amphitheater and an indoor arena and some other performance spaces. I wasn’t having much luck. I realized I was going to have to enlist some people to go with me, and I couldn’t think of who.