I was in a van with J. P. going to some kind of adventure in the woods, like a zip line or God knows what. We were in Mexico or Costa Rica or something, and the activity was run by locals who accompanied us on the way. One of them busted out some coke on a big mirror and passed it around. It was a beautiful chalky, pale blue. I smashed some rocks with a credit card and made myself a fat line. I snorted it with some difficulty, clamping my nostril shut to keep it in. One of the local guys chuckled.

When we got to the location I was directed to sweep up the pile of coke and hand it to the woman who had driven the van. Evidently there was a risk the authorities would see us, so I was warned to be discreet. I stood around with the coke formed into a ball in my sweaty hand. There were two women standing around and I couldn’t tell which one had been the driver. Finally a man held out an opened paper bag and I dropped the coke inside.

Donald Fagen needed a title for his new novel.

“Candyland,” I proposed. However, we agreed that as the setting for the denouement was a theme park of that name, it was a little on the nose.

I went with a friend to his apartment building and climbed the stairs. They were very narrow, steep stone steps and soon we were very high up. You could see out a window that we were hundreds of feet above the ground. I told him, “These look like stairs from a dream.”

I visited H. R.’s house, though maybe I was being summoned. His parents were there—though his mom died many years ago. She took me aside and reproached me of something. H. had been accused of killing a Native American in the woods some time ago. She reminded me how she’d contacted my family and me by fax because we were in possession of some information that might exonerate him. We never replied, and she was still furious. At first I said, “Mary, that was a long time ago,” trying to end the discussion. She persisted, and I realized with dread that she was right—my family—I—was always irresponsible about these kinds of things. H. had done his time, apparently, and never recovered, never got his life on track.

I was a college student, hanging around the dorm, reading a coffee table book. Someone took it and brought it over to another room and I had to go find them to get it back. In it I had been reading a story about the music scene in San Francisco in the ‘70s, and how Robert Hunter had done something wrong to a woman back then, and had not been held to account.

S. found a house on sale in Rockland County and we decided to move there. Turns out it was on a vast lake with rocky islands in view. It had been owned by a famous man of letters. In the dream I saw his coterie lazing on the lawn, watching the water. It was a scene from another time, like the 1920s. Then I was in the water, though it was cold. I retrieved a piece of trash, a drink can in a plastic bag, and returned it to shore. The woman of the house accepted it from me graciously. Jackie was in the water with me too.

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.