Last night’s dream had been no exception. Or rather, it had started out as no exception, being the usual parade of Bosch-type living torsos, many-eyed bartenders and childhood friends in awkward sexual positions, but all of a sudden it had shifted somehow. Like a TV picture which has been flicking between random stations with lots of static and incoherent images but then settles into a program and stays there, the dream had become—for the first time since Billy’s childhood perhaps—stable. A story even an old rumpot like Billy could follow.

Not that it was a reassuring story.

*  *  *

Billy found himself in a library. It was a huge place, with shelves piling up into the—the clouds? That couldn’t be right. The library was domed somehow, and even the dome part had shelves going up, and each shelf was crammed with books. There wasn’t an inch of wall that didn’t have a shelf full of books leaning against it. Billy knew, he didn’t know how, that every book ever written was here. If he’d been able to, he could have climbed a ladder and found books from every era of human history, from medieval manuscripts to Egyptian scrolls to Babylonian clay tablets. Billy even had a feeling that Moses’ two tablets of stone were in here somewhere, along with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Canterbury Tales and—Billy suspected—the manuscript for Billy’s own unfinished novel, which he’d lost, along with everything else he owned, ten years ago in an apartment fire.

Once, Billy would have loved to spend a lifetime in this library, pulling out volumes of Dickens and Thackeray and Ginsberg to his sober heart’s content. But now, even though it was a dream, he just wanted to get out. There was something claustrophobic about the place. No windows, he noticed, while the book-lined dome seemed to loom over him like a monster made of spines.

Billy was about to look for an exit when he saw the counter. It seemed sensible to him to approach the counter and ask the person behind it for help. So Billy approached the counter, and as he did so, he noticed that there was someone already there, engaged in conversation with what he presumed was the librarian. As he got closer, he recognized the someone. It was Todd. Todd didn’t see Billy, perhaps because he seemed het up about something, which was about as surprising as Billy’s waking up sweating.

“You must have it!” said Todd.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the librarian who wasn’t dressed much like a librarian, being clad in overalls with a pencil behind his ear. “We do not have the book you are requesting.”

As Todd went redder and redder in the face, Billy realized he knew the librarian from somewhere.

“Be with you in a moment, sir,” said the librarian.

“No rush,” said Billy, and felt foolish.