Another opened on the third room in my apartment, the archives, all the precious contents shelved and tidy. As I stepped in, I saw more clearly: CDs fused to their plastic boxes in strange half-liquid curves; amplifiers and cassette decks blackened and brittle, their chassis warped, their cases leprous; videocassettes oozing together; the books transformed into neatly ranked flaking bricks of charcoal. The smell of burnt things was nauseating. Then, item by item, each piece of hardware powered up by itself. LEDs and digital counters lit like opening eyes on all sides. Fans came on, and stuttered and shrieked, their lubricants cooked away. The color monitor was the last; it burst into life with the refinery gun battle from White Heat, made grotesque and technically impossible by the spiderweb of cracks on the face of the picture tube. Flames licked out of the vent panels of everything.

And there was the door that opened onto Frances — Frances? — sitting beside me, holding a glass to my lips and saying, “Eat your opium, dear; there are children sober in Africa.” That might even have been real.

But the strangest was the flat, white world, like a sheet of paper, with nothing on it but a motionless line of pictographs like the ones from native southwestern cultures, stylized silhouette figures in black. I seemed to see them all from above. I was the one on the left end of the row, I knew, the one that might have been a dog or a rabbit. I couldn’t see the other end; I don’t know why.

The second figure on the left was a woman, her arms and legs at lively angles, wearing a headdress. Or possibly a halo of fire. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” said the dog/rabbit/I.

“It’s a debased age,” she said. She sounded disgusted, and a little like Frances. “You’re not supposed to simply land on the doorstep like an unlucky relative. You’ll have to go back.”

“I don’t know how.”

She clicked her tongue. “I could do it, but we’d better begin as we mean to go on. It’s time you met him-her anyway. You’ll love this.”

She wasn’t the next pictograph in line anymore. Instead there was another, curved and capering, two projections like horns or feathers poking up from its head. It was holding a flute.

“Ah! Ah! Not now!” it said, dismayed and delighted. “Indeed, you are a cub of mine. Sorta. And your timing sucks! You’re welcome anytime, as long as you only come when you’re called. This is your head speaking. Now beat it!”

As the white surface broke up like a bad video signal, I thought, That probably is what my head sounds like.

A decent continuity finally reasserted itself. I became aware of that — the feeling that the things around me were real events, in chronological order — even before I began to receive commentary from my senses. Then I felt the passage of air over my hair and face and shoulders, and smelled, faintly, an unlikely combination of growing things and rubbing alcohol. I heard footsteps and stirring cloth and a clink of metal against glass, and voices far away.