I’m in some cheap room in some clapboard house in some hot, dusty prairie town in the middle of America someplace, I don’t know exactly where, and I need to catch the next train out. The only train out. The trouble is, I can’t seem to leave the room. My fingers won’t button my blouse. My clothes won’t stay in my suitcase. My hairbrush, my toothbrush, my lipstick—they go missing, time and again, so I have to go looking, and I can’t find them. The room gets smaller and hotter. The clock ticks faster. The train approaches. And while I’m making these agonizing preparations that must be done, cannot be done, I’ve got to move silently, create not the smallest noise, because a stranger’s passed out drunk on the metal bed against the wall, and he’s going to wake up any second, any second, any second, goddamn, somebody get me out of here, somebody drag me out of this room, this scene, this dream I know is a dream, goddamn, it’s just a dream but I can’t get out, can’t wake, stuck here forever like a black fly in a jar, he’s going to wake, any second, any second.

Thump, thump.

Mother Mary, no. Don’t wake him up.

Thump, thump.

BE QUIET, FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP THAT THUMPING, YOU’LL WAKE HIM UP!

Thump, thump. Dragging me outside myself, outside this sticky, dusty, terrible scene in my head. Thump, thump.

A voice. Miss Lulu? Miss Lulu? You sleeping still?

Eyes fly open. Small, white room. No prairie, no train, no stranger passed out drunk in a bed. Unless that stranger was me.

From the rear patio of my little bungalow on Cable Beach, I sat and watched the Hog Island lighthouse rising from the turquoise sea, so white and tranquil that you simply couldn’t believe the entire world was now at war.

I remember the patio was paved in this quaint mixture of crushed seashells and concrete. There’s a name for it, I believe, but I’ve since forgotten. Never mind. I liked the way it felt on my bare feet, the way there was nothing like it back home, the way it connected me to the beach beyond. I liked the way I could sit in a round-backed garden chair of cunningly wrought metal, lean my elbows on the small wrought metal table, smoke my morning cigarette, drink my morning coffee, like the only customer in a Parisian café that didn’t exist, while I stared out to sea and pondered things.