“How about a quicky?” he said, following her to the bedroom where she slipped on her nurse’s uniform.

“No time, darling. Would you mind cooking something simple tonight? Say, with a light hand on the spice rack?”

“Jeezo. Here I sit, unfucked and my cooking criticized. High and dry. Do you have time to tuck me in?” he added archly.

“If you hurry.” She tapped her foot as he ripped off his clothes. She had been the sole daughter in a family that included four brothers and had a profound understanding of men. She arranged the sheet around his neck as a barber would, and kissed his brow. He was a world-class sleeper and was already drifting off as she brushed her golden hair. She noted that his brow was beginning to furrow. His spicy cooking and absurd nightmare had scarcely provided her with the sort of sleep a surgical nurse needs. The poor soul has just figured out he’s going to die someday, she thought, leaving for work.

She was right on the money because she was very smart. Johnny was, in fact, taking dictation in his dreams: one of those curious, relatively rare dreams where there is a voice, and the voice presumes to give instructions. He was commanded to change his future. The summer before, his ninety-six-year-old grandmother had told him of such a voice: first she heard a soprano singing a hymn in Swedish, then a huge rushing of a river, then the voice, “Don’t ever go back to Milwaukee. There’s mud on the streets in Milwaukee.” In her dreams Johnny had recognized the roots of prophecy. If a faddish contemporary evangelist, say Oral Roberts, had such a dream, Johnny thought, Milwaukee would be in for trouble in regards to tourism. But to change the future moment by moment. To throw this fatal gauntlet in the snout of life. Deep in his dreams he became a cowboy, a fireman, a farmer, a sailor at the prow of a barkentine sailing across a coal black sea. The dream was a violent baptism, a little vitiated by the detail, just before awakening, of Johnny receiving a blowjob from a crone in Spain. Her face looked like a shucked pecan. But the voice itself was an oracular baritone and came from a water-filled puddle where a tree had tipped over.

Chapter 2

The trouble is that nobody gets to be anyone else. The often sorry mental states of actors and actresses attest to that. Meet them. See the folly whirling in their eyes.