Dream (with Michael Chabon)

I am a spy. Maybe an assasin too. I sneak around the underground parking structure. My backpack stitching strains with the books stuffed in so tight that the backpack is almost as thick as it is tall. I emerge, walking up the ramp into the light. I have my mission and set out.

I walk around Chinatown, peering in the red-painted restaurants with the neon signs and the spinning ducks in the windows. I forget my mission now (in the wakened state) but I remember I keep running around looking for something, running from someone one.

I walke back down into the parking structure, to meet with my team. I stoop under a concrete ledge to get down into the parking area and find my team waiting. Then I realize that the whole plot was a story, written by the guy that wrote Summerland (I can remember the cover of the book -- that is how I know it was him) standing in front of me. I am not real -- I am just a character in his latest spy thriller.

A team member (call him Alfie) stands behind his pickup and unties a moacha brown sweater (the color of coffee after 2 heaping tablespoons of artifical creamer) from the rear loading hatch. His boyfriend had died earlier in the mission -- a casualty of the secret war we were in. Written on the back of the sweater in big, black block print was the note (like you would write on a note on a fridge) "Speaking of lemonade -- " and I can't see the rest of the note. Alfie crumples in tears, the loss of his boyfriend finally sinking in -- the final message is a mundane message about lemonade. I went over and encircled him in my arms, comforting him as he clutched the sweater to his chest, still sobbing those wet, wracked-with-uncontrollable-grief tears.