Another dream on the archipelago: all the main players from my college debate career were attending a tournament at a coastal university. Though it was only minutes down the road from the Swiss village, the town seemed to occupy two climates simultaneously. Ornate beach-front restaurants enjoyed endless summer, with a transit system leading into parts of Istanbul. The debaters, elite and voracious in all aspects of their life, ordered street food in halting Turkish, exchanging tips on pronunciation. As I followed a busy highway along the inlet, the scene changed: frosty paths that required an ice pick to navigate, a horrific dogsledding accident, small British homes with messy gardens.

I had taken up residence in a professor’s home—solid glass, accessible only by a miraculous spinning leap through a hole in the ceiling—and the professor’s mother soon died in her crystalline breakfast nook, leaving me piles of pamphlets and cardigans to sort. They allowed the woman to decompose in her clothing, so I left abruptly. Back in town, M.T. requested a notebook from H.E. so I went into the library, where I found M.W. and his friends studying for their upcoming rounds. They pointed out the library’s refreshments table. Piles of massive, grotesque tomato sandwiches were labeled for sale - you’d pay on your phone and a woman would appear to hand it to you. As I leafed through the layers of swollen cherry tomatoes and cheese, I noticed small brass hinges embedded in the bread, and the sandwich opened stickily to reveal an advertisement for the library cafe’s new milkshakes.

I left the library. The campus had become an underground warren of brightly lit, glass-fronted rooms displaying the manufacturing process for the cafe’s confections. Robots dressed like rabbits crushed cookies into small vats of swirling ice cream. Men in superhero costumes gave studied pitches to groups elementary school students. By the end of the tour, we’d each been handed an old-fashioned air compressor. It fell into pieces whenever you held it too tightly, so we all crouched beside our pile of disassembled metal. Someone in a cape explained that these products - the sandwiches, the milkshakes, even the compressor - were designed to grow a second stomach inside of you. Upon contact with animal products, it would react violently - enforcing a sort of veganism that had been deemed necessary “by those in our community willing to do the work.” Everyone held the compressor’s nozzle to their lips and gasped as a flexible, pink orb expanded into their throat and rushed down to coat the inside of their stomach.

I ran outside and hid on one of the small, rocky beaches that were always present in these southern archipelago towns. The waves stretched 50 feet into the sky and seemed to hang there for hours.

I was on the archipelago again, trying to purchase a tree on Craigslist. I followed an ad to a rural neighborhood on an island with long dusty streets. The house from the listing was a dark wood cabin looming over a deep, thin yard, and I wandered to the back where a hill rose sharply to meet the fence. It was a horrific scene: at first the trees were tropical—thick, swollen bulbs at the ground tapering off to dozens of small growths each like a palm—but slowly they resolved into human figures. They lay sprawled around one another, grown together with skin like pink, faded paper and large cartoonish sutures at the seams. The entire body of the first was growing out of the groin of the second, whose face was larger than my torso. He couldn’t focus his eyes very clearly, but he gestured up the hill toward a ladder leaning against the fence. I climbed up and picked through the contents of a forgotten tool belt, finding a machete. A clear sense of its purpose dawned on me with that usual dream clarity just as the owner emerged from the cabin, pointing a gun at me. I descended and we discussed the tree, though I had to apologize immediately as I didn’t intend to take it. He asked why I’d come and I told him about the machete, about what I thought the trees were up to. Though both the man and the trees smiled at me sadly, I struggled to determine my loyalties in the scene. He told me it was time to leave so he could work in peace, then turned to gather the machete as the trees began to wail.

Seconds later, I was in an underground mansion. Packs of dogs chased one other around a kitchen of at least a square mile while my cousins, Mormon but clean cut with slicked back hair, discussed wine in a series of scattered vignettes. I kept trying to find my bedroom but it was hidden, so I slept in shifts, continuously awoken by shouts and laughter from the party. I tried to warn everyone about the slaughter of the trees, as that property was clearly just above the mansion, but nobody would listen. Finally I found my mom, helped her into the glider, and we resumed our usual aerial tour of the islands.

Last night I was back on that same island road, camping in Alex’s living room with William while we were on break from school. His family knew we were there but we had to hide behind the furniture and could never stop crawling. I was responsible for carrying all of us up a hillside each night for dinner at the monastery, climbing slowly between the large roots that pushed out from the path. The monastery was a school in the style of Santa Barbara’s architecture, and when we arrived there was some brief tension with Francis’ roommates in the dining hall. I was asked to perform and swung between some vines dangling from the ceiling while E looked on, applauding tepidly. This crisis quickly changed back to the road, where I was now taking a vacation with MT’s family out to the island kingdoms. The Tonga lived off that Swiss town’s port just past the hill, and their first island was made of thin strands of dirt woven together like a cinnamon roll. As you climbed ashore, they would perform a ragged dance, prompt you for 10 pence, and then lead you to the point where the tours departed. MT’s parents spoke a strange version of Japanese and kept asking me about my intentions. As we waited for the tour boat, the whole family jumped into the water in their clothes and looked up at me sadly as they sank, mouths open. I laboriously pulled them out one after another but found that they’d turned into a chubby version of Larry’s family. There was a baby that hadn’t been there when we started. Everyone survived, but MT, now white and swollen, wouldn’t talk to me. I knew I was in a novel she had written—she’d shown it to me, said it covered my current life in the island nations—but the baby warned that my appearances in the plot were brief and tragic.

I was driving the archipelago’s connecting road: impossibly green hills, European towns that reappear every few minutes, sudden drops to the sea. After a series of windmills, it all briefly became the Gaviota Pass and I noticed a very thin state park—maybe ten foot by forty—alongside a bend in the road. It had a small ranger station—maybe five foot square—where I took shelter. The next day, Ian appeared in the small neighboring town (tacky cobblestones, lots of Best Buys, people in beach outfits) but he had shrunk to 5’8. He told me that he was buying the state park with Michelle and that they would turn it into an architecture project. Then: a joyful shout of “Change scene!” and a huge crack from the sky. Suddenly it was a montage of Ian, Michelle, and a rotating cast of sleepy, slovenly architects, dozing off on the benches across the road from the park as they studied how the light fell on their new property. They drew incomprehensible “emotional studies” of the place and talked in circles about “the social utility of the discipline”. Michelle kept trying to tattoo Ian, but he was shrinking too quickly now for her efforts to last.

I left them there, embarassed at what I had introduced to the islands.

In the weeks before my flight, I’ve found myself dreaming of a series of islands. A single road connects everything—at times tropical, often European—though the order in which things appear is unpredictable. The main climaxes and inversions often take place in a Swiss town: erratic topography, a large wooden pavilion, wide balconies with pastel umbrellas looking out over the sea. The road never quite reaches any of this, though; it dips and buckles and turns in on itself, always missing what you see through the windshield. Roadside stops involve a series of boats and flights, the occasional swim. I’ve encountered almost everyone I know well along the road by now, but social scenes haven’t been very important in these early nights of exploration.

Mostly there are long, silent periods spent in a glider, examining the islands from above.

I was attending a debate tournament in a massive neoclassical palace. Terraced sloping hills, gravel paths, and then through an ornamental gate and out into a faded high school gym. Towards the end of the day, my mom arrived and we watched a trial presided over by EL and some other Yale students. Mom interrupted the proceedings with an oddly formal speech against cruelty: tight metaphors, long pauses, and a pattern of eye contact that couldn’t have been random. We walked back to the car as I tried to gather my childhood belongings from the topiary. Beside the hedge, a girl from Terrace House (the one who spoke Korean and started a lingerie brand) invited me to her house in Hope Ranch for “something less dour than all that”. She was there on behalf of the Singaporean treasury. As we left the formal gardens behind, my Mom turned to me and said “Watch this”: and then she was in the air, twirling down a tree-lined hill into a city that resembled downtown Seattle.

I shared a squalid apartment in a coastal town with a bunch of young people during the late days of the pandemic. Someone in the flat had two fathers, and I ran into one of them floating in an inter-tube under a local bridge. I was trying to swim between the pillars, but I was encumbered by my backpack and the current had taken both of us by surprise. He whispered the day’s virus numbers to me as we clung to the inter-tube. Once I made it to the other side, we all met up at a cafe and my father appeared to tell me that my childhood friend had died, not as a result of the virus—”but it certainly didn’t help”. Later, I walked down the coastline outside of town, which was densely forested and had long, rough stone paths between columns that I kept trying to photograph. Other walkers chided me for my desperation to record such an ordinary scene. At times, the ocean seemed to run backwards up into pools on the hillside above. Realizing that I couldn’t stay there forever, I decided to become a detective in Hong Kong, and luckily one of the boats tied up to the dock was about to return there. It began to rain softly as we huddled on the small, curved deck, and I learned the Cantonense phrase for ”he’s addicted to the pursuit, as am I” as the town shrank in the distance.

Dusty, open roads enlivened by a medieval procession: groups of spearmen from different kingdoms charging endlessly back and forth under colorful banners. Daniel and I picked our way through the crowd and climbed into a university campus, covered with walkways and open trenches that led down into the HVAC equipment. It soon became clear that we had to use a barrel (infinitely large on the inside) to sneak out a delicate metallic object that contained everything we cared about. Daniel set the barrel on the ground and said “Watch this”: The whole building melted down into it like wax and we ran off past the spearmen with our prize.

Old Town Goleta was London, but the embassy was closed. Next door on the corner, Larry’s shop was a vast warehouse of piled antiques. Dad and I snuck in and jumped onto a decaying tapestry on the wall that unraveled as we climbed.

Later in the hallway, I loaned a young girl a torn sheet of paper and a pen. We stood and watched dad perform Tom Waits songs for the store atop a pile of accordions, each expanding and contracting on its own in excitement. I leaned over to see what the girl was writing, and she coyly showed me her neat handwriting: “It’s night, and the thing walks through the valleys so slowly.”

I dropped mom off at yoga before heading to a cooking class in a converted martial arts studio. The stairs were impossibly narrow but I had to leave my backpack in a top room where everything shrank away at odd angles. I walked out through the lobby and discovered an airport terminal where Tom Hanks was holding a sign with my name. On the elevator down to Ocean Beach, Tom touched my shoulder and warned me quite earnestly about the tide. As soon as we stepped onto the sand, I saw that he was right: forty foot tall waves, entirely transparent and crashing against a quickly receding strip of coastline under the cliffs. We ran along the beach timing the waves and Tom gave me his phone to call for help. Eventually the tide receded, but new caves had appeared in the cliffside. Elaborate totems were scattered along the sand, and Polynesians emerged in grass suits, adopting formalized poses as they guarded the elevator.