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deputy superintendent.
    In the second he finds himself snorkeling in water so clear it is like dense air. The fish are plentiful. They get in the way; they nip at his skin. He sees a manta ray the size of a car flap by under him; he sees moray eels and green and yellow sea snakes and a twenty-foot shark swallowing a brown grouper. Without realizing it he has swum several hundred yards away from the shore, past the continental shelf. When he looks down, what faces him is bottomless ocean, deep blue, all-encompassing, and he falls into the eye that is looking at him.
    The third dream is the one Angel longs for most and the one he is most reticent to enter. When it happens, he is drinking champagne with Amanda in a room where everyone is naked except them. After a few minutes a blonde-haired woman approaches the two of them and asks them in a gentle but insistent tone to take off their clothes. She is helping Angel unzip his pants when suddenly a rabbit bloops out the fly. She laughs and throws the rabbit into the air. Amanda is looking at this with a smile or a grimace on her face—he can’t tell. She asks him if he knows the woman, and he says there is something familiar about her but that no, really, he has never seen her before. In some versions of the dream Amanda catches the rabbit and is petting it. In another variation the woman with blonde hair is Angel’s wife and Amanda is in love with her. She pulls her away from him and takes her to the sofa, where they have sex. Usually a dead fish makes its way into the dream, wrapped in newspaper or hanging from a hook, and off in the distance there is a beautiful beach on which soft, creamy waves are breaking. What wakes him: a white bird crossing the sky.

THE CITY OF
THE PRESENT
    E ach day you wake to a landscape that has followed you since childhood. Each morning you miss the songs of mockingbirds you heard many years ago when you lived by the river. What you hear instead are the garbage trucks of America, their grating roar, and the honk of taxis, impatient yellow geese, and the banter of drunken children going home at dawn to anxious parents in the suburbs. You are not of this place and so you can only pine for those early days, finding yourself awake in the same spot, the city of the present and the city of the past repeated again and again as if they were practices of memory trapped in reality.
    The city now is ahead of itself. Deeply wounded, it has healed. What is left is a scar, a raw, hard place on the skin, and the airplanes crashing into buildings and the smoke billowing and the ashes settling on the cemetery. One third of the people want to cover up the hole as if it never existed; another group wants to dig inside, keep the wound open, let it suppurate until it infects the abdominal cavity; the last third doesn’t know what is best. They go to their jobs in the morning, return home at night, live the everyday life in suspension between the idyllic past and the lurching future, and hope that from the constancy comes the antidote against the claims of time. What none of them knows is that over the actual city there is a primal city that will outlive them. They inhabit both, one as a function of their geographical selves, that is, creatures who either find themselves accidentally among its structures or have actually sought it out for its familiarity; the other in relation to their function as businessmen, construction workers, writers, cooks, crane operators, hot-dog vendors, sausage makers, ballet dancers, window cleaners, priests, simultaneous interpreters, brick layers, bridge painters.
    At lunch you overhear a conversation between two friends about seducing a landlady. Friend number one wants nothing more than to have her turn off her radio. She plays an oldie station with the volume loud enough that he has trouble concentrating. Listen, he tells his friend. I could do it. She’s still attractive; she must have been beautiful as a young