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funerals."
    "What kind of foul play?"
    "I have no idea."
    "Jesus," I said. "This bothers me; this scares me."
    "Forget it," he said. "You're covered. If you hear from him
again, call me; I'll find out what I can, but you don't have
anything to worry about."
    In the first Lisa Kim dream I had, we were sitting in the garden
at La Choza. It was late October, but the sun was warm
on our backs, bright on our faces. It was too high in the sky
for the time of the evening; we wore big sweaters. We were all
lovely. The women had white teeth and wisps of hair across
their faces. We laughed and laughed. The air was golden. We
were all friends, although I hadn't seen some of these people
in years, didn't know a couple very well, didn't know one at
all. Still, I felt closer to them, more comfortable with them
than with my real friends, with myself. Perhaps we were
stoned. Things moved slowly. Things tasted wonderful.
We were passing big platters of kamoosh: fried tortilla
chips spread with beans, then melted yellow cheese, then guacamole.
    We were eating Steak Oaxaca: flour tortillas covered
with chunks of carne asada, onions and cilantro, then melted
white cheese. We were drinking beer from cans so icy they
were hard to hold. We were holding them high in the air.
    Someone toasted Carlos Zambrano, who had just pitched
a no-hit, no-run perfect game striking out all twenty-seven
Red Sox he had faced to win the World Series. I think we'd
just come from Wrigley Field. It must have been a Sunday.
    We toasted Ernie Banks for hitting a home run onto a
rooftop across Waveland Avenue.
    We toasted Bill Madlock for going four for four on the
last day of the season to win the batting title.
    We toasted Rick Reuschel for being so fat and graceful.
    We toasted John Kenneth Galbraith for being so tall
and old.
    We toasted Dag Hammarskjold for giving his life for
world peace.
    We toasted Homer Simpson and Julia Child and Dave
Van Ronk and Susan Sontag and Snoop Doggy Dogg. Then
Lisa Kim appeared at the other end of the picnic table like
a happy Banquo. She raised a champagne flute. She smiled
that smile, her eyes locked on mine, and she shook her
head a little bit as if to say, "I can't believe it." What she
actually said was, "Here's to you, mister, and we both know
for what."
    On Saturday morning I bought a clothbound artist's sketchbook
at Good's Art Supplies and took it down the street to
Café Express, a coffeehouse full of secondhand couches and
kitchen tables near our apartment in Evanston. I got a big
ceramic mug of coffee and started writing. It was the first
time in a long time that I'd written much of anything that
wasn't of some utilitarian or commercial value, and I didn't
quite know how to begin. I decided to make a list, a catalog
I guess, of something that had been on my mind a lot: my
near occasions of death. The first time I know I might have
died was when I was two or three and I had a temperature
of 104. My parents put me in a bathtub of cold water and ice
cubes, and I screamed bloody murder. The first such event I
remember was three or four years later, when I slipped off a
jetty in Lake Michigan into a riptide and someone—I don't
know who—just caught me by the back of my T-shirt. Then
there was the cold spring weekend my family went to our
summer home before the water was turned on or the phone
activated. We built a huge banked fire in the living room and
slept on mattresses around it. It turned out that the firebrick
in the fireplace was old and bad and the heat had caused a
smoldering fire in the wall behind. We all woke together
in the middle of the night to a room filled with smoke. My
brother and I rolled down our hill in pitch black to seek help
while my parents kept the fire at bay with water, soda, milk,
and then sand until the volunteer firefighters from Covert
five miles away arrived.
    Another time my dad got a headache working in the
basement on a Sunday afternoon in January. He suspected
a gas leak, but the two guys