First I'm in a nondescript house. My 'sister' is one of the clerks at the Hillside Market: a short, small, insubstantial brunette girl who always wears piles and piles of clothing, perhaps to add to her size. Anyway, she walks through the house wearing black sweater, black sock hat, black everything, trailed by her simian boyfriend. He has a sloping forehead, eyebrows growing together, he slouches, wears a leather jacket with a chain over a T-shirt with some band logo on it, and dirty jeans. In the meantime the place has coalesced into something resembling my mother-in-law's house, where we're sleeping tonight. I go into the other room to get my biography of James Joyce, and find that my old friend Steve has placed a band logo right over the front cover picture of Joyce, so that the cover looks like a band logo in a straw hat and tailored shirt. I'm somewhat annoyed, because my copy was in perfect condition and it's a good book, but I figure I can get the sticker off. Then I realize that Steve has signed it on the title page: "Hey David This is you're old budy Steve hey!" Idiot. God damn it, I think, dropping the book, because I realize that they've ALL been here. All the old band members of every band I've ever been in has come in and left his sticker and signature on one or another of my books. Thankfully, only some two and a half dozen books, mostly paperbacks, have been ruined, so it's no big loss. The main damage was to Ellmann's Joyce biography. So I go out into the hall carrying nothing, intending to tell Laura about this, when I find my way blocked by my younger brother, Nick. Except in the dream he's my older brother, and over the course of the following conversations and actions, he becomes the actor who plays Frazier's brother on the T.V. show Frazier. He shows me a jar filled with something grey. "What is it?" I ask. "Ashes." "Ashes?" "The ashes of Cary Grant." "Cary Grant was quite a womanizer, wasn't he?" "Yes, he was," says my brother, who shows me a film about all of Cary Grant's women. We then find ourselves in a storage room in my parent's house, riffling through a desk. We're looking for the photographs of Cary Grant's women. I turn up a small rubberbanded pile of hot rod magazines, kept, it seems, primarily for the swimsuit models. Because Nick turns very red and says: "Put those back! Now!" I kind of laugh and say, "What's wrong with them? What's the big deal?" knowing full well why he's so embarrassed, but wanting to cure him of that embarrassment. It doesn't work and he shuts the drawer himself, saying: "They're mine. You can't have them." Now we're in Arizona, my brother and I, with a bottle of Cary Grant's ashes. We're sitting at an old picnic table below a freeway. On the other side of the freeway is a huge red cliff. I open the jar of ashes to get a better look, and like an idiot, I spill them. Now, that would have been fine, except it was a picnic table, so the ashes begin to pour through the spaces between the boards. Frantically, I try to contain the pile and put as much of it as I can back in the jar. My brother, apparently (now the actor-guy) knows all about cleaning up Cary-Grant-ash-spills, and he gives me a straw. He shows me how to clean up the spill and retrieve every ash: all you have to do is put the straw in the jar and point the jar at the cliff; then, you eject the ashes at the cliff. The ashes bounced off the cliff face and swooped around the back of the table, then swooped around you again, hit the cliff face, and bounced back into the jar. The straw was to direct the initial flow, so the outgoing and incoming streams of ashes would not collide and make a mess.