I was reading books that Will had just written. Very Will. The covers were dark, mottled, evil looking, with shadowy pictures of him all over them, smoking cigarettes, wearing his boots, being evil. I read them through. They seemed very much like something Will would write, very natural. I thought they were unfocused, diffuse, full of sarcastic laughter and evil -- very good. They were like other of his writings but much better.  Then, Brad and I were working on a corpse. These were the remains of a French abbe, a monk who lived in the fourteenth century. We were smashing his bones in the name of research. Or rather, I was. Because earlier I had a choice of occupation, and I chose smashing his bones, because the other job, sawing through his meat, was far too grisly for my stomach. Smashing his bones was the least gory and unpleasant of all the research Brad had to offer me. Even then, after I had the abbe's bones all laid out on the table and I picked up the skull and my hammer, I had an enormous amount of difficulty bringing myself to smash the skull in. Something about it was still too human, still too alive.  Then I guess I took a break or something, because all of a sudden I'm in a bakery, waiting in line. I ordered candied bread -- they didn't have any of that. So instead I got a loaf of raisin bread. As the baker, a young guy with blond hair and a yellow shirt, got the bread, I told him about my adventures with the abbe's bones. He was very unamused and glared at me with the most intensely angry, chilling blue eyes I have ever seen. Perhaps he was a Christian. Wisely, probably, I left the bakery and went back to bone-smashing.  When I came back, I learned that we were doing this research in the name of the National Geographic Society. No sooner had I set my loaf of bread down and picked up my hammer to keep smashing monk-bones when hot damn but George from Seinfeld reportedly steps on the work site. The resulting crush of tourists made it all but impossible to work. Luckily, I only had a metatarsal or two to grind into powder, so I finished up and packaged the dust up for Brad.  Whoops! Brad was suppossed to send the monk's bone-dust to "Cancun in China" but he sent it to somewhere called Xencin; transliteration error. Disastrous! The gleeful natives of Cancun, China nearly stole it for use as an aphrodisiac (Traditional Chinese Aphrodisiac: Powdered Monk Bones), but they sent it back to us after concluding they were on the side of science. Close one.  I guess it's after work, because now I'm passing the downtown library. I walk by the window; sitting at the tables, reading books, frozen in sleep, are all my friends from highschool. They are all asleep, sitting up straight, holding their books open. Josh in particular (a short guy with a beard, shoulder-length hair, leather jacket, smell of cologne, very soft-spoken and intelligent) has a half-there smile on his face, as though he knew I was outside the window, looking in, but he's too sharp to let people know he's awake when he's supposed to be asleep. The library was dark and closed, so evidently all these friends of mine had gotten trapped inside when the library closed, and so they had to sleep there, in the middle of their studies. Though it was more like their bodies had been put in suspended animation -- there was a very strong feeling that my friends in the window -- Josh, Nathan, Mike, and others -- had been *preserved* there somehow from time immemorial, as though they only gave the appearance of life. As though dust built up on them day after day after day, like they'd been pickled or formaldehyded and stuck with pins into their current "studying" positions.  Now I'm in some house, a hippie house in town. I'm in the main room with a very hostile guitarist. Every time I come near him he scowls and lashes out with a limb. So I keep to the other side of the room, amongst the huge pile of used books and board games. I see that these are separated into two main piles: civil rights materials, and a large pile of books and games about sex which dated from the seventies, and some porn magazines of the same era. Laura showed up from nowhere, and insisted I say something brilliant-sounding about the civil rights movement. Off the top of my head I said: "I think it was the defining political movement of the late twentieth century!"  I woke up at this point to use the bathroom, then I climbed back in bed and tried to go back to sleep. Alas, awaiting me in that half-world between sleep and waking, was an intensely frightening blue face, perfectly round, set off in the darkness. It looked like it was made of blue metal. STARING AT ME. Just this BLUE FACE, leering at me with this stupid, malevolent, menacing look.