Last night I came home and Rebecca was gone and there�s going to be a delay getting the laptop to me, and I had thought I�d go to the supermarket and clean up and be all kinds of industrious, but I couldn�t stop thinking about Todd and was getting more miserable by the minute, gulping back the teasingly incipient sobs, and around nine I made myself go to bed, banking on the freedom and forgetting of sleep. Guess what I didn�t bank on.

In this dream, Todd and I had gone to Mexico on vacation. The first place we went I don�t even know what it was supposed to be � it was a large semi-enclosed space, like a carport or a judging arena at a county fair, that you could walk through, peeking through long windows into little rooms where all that was happening was that a fan was blowing liquefied beef tallow out of a small vent maybe a foot off the ground, so it blew everywhere and then solidified in accumulating lumps and splatters, like stalagmites. It smelled awful. The other people who were there, all tourists, seemed much more impressed than I was and kept taking pictures through the windows. When we�d seen all there was to see, we had to file out one by one through a gate. There hadn�t been any admission to get in, but the line to the gate was along a cafeteria-type counter, and a man working there would dip up a cup of dirty brackish lemonade and hand it to each person and say, "Two dollars." It wasn�t optional. He wouldn�t take exact change, only fives and tens, and I looked past the gate and saw several beggars clustered there, two or three of whom would descend on each exiting tourist, who because the lemonade transaction occurred just a few feet in front of the gate and there was someone at the other end ensuring that the line moved at a fast clip probably still had bills in their hands. So it�s all a scam, I thought, and this depressed me. I decided to give my money to the one little boy in the group, who wasn�t as aggressive as the others therefore was empty handed so far. Then I realized that likely as not one of them would just take the money from him later, and this depressed me even more.

Then we were at a small casino/museum where Todd said two of his good friends worked. It was round with no windows, and after we�d gotten tickets, there was a vestibule with signs all over it to the effect that all guests and patrons must remove their pants for the duration of their visit, absolutely no pants or skirts allowed past this point, people in pants will be asked to leave immediately, etc. So I took off my pants. There wasn�t anywhere to put them, so I wadded them up and put them under my wool sweater � which I was wearing even though it was summer in Mexico and the museum wasn�t air conditioned. We were walking around, looking at stuff � run-down blackjack tables populated by old men with oxygen tanks and old women in pancake makeup and miniskirts, crappy dioramas of indigenous history � and two things were happening. One is that only a few people had taken off their pants (I realized Todd hadn�t) and those of us who had, when we passed each other, would exchange pained and confused looks: how had we misunderstood? We were only following directions. Two is that I started asking Todd where his friends were, and his answers were first evasive and then rude and always defensive, so I just shut up, and I began to think that maybe he�d made that part up. But he had told me all about them, and we�d come to Mexico partly to see them � if they didn�t exist, then what was he doing here? And why here, this nasty dirty tourist trap with nothing to recommend it? And also if they didn�t exist, how had he thought he was going to keep that from me? I was bewildered and hurt and feeling like I wanted to cry and the blackjack guys were starting to look at me and leer, and suddenly I was very conscious of having no pants on, so I said excuse-me to Todd and ran out a side door. I found myself outside in the sun and got fully dressed again. Then a very short, fat Native-American-looking woman (I fell asleep while reading "Indian Killer") with painted-on eyebrows as ornate as sideways treble clefs grabbed me hard by the arm and marched me up a flight of stairs to another semi-enclosed area, like a raised deck just off the museum where people could sit and chat. She was angry with me. She was wearing the strangest glasses I�d ever seen � there was a clear vinyl contraption that wound around her head and had two puffy pouches in front, and in the pouches were something, also made out of clear vinyl, that looked like change purses, with zippers around the edge of each of them. I wondered how she could see at all through four layers of thick plastic. She asked me what I�d been doing and I said, Well, putting my pants on. She asked, "Are you trying to tell me you didn�t see the signs?" I said, "What signs?" and she sighed elaborately and pulled out a stack of grubby Polaroids. Some showed the entrance vestibule, and in addition to the signs that I�d seen posted, there were other ones too, there were Please remove and put on pants only in this room; changing elsewhere on the premises is strictly not permitted and All pants and skirts must be stored in lockers. In the photo the room looked different � there were in fact lockers in the room, as well as an open armoire with hangers, and it was pretty and well lit and welcoming, like someone�s bedroom. The room I�d been in was dim and dingy, with mildewy, cigarette-burned carpeting. I tried to explain this to the woman, that her Polaroids must be old because the lockers were gone now and some of the signs had been taken down, and she got furious, shaking me by the shoulders and accusing me of trying to be a smartass, because everyone understood the concept of a Polaroid, the whole point was that you only had to wait a few seconds to see the image, therefore a Polaroid was the closest representation you could have of the way things actually were. But what if the Polaroid was taken years ago? I asked. She slapped me and said, No, it didn�t work that way, what you saw in a Polaroid was definitively true and real, for that was the nature of the medium. I didn�t know what to say � where could I begin? Looking over the deck, I saw Todd come out of the same door I�d used, and I thought I caught his eye and then saw him move in the direction of the stairs to the deck. I waited for him to rescue me from this bizarre interrogation, but he never came up the stairs, and a minute later I saw him duck back inside the museum without another glance at me. I knew I was stuck. Something inside me settled, resigned, and I looked at the woman again right through her outer-space glasses, waiting for whatever else she was going to say to me and maybe for her to hit me again. I didn�t care anymore. I felt, not in a good way, like I had all the time in the world. When she finally started talking, her tone was different. It was aggrieved, as though I�d tried to hurt her. "All you rich American kids," she said, "and especially you from your hoity-toity family with your hoity-toity friends, all you want to do is come down here and break the rules and take your pants off where you�re not supposed to and laugh at us. You think you�re better than we are." I started to explain the truth about my family, how, fine, my dad�s a college professor now but until I was in junior high school he was first getting his Ph.D. on student loans and then in scut junior-faculty positions and there was no money at all, how the reason I won�t eat mac and cheese from a box anymore is that I used to have to eat it every night, but after a minute I became aware that nothing I could say would change this woman�s mind about me or � and I realized this was what I wanted � bring her closer to me, so that we could have a moment of commonality and just sit quietly with each other, understanding. It was all hopeless. I let my voice trail off, feeling as I did so that it was a thing separate from me. I lay my arm across the edge of the deck and my head on my arm and I looked off past the museum, into the distance. We were in the middle of a desert and I saw that the museum was only one part of a whole shitty tourist-oriented complex, like someone had built a set for a cowboys-and-Indians movie. The buildings all looked alike and had signs on them in what someone had apparently decided was an Old West typeface: Provisions, Grub, Book-Learning (this was the schoolhouse). I read the signs to myself over and over again in a whisper, trying to make them mean something, trying to make anything make sense. Then I woke up.

P.S. (later) It just hit me that even though what I was doing was putting my pants back on where I wasn't supposed to, the woman who busted me would later name my crime as taking them off. That's the way I dreamed it, though.