1. The door to my favorite coffee house, in fact the only one I bother going into anymore, is speckled gray and pink, and looks a little like one of those funky pads they put underneath carpets. To get to the door, you have to go up five cranky steps to a gap-toothed porch painted chippy grey. Three big windows look out at you. If the shades are down, you see a warm glow. If the shades are up, you see a couch, some chairs, a table, and off-white walls painted with the most hideous, chaotic slashings of graffitti. A sign of white wood, looking like something salvaged from a sunken galleon, hangs by little chains from the eaves of the porch. It reads, “the blank page.” 2. The first time I went to The Blank Page was quite by accident. It was a fresh summer night—just like this one—and there were tall, wet clouds slippery over the moon. I had my windows open, and the breeze was swinging in and out, lulling me, and I had entered, some indeterminate time ago, that half-awake, half-asleep place where sentences become vines, and pictures become more real than life. Gently my bed began to float up into the air. A little bit startled, I decided I was having a lucid dream—that rare state that always feels like such a bonus. Only, certain elements did not fit the usual dreaming situation. For instance, to get through the door of my one-room apartment, the floating mattress had to squunch up on either side, squeezing me in the middle like the beans in a burrito. I had never felt anything like that in a flying dream before! I had supposed astral projection involved leaving your body behind, but here I was, still in bed, hearing the door frame scrape by on either side as my unlikely craft headed for open air. But who was I to question the physical laws of alternate planes? I reached out and slammed the door shut behind me—not even pausing to wonder, at the time, how that door had come to be open in the first place. Silently I sailed over the front steps toward the street. 3. Fortunately there was no traffic on my residential street just then, for it took almost the length of the block to gain an altitude about on par with the tops of the oaks in the boulevard. The breezes now rocked my bed sedately, like the ripples of a dark, slow river nudging a rowboat. It was intensely pleasant. I propped my pillows behind my elbows, and sat up, pajama collar flapping gently, to look around. The moon gave the leaves and the pavement below a creamy luster. A few cars sidled by a few blocks away, but no one seemed to take any notice of me. That’s the city for you, I thought. Why should anyone look up? Unlike fish, who, I’d often supposed, would have to have at least four turn signals if they were to take to driving cars, we humans lived mostly in a two-dimensional world. But not I, tonight! What a class-A dream I was having! 4. It was chilly up here, delightfully so. I turned over so as to lie on my belly and watch the scenery head-on, bundling the covers around me. How incredible to feel so cozy, and be in the middle of the air, free! It reminded me of riding in a sleeper car overnight on a train, gliding through worlds of troubles that were never your own, safe and warm through a universe of dark strangeness. I passed over the river, and watched the moonlight glinting there. I passed a sloping cemetery, and saw two squirrels just standing, quietly, on a tombstone. I looked over my shoulder at the downtown lights as they winked their myriad secrets to each other across unending, invisible networks. Finally, in a quiet part of town I’d always been aware of but had never had reason to visit, I started to float downward. I rolled over and sat up, ready. 5. I found there was a woman in my bed with me. She placed her hand on my stomach, and massaged it gently. It was a most reassuring feeling. Without speaking our agreement, we got out of bed and went to sit at a picnic table in a small, concrete court with a few oaks growing out of large, mulched squares. The night was now very dark, the moon having slid behind some burdensome clouds. I heard sirens, a commotion in the distance. I grew slightly nervous. I glanced at the woman beside me—she was small, dark—but she was not looking at me. The din grew steadily louder, but I could not tell from which direction. I had an urge to flee, but a stronger feeling kept me sitting there quietly, as if the only thing to do was to wait. The sky grew orange and hazy, and suddenly a huge emergency vehicle swept into view from a side street to our left. Its sirens were grinding slowly. It was as big as a double-wide mobile home, but had projections and devices all over its hull. It was a dirty white colour. It halted right in front of our little park, and the noise ceased, but the issuance of steam and the whirling hazard-coloured lights kept on. Three or four—it was hard to see in the strange atmosphere—tall figures brusquely dressed leapt out of a door in the vehicle’s side, and walked with purpose and perhaps menace over to our table. They were talking. I could not tell what they were saying, but it sounded accusatory. Feeling overwhelmed, not stopping to think, I got up and walked swiftly in the other direction, back towards my bed. But my bed had vanished. I found instead a lowly building, with a door—a grey and pink speckled door. With a queer feeling in my gut, I opened it and went inside to the warm light. 6. I was surrounded by gentle noise and warmth. There was a smell of popcorn. People stood on the dirt-brown carpet and talked in little groups here and there. They held glasses or mugs in their hands. A couple bathed in moonlight blue from a tin-shaded lamp sat in close embrace on a love-seat by one wall. And the walls! Swirls of paint and words in all shades of magic marker graced, or defiled, I couldn’t quite tell which, all available wall surfaces, including the ceiling, where a broad fan lazily whirred. I realized in the back of my mind that piano music lightly strung all the disparate conversations together. The whole room thrummed. 7. My eyes wandered over the walls. Over a rounded archway that appeared to lead into another room, a space had been reserved for a menu. There were plenty of normal-sounding items listed—ham sandwiches, iced tea, cappucino, etcetera—but towards the bottom of the list, the entries started to make a little less sense, somehow: Chicken and Popcorn Eat Less Special, Black Slab on Rye, Swirling Tendriloin, Tennis Balls Any Way You Like ’Em.… As I was studying all this (beginning to realize I was hungry), an orange dog, about knee-high to me and with a bold white chest, came out from the archway. He was smiling.