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Out on the dunes, back in the present tense, your roommates are morphing into comic book figures. Shana is Albino Woman and Zed is Hash Man, their heads and eyes ballooning, becoming stylized. You hear yourself start laughing, your voice way far away down your throat. You want to beat them back to the trailer so you can carry out your plan, which no one, no matter what route they took to get here, has heard. But the logic of your scheme — hide the forgery? or do you have the Rosellini? etc. — eludes you. You can only recount the individual elements, the variables, not the connecting thread: your encounter with the decaying crate; your roommates' stories about the weird American; the December pig performance; the mysterious Algerian "Tanya." You try to run but your legs are rebelling as in dream escapes. It's like you're trying to will someone else's legs to move, or your own robot legs, artificial joints, hip-knee-ankle replacement surgeries performed while you slept. Maybe you should've gotten hands instead, or at least hooks. You wonder what Zanger, the original World-Famous Cup Flipper, would do in this situation.
