In the early morning, I looked down at the parking lot, which was full of mud and empty of cars. The mud was on the street, too, where the few remaining cars were parked haphazardly and were disappearing rapidly as little clusters of people came out and drove them off. I wondered if there had been an apocalyptic storm.

I noticed that I was looking down from an unusually sharp angle and what seemed to be a tremendous height, far greater than that of my 12th-floor apartment and probably far greater than that of the 18th floor. I felt even more disoriented and disturbed.

As it was early, I wasn’t dressed. I walked into an unfamiliar, contemporary, posh white room, and then another, before realizing that all the apartments must be connected and that I had entered those of neighbors. I was lost. I heard voices and tried to avoid them but was terrified lest they come upon me in my nakedness. I wondered if they too were nude.

Then I was at a baseball park, where I was half of a renowned pitcher-catcher team. We were known for throwing home runs, as though that were a really difficult and desirable feat. But we were cheats. To keep the fans happy and cheering, we started to pretend we’d heard the crack of the bat and that we were watching the trajectory of a home run ball, time after time. As I did so again, guiltily, I saw the enormous head of the Statue of Liberty loom before me as though she had appeared to remind us of the great lie we’d begun that we could not seem to stop.