Red brick sidewalks and white stone buildings, clots of people, some strolling, or waiting, others sitting; people talking to each other, or, like schizophrenics, into plastic that talks back: Friend, or God? each breath                a word                 unsaid. On the bus, an old Chinese woman sits in front of me. Small-boned, high cheekbones slanting to a dignified carriage, straight black hair with paths of gray drawn back through a green jade clip, she talks to the driver in brittle words. I awake trying to recall what I'd just dreamed. Usually I can't; feeling it, too, is trying to break through. Why is this reality and that a dream? If I'm cut here, don't I also bleed there? Yet each day I naively set out, trusting my senses are describing the world.