You dream that a high school buddy of yours is going to have lunch with Lorrie Moore and won’t introduce you to her when you ask him to. You decide to stalk him and then run into them “by chance” where you’ll make your move by impressing her with your knowledge of her work and the best of your charismatic magic.
There is a subplot wherein you try to speak with two tattooed Russian girls who are working a counter at a lemonade stand at a mall food court. The detail of their tattoos is inconsequential. They are terribly young and their bored eyes are by far their most striking feature. They never speak a word but you just know. They are one person.
After this it becomes clear that you’re at the mall because that’s where your buddy and Lorrie Moore will be. They lunch at a Mongolian barbecue place. All of the seats are made of fiberglass and the decor is themed mustard yellow. There is a bar and that’s where your friend and Lorrie Moore sit to lunch. Their conversation appears to be moving along swimmingly.
You notice the two Russians are sitting in a booth near yours, with older men. You try to tell them to stop but realize you haven’t the right.
You hear your buddy yell, “Fuck you!”
Then you hear her yell, jokingly, “No, fuck you!” Then she laughs, and it occurs to you that you would never have yelled “Fuck you” at Lorrie Moore, not ever. Maybe that’s what you’ve been doing wrong all along.
You would have told her, Lorrie Moore, that you’re a huge fan, and that you write, too, and although you don’t do this in the dream you can still see her eyes glaze over and prepare to say, “Thank you very much. So kind of you. Keep writing.”
You wake up and listen to the ceiling fan flow like a distant river. You curse the flashing LED lights of a dozen aparatii and wish for a blackout, for total darkness. You are prepared to sweat through the night from lack of ceiling fan.
You fall into another dream in which you are sitting in a surgery observation area overlooking some poor sap getting his brain cut into but don’t really notice because you are too occupied by making out with a blonde woman who is perhaps five to seven years older than you and wears thick burgundy lipstick, a lot of which ends up on your lips, cheeks, and neck, but what you remember most of all is that waxy cigarette and beer taste that remains in your mouth and on your shirt and you just wish you could remember a single name and not a list of them.
You wake up again and stand in the shower letting the hot water cool you off because now there’s nothing left to do except remain awake until a day has passed and you’re too tired to dream.