In the mornings, Will Jeffords lay in bed after he woke, trying to figure out what made him tick. Things had slowed down after he lost his job. No one seemed interested in him. Maybe he was wrong in some way, broken. He couldn't explain his failure. He was sure he'd done something incorrect. Sure, lots of people were out of work, but he wasn't supposed to be included with that lot. He knew stuff. He could make things. Something about him must be wrong. What didn't he know about himself, he worried.

He tried going over his dreams, re-running them like a movie. He'd have to trek through them in reverse sequence. He could remember the last thing he dreamed before waking, then just before that, then sometimes, the scene before that. Anything dreamed even earlier seemed grey and thin, too elusive to apprehend. But as far back as he could recall, he'd plunder the dream and then return forward through the fantasy events he'd assembled in memory.

Sometimes the adventure seemed to work. The dream played smoothly and seemed to resemble accurately what he felt he'd endured. The dreams were seldom pleasant, although they sometimes included moments he liked.

Special moments confounded reassembly. They almost always placed him in some embarrassing or disgraceful fix, or they were erotic encounters, sometimes with his ex-wife, sometimes with a strange woman.

On Wednesday he recalled the woman he met in the night's dream. He liked her name, Nareena. He repeated it often to make sure he wouldn't forget it. The ring of it implied Northern Africa, surely some exotic location. He could still feel her skin, wonderful, without blemish, so perfectly light brown and taut that he could discern the veiled blue of thin blood vessels near her temple. They had talked. He wanted to do more.

But special moments acted like tripwires. As soon as his remembered dream evolved into a special moment in which he scrambled to cover or hide himself, unexpectedly nude in public, or a moment in which he floated in delicious anticipation of affectionate embrace, the reconstruction ran off course. The memory kept repeating like a phonograph needle skipping on a scratched record. He couldn't get any relief and he couldn't escape. Why not? What couldn't he get away from public ridicule? Why couldn't he stay with her? What should he have done? The scenes taunted him.

Replaying any dream dredged up memories. The special moments made replay jerky. Then, just as he might slap a phonograph turntable playing a broken record and make the needle hop to a smoother track, he would force himself to skip to some other part of his assembled fantasy. He couldn't concentrate after that. The dream would bubble with memories. Every setting seemed elastic, distending here and there to expose a remember-when. Memories of gaffs and failures and lost love drove at him like pinpricks.

They defeated Will. Sometimes memories would grow and play out by themselves. He would sleep without knowing he slept and enter a world where he wasn't remembering but doing. The confused meandering of dream, deliberate recall, memory, and dream again confounded his rest. Around seven in the morning he wearily drifted awake since no alarm clock was set to signal a definite stop. He didn't need to get up since he was unemployed. Swinging his legs over the side of the mattress, he stretched and twisted the kinks out of his back. He never bounced out of bed anymore, not like when he had a job. Echoes of night's clamour in his head continued until he read something or spoke to someone. The first words not his own broke night's spell and released him to attend the deliberate purposes of daytime. He had to pay some bills and buy food. Later on he would resume studying a computer program in hopes of finding a job that required that skill. In the afternoon, if he still had some cash remaining from his last unemployment check, he would call his girlfriend and maybe they could find a movie they liked.

He had no idea what made him tick.

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