I'm alone in my parents' house, but now they live in a parliamentary banana republic. The Minister of State calls to say he'll come by to pick up my backpack. It's supposed to be filled with something secret I got on my spy mission. But it's empty. I'm sick of intrigue, and I quit.

He'll be furious.

I hear voices outside. On and on. Sounds like rioters methodically torching houses... but I hear cops too. Are they messing with this house? I dread hearing footsteps on the front walk. Just want to be left alone. Only, I have a sneaking sense this passivity is really designed to provoke trouble! Just waiting for invasion.

I hide and listen as the voices get louder, angrier.

See motion in yard next door. The fence is down! The neighbors are arguing harshly. It's them, not rioters in the street!

But it's too late. My expectations have set up a synchronistic funnel, like a gravity well, pulling in physical manifestations of my fears.

A huge man with a gun breaks in. He fires at me, but the bullet hits at a low angle and bounces off a rib. Stings, bleeds, but not deep. I'm armed too--I hesitated to shoot first, but now I fire back with no guilt. A deep flesh wound. He's so big it just makes him hesitate! This could get nasty.

I snarl "Who the hell are you, breaking in here!"

And he answers! Not too clearly--but then, he's an astrophysicist, what do I expect?

But soon I see his garbled talk isn't just physics jargon--what's happened is, the implications of the new cosmology have driven him insane! Budding universes, cosmic natural selection, the anthropic principle! Cosmology's just not constant! He can't take it.

So, naturally, he shot me. For cosmological reasons.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• Arsonists = my guts are inflamed again!
• Troubled cosmologist = my friend and fellow dreamworker Xanthe called. She was troubled by the book PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard, which looks at the horror of small creatures' lives--a frog dissolved alive, a moth trapped in a jar so its wings can't grow, caterpillars devoured alive from within... The cosmos, looked at closely by any competent observer, is far more intricate than we thought--but crueler, too.
• Metaphysical shootout = Dillard's observation, while true, is toxic--people tend to conclude THEY should be heartless because "the universe" is. When all she shows is that bugs are. We're part of the cosmos too.
• My fears manifest as a crazy cosmologist = I'm wary, always looking for trouble--and the stress of that summons illness!
• A more general lesson: attitudes are nonverbal prayers and spells, with more power than I admit.

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