He was walking into a grungy little mill-town. Apparently he was on the bum, because he had a pack on his back. The name of the town was Oatley, and Kevin had the idea it was either in Vermont or upstate New York. You know anyone hiring here in Oatley? he asked an old man pushing a shopping-cart along a cracked sidewalk. There were no groceries in the cart; it was full of indeterminate junk, and Kevin realized the man was a wino. Get away! the wino screamed. Get away! Feef! Fushing feef! Fushing FEEF!

Kevin ran, darted across the street, more frightened of the man’s madness than he was of the idea anyone might believe that he, Kevin, was a thief. The wino called after him: This ain’t Oatley! This is Hildasville! Get out of town, you fushing feef!

It was then that he realized that this town wasn’t Oatley or Hildasville or any other town with a normal name. How could an utterly abnormal town have a normal name?

Everything—streets, buildings, cars, signs, the few pedestrians—was two-dimensional. Things had height, they had width ... but they had no thickness. He passed a woman who looked the way Meg’s ballet teacher might look if the ballet teacher put on a hundred and fifty pounds. She was wearing slacks the color of Bazooka bubble gum. Like the wino, she was pushing a shopping-cart. It had a squeaky wheel. It was full of Polaroid Sun 660 cameras. She looked at Kevin with narrow suspicion as they drew closer together. At the moment when they passed each other on the sidewalk, she disappeared. Her shadow was still there and he could still hear that rhythmic squeaking, but she was no longer there. Then she reappeared, looking back at him from her fat flat suspicious face, and Kevin understood the reason why she had disappeared for a moment. It was because the concept of “a side view” didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, in a world where everything was perfectly flat.

This is Polaroidsville, he thought with a relief which was strangely mingled with horror. And that means this is only a dream.

Then he saw the white picket fence, and the dog, and the photographer standing in the gutter. There were rimless spectacles propped up on his head. It was Pop Merrill.

Well, son, you found him, the two-dimensional Polaroid Pop said to Kevin without removing his eye from the shutter. That’s the dog, right there. The one tore up that kid out in Schenectady. YOUR dog, is what I mean to say.

Then Kevin woke up in his own bed, afraid he had screamed but more concerned at first not about the dream but to make sure he was all there, all three dimensions of him.

He was. But something was wrong.

Stupid dream, he thought. Let it go, why can’t you? It’s over. Photos are burned, all fifty-eight of them. And the camera’s bus—

His thought broke off like ice as that something, that something wrong, teased at his mind again.

It’s not over, he thought. It’s n—

But before the thought could finish itself, Kevin Delevan fell deeply, dreamlessly asleep. The next morning, he barely remembered the nightmare at all.