Yoni Brenner:: The New Yorker A clear June morning. My wife and I arrive at the big top to find that our seats are inside the lion cage. We are situated for less than two minutes when a ferocious African lion bears down on us, teeth gnashing. After a short argument, I produce our ticket stubs and tell him to find his own seat. But the lion persists, suggesting that our tickets must be for another date, or that they were purchased from a non-authorized vender. We wrestle violently for a few minutes, and the lion mauls my left arm. Still, I prevail and the lion retreats. After a moment, the lion returns with an usher. The usher and I wrestle violently for a few minutes, and I maul his left arm. Finally, the band strikes up a spirited march, and the circus begins. Two clowns enter the ring on roller skates. They ask for a volunteer from the audience and spend the ensuing hour and a half trying to convert him to Mormonism. We laugh uproariously. A moment later, there is a deafening boom and a human cannonball lands right behind me. I dive into the scrum and emerge victorious, carrying the bleary daredevil as a souvenir. I turn to my wife to share the good news, but find only the lion - wearing my wife's jewelry and, inexplicably, talking to my mother-in-law on my wife's cell phone. I wake up with a start, my wife fast asleep beside me, a circus band at the foot of my bed playing "Semper Fidelis." Backstage at the Saskatchewan convention center, I'm about to deliver an inspirational lecture on cosmetic dentistry for TEDxSaskatoon when I suddenly realize that not only do I not know the first thing about dentistry; I'm also wanted by the Canadian authorities for outfitting a moose with a bowler hat, with the intent to teach him canasta. I take out my phone to call for help, only to be sidetracked by a Facebook notification that I have been erroneously tagged in forty-three photographs of the Nuremberg trials. By the time I've finished untagging myself, it's too late to escape, and as I'm escorted to the stage I black out momentarily. When I come to, the audience is giving me a standing ovation, and within two days "Zen and the Art of Unnecessary Bridgework" has more than fourteen million views on YouTube. Before long, I'm in a taxi on the way to the airport, at which point I open the envelope containing my honorarium, only to discover - to my horror - that it is empty except for two loonies and tickets to a French-Canadian production of "The Fantasticks." I wake up in a cold sweat, a headset microphone pressed to my cheek, my iPhone pinging with a friend request from Joachim von Ribbentrop. Saturday. I'm sitting in my high-school cafeteria, about to take the S.A.T., when I open the pouch where I keep my No. 2 pencils and instead find it filled with day-old crudités. Alarmed, I run to tell the assistant principal. She smiles sympathetically, then reaches into her purse and produces a bowl of ranch dressing. I return to my desk, bewildered, and the test begins. The verbal section breezes by, and I am feeling confident, despite the fact that I have answered "E" for thirty-four questions in a row. But, when I reach the math portion, my spirits begin to flag as I confuse sine with cosine and integrals with integers, and my visions of Dartmouth are replaced by Penn State, then Wichita Junior College, then an associate's degree from the zeppole truck that parks in front of our building during street fairs. It is then that I realize that I am seated next to the seventeenth-century mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Discreetly, I begin stealing glances at his answer sheet, but I stop when I realize that Leibniz is stealing glances at my answer sheet. Panicked, I tell the assistant principal that I need to use the bathroom, and end up spending the next three hours hiding in the science lab's supply cabinet, huffing ammonia from an Erlenmeyer flask. When I return home, I find out that somehow I received a perfect score on my S.A.T., but I have been wait-listed by the zeppole truck. I wake up gasping for air, my mother-in-law fast asleep beside me, my left hand immersed in a bowl of ranch dressing. Self-explanatory. It is just after takeoff when turbulence begins to shake our 737 like a pressurized maraca. I buckle my seat belt, grip my armrests, and begin to recite the Shema. After a minute, I realize that I don't know the Shema and I'm actually reciting the lyrics to "Bennie and the Jets." Suddenly, the intercom crackles to life and the pilot reassures us in a calm voice that everything is fine. He then proceeds to read my college transcript: "Bovine Psychology, B-minus; Topics in Needlepoint, C-plus . . ." I leap from my seat and tell the stewardess that the plane is going to crash, that I'm too young to die. "Nonsense," she says, arguing that I'm an excellent age to die, and, furthermore, that I ought to have someone take in the shoulders of my jacket if I plan on wearing it at my wake. I turn to kiss my wife goodbye, only to find, in her place, the same lion from the circus, playing Words with Friends on my wife's iPad. I hesitate for a moment, then I make out with the lion anyway, because, hey, you only live once. The plane begins to nose-dive. I close my eyes and brace for impact - but it never comes. Slowly, I peel my fingers off my face to find that I am co-hosting an MSNBC talk show with Eliot Spitzer, arguing passionately for a federal registry of novice banjo players. Tragically, the show is cancelled before the second commercial break. (I wake up in a panic, Elton John fast asleep beside me, my bed gently floating two hundred miles north of Reykjavik.) ♦