Last night Arnold Schwarzenegger put on his marching band uniform and went and stood in the parking lot outside of a small building. The parking lot was asphalt but the other parking lots were gravel. Arnold stood calmly with his hands behind his back. Inside a light came on, and then a door opened, shooting a path of light across the parking lot and a woman ran out along it. For a second the light from the door hid the fact that what the woman was carrying was shining too, and that it was a silver-shining baby and it kept shining after the door closed and when she placed it in Arnold Schwarzenegger's arms it lit up his face and he leaned back his head and laughed.

and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed until the baby whimpered and also a cloud went over the moon. Arnold glared around, looking for the woman, but she was gone. He shook the baby gently, kissed its knees and forehead, and it stopped making noises and he started walking. He walked away from the building, across the gravel parking lots, into a field with a hill at the far end. The ground and grass were wet but he set the baby down and it began slowly crawling toward the hill. For a minute he watched it go and saw the moths that hovered into its light and then he took small steps to follow it. After a few yards the baby stopped crawling and sat down and started to cry. Arnold lay down on the ground by it and held it to his chest underneath his jacket and they both fell asleep.

No one will ever be able to explain what the baby dreamed that night, but Arnold Schwarzenegger dreamed that he was 24 again, and he had come home from work and found his friend's girlfriend in his house. All over his house she was hanging strings of those square flags that he didn't understand and thought might have something to do with being dead in the mountains. While he tried to figure out what she was doing he realized more and more of his friends and people he wished were his friends were coming to his house and that he was having a party and his friends were rolling around in his yard and dancing on his neighbor's porch and digging through the sand in his attic and pulling out of the sand handfuls of tiny glass balls and the balls were full of pictures if you could see small enough and everyone layed by each other and on top of each other and looked into tiny the glass balls.

When he woke up the baby was already awake too and was thirty feet away, crawling in the direction of the hill. Arnold stood up and looked around and clenched his jaw, hard. It was bright out and he was thirsty. The baby was a good crawler. He hurried after it and when he caught up it looked at him and laughed, and then kept crawling. Arnold scooped the baby up and sat down cross-legged with the baby in his lap. He reached into his jacket and pulled out two tangerines. While he tore them into pieces the baby tried to get away and keep crawling, until Arnold gave it some of the tangerine, and then it ate, messy and happy. In the bright sun its glow was not as noticeable, but sitting in his lap it made Arnold cast a long shadow across the field. Suddenly there was a noise, high above them in the air. Arnold and the baby both looked up and saw two huge birds, one yellow and one black, spiraling down towards them.