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2 Waking Up with Mechanics Do the same extras drive the cars in my dreams each night, or do they work in shifts? There can’t be more than forty or fifty cars; maybe they all come from a central lot, are shared out among us. Maybe that is why they drive so well. Somewhere between Christchurch and McMurdo I wake up in a web seat inside an Air Force C-17 in time to hear somebody say that when it comes down to it, you can use urine to rinse off just about anything. And somebody else insists, no, not Wednesdays, it’s Thursdays that the condom bowl is refilled in 155, and all I know is that I already ate my lunch and it’s not time to get up and put on our Big Reds, and in one of the dreams there was a car sort of like the 1957 Bel Air my grandfather had, two-toned turquoise and cream, and wouldn’t it be cool to airlift one of those down to McMurdo and put on whitewalled snow tires and just to drive slowly up and down the gravel and ice of Highway One, lip-synching 1940s-era Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra, the only car without an emergency kit and a serial number for a thousand miles? ...

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