Every time Valencia visits the house, I always have a restless night afterwards. My brother's wife is a formidable presence in my life, but I'm ashamed of the way in which she throws my dreaming world into turbulence.
        Not that my dreams are about her. Rather, after Valencia's visits, I tend to dream of anomalous zones, of unpredicted action, of uncertainty and of the unknown. As if Valencia functioned in my life as a kind of overthrowing, an undermining and subversion of all things stable and secure.
        (I would never tell her this. It would sound ridiculous. Anyway, I would not like her to know she possessed such an absurd degree of influence over my mind states.)
        Tonight, while sleeping alongside my wife in our bedroom upstairs in the Moss Mansion, I find myself becoming conscious of Melshu's snoring, which infiltrates upward into my dreams, loud but unhealthy, suggesting old wood being sawed by rusty ice. It is the sound of Melshu's sawdust years, the years of his extreme old age.
        And then the snoring fades out into a nothingness which smells of wet seaweed, and all I can hear is the hiss of noxious gas voiding into vacuum. Then there is a voice. The voice is male, a baritone voice. Speaking to me from a darkness which smells momentarily of baked beans and then of red paint.
        "If you sell out you will be killed. The human genome insists on this."
        "The human genome?" I ask.
        "Stop expecting everything to make sense," says the voice. "Just do what you're told. When you have to kill, follow through."
        "What do you mean, have to kill?"
        "Too many questions, Ken. That's your trouble. You ask too many questions. When you get your orders, follow them. That's all you need to know. That, and the land. The land is not yours. If you try to sell it, you will be killed."
        This is presumably a dream, but dreams can cue you to unexpected contours in reality. And, to quote the language of the management training videos, don't shrug off a learning opportunity just because it's unscripted or unexpected.
        "Who would kill me?" I ask. "If I were to be killed, that is."
        "Oh, I think you know the candidates," says the baritone, who has not yet condescended to take on any form, human or otherwise. "Your brother's wife Valencia, for example. A very proud woman. Very much the center of her own universe. If you were to disappoint her, and I think we both know how you might, then her rage might prove murderous. Even without my intervention."
        "Valencia?" I say. "Splurging on a fur coat -- that's her recklessness. She wouldn't barbecue me further. Anyway, you're just a dream."
        "I'm not just anything," says the baritone.
        And that's when I wake up. Or seem to. I wake to an interior of shadows, a long hall lit by glimmering darkness. A shadowy form is in front of me. A man, an older man, the baritone to whom I have been speaking, someone in his fifties or sixties, familiar and yet unidentifiable at one and the same time.
        "Strom," I say.
        What makes me say that? The figure in front of me is most certainly not Kentruck Stromothard Pelagresi, our ignoble steward. And yet, the name comes naturally to my lips. A smell, that's what. Something here smells of Strom.
        I'm standing by a window (I have no recollection of how I came to be standing) and by the window are a couple of crumpled blankets, faintly sour with the smell of someone's sweat. Near the blankets, some paper bags. If the light were better, I am sure that it would be clear that the bags are adorned with the lime-green logo of Gonstrostel House. I can smell that peculiar curry which Strom always buys there. It is tainted with aniseed, a smell that for some reason I can't stand.
        Gonstrostel House and Pablanosh Curry. If it wasn't for those two eateries I can't begin to imagine how Strom would survive.
        The smells of blankets and stale food are having an upsetting effect. I close my eyes and try to squeeze the illusion out of reality. I try, without success, to hear Melshu snoring.
        "Open your eyes," says the baritone commander, speaking with an authority suggesting immense reserves of willpower, self-discipline and anger. Granite-bursting anger, should he choose to release it.
        I do so, scanning place that my dreams have brought me to. A room? A hall? It is a capacious space reminiscent of a warehouse, going on seemingly forever, dingily lit, now, by phosphorescent light.
        The baritone commander steps toward me. His body reveals itself. It is twisted. It is fashioned from gnarled grapevines of hideous strength, from muscular ropes of fiber oiled with a dark wet stuff which acknowledges no color. The ropes are animated by a shifting surface layer of swarming cockroachs, insects the size of saucers.
        Something which both is and is not a hand reaches out and takes me by the chin. It squeezes, sending pain shooting along my jaw. Weirdly, an answering pain flares in the base of my back, sharp and jagged.
        "Do not sell," he says. "And, when you get the order to kill, kill."
        Then he twists me onto my side and I find myself lying in bed, awake, on my side, with my wife beside me talking in her sleep, saying something about blueberries, and with Melshu's harsh but welcome snoring going on downstairs.
        How to interpret this? Well, one possibility is that maybe it suggests I should make an appointment with Doctor Sogara. It's time, I think, for a checkup.
        Haven't I had this thought before? I surely have, but I've done nothing about it. By the time I get to see the doctor -- if I need to see the doctor -- it will be too late.