After she signed off, I clicked the boob tube for my evening dose. Five seconds later, Dr. Pruitt texted the vitals of the investigator who’d previously quit the case. Rod Griese out of an office in Buffalo. I passed this along to Red McLaren and requested that he huddle with Adeyemi’s lawyer and get to the bottom of Griese’s dossier, and what, if anything he’d discovered.

News anchors recited a litany of absurdist tragedy with a familiar refrain—people were shooting one another by the gross; tensions among various countries continued to intensify amid saber-rattling; the world burned, but not to worry, water was rising fast. I cried uncle and went facedown for the count.

■■■

At Meg’s urging to “get in touch with your mother’s blood,” I’d reacquainted myself with the rich tapestry of Maori culture and mythology. In the U.S. of A., every youngster learns of Alexander, Thor, and Zeus. Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, and Oberon’s court. Kids here are steeped in the cult of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and The Catcher in the Rye. Having swallowed enough of that for this particular rotation of the grand cosmic wheel, I made it a practice to range farther afield. A humble beginning, yet it awakened a network of sleeping nerves with pinpricks of sublimated awareness.

This renaissance didn’t occur in a vacuum. During childhood, I’d visited my Maori grandfather, Hone, in New Zealand and listened to his garrulous recounting of wartime exploits as we reposed in his weedy backyard beneath the stars. Mom had also imparted a bit of the ancient lore upon us Coleridge kids in the guise of bedtime stories; the CliffsNotes version of her heritage.

Mom and her kin believed that souls wander at night. Dreams represent fragments of what the dreamer experiences while roving in astral form. She further held that when some people die, their souls twist and congeal and become inimical to the living. Whether these persons were good or evil in life is of no consequence; it is a matter of fortune and susceptibility. The vulnerable souls become their worst selves, condemned to haunt the earth and make trouble until they slip through a crack and plunge into the Underworld, where the Lord of the Dead waits to eat them.

Such jolly thoughts of darkness and the uncanny haunted me in the wake of my conversation with Dr. Pruitt. It spelled troubled dreams. My soul got a second wind and a-wandering it went. Old gods Papa, Rangi, Tane, and Whiro beckoned.

The dream began as a memory of my childhood. Mom sent me to fetch Dad; we were going to a barbecue at a friend’s house. Barbecues and house parties dominated that stretch of my parents’ social life. It was predictable as the tides and the phases of celestial bodies. He boozed with his male colleagues while Mom suffered small talk with the women in the kitchen. Sometimes there was an argument and public recriminations. Sometimes he or she would get a tad physical and voices would be raised. Stony expressions and frigid silence on the drive home. I could scarcely contain my enthusiasm.