On this occasion, Dad laired in the garage, sliding a Green River knife across a whetstone.

Is it sharp? I said to show interest; a cub desperate to bond with his grizzled sire.

He delicately tapped the blade’s edge. Yeah, buddy. Sharp enough to split an atom. By the way, and this information will come in handy sooner or later, you happen to get the drop on a fellow, remember there’s a major artery in the anus. One poke and a twist, and that’s all she wrote.

I thanked him and said I’d remember. He was a prophet when it came to the bad stuff.

I used to say, bury me in a cave or in a ziggurat. The knife shicked back and forth across the whetstone. Bury me with a two-headed dog who will be my servant in the afterlife. Welcome, my son, to the afterlife. This purple and black wasteland is purgatory. The white light in the window dimmed and clotted. Beat it, kid. I’m getting this ready for a friend. He dismissed me, enraptured by the knife and what it could do for him.

Tom Mandibole materialized from a patch of gloom near the furnace. Smooth and plastic-faced, clad in his ivory jumpsuit and smiling carnivorously. He and Dad regarded one another like gunfighters ready to skin their shooting irons. Dad said something in a foreign language and held the big knife loosely in his lead hand, tip in line with the dandy’s heart. Mandibole answered with the atonal snarl of circuits scrambling. They rushed to meet in the center of the garage. Dad, charging like a bull; Mandibole, mincing and prancing with the grace of a tarantula.

Rather than reporting to Mom, I chose a different path. A wooden security door led to the yard. In life the door was pale white, but in this place wood had blackened as if by flames. An elderly Sean Pruitt, dressed in a Valley High School letter jacket, stood at the threshold with the posture of a doorman. He’d plastered pancake makeup and eyeshadow to create a façade of youth. He didn’t open the door, but gestured for me to step into a void. Brushing past him, I marked the crimson and bronze colors and the heavy stitching of his jacket, the diabolic horsehead skull that symbolized I knew not what. He wore a class ring forged of iron and set with a ruby in the jaws of the horse skull. The metal ring had broken to form a notch with jagged teeth. Sean Pruitt made a fist. Blood dripped steadily between his fingers onto his tennis shoe.

I passed over. A symphonic gong intoned over the heat of a low, crackling fire. A choir of sirens sang a lingering note of lust and mourning. The song led me into manhood and the second, worse, chapter of the dream.

■■■

Centuries before European colonists decreed it New Zealand, New Zealand was named Aotearoa by Polynesian settlers. I strode across a grassy plain, marching inland. The sky was the dark green of pre-industrial reality, and obsidian where it bled into the vacuum. Red light glowed on my flank. Dust and smoke towered above a wilderness consumed by an inferno. Moa birds darted around me, talons churning the earth as they fled for their lives. Farther off, tribal hunters shouted and clashed metal upon metal, driving their quarry onward.