“Andy,” I said. “What happened to you?”

“Prostate,” he said. “I should have listened, baby brother.”

Sitting on the table was mold-covered birthday cake. As I watched, the frosting humped up, broke apart, and a black ant the size of a pepper-shaker crawled out. It trundled up my dead brother’s arm, across his shoulder, and then onto his face. My mother turned her head. I could hear the dry tendons creak, the sound like a rusty spring holding an old kitchen door.

“Happy birthday, Jamie,” she said. Her voice was grating, expressionless.

“Happy birthday, Son.” My dad.

“Happy birthday, kiddo.” Andy.

Then Claire turned to look at me, although she had only a single raw socket to look out of. Don’t speak, I thought. If you speak, it will drive me insane.

But she did, the words coming from a clotted hole filled with broken teeth.

“Don’t you get her pregnant in the backseat of that car.”

And my mother nodding like a ventriloquist’s dummy while more huge ants crawled out of the ancient cake.

I tried to cover my eyes, but my hands were too heavy. They hung limply at my sides. Behind me, I heard that porch board give out its ill-tempered squeal. Not once but twice. Two new arrivals, and I knew who they were.

“No,” I said. “No more. Please, no more.”

But then Patsy Jacobs’s hand fell on my shoulder, and those of Tag-Along-Morrie circled my leg just above the knee.

“Something happened,” Patsy said in my ear. Hair tickled my cheek, and I knew it was hanging from her scalp, torn off her head in the crash.

“Something happened,” Morrie agreed, hugging my leg tighter.

Then they all began to sing. The tune was “Happy Birthday,” but the lyrics had changed.

“Something happened . . . TO YOU! Something happened . . . TO YOU! Something happened, dear Jamie, something happened TO YOU!”

That was when I began to scream.

 • • •

I had this dream for the first time on the train that took me to Denver, although—fortunately for the people riding in the same car with me—my screams emerged in the real world as a series of guttural grunts deep in my throat. Over the next twenty years I had it perhaps two dozen times. I always awoke with the same panic-stricken thought: Something happened.

At that time, Andy was still alive and well. I began calling him and telling him to get his prostate checked. At first he just laughed at me, then he grew annoyed, pointing out that our father was still as healthy as a horse, and looked good to go for another twenty years or so.

“Maybe,” I told him, “but Mom died of cancer, and she died young. So did her mom.”

“In case you didn’t notice, neither of them had a prostate.”

“I don’t think that matters to the gods of heredity,” I said. “They just send the Big C wherever it’s most welcome. For Christ’s sake, what’s the big deal? It’s a finger up your ass, it’s over in ten seconds, and as long as you don’t feel both of the doctor’s hands on your shoulders, you don’t even have to worry about your backdoor virginity.”

“I’ll get it done when I’m fifty,” he said. “That’s the recommendation, that’s what I’m going to do, and that’s the end of it. I’m glad you cleaned up your act, Jamie. I’m glad you’re holding down what passes for a grownup job in the music business. But none of that gives you the right to oversee my life. God does that for me.”

Fifty will be too late, I thought. By the time you’re fifty, it will already have taken hold.

Because I loved my brother (even though he had in my humble opinion grown up to become a moderately annoying God-botherer), I made an end run and went to Francine, his wife. To her I could say what I knew Andy would scoff at—I’d had a premonition, and it was a strong one. Please, Francie, please have him get that prostate exam.

He compromised (“Just to shut you both up”) by getting a PSA screening shortly after his forty-seventh birthday, grumbling that the damn test was unreliable. Perhaps, but it was hard for even my scripture-quoting, doctorphobic brother to argue with the result: a perfect Bo Derek ten. A trip to a Lewiston urologist followed, then an operation. He was pronounced cancer-free three years later. A year after that—at fifty-one—he suffered a stroke while watering the lawn, and was in the arms of Jesus before the ambulance got him to the hospital. This was in upstate New York, where the funeral was held. There was no memorial service in Harlow. I was glad. I went home all too often in my dreams, which were a long-term result of Jacobs’s treatment for drug addiction. Of that I had no doubt.

 • • •

I awoke from this dream again on a bright Monday in June of 2008, and lay in bed for ten minutes, getting myself under control. My breathing eventually slowed, and I got past the idea that if I opened my mouth, nothing would come out except Something happened, over and over again. I reminded myself that I was clean and sober, and that was still the biggest thing in my life, the thing which had changed that life for the better. The dream came less often now, and it had been at least four years since I had awakened to find myself poking at my skin (the last time with a spatula, which had done zero damage). It’s no worse than a small surgical scar, I told myself, and usually I could think of it that way. It was only in the immediate aftermath that I felt something lurking behind the dream, something malevolent. And female. I was sure of that, even then.

By the time I was showered and dressed, the dream had receded to a faint mist. Soon it would burn off entirely. I knew this from experience.

I had a second-floor apartment on Boulder Canyon Drive in Nederland. By 2008 I could have afforded a house, but it would have meant a mortgage, and I didn’t want that. Being single, the apartment did me fine. The bed was a queen, like the one in Jacobs’s boondocker, and there had been no shortage of princesses to share it with me over the years. They were fewer and farther between these days, but that was to be expected, I supposed. I would soon turn fifty-two, the age, give or take a few years, when smooth Lotharios begin their inevitable transformation into shaggy old goats.

Besides, I liked to see my savings account slowly fatten. I wasn’t a miser by any means, but money was not an unimportant consideration to me, either. The memory of waking up in the Fairgrounds Inn, sick and broke, had never left me. Nor had the face of the red-haired country girl when she handed back my maxed-out credit card. Try the card again, I’d told her. Honey, she had replied, I look at you and I don’t have to.

Yeah, but look at me now, sweetbritches, I thought as I drove my 4Runner west on Caribou Road. I had added forty pounds since the night I met Charles Jacobs in Tulsa, but at six-one, a hundred and ninety looked good on me. Okay, so my belly wasn’t quite flat, and my last cholesterol count had been iffy, but back then I’d looked like a Dachau survivor. I wasn’t ever going to play Carnegie Hall, or arenas with the E Street Band, but I did still play—plenty—and had work I liked and was good at. If a man or woman wants more, I often told myself, that man or woman is tempting the gods. So don’t tempt them, Jamie. And if you should happen to hear Peggy Lee singing that rueful old Leiber and Stoller classic—“Is That All There Is?”—change the station and get some good old stompin music.

 • • •

Four miles along Caribou Road, just as it starts to climb more steeply into the mountains, I turned off at the sign reading WOLFJAW RANCH, 2 MILES. I punched my code into the gate keypad and parked in the gravel lot marked EMPLOYEES AND TALENT. The only time I’d seen that lot full was when Rihanna recorded an EP at Wolfjaw. And that day there were more cars parked on the access road, almost down to the gate. The chick had a serious entourage.