It all started… well, who knows when it started? When I was born, maybe, or when I was conceived, or somewhere in the dim dark past when my great-great-grandfather met my great-great-grandmother and decided he liked the way she combed her hair. Maybe it started on a numbered hill in Korea, where a shard of shrapnel from an incoming artillery round embedded itself in my skull, forever relieving me of the need to sleep. (No one knows exactly how the sleep center works, or why we need to sleep, but mine doesn’t, and I don’t.)

Maybe it started when I got home from Korea and started to make a life for myself. I found a way to earn a living, supplementing the monthly disability check I got from the government. And I found a way to fill up twenty-four wide-awake hours a day, and learned, too, to live out the fantasies other people use up in dreams. I studied languages, and I joined political movements, and I supported lost causes. I had adventures. Somewhere along the way I stonewalled my jailers in Washington by insisting I worked for a government agency and refusing to tell them which one. Then a guy showed up to claim me, evidently believing I worked for him. And, as the years went by, maybe I did. It’s not always easy to tell.

Enough. It all started on a Tuesday afternoon in October, in the pine-paneled basement recreation room of a house in Union City, New Jersey, where a man named Harald Engstrom poured me a glass of brandy.

“The trouble with Scandinavia,” Harald Engstrom said, “is we’re too bloody civilized. We used to be Vikings, for God’s sake! We were the scourge of Europe, more to be feared than the Black Death. We’d raid your coastal villages. We’d butcher your cattle and rape your daughters – or was it the other way around?”