They were on Gotland. He knew this the way you know things in dreams — not because anyone said it, not because there was a sign or a map, but because the dream told his body and his body believed it. Gotland. The island in the Baltic. Fårö, perhaps, or somewhere on the western coast where the raukar stood in their patient rows and the wind came in off the water and the light had that particular Scandinavian quality — flat, endless, the light of a latitude that holds the sun at arm's length even in summer.

His father's brother had a villa there. His grandmother — Nain Åsa, though she was not yet Nain to anyone, was simply Åsa, was simply a woman in her fifties with friends across Sweden and the kind of social network that existed before social networks, the web of summer cottages and borrowed houses and the mutual understanding that Swedish summers were not to be wasted indoors — Åsa had a friend with a cottage on the island. One of them. The villa or the cottage. He didn't know which. He knew only that they had been there, once, his parents and their three small children, in the geological age before everything changed — the age when his parents had been completely different parents, when they had been young and married and functional and raising children with the help of extended family and borrowed kitchens and the long, light-drenched Scandinavian summers that made everything possible, that stretched the days until ten at night and filled them with the smell of grilled fish and the sound of children on grass and the particular Swedish silence that is not absence but fullness, the silence of a country that has enough space to be quiet.

The dream held him there. His father's arms. The wind. The cliffs.

It was not a long memory. He had told himself this, in the waking hours, on the occasions when the dream returned — which it did, sporadically, without warning, arriving in his sleep like a letter from a country he'd visited once and never returned to. It was not a long memory. A few seconds, maybe. A moment. The kind of moment that is so small it should not survive, that should be dissolved by the decades that followed, by the white room and the towels and the silence and the take care and the woman his mother became and the man his father stopped being. But it survived. It survived because the body is more faithful than the mind, and the body remembered his father's hands, and the wind, and the salt, and the cliffs that stood like sentinels at the edge of a world that had once, briefly, been whole.

Why this dream? Why tonight?