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always returned with a vengeance.
    Perchance to dream, perchance to burn.
    I kept my condition a secret because I knew bringing in a shrink would derail, or at a minimum delay, my getting back on the force. The way to stop my dreams, I thought, was by getting back to who I was before the fire.
    Jen had been the photographer in the family, and she’d turned the video camera on me a number of times during our five-year marriage. I used those tapes as reference material, reliving birthday parties and Christmas gatherings, and even watching home improvement videos of me building a deck and painting our new house. The guy I studied was confident, even with paint on his face. He had a one-liner for everything. He was a man who spoke his mind, usually managing to do it with a wisecrack. The personon the tapes came across as a tough guy, but he softened whenever he was around his wife or dog. It hurt a little—you could even say it burned—reviewing these tapes, but I did it to try to remember who I was and how I should act. In looking back at the tapes, I realized that I had been an innocent, unprepared for life without my wife and the firestorm that was coming at me.
    I learned from the tapes and did my best to play the former me. My imitation was good enough to fool almost everyone, but it didn’t stop my fire walking. I burned, and I burned again and again. Because of the frequency of my fiery dreams, I kept expecting that over time I would build up a tolerance to them, but that still hadn’t happened. My night terrors continued to plague me. Maybe there are some things you can’t, or shouldn’t, get used to.
    Still, there was one strange benefit from my burning dreams that I thought of as the “moment after.” When I realized my flesh wasn’t really afire, my heart would stop its thundering and relief would rush over me. It was then that I had my moment of clarity; or sometimes, like this latest episode, it was more like a moment of ambiguity.
    Maybe the sudden reprieve my body experienced after my fire dream made it relax in such a way that a kind of window opened. Maybe I had to pay a high price for gaining insight of any kind. It’s not like the moment after was a gift from the gods, or that it made me Confucius or anything, but it often gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Earlier in the week I had gotten this image of the Iron Maiden reacting to one of my pranks. The Iron Maiden is big on Norman Vincent Peale–type messages and loves posting rah-rah words up on the walls. Her pearls of wisdom for the week had been “Hard work pays off in the future,” and “The early bird gets the worm!” When no one was around, I had used a Sharpie to add my own editorials below hers: “Laziness pays off now,” and “The second mouse gets the cheese!” At the time I was pleased with my handiwork; everyone laughed when they saw what I wrote, including the Iron Maiden. But in my moment-afterinsight I could hear the false notes in her laughter and see the disguised hurt on her face. The Iron Maiden’s cheerleading routine might not have been sophisticated but it was heartfelt, and in my moment of clarity I could see that I had pissed on her efforts. Sometimes what you see in the mirror isn’t always pretty.
    It was easy to imagine how and why the Iron Maiden had come to mind. My subconscious—probably tired from working overtime on my own pyre—had cued me into my inappropriate behavior. But my latest middle-of-the-night vision of Chief Ehrlich wasn’t as easy to interpret.
    In some ways my conjuring up the chief shouldn’t have come as any surprise to me. The doctors had finally approved my going back to work, and today was the day I planned on cashing in his marker. I wanted Robbery-Homicide Division, what LAPD cops called Homicide Special. That was what I was going to ask him to deliver. I had thought I was sure about that, but my moment after was making me have second thoughts about my game