TED DAWSON DROVE his late-model Japanese sports coupe into the garage adjoining his darkened house and lingered in the driver’s seat, listening to the final measures of Mozart’s Linz Symphony. But just then the unexpected closing of the garage door behind the car jarred him out of his reverie, making him wonder whether he had accidentally closed the door himself. He knew that was unlikely, considering the out-of-the-way location of the remote control. Then the overhead garage light switched off rapidly—too rapidly—immersing the car in blackness. Blocked from backing out of the garage, Dawson locked the car doors as his heart pounded and he wondered what to do. When he heard an external radio-frequency security controller unlock the car doors, he relocked them manually, unfastened his seat belt, leaving the ignition on, and groped through the glove compartment for something—a metal tool, a cell phone— anything to defend himself with. Once again he heard the door locks being opened externally, but this time the intruder was faster. The door next to him opened and the dome light came on as Dawson extracted a metal flashlight from the glove compartment. A man removed night-vision goggles and attempted to grab him. Holding the flashlight in his right hand, Dawson swung with deadly purpose and managed a glancing blow off the man’s forehead. He knew he had connected when his assailant cursed angrily in pain, “Son of a bitch.”
     His mind scanned the possibilities: robbery, bodily harm, kidnapping? Could he subdue the man? Although it was 10:30 p.m., his wife hadn’t yet returned home—or had she? Was she at risk? If not, would she find him in a pool of blood? Would she find him at all?
     His staggered assailant grappled awkwardly with Dawson, attempting to wrest the flashlight from him. Suddenly an accomplice pinned Dawson to the seat and jabbed a hypodermic needle into his left arm.
     Expecting that he had been drugged, he knew that he would have only a few moments of lucidity before losing consciousness. While he didn’t see his life paraded before him as tradition would have it, he did marvel at how much could race through one’s mind so rapidly. His thoughts focused on what mattered most immediately to him: the future of his business and the safety and well being of his wife.
     Rapidly thinking back, his morning had begun as just another busy, but undistinguished, workday; he could think of nothing out of the ordinary to suggest otherwise. Certainly, important things were on tap for him; but in his business, that was the rule rather than the exception.
     As the proprietor of a high-technology instrumentation firm, Dawson often put in many late hours at the plant, and during the last month, he had worked evenings with some regularity. Anticipating an imminent tender offer for acquisition of his company, he used the quiet evenings to prepare technical and financial material for potential buyers.
     On those late weekday evenings when Dawson expected to return home before 11 p.m., he called in advance to Jeannie, his wife, who waited for him before retiring. They had a romantic little ritual that started when the second of their two kids had moved out a few years earlier. Dawson would bring in a tray containing a plate of cookies and snifters of brandy. He would undress, get into bed, and they would leisurely exchange reports of the day’s activities as they sipped and ate. Follow-up sexual activity in the early years of their marriage had been a certainty in such a setting, but now, decades later, was limited to an interesting, though somewhat unpredictable, possibility.
     Dawson thought with anguish about his wife. On this particular evening in mid-August, he had been the first to arrive home. He remembered only a short while ago pulling into the garage, which adjoined a quaint Anne Hathaway cottage of a type popular in Southern California bedroom communities in the 1950s. He was disappointed when Jeannie didn’t answer his phone call before he left his plant, but he understood that his wife’s publishing job sometimes made unpredictable schedule demands on her. Now, with a searing anxiety, Dawson realized that he didn’t know where his wife was. The fact that the house was dark on this particular night didn’t make him confident that she was away. Where was she? Had anything happened to her? If not, what was going to happen to her now?
     Dawson muttered thickly, his speech barely comprehensible, “What next?”
     The man with the hypodermic needle, still cradling Dawson inside the car answered, “What next? Why, you’re going to take a trip to dreamland.”
     But there would be no dreams. Instead, within what seemed like only seconds after the injection of the fast-acting anesthetic, he lapsed into sudden oblivion.

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