Blake called himself “an American Mutt.” His ancestors were Swedish, German, English, broadly European, too finely blended to be recognizable, and his family didn’t care about ancestry. He remembered clear October blue skies, occasional puffy clouds drifting across the sun. A gentle breeze carried hints of woodsmoke. They ate hotdogs and hamburgers in shady backyards. Growling battle-chatter into walkie-talkies, children stalked renegades through the dump, where a backhoe lay rusting between mountains of woodchips. Blake kicked his friend off the backhoe and jumped knee-first onto his chest, but missed on purpose, like a pro wrestler. He fell among ferns by the creekbed, returning to life as a five-second-long chain of moments, possibilities trailing off into the past like the wake of a ship. He wandered through fear and terror until he found himself on his friend’s porch, eating pretzels and watching the music video of “Three Little Birds,” by Bob Marley. Then he felt joy and peace wash over him, as if he’d seen the face of God.

  Blake joined the Boy Scouts. He became an Eagle Scout. He built a trebuchet and launched pumpkins across a parade ground. He hiked down to Cool Dip, dove into the pool from slippery rocks, body-surfed down ice-cold cataracts. He canoed the high Delaware, through meadows and woods in the headlands, where the water lay crystal clear upon beds of smooth stones. He shot rifles, pistols, and bows. He sharpened knives, fought with sticks, cut potatoes, fried eggs, and washed dishes. He tied a tourniquet. He performed CPR. He treated for shock. He broke someone’s finger by accident in a casual fistfight, scrambled across boulder fields on a moonlit night, and hiked through keening hollows of bare trees, brittle, creaking in cold winds, black clouds racing across the moon, winds like the howls of ravenous wolves.

  In Boy Scouts, they played a game called Manhunt. Walking on a high trail at midnight, lit by stars filtered through the skeletal canopy, Blake spotted an older boy, two feet taller, running at him out of the darkness. He turned on his heel and dove off the trail, slid under a bush, down twenty feet of steep incline in an avalanche of dirt and gravel, glanced off a tree, under another bush, rolled forward onto his hands and knees, crawled, charged, stood up, and dashed through dense undergrowth, dodging brittle branches. The older boy hadn’t followed him down the hill. He was still up on the high trail.

  He played Age of Empires, Civilization, Homeworld, Half-Life, and Counterstrike. He played Pokemon, Super Smash Bros., Golden Sun, Fire Emblem, and Tales of Symphonia. He read Lord of the Rings and Redwall. He read Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Roger Zelazney. Later, he read “The Wasteland,” by T. S. Eliot; “Panopticism,” by Michel Foucault; “The Left Hand of Darkness,” by Ursula K. LeGuin; and “The Savage Detectives,” by Roberto Bola?o. He listened to Muse, Blue Oyster Cult, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He listened to the Arctic Monkeys, Richard Thompson, Mark Knopfler, and Patti Smith. He listened to Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. Dave Carter died when Blake was 12, but he didn’t know that. He just sang, “Daylight’s dragon fenceline keeps me working in this trance, pounding down the bedrock with this rusty lance. We don’t stand a chance.”

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  Around the same time, his teacher took them on a field trip to a museum about the Lenni-Lenape. This museum had a replica of a traditional village. The Lenni-Lenape built a house called a wigwam, a lattice of wood shingled with bark or reed. They used the same material to build “longhouses”, which could shelter entire villages. These buildings felt compact and cozy, designed to ward off rain and conserve heat. Blake and his classmates made fun of their music. In those years, he felt guilt and rage, sorrow, indulgent cruelty, and listless depression, like the thousand-yard-stare of a shell shocked soldier.

  They also visited Independence Hall, the building where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. This building was a replica of one that had existed in 1776. The doorways were fenced-off, so guests could only look into the rooms. In the room where the signing had taken place, an array of tables faced a stage where tiers of desks surrounded a central podium, the highest desk of all. For each signer, there was an inkwell and a chair of lacquered wood.

  Blake saw, in textbooks and on TV, the lifestyles of other cultures. He saw Inuit people fishing in kayaks. He saw Comanche horse archers. He saw the cities of the Aztec Empire in full color, and of course he watched “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” One of his High School History teachers, a former principal, propounded the theory of Racialism, which held that all people descend from one of “three castes”: “Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid.” Blake and another student, a notorious stoner, brought evidence that this theory of race had been disproved by Darwin. Their teacher exclaimed, “But that was a hundred years ago!” with blank, triumphant incoherence. Next year, Blake heard students complaining about the same lesson..

  Oreland was just one neighborhood in Springfield Township. Springfield had a town council or a mayor, presumably. It had a police department, a school district, and a library. “Oreland” was just a “census-designated place.” Flourtown was a census-designated place in Springfield Township too, a bit more upscale than Oreland, closer to Philadelphia. Between Oreland and Flourtown, one found nothing but miles of four-bedroom houses with front and back yards. Blake’s house lay right between the two towns, in the middle of Springfield Township, but he liked Oreland and he didn’t care about Springfield. A long time ago, there had been an enormous kennel there, maybe twenty acres.

  Once there was a rail interchange in Oreland. There had been a tanker-car factory nearby, and a waste dump. Some people said there was a nuclear missile silo hidden under the abandoned quarry (which had turned into a lake). At different times between 2015 and 2018, tests found in the tapwater: strontium; chlorate; 1, 2, and 3-trichloropropane; 4-dioxane; HAA5; HAA6Br; HAA9; butylated hydroxyanisole; o-toluidine; and quinoline. Blake sat on his father’s knee and watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. Blake’s father was diagnosed with glioblastoma at the age of 55, when Blake was 19. Blake came home from college in Pittsburgh to watch his father die. He died with infinite defiance and no complaints except “cancer sucks.”