Days before his 19th birthday, Grid awakes in the middle of the night screaming, “THE ELEVATOR! NO HANK!”
He had just endured his first nightmare – his first of two. His dreams had been unusually pleasant to date – all of them. And until days before Grid’s 19th Birthday the protagonists were people he didn’t know, or so he thought.
Every night since his second birthday, Grid would dream about Mike and Hank, The Brothers who weren’t really Brothers, the main characters of what played out like a series of movies in Grid’s head every night as he slept. He had wondered as a child what it was all about. When he asked his mother, Dolly, she became inexplicably cross and lashed out at her son. She convinced Grid that Hank and Mike weren’t real. And then Dolly warned her son sternly to never speak of it for fear that people would think Grid was crazy like his Grandfather. He had died the day Grid was born. She didn’t tell him Mike was that grandfather and Hank was his uncle, but not his real uncle.
Grid only began to wonder anew what it was all about after his first nightmare, days before his 19th birthday on a Kibbutz in Israel. He decided to share his dreams for the first time with his roommate after waking from his second nightmare screaming, “NO HANK! DON’T LEAVE ME!”