In this way you escape detection. The nurse melts seeing how Mom reaches for you like a sleepwalker. Seeing how you take her hand, you don’t shrink away as another kid might do, embarrassed and scared.

Yeah, okay. Though you’d been ready to strangle her, the nurse, not your mom. Stuff her lumpy body in the utility room with the sign SOILED LINEN.

Alone in the room. With your mom. Blank black windows reflecting only the room as in a concave lens, subtly distorted. But safe!

Clutching your mom’s (chilly, limp, thin) hand though she (still smiling, wanly) seems to have drifted off to sleep. Jesus!—the wild plan comes to you, you will activate the Juul in your pocket, bring the e-cig to your mom’s mouth, give the patient a jolt to the brain like an electric shock.

Wake up, Mom! You’re too young to die, and I am the one to save you.

Here’s the deal: Mom lives, Dad lives.

Mom dies, Dad dies.

Think I can’t do it? Watch me.

Jesus!—the kid put together a perfect crime.

Got to hand it to the kid, would’ve never thought he had the brains. Or the guts.

Yes-s-s—I am impressed. Guess I never gave him credit …

No. I don’t know how he did it. Had to be high, I guess.

Goddamned vaping! These kids, today.

All I can figure: he must’ve bought an assault rifle online, used a fake ID or—whatever …

No, I wouldn’t be surprised, he’d used his mother’s credit card. (Wouldn’t be the first time, d’you think she’d discipline him? N-o.)

Next thing, must’ve followed me in my car, Saturday morning. Headed for Otto’s Discount Electronics at the mall, and at the first escalator going up, jammed with people, there’s this explosion of sound—“fusillade of bullets”—“scene of terror”—people screaming, trying to get off the escalator, someone has fallen, another person has fallen, spurts of blood, jets of blood, crazy terrified wounded crawling over one another, I’m at the foot of the escalator on my knees, shielding my head, trying to crawl to safety behind a wall, but there’s other people cutting me off, disbelieving that this is happening to me, victim of a “mass shooter,” as bullets whip into my body, severing my spine in seconds, causing me to dance like a puppet cruelly jerked on strings, and then the back of my head explodes …

Okay, something like that.

Then the kid escapes.

So high, maybe the kid just flies away. Dad below, drowning in his own blood and skull burst like a pumpkin leaking brains, how’d Dad have a clue what the kid does next?

NIGHT, NEON

1.

Dusk, the heartbreak time. Slow-waning light falls upon the river like melting snow.