“Get me a balloon, Daddy! I want a balloon!”

Joe looks down at his small son, a motherless 7-year-old demanding a toy, red in the face, tantrum brewing.

“The big balloon!” Hunter says, pointing at the sky.

Joe’s vision swims and an adult Hunter stands before him. “You shot it down good, Daddy,” this scrofulous Hunter says, his sweet child’s voice now a raspy croak.

“I shot it down?” Joe asks. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a good thing, Daddy,” Hunter says, his adult voice now coming from a 2-year-old covered in blood, his face lit up in the red and blue of the rotating police lights.

“You have to sit down now,” a pretty young woman says, materializing beside him. She is smiling and her hands are warm on his arm. Joe feels blood trickling into his penis. There is a chair. Joe sits in it and the Oval Office floods in around him.

“We have a lot to do to get him ready for tonight,” Finnegan says to Hunter.

“He’ll be fine,” Hunter says, scratching himself absently. “Dark Brandon rises.”

“Who?” Joe asks, his hand straying to his tie but finding only the neck of a hospital gown.

“He’s sundowning at 10am nowadays,” Finnegan said quietly. “We have to get his neuroleptic levels up, change his blood, over-oxygenate him, change his filters and maybe install new feet before tonight. I don’t have time for this today.”

Joe watched as Jill began to dance with Hunter, 13 and angry, ravaged by puberty. “You want to know how to dance, don’t you?” she asks as she pulls him to her and pushes him away.

“Why do I even have to go to this stupid dance anyway?” Hunter asks sullenly.

“You want to meet girls, dontcha?” Joe hears himself ask.

Laughing, Beau rabbit punches the smaller boy in the kidney and then runs away.

“Stop it,” Jill says, turning back into Finnegan. “I don’t have time for your fucking shit today!”

“You shouldn’t talk to my son that way,” Joe tells Finnegan as he is strapped to a gurney. “You’re the only mother the boy has now.”

“He’s been using that as an excuse my entire life,” Finnegan says. “I just want a normal father.”

“I am a normal father!” Hunter insists, pulling an enormous joint from the folds of his ladies’ scarf.

“I think you are a great father, Beau,” Joe says feebly.

“I’m Hunter!” the blood-drenched 2-year-old screams. “Beau’s the dead one!”

“Beau is dead?” Joe asks, fat tears forming in his eyes.

“We need to begin the transfusion,” Finnegan said from behind a huge ficus.

“I am not a ficus,” she continues. “I am just standing behind one.”