He lies there warm all night, but he doesn’t sleep. He can’t turn off the thoughts. He wonders: And if this were all real? If he were put away for two years, or ten, or two hundred? Locked up for eighteen years for manslaughter, like the drunken junior high teacher back in Townsend who smashed into his parents’ Gremlin while they were coming back from line dancing? Put away behind bars, like the invisible millions across this country who he’s never thought twice about? He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.
