His drug addled brain wouldn’t let him sleep but he remembered being trapped in an MRI machine, his arms pinned to his side, and looking back above his head at the sterile room, trying to call, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. The machine caught on fire and he woke up. He left the hotel and met Delia, a former student, sitting by the river.

She told Davis the story about when she worked at a high-end bottle service club and a patron had reached up her dress. “My mother told me I was asking for it.”

“You get along with your mother?” Davis asked.

“Mothers are overrated.” Delia eyed him. “All that self-sacrifice stuff, I get sick of that.”

He watched the clouds over the building tops and thought about going to look at the Viking ships in Roskilde in the morning. “They like to be martyrs and they hate it when they can’t sacrifice themselves.”

“I mean, my mother’s fine.” Delia looked at herself in her phone. “It’s not that I resent her for anything. She’s just my mother.”

“I forgive my mother for whatever she was supposed to have done to me.” Davis downed half of his beer. “I had this dream, more of a vision really because I think I was still awake. I was with my mother and she was in a smart button-down dress, and she looked beautiful, conservative and smart. She was younger than me and we were on the classic propeller plane going somewhere. But she was at the front of the plane with her friends.”

“That’s it?”

“I was sitting there, thinking that she would come back to me. And she didn’t.”