We sat on the floor. I drank, trying not to wince. Eric took a large piece of paper and folded it into three sections. He explained a game he’d learned in art class: one person would draw a figure’s head on the first third of paper, then make guidelines for the body into the top edge of the middle section and pass it to the next person. Artist number two would draw the body, leaving guidelines for legs and feet. A third artist finished the figure.

Eric handed me the folded paper. The head would be my assignment. “I know,” he said. “Draw an alien.”

I frowned. “Is it in the rules that you have to tell me what to draw?” I began sketching a lightbulb-shaped noggin to appease him. The alien’s nostrils seemed bigger than the ones I remembered from my dreams. After I finished the enormous eyes and the mouth’s miniature slit, I took two more swigs of booze. It felt hot going down, a giddy fusion of fire and water.

“Neil’s lips have touched that exact bottle,” Eric said.

His turn. “I’m not going to tell you what to draw,” I said. I left him the pair of required lines so he could begin his body. He started in, taking twice as long as I had, nibbling his bottom lip in concentration. On the stereo, the band sounded especially melancholy. “There you are with your idiot ideas,” the singer sang. “More or less as far-fetched as mine.”

When Eric had finished, he turned up the final third of paper. “Stupid me. I guess there’s only two of us.”

I thought for a second. “Let’s pretend Neil’s here,” I said. “Do the feet the way you think he’d do them.”

Eric drank. I drank. He chose a different magic marker, started to touch it to the paper, and stopped. “No,” he said. He slid the paper across the floor to me. “You do it. Based on what you know about Neil, based on what you remember, start drawing.”

Neil’s appearance from the Chamber of Commerce photograph formed in my head, and I began from the lines Eric had traced on the paper’s last third. I concentrated on any scrap of evidence I’d discovered about Neil until the drawing was finished. My head felt disordered, and I knew I was getting drunk. I centered the paper between Eric and me, and we unfolded it together.

First came my alien’s head, a picture nearly identical to the one Avalyn had drawn for the Wichita newspaper, its eyes slightly lopsided and overwhelming its face. “That’s good,” Eric said. His torso, a detailed representation of a skeleton, held a blood-dripping scythe in hand, its finger bones splayed at angles, its hipbone shaped like a fat heart. And the skeleton’s legs led into “Neil”’s-my-drawing of feet. Eric regarded it; said “and this is good, too.” I’d sketched a bowlegged form with knobby knees. The legs wore clodhopper, cleated tennis shoes, the laces untied. Next to the left foot were a baseball bat and a glove, the number ninety-nine written on its thumb. And next to the right foot, an oversized baseball. Across its surface, I’d written one word: COACH.

Eric tapped a finger against the baseball I’d drawn. “Coach,” he read. “What’s this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I downed the remainder of the whiskey as if it were water. “I really don’t know.”

I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I woke to the telephone ringing. I sat up from the floor, suddenly dizzy, my head pounding. I nudged Eric’s knee. “I think I’m drunk,” I said.

“I think you are too,” he said. He staggered over to answer the phone.

“Wait. It could be Avalyn. I still don’t know what to say. Just tell her I’m asleep or something. Tell her I’m not here.”

Eric stepped into the hallway and positioned the telephone on my room’s floor. He wrapped his hand around the receiver and paused, thinking. Then he picked it up. “Hello.” I waited to hear what he said next. “Well, yes.” He was stammering. “Just a second. I’ll get him.”

I mouthed, “Who is it?,” slightly panicking, since the clock beside me said 11:45. Shouldn’t my mother be home by now? I imagined her car in a crushed heap at the side of the road, her body lacerated by flying glass. I imagined a bullet from an inmate’s gun hammering into her skull.

“It’s some guy,” Eric mouthed back. He kicked off his shoes, fluffed a pillow on my bed, and eased his head onto it.

I crawled across the room and grabbed the phone. “Hello.”

Silence. The person on the other end swallowed, took a deep breath. “Brian,” a voice said. “It’s me.” At first I didn’t recognize the voice, and I stared at Eric as he began to drift into dreamland.

The voice repeated my name. This time, I couldn’t mistake the caller. It was my father.

I hadn’t seen my father in three years, since the Christmas of 1988 when he’d visited Deborah and me, when he’d tucked a twenty-dollar bill into each of our fists and perched in a corner to watch us open gifts. And he hadn’t telephoned since last year’s Christmas. He’d forgotten both my graduation and my recent nineteenth birthday. For some curious reason-the fact I was drunk, maybe, or Eric’s companionship in the room-I felt uncommonly brave. I also felt angry. I wanted to scream at my father. I wanted to dig deep into the place where I kept all my feelings for him, all the pieces of dissatisfaction or rage or hatred, then stir them around, retrieve a fiery amalgamation, and throw them into his face. “What the fuck do you want?” I asked. That sentence almost hurt my mouth, as though it had been jimmied from my lips with an invisible blade, and when I said it Eric shot up from bed, his eyes widened toward me.

“Brian,” my father said, almost scolding. My question had shocked him, too. Then his voice calmed and stationed itself. “I missed your birthday. You should get some-you know, some form of apology.”

“I don’t need anything from you,” I said. I’d never spoken to my father like this. If I had mouthed off to him when I was little, he would have backhanded me. But now, woozy within this drunken fog, I had to do it. So much had happened since he’d last called, so many people and places and memories. My father had no connection with any of them. He knew nothing about me. I was no more his son than the boy that probably delivered his morning paper or the kid from the house next door in whatever city he now lived in.

“That’s not true, son,” my father said. “You know, I’ve been meaning to visit you again, because we have so much catching up-”

“Like hell we do,” I interrupted. Eric was standing now, head cocked in curiosity.

“Don’t be angry with me. Please.” My father had said please to me, and it made me sick. “Just talk to me, son. I want to know how you’ve been, what you’ve been up to.”

I felt on the threshold of something. For years I had wanted to ask my father what he knew about my missing time, and now, our telephones connected, I wondered how I could gather together the words for the question. “You do, do you? Well, here’s what I want to know.” I could hear his breathing, lucid and steady, and for a moment I saw my father’s chest rising and falling with each breath, his image absolutely clear, as if I’d only seen him yesterday.

“Something happened to me when I was little,” I said. “Maybe you can tell me about it.”

“What’s going on?” he said. “What has your mother-”

“My mother isn’t here. She has no part of this. Right now I just want to hear from you. I’ve been fucked-up inside my head for so long, dear father”-on that word, Eric put his fingers to his mouth-“and since the last time you called I’ve been trying hard to figure out why. Maybe you can help. Maybe you remember that night years ago, when I woke in the crawl space. I was bleeding, and I was dirty, and I smelled horrible, half-dead. Do you remember that? Or were you upstairs, too busy sleeping, not caring a fuck about me? Do you remember how she took me to the doctor, and all you cared about was the fact that I wanted to quit baseball? And do you remember all the times I passed out after that, all the times I pissed the bed, with you never questioning why, only screaming at me for it? Do you remember that Halloween night a few years later, when I passed out again, and I knew something else had happened, and all you did was shrug it off? Do you?” I stopped to take a breath. My voice had elevated, becoming something I no longer possessed. And the words kept coming: “Could be that someone did something to me, on both those nights. Could be that someone tried to kill me even, or did even worse than that.” My sentences blurred together, and I wondered what he could understand of my ranting. “So what do you know, dear father? What do you have to tell me?”