Barney did not feel drunk so much as he felt ready for anything. Anything at all. “Here’s your drink.” He held the glass out and Daddy took it with a curt nod. He seated himself and stared for a while at the green roof of the Hotel Pierre above the terrace fence. Isabel’s black cat came through the French doors and began to explore some ivy leaves near the deck; he would look up hopefully from time to time as birds flew overhead and then would seem sad that none flew down to him. He must feel, Barney thought, that the world owes him a bird now and then. And maybe it does, since the world made him a cat.

“Daddy,” he said, “I want to tell you about the pyrotherapy they gave me when I was ten.”

“Why bring that up now?” his father said wearily.

“Because you wouldn’t let me tell you before. When you picked me up at the train station.”

“You were chattering away like your mother. And I had to drive. It was rush hour.”

“It always was.”

“What good would it do to tell me?”

“I’ll decide that.”

His father scowled, began to shimmer. Quickly Barney got up, reached out, took the glass from Daddy’s iridescent hand. “I’ll pour your drink out if you don’t stop that.”

The shimmering stopped. Barney gave him back the drink.

“You need me to want you here in the world, don’t you? Or back you go to Limbo where there aren’t any drinks.”

Daddy scowled and did not answer.

“They put me into a kind of homemade machine of brown-painted steel. It was half a cylinder and it covered my body from neck to ankles. I was flat on a hospital bed. They had already wrapped me tightly in a gray wool Army blanket and I was stifling with the heat of that before they even threw the switch on.

“There were about forty light bulbs screwed into sockets under the curved top of that brown thing, Daddy, and when they turned them on and the heat came pouring into that blanket it was unbearable. My hands were strapped to my sides under the blanket, so I wouldn’t hurt myself when I had convulsions, or break the light bulbs…” He realized that he was sweating profusely. He set his drink on the deck and took off his shirt, wiped his wet chest with it, dabbed at his neck.

“Daddy,” he said, “I’ve been afraid of heat all my adult life. They kept me in that thing fourteen hours a day for two weeks. Each day they brought my internal temperature up to a hundred seven. There was no clock in the room and when I’d ask the attendant what time it was she’d be cross with me. So I lay there and tried to count off the time in my head, a second at a time. Each minute was longer than I could imagine. I prayed to die, tried to will myself dead.”