That was the first time I watched him fight someone in his dreams. It seemed like a new development, but my mother later told me he had been fighting all along. At first, I thought he was choking. Throwing up like you do when your pancreas is failing you. But he was just trying to protect me.

We were in one of the darkest parts of the country, no light pollution reaching across the desert to us, save the few lights that dotted the parking lot full of cars with license plates from different parts of the country, and whatever light bounced off the highway nearby. We could see the Milky Way.

Earlier in the evening I had watched from the front door as my father slowly walked across the parking lot to the convenience store to see if he could buy beer. My mother was still in the habit of begging him not to, but I never tried to stop him, because I always wanted some for myself. He would buy me whatever he was drinking so he would not have to drink by himself. Sitting with him meant talking to him and trying to make him feel less alone. Like he wasn’t doing anything bad—he was normal, and I was normal. We had to hide our hangovers from her. It was an unspoken pact we shared while my mother looked on and counted how many cans we opened between the two of us. She must have counted tens of thousands of cans being opened in her lifetime. What a hobby to have!

Under the Milky Way I watched as my father walked back across the parking lot with a six-pack of Shiner Bock and a brown paper bag. The bag held bottles of cider for me, and he pulled them out while my mom frowned at us both. We were a team, and each complicit in what was happening to the other.

On the trip I could tell he was having trouble remembering things, or was confused by things that seemed simple to us. It made him angry, scared. If I had to guess, at that time my father was 80 percent on the PSAC: some evidence of disease; normal activity and work “with some effort.”

In the morning, as always, we pretended nothing happened. We wanted to believe it, really. We woke up as if we didn’t hear him whimper. As if we weren’t afraid he’d collapse each time he got up to go to the bathroom.

On the second night of our trip, I found myself trailing after my father in the streets of a dark desert town, peering into lit-up gas stations, hoping they would have whatever we wanted and we wouldn’t have to walk anymore.