He disappeared up the escalator of the Fishbowl, a concept disco designed as an enormous glass bowl with a platform around its perimeter. I climbed up onto the platform and peered into the bowl. At first I couldn’t see him. At first I couldn’t see anything but immaculately sculpted beautiful people illuminated in brief moments under strobe lights. Then I spotted him. He was fucking dancing. He was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath, moving clumsily and making strange, drowsy arm movements, like a lumberjack chopping trees in space, but he was having fun. Or was he? His smile was twice the size of normal smiles and he was gazing lustfully at cleavage of all sizes and religions. But what was this? He wasn’t dancing alone! He was dancing with a woman! Or was he? He was dancing behind her, gyrating at her back. She was ignoring him a little too effortlessly for comfort, so he swiveled around so he was in front and tried to sweep her up in that mile-wide smile. I wondered if he was going to invite her back to our sad and filthy apartment. But no, she wasn’t taken in. So he moved on to another woman, a shorter, rounder one. He swooped down and escorted her to the bar. He bought her a drink and handed over the cash as if he were paying a ransom. As they talked, he placed his hand on her back and drew her toward him. She resisted and walked away and Dad’s smile grew even wider, making him look like a chimpanzee who’d had peanut butter smeared on his gums for a television commercial.

A flat-nosed, no-neck bouncer in a tight black T-shirt arrived. His Goliath’s hand wrapped around the back of Dad’s neck, and he forcefully escorted him out of the club. On the street, Dad told him to fuck his mother if he hadn’t already. That did it for me. I’d seen enough. It was time to go home.

At around five in the morning he banged on the door. He’d lost his key. I opened up to see him sweating and yellow and in the middle of a sentence. I went back to bed without hearing the end of it. That was the only night I followed him, and when I recounted the story to Anouk, she said it was either “quite a good sign” or a “very bad sign.” I don’t know what he did the rest of those nights out on the town. I can only assume they were variations on the same fruitless theme.

A month later he was home again, crying. But what was worse, he started watching me sleep. The first night he did it he came into the room just as I was drifting off and took a seat by the window.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing. You just go to sleep.”

“What, with you sitting there?”

“I’m going to read in here awhile,” he said, holding up a book.

He turned on the lamp and started reading. I watched him for a minute, then put my head back down and shut my eyes. I could hear him turning the pages. A few minutes later I sneaked one eyelid open and almost recoiled. He was staring at me. My face was in shadows, so he couldn’t see I was watching him watching me. Then he turned the page again. I realized he was pretending to read, as an excuse for watching me sleep. This happened night after night, Dad pretending to read in my bedroom while I stayed awake with my eyes closed, feeling his eyes on me and listening to the sound of turning pages in the quiet. I tell you, they were some eerie, sleepless nights.

Then he started shoplifting. It began well enough. Dad came home, his bag stuffed with avocados and apples and fat nobs of cauliflower. Fruit and vegetables, nothing to complain about. Then he stole combs, throat lozenges, and Band-Aids- pharmaceutical goods. Useful. Then he stole nonsense items from gift shops: an old piece of driftwood with the words “My home is my castle” etched onto a plaque, a thong-shaped flyswatter, and a mug that said “You never know how many friends you have until you own a beach house,” which might be fun to put in a beach house, if you had one. We didn’t.

Then he was in bed crying again.

Then he was watching me sleep again.

Then he was at the window. I don’t know when exactly he took up post there, or why, but he was vigilant about his new role. Half his face was looking out the window, the other half buried in the bunched-up curtains. We should have had venetian blinds, the perfect accessory for sudden outbursts of acute paranoia; there’s nothing quite as atmospheric as those slits with their thin bars of shadow falling across your face. But what was he looking at out the window anyway? Mostly the backs of people’s shitty apartments. Mostly bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms. Nothing fascinating. Man with pale skinny legs stands in underwear devouring apple, woman puts on makeup arguing with person unseen, old couple brushes teeth of uncooperative German shepherd, that kind of thing. Staring out, Dad had a dark look in his eye. It wasn’t jealousy, that much I know. For Dad, the grass was never greener on the other side of the fence. If anything, it was browner.

Everything had taken a darker turn. His mood was dark. His face was dark. His vocabulary, dark and menacing.

“Fucking bitch,” he said one day at the window. “Fucking cunt.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Bitch across the way looking at us.”

“Well, you’re looking at her.”

“Only to see if she’s looking.”

“Is she?”

“Not now.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

Here’s the problem. He used to be funny. I mean, I know I’d complained about him my whole life, but I missed the old Dad. What happened to his lighthearted godlessness? That was funny. Reclusion is hysterical. Rebellion, a thousand laughs! But crying is rarely funny, and sociopathic rage never gets a chuckle- not from me, anyway. Now he was keeping the curtains humorlessly closed all day. No light penetrated the apartment. There were no longer middays or mornings or seasonal fluctuations of any kind. The only change was in the darkness. There were things breeding in it. Whatever mushrooms existed in his psyche were thriving in that dark, damp place. Not funny.

One night I spilled coffee on my bed. It was coffee, I swear, that soaked through the sheets and seeped into the mattress, but it looked like urine. I thought: Anouk will think it is urine. I tore the sheets off my bed and hid them. I went to the cupboard for clean sheets. There were none there.

Where did all the sheets go?

I asked Dad.

“Outside,” he said.

We didn’t have an outside. We lived in an apartment. I puzzled over this mystery awhile before arriving at a frightening conclusion. I went to check. I opened the curtains. There was no outside world. What I saw was sheets; he had hung them over the windows from the outside, maybe as a white flapping shield to hide us from prying eyes. But no, they weren’t white. They weren’t a shield either. They were a sign. There was something written on the other side of the sheets, in red. The words “Fucking Bitch.”

This was bad. I knew this was bad.

I took down the sheets and hid them with the others, the ones with urine on them. Shit, I wrote that, didn’t I? OK. I admit it. It was urine (it is not attention-seeking that makes children wet their beds, but fear of their parents).

Just so you know, you don’t have to be religious to pray. Prayer is not so much an article of faith anymore as it is something that is culturally inherited from film and television, like kissing in the rain. I prayed for my father’s recovery as a child actor might pray: on my knees, palms locked, head bowed, eyes closed. I went so far as to light a candle for him, not in a church- you can take hypocrisy only so far- but in the kitchen late one night, when his nocturnal rumblings had reached a fever pitch. I hoped the candle would unwrap whatever it was that bound him so tight.

Anouk was in the kitchen with me, cleaning it from top to bottom, muttering that she wanted to be not only paid but praised, and, citing mouse poo and cockroach nests as evidence, she implied that by cleaning the kitchen she was saving our lives.