My first memory is of riding my tricycle under a pale blue sky, down streets lined with compact houses and generous yards. I rode toward things that pleased me—the shape of a tree, the spacing of telephone poles, an arrangement of power lines above the street. I rode down the middle of the street, so cars would be able to see me.

I didn't feel worried or afraid. It was a beautiful day. I took my time. When the door of one of the houses opened and I heard my mother call, "Jason?" I smiled and waved at her.

She brought me inside. Her living room had a big picture window that faced onto the street. The curtains were drawn back, and the room was full of light. Most of the floor space was taken up by a large wooden loom, but there was a couch and a big overstuffed chair farther back in the living room, near the kitchen. There was a small square trunk next to the chair. The shape of the loom, the pedals and the rows of steel wires, reminded me of a piano. I sat on the couch while Mom called Dad on the telephone. Dad showed up a little while later, and I sensed that I was in trouble so I crawled under the loom, but nobody yelled at me. He sat down on the couch, and she sat down on the chair.

"Honestly," he said. "I didn't even know he was gone."

"That's not very comforting," she said.

Then they were quiet for a while.

"It's more than a mile, Mark," she said.

"I know," he said. He looked at me then, and I could tell he didn't know what he should say. What he should think.

They talked for a while longer, then he took me home.

It was the summer I turned three years old; the summer of 1975.

* * *

My dad and I lived in a dark brown house with a gently sloping roof, a wood-slat exterior, and windows that opened out like little doors instead of sliding up and down the way windows were supposed to. It was built in a flatter, more sprawling style than most of the other houses in town. I didn't like it. It was the only house on a dead-end street in the middle of a giant field. There were no other kids nearby. There were never any people walking on the sidewalk or playing ball out in the field. When I went outside, all I heard was wind.

The street ended a block past our house, where a heavy galvanized steel chain was stretched across the road between two metal posts. The posts were made of thick metal pipes that had been driven into the ground and filled with concrete. They were painted bright yellow, and the chain was locked in place with a bulky rubber-coated padlock. The blacktop road ended at the chain. Beyond that, it was a dirt road, covered with gravel, that went toward a large, low building in the distance.

I spent a lot of time contemplating the mystery of the posts and the chain. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to put them there, but they seemed like a poor solution to a problem that didn't really exist. If someone really wanted to go on the dirt road, all they had to do was drive into the field and go around the posts. And yet I never saw it happen.

Of course, people did dump garbage near the posts, and I never saw that happen either. So maybe the chain did serve some function, even if it was just to keep the garbage on our side of the posts. One day I went outside and found a burned-out mattress lying in our driveway. I had no idea how it had gotten there. All the cloth and stuffing had burned away, leaving nothing but the metal springs and frame, like the bones of some poorly evolved dinosaur. I climbed onto it and started bouncing as hard as I could. Cartoons had given me the idea that a really enthusiastic bounce would launch me ten or fifteen feet into the air, but I didn't seem to be able to get more than a few inches of clearance. At some point, Marianne came out and told me to be careful on that thing.

I looked back at her, as she held open the screen door that led out of the house and onto the driveway—a plump hippie with a wild mop of curly brown hair. She had a wide face with sunburned cheeks; strong nose, weak chin. She looked sleepy. She sounded sleepy; she had a scratchy voice, like someone who'd just woken up. She wore loose blue jeans and a baggy T-shirt. She didn't live with us but she was around a lot, and she seemed to want to look after me. Most of my dad's friends ignored me.

"I'll be careful," I said.

She nodded and went back inside.

Everything else I remember about that house amounts to a small collection of moments. I make guesses about when they happened, or in what order. The last memory is the only one I'm sure of.

* * *

I was hiding in my dad's closet, watching him through a crack in the door while he did something he didn't want me to see. I felt clever for catching him, but I didn't understand most of what I saw.

I tried to make up a story that would explain what he was doing, but whenever I thought I understood what was happening, he did something else that surprised me: burning silverware with a lighter; holding a hot spoon between his knees; tying a piece of rubber around his arm. No story I could come up with explained what he'd done so far, let alone anticipated what he'd do next. At some point the whole ritual reached a kind of climax and he sat there on the bed for a while, like he was doing some really deep thinking. Then he stood up and started hiding his collection of strange implements in various small wooden and metal boxes around the room; the rubber tubing went in one box, the spoon in another box, and so on.

I waited until he left the room, then snuck out of the closet and opened the last box I'd seen him touch.

I recognized the thing in the box as something that doctors used. I even had some idea what it was for, though I didn't know the word for it. It was a little plastic tube with a wire-thin needle poking out of one end. The other end had a blue plastic plunger with a rubber tip, which was used to push liquid through the needle. I didn't know what Dad had been doing with it, but I knew the pointy metal needle meant I shouldn't touch it. I closed the box and left the room.

* * *

I was in the living room. I wasn't doing anything, just sitting quietly and watching. Marianne was standing across from me. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a black vest. The curtains on the front window were open, and there was afternoon light coming in behind her, framing her in two giant golden rectangles. The living room was cluttered, and she was making her way carefully toward the back of the house. She had one hand on the wall, like she needed help staying upright. In her other hand, she had a glass jug full of red wine. She lifted the jug to her lips and took a swig, then shivered and shook her head like the flavor had hit her wrong.

* * *

It was nighttime. I was in the living room. My dad and some of his friends were sitting around the coffee table in front of the couch. A lamp hanging down from the ceiling cast a circle of glaring white light on the glass surface of the table and made the rest of the room disappear. The adults were laughing and playing a game where they tore pages out of a magazine. The page I could see had a glossy picture of a bright blue ocean and a wide blue sky. The sky was full of hot air balloons, and the balloons were all the colors of the rainbow. The adults tore the page into strips, rolled the strips up into tubes, and used them to inhale lines of white powder off the tabletop, into...