Dan settles into a patch of strawberries and starts picking the ripe ones and pulling weeds from the earth. The physicality of labor does him good; he feels more at ease as soon as the dirt works its way under his fingernails, tinting all the calluses on his hands dark and staining the bandages. He waits to be addressed, but he's still surprised that Aster gets right to the heart of the matter without any conversational cushioning.

It's a simple question. Dan has simple answers. He drinks because being sober hurts as much as being tortured to death. He drinks because he misses his family and misses his daughter and he's helplessly at the mercy of that grief. He drinks because it feels good in a world where barely anything feels good enough to penetrate that formaldehyde-like sadness he's embalmed in. He drinks because it's easy and he's been doing so much hard work just not dying or killing himself that he needs things to be easy. He drinks because if it does kill him, it's technically not suicide.

Dan has every explanation in the world for why he drinks, and all of them die on his tongue.

"I don't know how else to get through the night."

And for as terrible as Dan's addictions have been for him, he feels so certain that the alternative would be worse. He doesn't know what would be waiting for him at the end of a day of voluntary sobriety, but it must be worse than death and worse than pain and worse than humiliation, because even deep in intoxication's brutal grotesquerie, even shivering sleeping on the street in clothing soiled with bodily fluids and with a pounding headache and inflamed, damaged organs, it's always just made more sense to keep drinking. That misery's been preferable to the alternative.