The narrator meets his friend Dogman in a sports bar. Dogman gets the both of them a beer, but the narrator is committed to sobriety and refuses Dogman’s attempts to get him to drink again. By surprise, Dogman has invited an old friend of theirs, Steve Sudimack, and Dogman catches the narrator up on who Sudimack was back in college: a dropout who got his back-then girlfriend pregnant and has since fathered his son, Jayden, after moving back into his parent’s house in Scranton. Dogman says that Sudimack is not only just as unstable as before, but even more so now, and the narrator is displeased with the surprise guest he’s brought.

When Sudimack arrives, the narrator recalls having known him, and Sudimack goes for a drink right away. When Dogman makes an insensitive joke about Jayden, Sudimack punches him right in his face, and he bleeds out from it for the rest of the night. The three of them then continue talk back and forth about their shared pasts for a little while before they decide to find drugs. Their first stop, an industrial lot, proves unsuccessful, and Sudimack returns without any drugs but lots of bleeding. Dogman recommends another plug who had previously sold him cocaine, and they drive to the dealer’s block. The dealer, a man named Attilio, is unsettled by the triptych of Dogman, Sudimack, and the narrator, and he refuses to sell them any drugs, instead asking them to leave. In the dealer’s basement, Dogman spots a table with an aquarium where a lizard lives. All of a sudden, Dogman flips that table over, causing the aquarium to shatter and the lizard to roam free, specifically attacking Attilio as it does.

Nearby the dealer’s block, the narrator finds himself in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where he listens to a woman named Tracey speak. Tracey was someone who didn’t have much going for her, and her marriage was unfulfilling such that she eventually left it. Throughout all of her life, she felt strung along, as if there was nothing more to it than late fees and a saddening lack of good qualities. Much, much later, she was on a train that, in some freak accident, derailed and, in her words, flew into the sky. As Tracey tells her story, the narrator spots Dogman and Sudimack sitting nearby—Dogman is holding Attilio’s lizard. After Tracey finishes, everyone in the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting goes around to say the name of someone they’ve lost. Sudimack then reveals that Jayden, his three-year-old son, has passed away. Sudimack then cries, and everyone attempts to comfort him.