Charlie opened his eyes again. ‘You look just like him,’ he said. ‘It’s a wee bit fucking spooky, actually.’

Charlie never did find the photo of my father on the roof of the dome at Emerald City. He looked for it for a while, and then he must have forgotten all about it. Or perhaps it never existed to begin with.

Some months later, I sent Charlie an email despairing of Trump’s recent election, and Charlie sent me a short email in return, excoriating my limp liberal pieties. He was celebrating the result as a step in the right direction. Only a global catastrophe will reset the corrupt order of the world, he wrote. We exchanged a few more emails in the following weeks, friendly notes about books or movies, and then one afternoon, he sent me a single line:

I’ve decided I want no further contact with you.

Charlie had loved my father. Maybe he was afraid he would start loving me, too. Or maybe it was something else. I wasn’t my father; maybe that was the problem. Maybe I was just a disappointment to him.

10.

10.

One night, a few weeks before he died, my father came home and woke me up. When I opened my eyes, he was swivelling around in the chair beside my bed, whistling. On his head he was wearing a tattered Johnnie Walker cap that I’d never seen before, and which didn’t really suit him. It made him look older than he was. But he wasn’t old. He was only forty-three. He was still a handsome man, although that’s not what I thought at the time. I could smell him. He had a smell I wish I could smell again. Sweat and tobacco and motor oil and wood. His fingers often bled from the work he did. Sometimes it took him half an hour to wash the grease from his hands.

‘Come have a drink,’ he said, and he passed me a beer.