The first Doug on record in the New World died during birth, in the backcountry, in 1729.

Another Doug, a cousin of the first, was by all accounts an intelligent and sensitive child, but was thrown from a horse and killed at an early age.

The next Doug reached puberty before succumbing to injuries sustained in a plummet from a roof.

That Doug’s nephew and namesake was lost at age five in a boating accident on the black river that snakes through the mountains to the west.

After that there were no more Dougs for a while. In 1854, one materializes among the rolls of a preparatory academy run by a Scotsman who believed in the godliness of child labor and freezing baths. Need I say more? In the decades that followed, the name Doug became identified with an array of superstitions and death anxieties.

This brings me to the situation as it stood that night in the red library with Hiram and those flowers. How could I, a fully grown Doug descended from a worthy line in which previous Dougs were squandered so beautifully before their primes, forgo this chance to establish a magnificent and honorable behavioral precedent, a fine example for all my brothers and for any Doug who might one day thrill to call me his ancestor? I do not consider my prostration before Hiram a surrender. Not in the least. Kneeling down for flowers was a triumphal revelation of willingness to quit a meaningless standoff in favor of community and concord. It felt good to get on the floor.

The carpet was obscenely dirty. Who was responsible for vacuuming? I looked underneath claw-footed chairs and saw dust balls, ripped papers, desiccated food particles and cigarette butts, matches burnt black, and many gray heaps that must’ve been ashes surreptitiously dumped. The carpet itself was gritty to the touch; the weave felt suffused with sand and dirt, and the rancid smell that rose from it was of something wet and dead. How many after-dinner ports had been absently tipped and allowed to dribble into sugary pools that fed the bugs and soaked through these old threads, down into the foam matting and between cracks dividing floorboards that groaned beneath our shoes and boots all stomping this way and that, to the bathroom, the porno cabinet, the drinks table?

Hiram’s stockings were checkered and sheer. One had slid down its leg. There was not much leg there. The skin was chalky alabaster, speckled brown. Hiram’s trousers rode high on him. He belted these at the bottom of his rib cage. If you look around the world, you’ll notice elderly men wearing pants in this fashion. Hiram’s were green and a mismatch with his socks. The shoes, as I have said, were black, and they were massive. They held my attention. I should say that they held me under their spell. I reached out to take a flower that lay across a shoe’s toe. As if responding, this shoe moved toward my hand. Of course, this was only Hiram shifting his foot. But it seemed to me, down there on my belly on the reeking carpet, as though this fat black wing tip had become self-activated, that it had decided, all by itself, to proffer its white bloom. Obviously, Hiram’s wing tip was not alive. I knew this. It’s just that the shoe looked so big up close, and so oblong, so impressively thick-skinned, with its laces like whiskers and its toe that glistened like an animal’s wet nose.