‘What can you do? Carlin there’s calling the dog’s name, but the dog just ignores him. Finally someone has to rush in and yank its collar, still shouting its name. This, by the way, was the very thing that horrified MacDougall above all, I was to find out later.’

‘The name?’

‘How it could ignore its own name. Anyway, that’s more or less the way it would always play out. Before kids eventually learned to keep their dogs locked.’

‘Yours too, I take it.’

‘Didn’t have a dog, growing up. But one time MacDougall did come over to spend the night, and my dad scarred him for life, inadvertently.’

‘Hard to imagine you having a scary dad.’

‘Yeah, well. He was a big guy. Burly. A construction worker, you know, a plumber. But built like a barbican and with these fat strong fingers that could unscrew screws and his sheer physical presence had impressed upon us all terribly, as children, my friends and me. MacDougall most of all. He was the kind of big that he got an ironical nickname: Cookie. “Mister Cookie,” to MacDougall. We can watch something else, you know.’

‘No, come on. It took us half an hour to settle on this. We go back to Netflix, we’ll browse, bicker, it’ll be another half hour before we’ve agreed on anything. This is fine. Just let it play.’

‘All right, you’re right.’

‘So your dad and Dougall.’

‘The thing about my dad was that he loved jokes and knew a lot of jokes and got a kick out of goofing my friends whenever they came over. But there was one joke in particular he loved to play. Practical joke. It starts out as just a story he’s telling you, a memory he’s remembering, this long and rambling anecdote concerning a road trip he supposedly took to New Orleans in his twenties. While there, he tells you, a group of his friends talked him into having his palm read by one of those Jackson Square chiromancers, a wizened old woman decked out in geodic jewelry and a flowing gown and a purple turban and heavy eyeliner, who my dad says he’s immediately skeptical of but decides to humor anyway, for his friends.’

‘This is a real memory?’

‘Hold on. So he says that he sat on a folding chair at this woman’s picnic table and paid her and let her take his hand in hers—and here, while telling the story, he likes to take your hand in his, and begin idly tracing your palm with one of his big fingers, a hypnotic massage such as he is supposedly receiving in the diegesis of the joke—but when the woman took his hand, he says, she squinted down at his palm and gasped, telling him that his was a soul rich in reincarnations. That his past lives were many and vivid and preserved with uncommon clarity in his lines. The whole spiel. He says he was expecting her to flatter his pride, tell him he’d been a Napoleon or an Alexander. And indeed, when she started to trace a curve—and his own finger is imitating hers by circling your palm like—she told him that this was a mark made on his soul in ancient Rome. He perked up here, he says: Was he a Caesar? No, she told him—he’d worked with a crew on the aqueducts. Now my dad looks you in the eye and shakes his head and sighs: a plumber. Quips that he just can’t win. You know, he was a plumber even in his past lives, his soul will be sweating and toiling for all eternity.’