“The Same Bad Jokes Uncle Dale went into the float tank at the wellness center on a Thursday. Ninety minutes, the brochure said. Total sensory deprivation. "A return to the primordial waters." He came out at 4:47 p.m., and something about him was off. It wasn't anything you could point to. He had the same mustache, the same Costco fleece and the same left shoe with the lace that never stayed tied. But when the attendant handed him a towel, he looked at it for a long moment, the way you'd look at a letter from someone you used to love. "Thank you," he said. "For the cloth." Then he turned to me, eyes bright, and said, "Hey. What do you call a fish with no eyes?" I said, "Dale, no." "A fsh." So it was him. Probably. Over the next few weeks, the evidence piled up. He started greeting the crows in the backyard by name. Not cute names. Old names. Morwen. Tathal. The One Who Remembers Sundays. The crows, to everyone's discomfort, seemed to answer to them. He stopped wearing a watch. "Time is a rumor," he told my mother at Thanksgiving, then glanced at the oven and said, "The turkey has eleven minutes left." It did. Nobody had told him when it went in. He began holding his coffee with both hands, gently, as though it were a small warm animal that might be frightened. He hummed in a key my cousin, who teaches music, said "doesn't technically exist in Western tuning." And once, while we were waiting in line at the DMV, he leaned over and whispered, "This place is a minor bardo. Be kind to the souls here. They are between forms." The woman at Window 4 heard him and nodded, like she'd been waiting her whole career for someone to say it. But then, as we walked to the car, he said, "Why did the scarecrow win an award?" "Dale." "Because he was outstanding in his field." Same Dale. Probably. I did my research. In certain corners of the internet, among people who own a lot of amethyst, there's a concept called a walk-in. The idea is that sometimes a soul gets tired, or finishes its business, and steps out of a body, and another soul, one with paperwork in order, steps in. The new tenant keeps the memories, the mortgage and the dental records. But it isn't quite the same person. I brought it up at dinner. Carefully. "Dale," I said. "Have you ever heard of a walk-in?" He set down his fork. The candle on the table leaned slightly toward him, though there was no draft. "Have you?" he said. The silence went on long enough that the dog left the room. Then he smiled, the old, goofy Dale smile, and said, "I used to be addicted to soap. But I'm clean now." The thing that kept me up at night wasn't the crows or the turkey or the way he'd started speaking fluent Portuguese in his sleep. It was the jokes. Because if a new soul had walked in, a soul who knew the names of birds and the shape of time and the true nature of the DMV, why on earth would it keep the jokes? Finally, one evening on the porch, I asked him straight out. "Whoever you are. Wherever you came from. Why the jokes?" He was quiet for a long time. The stars seemed closer than usual. One of them blinked, the way a person blinks when they're listening in. "When a soul leaves," he said slowly, "it takes almost everything with it. The fears. The regrets. The password to the Netflix account." "That explains a lot, actually." "But some things are bound to the vessel. Fixed to the frame, like a lien on a house. Load-bearing." He looked at me with eyes that were very old and very kind. "The jokes are load-bearing." "So you're stuck with them." "No," he said. "You're stuck with them. I was briefed." I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything. After a while he stood up, stretched in a way that looked like he was remembering how arms worked, and headed inside. At the door, he paused. "Hey," he said. "Did you hear about the guy who got hit with a can of soda?" "...No." "He's fine. It was a soft drink." The porch light flickered once, approvingly.”