Nearly dying was something my brother did well. Nicholas knew how to be cherished. He went on hunger strikes and had seizures. They were real, but I always suspected that he knew how to bring them on. I was always sure that he knew how to fall down and go into a spasm at will, and I wondered why he did not look worse in a fit.

His was the minor affliction, the kind that children can grow out of, and he always looked unruffled in a spasm.

The face remained composed.

He looked rapturous.

He asked me once what he looked like in a fit. I told him he did not want to know. I knew he would ask again, and when he did, I touched him and told him that his eyes bulged out and rolled up white, that his skin turned red, and that his mouth was transformed into a huge, wide-open, beatific smile. I told him that the smile was so huge, so wide-open, you could see the tail wagging.

I told him this and watched his face collapse.

When Nicholas was twelve he was tested for intelligence. That test made him, all at once, a genius.

Becoming a genius took Nicholas one day.

As with my own test, no score was reported, no actual number. It was our father’s idea to keep our scores from us. When I had my test, several years before Nicholas became a genius—when in fact Nicholas was still learning to tie his shoes—our father called the two of us in to his dressing room and told us that what he had to say concerned us both. Nicholas stood in a corner, leaning into it, looking unconcerned, and that was the expression he more or less maintained when our father announced that I was an intelligent boy.

I already knew I was; he had told me this before, but this time I was smart enough to know that he was talking about the test, my test.

Nicholas was also smart enough to know this. He knew that there had been a test, that I had had it and he had not.

Our father was changing for dinner and sat down in a wing chair to take off his shoes. When he bent over to untie them, Nicholas moved from the corner to the doorway. From a remarkably early age Nicholas was partial to standing in doorways, or more accurately, he was partial to doorways as places to stand. Among places to stand, Nicholas tended to prefer settings to locations. Doorways, of course, are settings.

They are also frames. When my brother moved from a corner of our father’s dressing room into the doorway in the same instant that our father bent over to untie his shoes, he did so, I realized, with an instinct for placing himself in a frame.