Nicholas considered this. “As it were,” he said, “if you will. I don’t know what he was doing there. I mean, actually, sweetheart, I didn’t ask him, ‘So, what’s a nice Jap like you doing in a Chink joint like this?’ It did not exactly cross my mind to ask him that. Maybe he liked cashew chicken. Maybe he had a yen for sweet and sour. How would I know what he was doing there?”

We walked a block.

“Just one other thing,” I said. “Why would Mother leave you, when you were twelve years old, at a bar at three in the afternoon?”

“I said why. Didn’t I say that she had to run an errand?”

“What errand would make a woman leave a twelve- year-old boy at the bar of a Chink joint at three in the afternoon?”

“Honey, what’s this Chink business? What’s all this business about Japs and Chinks and Japs in Chink joints? Who have you been seeing lately, honey?”

We crossed the street and walked to the end of the next block, to the hotel entrance. We had to ring to get in. Nicholas lit a cigarette while we waited.

“She had to dash to Gump’s,” he said. “She had her eye on some jade ashtrays at Gump’s.”

I have made up my mind that it must be Chichén Itzá. Even though it had almost nothing for sale, Chichén Itzá was another of Nicholas’s favorite places in the world. He went there more than once; there were a few years, I think, when he went there every year. The skull faces behind him in the photograph, if I am not mistaken, are the ones that run along the walls of the ruins of the ball court. The faces run in rows and have long teeth. They do not smile, either.

Nicholas and I went to Chichén Itzá once, and it occurred to me that I might even have taken the photograph, years ago, until I realized that I had not before seen my brother in this particular Japanese robe.

I am wondering how, exactly, he got to the ruins in the Japanese robe. The hotel in Chichén Itzá, the one where Nicholas would have stayed when he went back without me, the one where peacocks run loose in the gardens, devouring papayas that the clientele toss down from balconies, is about half a mile from the site. One can walk to the ruins on the shoulder of the road, and I am wondering if that is what Nicholas did. On the shoulder of the road that one takes to the ruins in Chichén Itzá, as on many roads in Mexico, one will see, frequently, a horse or a cow that has been hit, burning. One sees the animal in flames. On many roads in Mexico, when a horse or a cow is hit, the natives ignite it with gasoline. Sometimes the animal is alive when it is ignited, and one can see, from one’s car, or on foot if one is walking, the animal dying of the impact while it is dying also of the fire. One sees the animal convulse. The smell of the fire and the flesh is also a taste. It gets into the throat, the carcass taste, with the smell of smoke and the taste of blood in the swallow of each breath.