Of course, Nicholas may not have walked. He may have gone by car, but I can picture my brother on foot, tight-waisted in the Japanese robe, passing an animal on fire in a ditch. I can picture the flow of the robe, the lilt in my brother’s walk, unbroken by the stench, and it occurs to me that, in his mind, Nicholas may already have been planning the composition of the photograph.

Nicholas liked to refer to photographs of himself as shots. It was his word to distinguish photographs of himself from photographs in general. On occasions when Nicholas and I were photographed together, which became rare, Nicholas would say, “This is a good photograph of you, but it is not a becoming shot of me.”

On his way to the ruins, Nicholas may have known, even then, that he would enlarge the photograph of himself, the one for which he may have walked around a burning animal to pose, and that he would hang it on a mirrored wall, within a mirrored frame, in exact proportion to the size of life.

He may have decided in advance that it would be a stunning shot.

The year that Nicholas and I went to Chichén Itzá was the year we sold the house we had grown up in. It was four years after the summer in Madrid, not quite a year after the time in Rome when he swam in the Tiber. It was the year that Nicholas left California and moved east, and a year or so before he went back with another man to Chichén Itzá and posed in the Japanese robe, in front of the skull faces, for the life-size photograph.

Or rather, the life-size shot.

We spent three nights at the hotel with the peacocks, a long stay for Chichén Itzá, but we stayed because Nicholas decided that Spanish was the most beautiful language in the world when he heard a bus boy say good morning. When I pointed out that the bus boy had said good morning in English, Nicholas said that was not the point.

“When he says just ‘good morning’ in English, I hear something else in Spanish,” Nicholas said. “I hear epithalamia.”

“Epithalamiums,” I said.

“What?”

“Epithalamiums. The plural of epithalamium is epithalamiums. You hear epithalamiums.”

Nicholas smiled with one lip. “Now, darling,” he said, “let’s don’t get carried away. How many of them do you think I hear?”

We could, of course, have heard Spanish anywhere, but that, too, I suppose, was not the point. Nicholas wanted to hear the bus boy’s Spanish, though that year, I think, was about the time, roughly, that Nicholas began to narrow his range to exclude bus boys. That year, I think, Nicholas would not have bothered to tell giants in crew cuts to fuck Mom. That year, in the afternoons, after visits to the ruins—visits which did not, until the third day, include the climb up the pyramid, because he was afraid of the climb down—my brother played chess by the pool of the hotel in Chichén Itzá with a man who turned out to be from New York and who had, inside an unbuttoned, short-sleeved madras shirt, a covering of white hair across his chest.