The steps up are steep and look steeper going down. Halfway up, Nicholas looked behind him, down, and I saw panic in his face. He said I had better make him look his best, because it might be the last time anyone would see him in one piece. He said that he was sure that he would never get down. He said that I must do him justice, make him look divine, because that was what he would probably need to be.

“Take it like a lover would,” he told me at the top.

That year, my brother could actually sit on his hair. His ribs pressed ridges out against his shirt. He faced away from me, looking down at the ruins. As I began, to focus on his back, Nicholas turned around, pressed his hair against his ribs, and casually upstaged a circle of horizon.

He touched a cheekbone and ran a finger down along his jawline, testing the edge. This was a ritual that Nicholas went through before a photograph. He also went through it in front of mirrors. In Chichén Itzá, I had seen him go through it every morning, before he scrubbed his face with rough towels that he saturated in tequila for astringent.

In Italy he used grappa; in France he used framboise.

On days that the cheekbones or the jawline did not feel to the touch as he thought they should, days he called his harridan days, days he called himself a termagant, Nicholas, wherever we were, would find an issue of Time or Newsweek and would turn at once to “Milestones” or “Transition.” He would read in silence, until he made his choice. Then I would learn the death of the week most salient to Nicholas.

“God help me,” he would say. “I look like Helena Rubinstein.”

Or it would be, “God help me, I look like Linda Darnell.”

On trips with my brother, I heard in this way of many illustrious passings, even on weeks when no one illustrious had passed.

Nicholas always said that the best people died when one was traveling, but there were weeks of disappointing milestones, dismal transitions, passings which were, for Nicholas, deficient. On such weeks, my brother would assign untimely demise to names that came to mind.

“God help me,” he would say. “I look like Miriam Hopkins.”

“God help me, I look like Clare Boothe Luce.”

“God help me, I look like Olive Higgins Prouty.”

Sometimes I would find a name a shock and would ask Nicholas if it was true, if the one he had named was really dead in Transition.

Nicholas would answer without looking up. “Not yet, but can you imagine how she must look?”

But that afternoon on the pyramid, the cheekbones and the jawline must have pleased my brother’s fingers. He must have believed that he looked more glamorous than a transition. He must have believed that his face was in order.

His face was in order.