When Nicholas murmured to babies, as when he murmured to animals, the same look came over his face. It was an expression that could be mistaken for a smile, and as I watched him with the dog, it crossed my mind that if I were willing to risk the outburst, the tantrum, then the pique and frosty silence that would follow, I had, just then, the closest opportunity that I was ever likely to get to take a picture of my brother smiling.

But it would not have been worth the tantrum and the frost. The few times that I had caught Nicholas unposed, he had found the camera and destroyed the film. Nicholas would crack the combination on my suitcase to get at film he wanted to destroy.

“Look at it,” Nicholas said. “This is an ancient beast. How do you think it got up here?”

I offered that perhaps its owner had carried it up and left it. I offered this even though the creature was clearly an animal that no one owned. I said that the Mayans had sacrificed virgins, that this, perhaps, was a sacrificial dog.

“That is not funny,” Nicholas said. “For saying that, you can carry it down.”

I said that nothing could make me carry the dog down, that nothing could make me touch it. I told Nicholas that the dog probably had every Mexican dog disease that there was in the world.

Nicholas knew how to do something with his eyes, and he did it then. It was a trick he had that made him appear to be on the verge of tears. He could stay on the verge of tears for hours, with the trick.

It was not the trick that actually did produce tears, though Nicholas had that trick, too. That was another trick, one he had not used on me for several years.

“Someone has to take it down,” Nicholas said. “It will never get down by itself.”

There were a few other people on the top that afternoon, a few men other than myself who looked able to carry a dog down a pyramid. Nicholas approached each one of them, and each man looked at the dog, then at Nicholas, and even when my brother offered money, each man shook his head, refused, walked off.

Nicholas went to the edge of the pyramid and sat on the top step, on his hair, with the dog. I could tell that he was looking down the steps.

With all that there was to look at from where I stood—the ancient structures of the site, the landscape stretching out in flatness to horizons that kept going—what I looked at, until he turned around, was my brother sitting on his hair. I looked at his back, his straight chain of spine, the ribs that were ridges in his shirt, and the childlike arms, slight within the sleeves that were buttoned at the wrist.

When he turned around, I saw a single tear poised halfway down my brother’s face.