Of all of them, the one in the photograph is, without a doubt, the one. It is the best. There is a landscape in the lining; crimson trees pierce embroidered sky; animals play in the river. The silk against my skin is a feeling Nicholas would have had a word for.

The robe almost fits, which seems wrong; Nicholas was always so much smaller. Yet the obi goes around me. Not twice, it is true, but it goes around.

In my brother’s robe, I lean against the picture glass, against the skulls in Chichén Itzá.

When we were there together, before we climbed the pyramid, before he met the man in the open madras shirt who wore French cuffs to dinner, Nicholas read aloud to me one night in bed. He read that when Chichén Itzá was a city and the ball court was in use for sport, the players played sometimes for gold, sometimes for the right to strip the spectators of their clothes. He read a description of the ball that had figured in the game, of how that ball was made. He read to me that holes had been drilled into trees to disgorge a sap, great white drops of it, which then would harden and be molded and turn black.

It took us time to realize that all that he was reading about was the making of rubber, and when we realized this together, we laughed at the same time.

Nicholas was still laughing when he read to me that it was the winner of the match, that it was not the loser, who gave up his life in sacrifice, and that men trained hard to win the honor.

I do not know if Nicholas remembered what he read to me in laughter, or if he knew, through all the years that he could see himself posed against it, framed in mirrors in this room, that the wall of skulls behind him was where the winners’ heads were laid.

About the Author

About the Author

Christopher Coe was a writer, photographer and cabaret singer. He lived in Paris and New York City. Coe’s first novel, I Look Divine, was published in 1987, his second, Such Times, in 1993. His style has been called "reminiscent of both Oscar Wilde's and Marcel Proust's late writings" (Publishers Weekly). In 1994, Christopher Coe died of AIDS.

David Leavitt’s books include Family Dancing, The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, and The Indian Clerk. A new novel, The Two Hotel Francforts, will be published in the fall of 2013. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is a professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary journal Subtropics.

About the Book

About the Book