In the lacquer, I can see the underside of a dark linen lampshade, and up inside it, naked, the lightbulb it hides. I see picture frames, the pictures in them, prints of figures in kimonos, masked actors, courtesans, their blues and whites tinted by entrapment in the orange-red; and depending on where I move or how I lean, I can see, slanting in the flat surface, just up to the red obi tied tight around his waist, where the lacquer edge cuts it, the blown-up photograph of my brother posing, years ago, in a long black Japanese robe.

To see higher, to see the face, I need to look up from the lacquer to the wall, where it looks down, my brother’s face, life-size within a mirrored frame.

Of course he does not smile.

In the mirrored frame, behind the light-splashed glass, my brother stands against a wall of skull-like faces carved in stone. His pose includes a cigarette, white filtered, and a hollow-stemmed champagne glass that he is holding to his neck, just below the jawline.

Nicholas prized his jawline; he prized all his bones.

The obi is tight around what was then a smaller- than-boyish waist.

A champagne bottle stands on a dried-out patch of grass at my brother’s feet. The bottle is turned name-side to the camera and has a year on it. The year on the bottle, of course, would not be the year of the photograph. The year of the photograph would have been a proper year to drink the vintage. The proper year to drink a vintage is the kind of thing that Nicholas made it a point to know.

The bottle at my brother’s feet is labeled 1962, and I would guess that it would have to be five or six years older than the photograph, at least, though this is not the kind of thing I make a point of knowing.

The cigarette between my brother’s fingers is smoked to a photogenic length of ash and is held at an angle that was, even then, a dated way to hold a cigarette. But it is clear that Nicholas meant to feature his hands.

Someone must have told him that he had beautiful hands.

Nicholas did have beautiful hands, and the only word that I can think of for the way he holds the cigarette is, I am afraid, demure.

There are other words, of course, but demure will have to do.

What I wondered, until I realized that it was not a question, was why a thirty-seven-year-old man would have displayed, life-size in his bedroom, in sight of his bed, in a mirrored frame on a mirrored wall, and mirrored all around by other walls, a photograph of himself looking like a twenty-two-year-old boy, or even younger, nineteen, eighteen, because Nicholas spent most of his life looking younger than he was.