“The reading was Mathias’s idea. He was going to read his new poems, and we were all mad curious about them. It was at one of those awful bars we went to back then, with cheap beer and an open stage. Mathias showed up looking terrible. He’d pretty much given up eating or sleeping. Viridian wasn’t there. They’d probably had one of their famous fights. Did he ever abuse her? I can’t say I know for certain. But I would not have been surprised.

“He started off by saying something about writing in blood, and about running out of ink, and the poems were his last will and testament. Typical melodrama from him. We all rolled our eyes. He read the first poem. It was good, it was more than good. When he was finished, he held it up by two fingers and set it on fire with a lighter. Another of his stunts. Once it was nothing but ash, he picked up the next poem and read that, and again it was good, rich and strange and potent, it’s stayed with me all this time, and again he set it on fire.

“By this time, it was clear that there was something wrong, very wrong, and a couple of people tried to stop him. But he held them off, reading, burning, reading, burning. I’d started scribbling notes, off in a corner where he couldn’t see, everything I heard, everything I could remember. I got the titles and a few first lines and maybe a bit more.

“He finished. The air stank of smoke. People sat him down, bought him a drink, tried to get him to eat something so as to change the awful, skull look of his face. People talked to him, wanted him to get help. My point is, people tried. But you can’t keep somebody alive if they’re determined to die. Two days later, he was gone.”

I waited a moment before I asked about the poems. “The ones he burned. I thought—”

“Somebody found out that Viridian had copies. I guess they saw them in her apartment, she hadn’t been quick enough to put them away. It turned into gossip and the gossip got around and next thing, Mathias’s publisher took her to court to get them. Viridian testified that she’d found copies in the garbage, she had to go through the alley cans to find them. I don’t know what to think about that. He’d meant to destroy them entirely. And now she had them, and she wouldn’t give them up, not to his publisher or anyone else.

“I had to give a deposition, because I had those notes, you see. Viridian won. She had herself named his literary executor. And there the matter’s stayed, for all these years.