“Drink to dat one,” Ian said, clinking stout bottles with Fire.

Ian and Fire laughed. They sat on the verandah and listened to music, chatting and drinking until sunrise.

Fire set aside a few hours each day to listen to Ian, who had pulled together his doubts about living in Jamaica into a somewhat incoherent political theory, which he labeled Gore-Tech, the central idea of which was that he, Ian Gore, should be benevolent dictator of the island, ably assisted by a cadre of Caribbean technocrats recruited from overseas. To Fire, the point of engaging him was not to indulge his political vision, but rather to steer him into discussions of his youth, their youth, in the hope of locating the exact time and place when he’d begun to resent Miss Gita. He’d given Fire the money that first night, had simply placed the envelope on his lap while they talked. There were no thank-yous or you’re-welcomes, yet there was an understanding, as subtle as salt on a strip of beach, that one was sorry and the other forgiving.

By the end of the third day, Fire could get him to talk about adolescence, and for the first time he began to really understand the weight of Ian’s class baggage, for none of his reminiscences about the pranks they used to pull, and the girls they used to like, and the parties they used to crash were centered in his own environment. Downtown. The ghetto. Which was strange, because they’d spent a lot of time there, playing soccer on dustbowl fields, and learning to flash ratchet knives, and going to dances at the primary school to dub against the chain-link fence to the heavyweight sounds of Jammy’s and Arrow’s and Ray Symbolic.

And the stories themselves, of concerts at the Police Officers Club and disco nights at Toppsi, in their lack of detail, sounded like adaptations from the secondhand account of someone else’s life, someone distant, a stranger, about whom he didn’t care. They didn’t have the vividness of adolescent memory. Which was like a stage play. Alive. Expressive. And emotionally engaging.

Had he chosen to forget? Fire would ask himself. Or is he talking about things he thinks I’d remember—the things he thinks I’d value? And what does that say of his impression of me? That I’m a bourgeois? And what does all this say about his impression of himself?

Most of their time was spent apart though. Fire would rise with the light and go running, then make breakfast when he returned; he would eat alone. Ian would come down usually after noon and sketch in the shade of a magnolia tree at the side of the house, while Fire read or listened to music or worked on refining some ideas for a novel. His mind was always active. It had to be. His emotions were safer in a crowd.

One morning, as he was about to do some laundry by hand, Fire went up to Ian’s room to look for dirty clothes. He heard him singing in the back and leaned out the window and asked if he had any washing. He said no. On the way down, Fire noticed a sketch pad on the bed. Ian was a master draftsman, so out of a sense of admiration Fire picked up the pad to glance through it, expecting to see landscapes, still lifes, and a few figure studies. The first page took him by surprise. He studied it for a couple of seconds and flipped to the next. To his disquiet it was worse. The entire pad, he discovered, was a meditation on the same idea. He flipped through from end to end again.