The sounds of the world were calling, but Fire didn’t answer.

Where was Ian? Teego and Buju were siding with him. They hadn’t said anything, but he knew. He hadn’t heard from either of them since the fight. Well, if is so, is so. You shouldn’t mash down de man so, Buju had said. Teego had just looked away and shook his head. They were simple men, he was thinking now. They didn’t understand the power of words.

He didn’t realize he’d closed his eyes until he opened them. A blade of lightning chased its sound above his head. There was a crack, which had startled him; then the sky split apart like smoldering wood. It would rain soon.

Where was Ian? he wondered, as he raised the tarpaulin. Miss Gita would be home soon. He had to find her boy. That’s what he was, a boy. Maybe Buju and Teego were right. As a man, he should’ve known better. But look at what the boy had done. He’d unfettered dangerous thoughts and feelings. The letter was a pen full of perilous words, words that had roamed his mind in packs and cornered his wounded self-esteem, yelping as they sank their teeth in and pulled it down.

He was thinking of writing to her again now. Dear Sylvia, On the flight back to London I locked myself in the bathroom and cried so hard …

Dear Sylvia, If your clit was a spliff I’d smoke it …

Dear Sylvia, The only woman I’ve ever loved as much was my mother …

According to I-nelik, the two women resembled each other. That’s your mother, the dread had said, peering at Sylvia in carnival dress. They had been viewing the stolen image on the edge of a hilly grove in the back of the family land, taking shade beneath a nasberry bush beside the radioactive spring they called the Jah-cuzzi. They’d been going there since his teenage years to soak and talk and burn a stick of weed, which they treated like a sacrament for communing with nature, the living, breathing temple of God.

At the time he’d been back from London about two months, he was thinking now as he secured the canvas, and was carrying an extra thirty pounds from trying to eat away the depression that was eroding his soul. He’d been having ice cream daily, at least a quart, and had backslid to red meat, mainly pork, which he’d fry in coconut oil and smother in butter sauce and eat with buttered mashed potatoes and mounds of buttered rice. Depressed, he’d begun to lock himself away in his room. He stopped answering the phone, and stopped going out, and told Miss Gita to tell everyone he was still away in England. When he wasn’t eating he lay awake in bed, fighting sleep and memory. Sleep was more dangerous. Memory he could challenge while awake. In sleep he was defenseless. She would float on his dreams like spilled crude oil and make him cry like a drowning gull.