Ian stirred and Fire drew the curtains against the light. But it found a way to seep through, lightening the tone of the somber wood that had been exquisitely turned and beveled to furnish the room.

He never felt closer to Ian than when he saw him asleep—when the skin on his face shrank back to his skull, smoothing the wrinkles that began to appear when he started doing coke in art school.

What moved Fire was Ian’s vulnerability, the way he wheezed instead of snored, the way he clung to soft objects—a grip that contained the hope that maybe he wasn’t a man yet … that there was still some time for him to change.

The night before, when Fire had to peel away his sweaty clothes and set Ian in the tub to wash away the piss and grime, his body had felt like a golf bag, the thin bones clanking like driving irons.

He was trying to roll out of bed now, rising and falling like a bat with broken wings. He tried to speak but his mouth gaped like a sore.

“You awright?” Fire asked.

He nodded, then words began to dribble out like pus. “Remember what you ask me bout Lewis last night?”

Fire checked his memory. He remembered now, but he thought he’d been muttering to himself.

“Well, this is it …”

Fire threw him a pair of boxers, yellow ones with blue stripes, that he’d bought him that morning. Ian slipped them on and thanked him with a nod.

“Fire, you and me are like brothers, y’understand, so you cyaah repeat anything I gweh tell you right now. Me and Lewis are involved in a slight bandoolo business.”

Fire leaned against the window. Ian sat on the edge of the bed, bending forward as if the weight of his story was pulling his body off balance.

“Hear me now. Back in the days when I was licking like a granda shit a week I met Lewis through this beef name Margaret. Nobody you know. A Yankee beef from down south … as a matter of fact I still slap it now and then.

“She, now, is a beef that know a whole heapa people—she’s the program director for CGR. You know them, right? WCGR … jazz station? Well, anyway, she introduce me to him at an opening at MOMA and everything was criss, cause I use to see him hanging around the galleries and all that, but I really never knew him. I knew him as a man that used to buy a lot though. But that don’t really mean nutten because you have people who buy with other people’s money. Which in truth was what he was doing. His company was starting a corporate gallery and they gave him three million to go and spend. And I heard that for every piece he bought for them he bought another one for himself. But that’s neither here nor there. Everybody tief when them get the chance.