Looking at Nan now, he saw not an old friend, but yet another person who needed to draw strength from him.

To whom, he asked himself, would he turn if he needed help right now? He couldn’t think of anyone except Blanche. And maybe not even her anymore. For she was a part of another set of problems. He thought about the letter he had written her from Brooklyn and wondered if he’d been right to mail it. Yes, he decided. She deserved it. She’d done so much. Even this house. She’d helped him to pick it out. Explained to him the nuances of down payments and mortgages, things he still didn’t know or care that much about.

“Well, Nan,” he said with a smiling face, “just put together a new one.”

“It’s expensive to do and I can’t afford it.”

“I’ll give you the money, Nan.”

“I couldn’t do that, Fire.”

“I’ll lend it to you.”

“It wouldn’t matter. I’d only fail.”

“So why’re you going to the polytech then?”

“To get out of the house. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”

She broke down and started to cry.

“I want a steady job, Fire … I’m tired of having to ask Courtney for things … I want to be my own person.”

She fell on top of him and he held her, stroking her hair with one hand, ignoring the discomfort of the other, which was trapped awkwardly beneath her.

Nan was depressed for days after that. There were days when Fire wanted to sit down and talk with her, but that would’ve been helping her to cheat, he thought. It was her situation. And she had to make the choice—after which, he believed, she’d be stronger.

Soon after his arrival, Fire settled into a daily rhythm anchored by his need to paint, a violent primal urge that would punch him in the belly in the middle of the night and drag him half asleep, half awake to the bathroom, shove his face under a bracing stream, kick him down the stairs to the shed in the back of the house, and jab him even as he worked furiously, in different media on different days, but never the same thing in a row, and never anything that he would have recognized as his own had he not been there to witness the work being released from the tip of his brush, which he maneuvered like a machete, slashing back and forth across the canvas as if its whiteness, its neutrality, were something that had to be destroyed, had to be chopped open and gutted so that its hidden emotions could spew forth, staining its skin with a multicolored stream that shone like blood and was bitter as bile.

This is not me, he said to himself one day after being kidnapped during a lunch break at one of his workshops. He hadn’t even bothered to wear an apron. Paint was splattered all over his shirt, his jeans, his boots, all over the floor, even on some of the work that he’d done over the previous days, work that had been left to dry against the moldy brick walls that sucked the life from the one bare bulb that hung from the ceiling by a length of cord.