His reply, hastily drafted in pencil on composition paper while he rode the bus to his workshop, was brief, considerate, and sincere. She shouldn’t call. They needed distance for the new reality to set in. Writing was fine, but he couldn’t promise either long or speedy replies. And although she was under no obligation to agree, he thought it would be best if she immediately returned the house keys to Miss Gita and took any belongings that she might have at the house back to her apartment. Sarge would take care of his things at hers.

He heard from her within a week. A cheery note saying that she’d done all he’d asked, reminding him however that Sarge couldn’t locate his set of keys for her apartment. Did he have them in London? And would he, if he did, send them via express mail along with a few books she hungered for.

He went to Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road and the next day mailed her five volumes, two collections of poetry and three long novels, along with the keys and a rambling letter of apology that found its purpose in the last line: “There is something unsettlingly final about this.”

To which she replied in a postcard delivered via two-day service: “That is not what I want to hear. What I want to hear is, ‘Blanche, I don’t need you to look after me anymore.’ Can you say that, Fire? Can you honestly say that?”

Shortly thereafter he was faced with a second compulsion—exchanging with her, by express post, thick, honest letters examining their history from the beginning till now.

One morning, just before sunrise, five weeks after he arrived, he was drawn from sleep by a sound that seemed to be calling from a distance. A sound as soft as it was beautiful, like moondrops falling on a mountain lake. Still groggy, he opened his eyes and made out through the mist of semi-consciousness a ghostlike figure drifting across the room—shirtless, he gathered, from the flash of pink that leaped from the dark when the man, as he now realized, passed under the trickle of window light.

As he sat up, unsure if he was dreaming or awake, the figure leaned against the back of a chair, revealing its familiar profile—the long neck and narrow shoulders that seemed to have been drawn by Dr. Seuss.

“Phil,” Fire said, fully awake now. “How the fuck’re you doing?”

Gangly, with buzz-cut sandy hair, Phil held his horn like a baby and slapped him five, taking a seat on the edge of the futon.

“So when’d you get in?” Fire asked.

“Oh, I just got in about a half hour ago,” he said, gray eyes bulging. “Fuck, after hearing you snoring from downstairs, I said I’d have to wake you up so I could get some sleep.” He began to laugh. Spastically. Which is the way he did everything except play music—as if God felt guilty for giving him so much talent and chose to deny him many other qualities, including shrewdness. As Ian liked to say, Phil was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Neither was he stylish. His glasses, which were clearly too large, bloomed out of his nose like the wings of a moth.