Fire was up now, pulling on his jeans and heading down the stairs without shirt or shoes. Phil trailed behind him.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“To paint.”

“Shit, you haven’t done that in years.”

“And you should see the stuff I’m doing. It’ll blow your mind. It’s blowing mine.”

“D’you know what I see when I look at this one?” Phil said, biting his lower lip as he picked up one of what were now over a hundred and fifty canvases.

“No,” Fire said, working furiously, wondering if this interpretation would be as classic as the last.

“I see a bird, right … flying through a forest … but like the forest is burning up … that’s what all this red messy-looking stuff is here.” He pointed to something that Fire didn’t recognize as anything. “But the bird is flying through these flames—”

“Phil,” Fire asked as he mixed some yellow, “so how come the bird isn’t getting burnt?”

“Well, cause it’s not real flames. It’s only a picture, and the bird knows that.”

“So it’s a real bird, then, flying through a picture?”

“Right. Oh, come on, Fire, it can be anything you want it to be. That’s what I want it to be.”

Fire began to hack away with the yellow, slicing through a layer of green.

“So, Phil, why would you want to see this particular scenario—a bird flying through fake flames?”

“Well,” Phil began, picking up another piece, “I was watching this program on television about a brushfire and there were all these little birds that died. And I began to think of a way to help animals in fires. And so I started thinking that maybe Du Pont or one of those companies could make a spray that would make animals fireproof. Y’know, something that you could spread like insecticide … I really can’t explain how it would work. But I think it’s worth looking into—”

“Right, but where does the fake picture come in?”

“So what? You believe that everything in life is real? How do you know we’re not dreaming this right now? Someone asked me that the other day and I couldn’t answer.”

Fire looked at Phil, looked at the work in progress, and looked back at Phil and began to laugh. “Because,” he said, “it would be a fucking nightmare.”

“Maybe we’re onto something,” Phil said. “What did Freud say about dreams? I know you probably know.”

Fire spent about thirty minutes trying to explain Freud to him, then gave up after Phil began adding his own theories to anything that didn’t make sense to him. The good thing, though, was that talking had somehow made the urge go away.

While Phil locked up the shed, Fire walked to a shaded spot by the back fence and sat on a bench beneath the apple trees, which were heavy with leaves and fruit.

“There might be something in that whole dream thing, you know,” Phil said, as he sat next to him. “What have you been dreaming about?”