I Look Divine by Christopher Coe

Author:Christopher Coe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay, fiction, novel, brothers
Publisher: Bruno-Books
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

I have made up my mind that it must be Chichén Itzá. Even though it had almost nothing for sale, Chichén Itzá was another of Nicholas’s favorite places in the world. He went there more than once; there were a few years, I think, when he went there every year. The skull faces behind him in the photograph, if I am not mistaken, are the ones that run along the walls of the ruins of the ball court. The faces run in rows and have long teeth. They do not smile, either.

Nicholas and I went to Chichén Itzá once, and it occurred to me that I might even have taken the photograph, years ago, until I realized that I had not before seen my brother in this particular Japanese robe.

I am wondering how, exactly, he got to the ruins in the Japanese robe. The hotel in Chichén Itzá, the one where Nicholas would have stayed when he went back without me, the one where peacocks run loose in the gardens, devouring papayas that the clientele toss down from balconies, is about half a mile from the site. One can walk to the ruins on the shoulder of the road, and I am wondering if that is what Nicholas did. On the shoulder of the road that one takes to the ruins in Chichén Itzá, as on many roads in Mexico, one will see, frequently, a horse or a cow that has been hit, burning. One sees the animal in flames. On many roads in Mexico, when a horse or a cow is hit, the natives ignite it with gasoline. Sometimes the animal is alive when it is ignited, and one can see, from one’s car, or on foot if one is walking, the animal dying of the impact while it is dying also of the fire. One sees the animal convulse. The smell of the fire and the flesh is also a taste. It gets into the throat, the carcass taste, with the smell of smoke and the taste of blood in the swallow of each breath.

Of course, Nicholas may not have walked. He may have gone by car, but I can picture my brother on foot, tight-waisted in the Japanese robe, passing an animal on fire in a ditch. I can picture the flow of the robe, the lilt in my brother’s walk, unbroken by the stench, and it occurs to me that, in his mind, Nicholas may already have been planning the composition of the photograph.

Nicholas liked to refer to photographs of himself as shots. It was his word to distinguish photographs of himself from photographs in general. On occasions when Nicholas and I were photographed together, which became rare, Nicholas would say, “This is a good photograph of you, but it is not a becoming shot of me.”

On his way to the ruins, Nicholas may have known, even then, that he would enlarge the photograph of himself, the one for which he may have walked around a

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