I got an email that my friend Lucius died last night. I still expect him to call and tell me that the news is bullshit. We talked weekly, often daily, often multiple times a day, for a decade and a half. He read me all his work in progress, and we watched scores of movies together. Incredibly eloquent, vulnerable, conniving, duplicitous, incisive, open-hearted — like his much-lauded, gorgeous fiction he was fantastic, an outsized projection of humanity in every respect. I will miss him very much.