Here’s a most unusual story about the effects of science on people ... but it isn’t exactly about technology or even scientific theories in the familiar sense. Carter Scholz writes, “I think it’s too bad that the mainstream takes so little interest in the philosophy of science, and that science fiction puts such stress on its speculative and technological aspects.” He takes a giant step in the former direction in this thoughtful and thought-provoking story.

Carter Scholz s stories have appeared in Orbit, New Dimensions, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in addition to Universe. His novelette in Universe 7, “The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs,” was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer. His first novel, Palimpsests, written in collaboration with Glenn Harcourt, was recently published as an Ace Science Fiction Special.

THE MENAGERIE OF BABEL

CARTER SCHOLZ

I was living then in a cottage behind a large house in the hills of Berkeley, California. I had taken it because the rent would let my money last three months. I could have had the basement for less, but when I saw it I balked—it was a tomb. Half the floor was dirt, the other half unsteady wormed boards. Through one glaucous window fell the light of a Manhattan air shaft at dawn. I knew my asceticism was not equal to it. And I wanted at most three months. So I took the cottage, one room twenty feet on a side, with a patchy roof and without electricity or plumbing. As it turned out I was there only a month.

My landlord lived in the main house. He was a law-school drop-out with an overbearing manner, which collapsed the moment I resisted it. Then he was almost unctuous. His name was Peter Fraser. He told me he paid six hundred a month for the house, and I guessed that because of his erratic manner he had a struggle to fill it. In a week the competition for housing would be fierce, and he could have named his price to a desperate student. But he chose to take my cash. We smoked a joint on it, and between lies I told him some harmless truths about myself. My luck was running well then in areas I did not care about.

Berkeley was neutral ground for me. I had come to the far edge of the country for some peace. When asked on my trip out, I would say I meant to finish my degree; I had quit Harvard that summer and had spent some time cleaning lab glass at Woods Hole. Yet, once underway, I took every chance to prolong the trip. I arrived in late August, ahead of the returning students, but too late to register for classes. On my last ride south from Eugene, I woke from the shallow dreams peculiar to travel to see the mud flats of Albany and, across the gunmetal bay, San Francisco, vague in smog. I knew then that all my intentions had just been stories. I had left the East because there were decisions I did not want to make.

So I have no right to judge Murphy. At every crux of choice stands an angel offering counsel, and only after you have chosen and passed do you see his other face, that of a demon, taunting, vilifying, and forbidding return. Glimpse this face once, and you live on a rack of indecision. My choice now was to live out the folly I had started or to run the gauntlet of retreat.

Murphy had no such crises. He was an idiot. I choose the word with care, for its root sense—I mean his mind was unlike any I had known, unique almost to the point of insanity. I do not mean to judge, only to describe him.

The day after I moved in I met him in the backyard. His drawing pad was set on an aluminum easel, and he studied it obsessively as he worked, not looking up but occasionally jerking his head nervously to one side. He was shirtless, and I had never seen anyone so thin. I judged him to be two years younger than I. In his left hand was a mechanical pen, which he shook every so often. I was not really interested, I was seeking isolation. But I had already stepped out of the cottage when I saw him, and by the excessive politeness I indulged to combat my diffidence I was obliged at least to say hello.

His drawing was a dense, precise nature study. I took it for a sea urchin until I looked past the easel and saw a withered sunflower twenty feet away. Perhaps it was the vivid contrast of sunlight and black ink that struck me. The sunflower might have been on the moon, the way he drew it.

After a minute he capped his pen and invited me inside. He had the crowning cupola of the house for his room, and it was crowded with drawings, all with the same stunning, changeable quality. One was clearly of a horseshoe crab, but I glanced at it repeatedly, expecting some transformation. Others were of cacti. He had twenty or thirty plants and watered them as I studied his drawings. Several cacti sat in a terrarium, which seemed otherwise empty. But as I looked I saw twitches of motion—a head, a dun tail, flashed on the dirt. I started to say something about the drawings when he interrupted.

—I love these, he said, reaching to touch a cactus spine. —Do you know why? Look at them. They know the secret. Life is a drug. We’ll turn ourselves into anything to have it.

I looked again at the drawings, and all at once they were morbid. It occurred to me that Murphy would make a master pornographer, so strong was the sense of death in his drawings of life. Around the edge of each object, tossed onto the dead white shore of paper by an unknowable sea, was an intense, obliterating negative space. Every line battled this void. The overdrawn precision was claustrophobic.

He lifted his finger from the spine and pressed it to his mouth. —Why so many? So many types? Who can explain it?

Like a good graduate student, I begin to answer by Darwinian rote, but his faint sardonic smile forced me to my more authentic, less scientific belief: the world was a plenum. The wonder of it had shaped my life. His innocent question, if it was that, was the one thing he could have said to draw me from my politic silence into a study of him.

* * * *

On occasion Murphy took his drawings to Telegraph Avenue for sale. One afternoon I went with him, because the route crossed the campus and I wanted a look. If the place became real to me, I might be moved to act. I also needed to buy an oil lamp. And I wondered how real Murphy’s business connection was. I had the idea his life was an elaborate fantasy. I had nothing against this— certainly my own life was phantasmal and seemed at times a slow but definite form of ritual suicide—but if I was to know him I would feel more secure knowing the habits of his delusion.

My paranoia was not unfounded. The rhythms of the main house were so erratic as to be mystifying. Since dinners were communal, I gained a quick introduction to the seven tenants. One played bass for a band perpetually and tediously about to get work. One studied midwifery. One proofread for a Buddhist press. One couple seemed to do nothing but drift in and out, vanishing sometimes for days. Once I came back from a walk to find them studying my cottage through its one window; they did not return my greeting. Their eyes were like oil.

My landlord liked to complain to me, as if thereby forming an alliance, and confided that he was owed over a thousand dollars in back rent; yet he was not indigent, and as far as I could see had no other income. He went out in his battered Karmann-Ghia only for tennis and movies. His way of life at least had an easy explanation; I found out he had a trust fund and sold drugs. But the overall logic of the house was that of a dream. Its structure was a holdover, or recapitulation, of the communes of the sixties, with the difference that I had more privacy than if I had lived alone. A nearly pathological avoidance of questions ruled the dinner conversation. I could have said I was a Nobel laureate and drawn no comment.

Murphy and I crossed campus. I did not like it. Architecturally it was American, which is to say a hodgepodge. Beaux-arts styles had been lifted and laid with the care of a rich parvenu moving a castle across the ocean stone by stone. The buildings declared that culture could be bought, transported, and legitimated in a new context. To stare at them too long invited dislocation; the classical style was subtly wrong, the air too raw, the flora too luxuriant and primitive. A controlled hysteria, very like the defensive edges of Murphy’s drawings, made a thin halo around the pale granite and red-tiled roofs to hold back the corrosive blue sky.

I picked up an application anyway. Girls passed, slit skirts swinging, on the plaza that thirteen years before had been flooded with tear gas and riot police. Two corner prophets, not yet extinguished by the natural selection of social history, hung on the edge of campus, one reading scripture from file cards, the other preaching a philosophy of hate, their voices oddly twinned. Undergraduates crowded the Avenue, clutching parcels. And I saw that here was a sinking of history, a twisting of time, unlike anything I had seen in the East. I was not badly matched, in my motives of denial and escape, to this place of lost connections and vanished history.

Murphy’s connection was real enough. He was a street vendor with a long folding table in front of the Bank of America. He accepted the rolled sheaf of drawings and shook his head.

—My man, why don’t you get yourself a matte knife? Now I have to take these to the frame place, and you know it comes out of your money.

Murphy shrugged. The vendor counted off several twenty-dollar bills and pushed them across the table. He left his hand on top.

—Listen, you want some coke?

Murphy said no.

—All right. The hand came off the bills. The vendor smiled. —But don’t tell me you do this stuff straight. Take it in trade sometime, okay? You’re giving me cash-flow problems.

From here Murphy crossed to a bookstore with an Indian name. He circled the shelves deliberately, pulled down six or seven books without examination, and laid them on the counter. I read the title on top.

—Bergson? Jesus, I read him when I was seventeen, and I thought he was flaky then.

I knew I was being a swine. The Harvard habit dies hard. For apology I was going to broaden my comment into self-parody, but as the cashier went through the rest of the titles, I was silenced. Flying saucers. Gods. Magic.

—It’s bull, said Murphy pleasantly. —But it’s also true.

So I learned by the way that he had a fear of words. He would scruple to use certain common phrases, as if in dread of what they might call up, whereas I tended to be profane, as if a dare to scatology or blasphemy might keep the named thing at bay.

—I’m sorry, I said. —I shouldn’t criticize. It’s just my goddamned training talking.

—Oh, I knew you were a biologist.

—What? How? How did you know? I felt violated. This secret had been easy enough to keep at the dinner table.

—By the way your eye traveled over my drawings.

I did not believe he had seen this. I could not. Yet somehow he had known.

—You see, when you look at things ... He seemed suddenly panic-stricken at the crowds. —Do you mind if we take the long way home?

We followed a road up past a stadium and some practice fields and into the hills. We were entering a botanical garden when I heard an insistent shrieking.

—What’s that?

—Dogs. The university has labs up here.

We toured the garden. Murphy stopped by a large cactus and broke off a lobe. Gingerly he slid it into his shirt pocket. We went on past succulents, camellias, rhododendrons, eucalypti, sage, manzanita, and we stopped in a stand of sequoia, the ground thick with ferns. My sense of time suffered a shift: in these plants, in the shape of these hills, was a vast sense of a young Earth. Everything here looked prehistoric. Cars took the curves below us dreamily, carapaces gleaming.

Murphy picked a cone from the ground and looked at it curiously.

—They won’t grow . . . unless there’s been a fire. He said this with wonder, as if he had just discerned it. He turned to me. —You see, if you look at things, after a while something emerges, you find that, that things want to change into other things. And you can draw that, you can see what they were or want to be. And in, in people too.

—In people?

He looked at me. —For example, you want to be dead.

I stood appalled. And then I laughed. —Murphy, you’re an idiot.

—You mean that I can’t speak, I don’t know how to communicate with others. That’s so. But you see it’s a, a ceding of self to be understood.

Now I was agitated. It was not just my vanity. True, I prized observation as the first skill of a good biologist, and I thought myself that; and now an amateur was outclassing me at my one pride. But it was also that he did not know how to talk to people, that he was picking at my wounds, and by not ceding an atom of his self he was taking mine. For I had long behaved as if sheer observation could give answer, as if a complete description contained an inevitable and correct course of action in its terms—and how wrong I had been, how much I had lost by it, I could still not confess.

—Do you know much about genetics? he asked abruptly.

—No one does. They all pretend.

—I read a story. It was about books, a library made of all the combinations of letters . . .

—Permutations, yes. The library of Babel.

—You know it? It exists?

—Murphy, it’s a story. An intellectual fantasy.

—Yes, but DNA is like letters of the alphabet, and, and if you rearrange them . . .

—You could have a menagerie of Babel.

—Yes. Yes, that’s right.

—No, it’s not right. DNA is not like letters. There are laws . . . And I stopped. For I realized that this was indeed the premise of Darwin’s theory—that, as Julian Huxley said, “Given sufficient time anything at all will turn up” from this promiscuous shuffling of genes—and I realized also, hardly for the first time, that the theory was therefore as fantastic as any of Murphy’s, acceptable to scientists only because it fit the historical form of their method. What were those laws, which could give this opening of all possibility a human meaning? No one could say. The function of DNA is to copy itself. Yet it does not, not exactly. There are sports and mutants. So life diversifies—not, we must believe, aimlessly—but we are unable, I think reluctant, to learn the laws. If we knew them, it would change us.

—This was my work, I confessed. —I majored in genetics.

—But you quit.

—I was eased out.

—You let them? But this is important! This is my work, too.

—What do you mean?

—I draw only to learn. If you draw things, using always the same kinds of lines, you can learn about . . . growth. My books help, they don’t all use the same methods, but I can see that they’re right. Just look! Look at it all! The plants, the animals, the superabundance, the excess, and no why to it except nature’s in— . . . insatiable hunger for new forms, why, on this planet alone the diversity is appalling! Life is, is nothing but a freak show! Look at it! Just look!

I had been following him to learn, as I said, the habits of his delusion. Now he had touched the core of his obsession, and his lean nervous body shook with zeal, his thin stuttering voice driven wholly by its force. I may have been his first audience. He spoke of the forces which could thrust up from common proteins a whale, a hummingbird, or any of a thousand different cacti, and of the family resemblances in the enzymes of sharks and grasses. But if this was a source of wonder to me, to him it was a horror. His world was no plenum. He spoke as if all life were the fever dream of a mad, insomniac intelligence. I remembered the old anthropologist’s saw that intelligence is pathological; the rapid evolution of man’s forebrain, that diadem of the species, is anomalous by any current knowledge. And more than one scientist, trying to explain it, has desperately likened it to a cancer. I wondered again if Murphy was sane. Certainly if an intelligence governed his cosmos, it was pathological; and its means were near to Darwinism, which also limited the instruments of creation to permutation and mindless competition.

It was almost touching. He was well read, if indiscriminate, and his attempts to find an order were like mine in everything but direction. My work too was heretical and against the dogmas of science, though constituted by them. So I did not tell him that the idea of an ordered world had always faced contradictions and inadequacies, from Plato through Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and beyond Darwin. Its history was a history of failure, though of a kind I aspired to. The idea had been such a grand failure. It was an idea born of humanity, reason, and purpose, when those abstractions had seemed incorruptible, and it was the only opposition to the brute mechanistic world that the current paradigms of science told us existed. I would rather fail on that path than succeed by the other, if I had the choice. For I knew there was an order to life. I knew it was possible to live. I had seen it done. But I did not know how. I had to know not first for my own existence, but to have a whole picture in which I could strive to place myself. Was the world indeed a nightmare of congenital competition, or was there yet some kind of cooperation at the center of being? For my own reasons I needed to believe the latter; I needed also, unlike Murphy, to know that I was not deluded in my belief.

—And you, he said, you can help me.

If Murphy would use me to work out his obsession, I could use him as proof against delusion. This cold quid pro quo was still a form of cooperation. So I said mildly, —Murphy, you ought to get some history. This idea is as old as the Timaeus.

Still, I knew that history would not help him. Even if he read Plato, he would only seize on the myth of Atlantis. In his way he was as betrayed by history as I by method. It was fitting that we meet at this place and time, under a primal sun that subsumed history. I could see the beasts of Murphy’s fantasy taking color in this light, engaging in their unthinkable activities; but not with his innocence. No, I saw them body forth under the pervasive smutching shadow of method, a mockery and reproach to all I had learned and suffered for.

But he was not done. He spoke of his splendid drawings, calling them tools of inquiry, experiments, with their own methodology of rigid line and black ink, and with the beginnings of a new woe I interrupted him.

—You have no pride in your art? For I thought that he, at least, had an arena of action in which he was free. But he looked utterly stunned.

—Pride? In copies of copies? As, as if the grandest Chartres could approach the balance of a bumblebee, or, or the finest pigment ever more than mock the glint of snakeskin . . .

—But you say that life is monstrous.

—It is.

—Then why draw it? Don’t you have to look at things with love in order to see their pasts and futures?

—Yes. That’s the worst. I do, I do love all this. Have you read Rilke?

—No.

—He speaks of beauty. That it is the beginning of terror. That every angel is terrible.

—Then why is it beauty? Why does it hold us so?

—Because it suffers us to live.

Overhead a fire-spotting plane droned, crossing and re-crossing the dry grass-grown hills. Below us a million souls sprawled round the borders of the shallow bay.

—I don’t know what to tell you, Murphy. But it’s foolish to pursue something that puts you in pain.

He regarded me skeptically. —Is it?

Another touch. I wanted to tell him to leave me out of it, but I doubt he knew he was hurting me. He just knew what he could see. So I said: —Yes. It is.

—Maybe . . . I’m at a dead end with my drawings anyway. Maybe another way . . .

But I did not want to hear any more just then. I suggested that we descend.

* * * *

One of my friends from Cambridge now lived in Berkeley. Homi had put me up my first week in California. He was from New Delhi originally. When I told him about Murphy he smiled and asked if Murphy was a Krishna.

—Offhand I can’t think of anything less likely to attract him.

—Oh, it’s not so unlikely. This horror of life can become quite ecstatic.

He told me then a Hindu legend about Shiva and his consort Parvati. One day a powerful demon came to Shiva and demanded Parvati. Angry Shiva opened his third eye, and at once another demon sprang from the ground, a lion-headed beast whose nature was pure hunger. Thinking quickly, the first demon threw himself on Shiva’s mercy, for it is well known that when you appeal to a god’s mercy he is obliged to protect you. So the anguished lionhead asked, “Now what? What am I supposed to eat?” And Shiva said, “Well, why not eat yourself?” And so the lion did, starting with his tail, eating right through his belly and neck, until only his face was left. And to this sunlike mask, which was all that remained of the grim leonine hunger, exultant Shiva gave the name Kirttimukha, or “Face of Glory.” He decreed it should stand over the doors to all his temples, and none who refused to honor it would ever come to knowledge of him. Those who think the universe could be made another way, without pain, without sorrow, without time or death, are unfit for illumination. None is illumined who has not learned to live in joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of this knowledge of life, in the radiance of the monstrous face of glory which is its emblem. This is the meaning of the faces over the entrances to the sanctuaries of the god of yoga, which word is cognate with yoke.

Homi had a hypnotic voice—his faint Indian accent falling on American idioms was beguiling—and as he spoke I thought of my demonic angels of choice, their twin faces merging into Kirttimukha, glorious sun-faced lion of life, and for the moment I felt at peace.

Before I left, Homi asked: —Have you spoken to . . . anyone back East?

I said no. Seeing me out, he touched my arm.

The next time I saw Murphy he had a fantastic book on cloning and a practical guide to the grafting of cacti.

* * * *

Let me tell you about Paul Kammerer. He was an Austrian biologist who set out to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired traits. This evolutionary doctrine was anathema to Darwinists and is still. In 1926, after a distinguished career as long as my life, Kammerer blew his brains out, thoroughly disgraced. The cause of his disgrace was a badly preserved and ineptly doctored specimen of Alytes obstetricans, examined by a hostile critic ten years after its preservation. A discoloration on the toad’s hand was supposed to demonstrate Kammerer’s thesis. On examination the discoloration proved to be fresh india ink. Kammerer had nothing to do with this botch of a hoax, and it proved only that some lab assistant had tried clumsily to support him or maliciously to discredit him. But his critics’ tactics were to tie the validity of all his work to the fraud of this one specimen.

This is a parable in the politics of natural selection. That Darwin’s work is based on a tautology his supporters like to forget. Survival of the fittest means only this—that creatures with the most offspring have the most offspring. Or, to put it academically, those with tenure keep tenure.

No attempts had ever been made to duplicate Kammerer’s work. I decided to do it.

My advisor had urged me to work in recombinant DNA. I demurred, and in one step moved from the cutting edge of my field to the backwaters of Lamarckism. We will not speak here of my apparent need to doom myself. I had good reasons as well. I thought too many favored Darwin’s fiction of life, because it tacitly endorsed every murder as life-furthering. A being, or an idea, that could not or would not compete for its survival, or which failed at the effort, was de facto useless. I could not endorse this. In itself the theory was badly flawed, and its analogs were appalling—”survival of the fittest” could excuse every cutthroat social act from betrayal to corporate capitalism to genocide. Nor could I return to the moral paradigms that had held good before the fall of God to Reason. Even Lamarck’s earlier myth of evolution—that no useful effort is wasted, that children may inherit the acquired traits of their parents—was too wistful for me to swallow. But I used it as a name for my ignorance.

For a year I persisted, walking the two miles from our apartment to the labs almost every night, entering between the two stone rhinos, the grates in the quad steaming in all seasons and the mist making coronas around the lamps. At last I had my second generation of Alytes and encouraged them to mate in water, contra naturam. I cleaned the fertilized eggs and kept them alive for two weeks. And then the approval for my project was withdrawn. My incubators were shut off. In disgust and despair I left for the Cape, alone, for a vacation, and took the chance job at Woods Hole thinking that I might still find a place for my work.

I see what drove Kammerer to suicide. All work for a community is in three parts—constitution, execution, and interpretation. The constitution is communal: you necessarily draw on common knowledge. The execution, the creative act, is irredeemably isolated and solipsistic: the mind is alone with its labor and must take unique responsibility for everything it uses—communal, original, learned by design, or at hazard. The only possible redemption is in the interpretation: from that isolated solipsism the community must be able to draw meaning. Kammerer failed at the last step and so was left with a personal burden of impersonal knowledge unredeemed.

An odd coincidence I discovered later was that Kammerer had shot himself on my birthday. Another was that the son of Kammerer’s harshest critic, Gregory Bateson, was at this time a regent of the University of California. Kammerer was a collector of coincidences, and I gather these here only for his sake—and for Murphy, who would doubtless find them meaningful.

* * * *

I wonder if forms have their own lives. I wonder if shapes in time repeat themselves, at periods, in variations, in retrograde, it is only by a long series of small accidents that we become what we are, and although we remain only what we are we can look back on branching points of possibility now canceled, an angel at each, that might have led to different selves. What is the number of accidents? What is the binding force? What is the shape of necessity? The notion that everything is possible is monstrous, so we restrict, by observing, then defining, then excluding what will not fit. The plenum is reduced to the principle of plenitude. But the excluded remain with us. Beyond all principles, we remain what we are.

I owned a slight book on topology. It soothed me to consider ideal space. In topology there is no direction, and forms are mutable. A coffee cup is a torus, congruent to a doughnut or the human body. Yet laws govern. I took the terms as incantations—Mobius strip, Klein bottle, Cantor set—as pleasant as good dreams. My interest in topology was needless, but in the grace of the excluded even the needless may be needful. It pleased something in me that I should need the needless.

Or perhaps it was a need related to my love of names. Like all biologists, I was a taxonomist at heart. I knew that things had names. They could float free of connotation and become pure poems. Or they could grant power. The true names of things were holy and fearsome. I even thought that a name could keep the thing it represented from existing, that imagination could prevent occurrence, that to envision something fully was to usurp it. At times I had purposely imagined the worst, to keep it at bay. But there is always something you fail to imagine. Every moment time branches. Each second murders possibilities. In a day, one’s most trivial decisions abort a million alternative selves. If we are the result of a sport of genes, how much more so of choice?

To me, this was the true menagerie, the myriad decisive acts of will that make us what we are, most of them beyond analysis, impossible to tame by naming. Since I felt that creation was a plenum and untroubling, I suppose I should have felt the same about choice. But I thought my will imperfect and liable to error. Therefore I admired will-less Murphy. It was part of the quid pro quo of our friendship. Life is the exchange of energies.

In all, I was as much a mother to him as I could be without making it obvious. And by degrees he opened up to me. Though a good student, he had never finished high school. He put himself through a trade school, doing smudged charcoal fashion drawings. He worked briefly in small ad agencies, always quitting. He seemed to fear the endorsements of the world. He had no social life, and filled his off-hours by reading von Daniken, Borges, Hegel, Rilke, Velikovsky, Nietzsche, Bergson, Vonnegut, Milton, Ouspensky, Frost, Heinlein, Koestler, a chaos of interests. He had no books on art, just as my own shelves had always been lightest in biology.

Family trees, evolutionary charts, the maze of choice, a garden of forking paths, the drawings of Alexander’s horned sphere in my text—all had the same shape. I came to see Murphy’s life as congruent to my own.

He began a painting, and to cadge a glimpse I teased him about not using always the same kinds of lines. He said solemnly —This is something else. I’ll show you when it’s done.

He kept the canvas turned back when he wasn’t working on it. It left on the white wall varicolored lines where the wet top edge leaned.

* * * *

Now it is time to tell the real reason I came West.

Topology, evolution, competition, cooperation, plenitude: these are stories we tell ourselves, as scientists, as politicians, as men, to hold back what we dare not embrace. But time and the time-bound mind are unforgiving; the excluded tend to surface.

I came West on account of John Lang. He was a year ahead of me at school; we shared the same friends. He introduced me to the other great fiction of the nineteenth century, that of Karl Marx—the grand vision of cooperation as the furthering force of life.

It was appealing. The metaphor of course did not hold in biology—Lysenko had been the great Soviet Lamarckian, working to vindicate the Marxist idea that life was not a free-market economy. But in time even the Soviets had bowed to their losing competition with Darwinism, and Lysenko was written out of history. I knew that. But as a binding fiction of life, it was appealing.

Lang was no exemplar, however. When he graduated he went straight to work in his father’s chemical firm. We made him the butt of tolerant abuse—poor John, twenty-one and already bourgeois. He was making thirty thousand a year and drove to Cambridge often. We would joke with him and nurse him like a sick bird.

I was living then with Joann Stephen, a slim dark beauty. For three years we were married in all eyes but the law’s. When I returned from Woods Hole she was living with Lang. He had finally quit his job. They took me out to dinner, and as my order arrived I fled, nauseated at the part I had to play, at my ineffectualness, my poverty, my pain and despair.

What I resented most was that Lang was using her as the flag of his liberation. “Living in sin” was the way he liked to phrase it to everyone but me. And I resented that there was that in Joann to respond to his instrumentalism. And I wondered what story I had used to blind myself to the possibility of betrayal. For as Lang reminded me, almost sadly, betrayal is possible only within a framework of cooperation. So had I collaborated in my betrayal? Probably.

I told no one when I went West, leaving Lang in my bedroom, with my books and plants, with the cat I had saved from a neighbor’s drowning. I left behind every totem of my three years of domestic life. I fled lamenting, How could he ever know her as I had?

But if I cannot judge Murphy, how much less can I judge Lang? He had known what was needed for his life. He had acted. And I had not even known that I was in competition for her.

I bought a radio. Late at night, when most stations were off the air, I listened to it. With my oil lamp set low I entered into dialogues with static. For variety I listened to talk shows. I seldom went to bed before three. It was here, after a month in Berkeley, during an unseasonable rain so light it seemed at times to ascend, that I was fully and finally acquainted with the depth of Murphy’s neurosis. I was reading a book on phylogeny by Gould, listening in the interstices to the murmur of rain and radio, which was holding an open telephone discussion of flying saucers, I think. I could ignore the sound of talk more easily than I could music, but an insistent inflection turned my attention to the radio’s tinny monologue.

—This is true, the voice said. —The Earth was fertilized from space. Aliens came and mixed proteins in the ancient sea, did this for amusement. The history of life on Earth is a catalog of permutations. All fabulous beasts were once real. We can’t have imagined them, our imaginations are poor, we can’t imagine a number greater than ten, nor the durations of our lives; our dreams are haunted only by what we’ve seen and done. The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of worlds. On their world, life is reasonable. But here they have made a genetic cesspool. It was a game to them. They are all perfect and identical. They do not die, age, or reproduce. What they have done here is a dirty joke, dirty because it is unnecessary. It is as dirty as speaking aloud, or writing, because a perfect thought needs no expression, and an imperfect thought produces only deformed progeny. We may clone, we may graft, we may splice genes, but we cannot approach the enormity of what they have done here. We mock ourselves by the very attempt. We are theirs. Perhaps they come back to observe us, perhaps not, that doesn’t matter. Perhaps they did it to mock their own perfection. Perhaps it gives them the filthy pleasure of the voyeur, of the boy fevered with the naked woman’s picture. The unspeakable difference. The eye and the act. It is a freak show, a menagerie of Babel, the combinations absurd, meaningless, incoherent. The eye. And the act.

At the word Babel I looked out my one window. A light was on out there. My eyes rose to the cupola. I saw Murphy pacing back and forth before his window, holding a telephone.

* * * *

Peter Fraser, our landlord, late of Boalt Hall, conducted a purge of the house on September 23, my uncelebrated birthday. He demanded all back rents, or eviction by October 1. I drove with him to the Co-Op to post “for rent” notices. Kristin, the student of midwifery, was the only one greatly upset. I was with Murphy when she came up to ask if he was moving. She had to; she hadn’t the cash.

I liked Kristin. She was as flighty as the rest of the household, but she was not truculent about it. She said she had been trying the past year to get her life in order. She needed two more months to finish her training, and if she had the expense of moving it would be back to typing at Cal and another year of trying to get free. Murphy listened to this, then took from his desk a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

—Use this if you like, he said. —I don’t need it.

After a speechless second she counted the money, wrote him a note, and promised to repay him by the new year. She did not thank him; her manner implied that thanks would debase his act.

Rents paid, we three were invited by Peter to go hiking with him in the Sierra. I think he wanted to escape the repercussions of his decree, figuring it would take a day or two to sink in.

Murphy and I agreed. We drove all night in the Karmann-Ghia. We had a ten-hour hike before us, and Peter crazily wanted to do it all in a day. We took Cayoga Road to 395 and drove south till dawn. Ten miles to our west and across the desert rose the sheer scarp of the eastern Sierra, sharp and clean. We turned up Pine Creek Road and parked near a tungsten mine at the trailhead. We unpacked the car, drank coffee, and ate rolls. The air was sweet. There was a van parked near us with a painting of the desert on its side.

After we put on our packs, Peter handed Murphy and me each a car key.

—Here. In case of emergencies any one of us can drive out for help. Go straight down 395 to Bishop. And for Christ’s sake, take a topo whenever you leave camp.

We hiked in, up a steep road, past junipers, timber, and lodgepole pines. We passed a second mine, its tramway and steel shacks idle, eerie in the morning calm. The trail crossed a stream, then leveled. After a while the timber thinned. We climbed, panting, not talking. Scant lodgepoles stood atop their reflections in Pine Lake. We skirted the lake and crossed its inlet. Below falls we stopped for lunch. I took off my outer shirt. From here the trail climbed sharply in switchbacks. We labored to an untimbered ridge that divided two basins: to the north the Chalfant Lakes, to the south Granite Park strung with smaller, unnamed lakes. For a few hours we followed a stream that ducked under and over jumbled rocks. A set of switchbacks brought us to Italy Pass. We paused here for the view and to get our wind. It was midafternoon.

The scale of the place was such that I did not know if it was beautiful or not—I was reminded of a line of Henry Miller: “No analysis can go on in this light; here the neurotic is either instantly cured, or goes mad”—you might as well call the moon beautiful. The warring forces which had jumbled this landscape were awesome, especially in this deep afternoon calm. From a human perspective it was like a desolated battlefield of giants—we were trespassing in their laps—and these images immediately canceled themselves before the reality, making all human perspective trivial.

West of the pass there was still snow. I could not believe it was September. The last time I camped was two years before, when Joann and I spent a week in a cabin on the Appalachian Trail. It was April, too early for hikers. Two feet of snow lay on the ground, but that week the temperature stayed in the sixties. We went naked most of the time. It was there I got her pregnant.

Near dusk we made camp by a rockbound lake in a glacial cirque. Peaks ringed us round. Despite our fatigue we were alert, and we stayed up talking, late enough to see Taurus’s V climb above the rough silhouette of mountains. The stars were brilliant. Each moment’s gaze seemed to bring out more. I named the Dippers and Cassiopeia’s W, but it took Murphy to identify the dimmer constellations. I remember laughing at Camelopardelus, the giraffe. I felt free and vigorous. Peter rolled a joint, and he and I smoked and talked while Murphy looked for meteors.

There was a resemblance between Peter and John Lang, and Peter too was a Marxist. Far from cooperation, this seemed to mean that he never made a profit on rent or dope deals. In America selling at cost plus right attitude is the nearest approach to communism. He repined over the evictions. He had been more than fair. But they had acted in bad faith, and it was no favor to anyone to support the irresponsible. How the responsible differed from those who paid their bills I did not hear him say. He sketched the consequences of his Marxist heresy in a capitalist, normative society. His parents gave him grief for dropping out. His job prospects were nil. He suffered angst. Only in the mountains did he feel free.

Doubtless I am being unjust to Peter. The point is that I liked unreflective Murphy better. Despite all Peter and I shared in training and rejection, I felt little sympathy. Still, I gave him in turn some of my background, my own heresies and failures, insofar as they reflected his. I was smoking his dope. We all felt fine.

After a while Peter stood. —Time to make some humus . . . anyone else? Why, I wondered, are Marxists such scoutmasters?

When he had gone, Murphy spoke to me. —I used to think that I was not human. I thought I was from a star somewhere. They had left me here to grow up as human, and when I had observed enough, they would take me back. I used this, this fantasy as a rationale for interest. I liked to study, and this gave me a reason.

—Which star? I asked.

—Omega Orionis, he said with no hesitation. —They live in an artificial world orbiting the star. It’s a winter star. Where I lived I could see it only sometimes, it’s dim. I knew they had left me, and would come back.

—How long did this . . . fantasy last? I asked carefully.

—Oh, a few years. I never told anyone. After a while I just stopped thinking about it.

—When I was a kid, I thought I was some kind of genetic sport, you know, a mutant. We all need some story to separate us from our parents.

—I was afraid. I studied Earth things, you see, and I began to believe in them. So I was afraid they would see this, and not come back for me. I was supposed to be just an observer. Not a participant. So I left off studying for a while.

—Murphy. My friend. What the hell is your first name?

—Hugh.

—Irish?

—My mother denies it. She says it’s Scottish. She wears orange on St. Patrick’s Day.

I laughed. —And what’s your father?

—Dead. Of drink.

—Oh.

—I ... I waited a long time for it. He raped my older sister. He was ... it was his name too.

—Is that why you don’t use it?

—Oh, no. It’s, well, I sign myself, my drawings, just “Murphy.” It’s kind of a personal secret. You know, the way some people won’t tell their middle names, as if names gave power? It’s silly.

—No. If you know someone’s name, in a way you’re responsible for them.

—And you, you know the names of so many things, don’t you . . .

—Not their true names. You know more of that, I think.

Peter returned.

—So what’s new? See that major meteor?

—No. We were talking about glaciers, I said.

—How weird they are. If we’d had more time I would have taken you to Evolution Valley. There’s outstanding glacial stuff there. A great place. Mt. Huxley, Mt. Darwin, Lamarck Pass, Le Conte Divide . . . I ll show you slides sometime. A great place. Nature named after natural historians. You guys coming to bed?

—Soon, I told him.

—Okay. Don’t step on me when you come in, you bastards. I’m sleeping in the middle.

He left. After a minute I said: —Murphy, I heard you on the radio the other night.

He was silent.

—Do you believe all that?

—But you think it’s the result of chance, he said.

—Not exactly. But if so, is that so horrifying? Isn’t it best to think that you’re all that cares? That the universe is indifferent?

—Do you believe in sin?

I was quite impressed. He had gone straight to the core of my argument and neutered it. But I played him out.

—What if I don’t?

—You do.

—You . . . saw that, of course.

—Yes.

—You’re right. I do. Or else evil must be the result of simple misunderstanding. And I don’t believe that.

—Then what is sin? he asked.

—A violation of the natural order, I said.

—So there is an order.

—I don’t know. Despite all the fictions we impose, yes, I tend to think there is one. So there’s sin. You’re responsible for your actions, in some unfathomable way. I laughed. —Murphy, congratulations, you’ve discovered God. No, I’m sincere. You’re very sharp, to come to this on your own. But let me tell you about Occam’s razor.

—Needless reduplication of entities.

—Christ, undercut again.

—You, you see, that’s where the God argument fails. He couldn’t have made ... all this.

—But why replace him with a race of aliens? Oh, I was stoned. I could almost see them.

—If they’re the result of chance . . . perfectly formed, but formed that way by chance . . . and we’re slave to their will, to the fall of chromosomes, the mutations, defects in material, and you can never transcend this flaw. But only aspire to, to find the controlling form. To know them. And I, I’m still afraid of what I might learn about them.

—By drawing? Then give it up.

—I have no choice!

I was still. We had reached our crossing. His path was mine in reverse—but in topology there is no direction. He was not the ideal will-less spirit I had named, had usurped by naming. His cosmos was controlled, and he was its creature, expressly and increasingly denied choice, whereas all my effort was to complete the image of a world in which my choices could be clear and effective. In which I could act. I had thought myself a doomed believer in cooperation, unable to fight well; but he was showing me a face far more radiant in its doom than any I had worn, and he could not even fight himself. He could not see that the order he had invented for his world was now autonomous, and he its slave. I saw him as one of my angels at a crossroad, but this angel was not fearsome. No, this one had trapped himself and turned slowly with a stricken lost look, while all around an unthinkable chaos of beings boiled, warred, loved, died, endured.

—Murphy, the stupid and the intelligent accept the imposed orders, because they don’t see them or because they know there’s no working alternative. But people like you, you wake up suddenly, and call it monstrous, and think this new. It’s not. And it does you no good, for in searching for a new order you only go deeper into the old. You come finally to the idea of inherent vice in creation, and even that is not final, and hardly new. You’re doomed. There’s no help for you.

—Of whom are you speaking?

I was glad. He was with me still. —Of myself. Of whatever it is we share. This ineradicable strain. I woke up too. Perhaps it’s the best thing for us ... if we choose it.

—To be doomed?

—Yes. To be doomed. To be excluded from the charnel house. In our own ways, freely chosen. All right?

—Y-Yes. I, I need your help, though.

—And I yours. Now let’s sleep. And seal this . . . compact with good dreams.

—I’ll stay up a while, said Murphy. —Until Orion rises.

* * * *

Bright, swift morning reached us. Peter laid out gear for climbing. He had extra crampons and tried to entice us to tackle a rock face with him, tried against his declared politics to catch us by competition, by stressing how hard and dangerous it was. But that morning Murphy and I were almost like lovers, and cooperatively we demurred. Instead we two mapped out a hike through Granite Park. Peter almost gave in and came with us, but he was caught by his own ideas and we went our separate ways.

Murphy and I climbed to the pass in silence. He stopped once to examine some lichen, that strange collaboration of the lowest animal with the lowest plant. —Design of darkness, he murmured.

From there we descended, leaving the trail. Across a scarped bowl ringed by peaks we hiked. Around noon it clouded over. The clouds scudded in rapidly from the west. It grew cold. We were about four miles from camp when it started to snow.

—Listen, Murphy, I don’t like this. It came up too fast. We’d better turn around.

—Go back? But why ?

—We may be in for a real storm. The snow’s starting to stick already, and it’s not that cold.

—It may blow over, he said.

—A friend of mine was caught in a summer snowstorm on Mt. Washington. It’s no joke.

—I know that.

—Jesus, Murphy, look at it fall. Another hour of this and we won’t be able to find our way out of this bowl. Have you got a compass?

—No.

—Neither do I. Terrific. Let’s get the hell out while we still can. He seemed reluctant. I had to lead him. Returning, we almost passed the trail. There was an inch of snow on the ground now. The surrounding mountains had vanished. Wind billowed the thick white curtain about us. I stopped.

—Christ.

—It’s that way, he said.

—I don’t know. Damn, I don’t know. If there was any shelter I’d say stop here.

—But there isn’t. We have to go on.

—Murphy, just look! You can barely see a hundred feet. If it gets worse we’ll never even find the tent; it’s two miles across an unmarked cirque.

—What else can we do?

—Maybe we can hike out, I said. I was not so sure, but his diffidence frightened me.

—It must be ten miles to the road, he said.

—No it’s not. Say five or six. And it’s downhill. We can get below the snow. And what about Peter?

—He’ll be fine. He’s probably back in the tent already. We should go on.

—Murphy! We have to climb two thousand feet, over the pass, right into the storm, then find our way across two miles of nothing! We could die out here; it happens to people every year because they make the wrong choice. In a snowstorm you go downhill. That’s what Peter said. You get below the snow.

—It’s ten miles.

—It’s downhill, on a trail. We have a car waiting. We just follow the water down. With luck we can be out by dusk.

But that was not our luck. When we crossed the stream out of Granite Park, Murphy lost his footing and soaked himself to the knees. The wind came up. The snow increased. Wet and heavy, its runoff was already swelling the stream we kept to our right. When we reached the next ford, Murphy balked. Rocks flumed the water, cast up pearls of foam.

—Here’s something else you find when you go down, he said. —And do you remember the other ford, on the way in? Below the falls? What will that be like?

—All right, damn it, we can’t cross here. Give me the map.

Farther on, the trail recrossed the stream. I thought we could cut across the arms of the trail’s U. The map became sodden in my hands as I studied it.

We were not dressed for this. The morning had been mild. We each had a parka but no hat, and Murphy had no gloves. He would not take mine. He shivered as we stood there. Snow, caked around my boots, seeped down my socks; my toes had started to sting. My hair was soaked, and I could feel water trickle down my neck.

—Here, look. We can stay this side of the stream most of the way down. We cross once at Upper Pine Lake, pick up the trail here, and follow it down.

Hands pocketed, shivering, he turned to watch the tossing stream. —All right. It’s up to you, he said.

I cursed at him, and we went on. I figured fifteen minutes until we regained the stream. We slipped and stumbled comically on snow-hidden rocks. Still, it was soothing to have a direction. A sudden panic jolted me. I could no longer hear the stream. I looked at my watch in disbelief. Forty minutes had passed since we left the trail. In hours it would be dark, and we were not yet a quarter of the way. Murphy sighed and said: —I have to sit down.

He went to his knees, and I grabbed him.

—Up! Stand up!

I picked up the map. It came to pieces in my hand. A gust took the scraps and blinded me with hard, stinging snow. I turned to shield myself.

Now I could not see thirty feet. The ground seemed level all around. I had no idea which way I faced. I strained for the sound of the stream and heard only the faint empty wail of wind, the accumulating silence of snow. The colder, pebbly snow rustled on our parkas as it fell.

—Now? said Murphy.

I chose a direction. After five minutes I felt sure that we were going down. We walked close, jogging against one another. We came to a ridge. I heard falls. We had found the stream, or, no, another, surely another, for before us was a moon-sharp cliff, impossible to descend. I turned us before Murphy saw. We went up. He stumbled against me, his voice a moth in my ear. —Hypothermia.

I held him. I would have given my life for him then. The feeling rose as a dull wash of anger that kept me going for ten steps more. Then a memory of his voice reached me: You want to die. I went another step and stopped. In despair I looked up, as if to summon the sun. Murphy too looked up. Then he raised his arm and shouted: —Look! Look there!

I squinted into the chaos of nothingness.

—Oh God, it’s enormous!

I saw nothing. There was nothing. I was enraged that he should debase our deaths with hallucinations. Then I grew weak and sat in the soft snow, thinking that this, being a voluntary act, might cure him. Dimly it came to me that I would not get up. This I wanted. He was right, I did want it: a clean death.

He shouted again.

—They’re here!

He began to sing.

From the white emerged two figures. They were backpackers. It was coincidence they had come, lost as us, just as Murphy’s insanity began. I made a murderous effort in every muscle to rise and realized stupidly that I had not moved at all. The two stumbled to within a foot of us.

—Help us, I said.

The taller man, rime-bearded, shook his head leisurely. He smiled. The two went on into the snow. Murphy gave a last cry and ran after them. Another gust blinded me.

I began to dream. It was a dream without pictures or actions. It was a dream of words. At times they passed before me as if printed. At times I heard voices, familiar and alien. Most of the words were incoherent but clearly articulated. I knew they were the names of things, and I strained like an infant listening to its parents to ferret their meaning. I imagined that Murphy and I were seated cross-legged in the snow, naked, reciting the true secret names of every species of life. Each name caused the extinction of another species. The world became sparer, more orderly. We chanted outside of time, beyond death and strife; we sealed our secret compact in a clean new light, not fictive, not random.

When I emerged from this into a pellucid state of waking, he was curled beside me. He had run in a circle. I put a hand on his forehead. I thought I could feel if he was still alive. I knew he was alive, but I thought I could tell if his body had still enough heat to keep him alive. It was dark. The snow was gentler, and the wind had fallen. Large flakes dropped straight down. Not many had collected on him. In the obscurity I watched his lips to see that fresh flakes melted as they touched. I felt warm and relaxed. Darkness fell from the air. A windless still settled. I burrowed deeper into the whisper of snow. All words were passing from me, words of power, curses, benedictions, words to shape and be shaped by, all passed. My life was a riot of vivid pictures, twists of emotion, inchoate cries of pain and exultation, and gladly I welcomed all this namelessness. If I were dying, as I surely was, no design of name was adequate to my consciousness. So words bowed and broke, vowels scattered ripples across the face of darkness, the material armature of my body weakened, and the support of all fictions fled from me, until the final fiction, the simplest word, the simplest name, I, also lost its meaning and its power. So I knew that either dawn or death was close, and I was glad that these were, at last, the only possibilities.

Then the dark was riven by a mad roar and a gyre of light. Its bite was as clean as the cold and as real. So I would not leave the living so easily. The radiance seared me, the mouth of the whisper I was buried in opened in a stuttering shriek. My body screamed in pain, and I felt time snap clearly as a dry twig up its length, the two paths distinct—and my demons stood at the crossing. Live or die, they cried, Choose, choose. Their grins were great as stars. The roar heightened. Angels sang in chaotic chorus. I turned my head to hide, but the light went through. I saw Murphy, the red of his parka beneath drifted snow, the green of my sleeve flung over him, his face a vivid relief in the fierce wavering light. I turned again into the brilliance and roar. And then I knew. These were not my demons. They were his.

—Spaceship, I whispered. It could not be. I had to banish it. But I was sick and weak and could only deny it with my voice, not with any force of my mind. Then I saw that my word had only confirmed it. In a gust the great ship rocked, its engines labored, its lights danced, as if biting deeper into reality. I had called it closer with my voice. For now Murphy’s reality had intersected mine. I had taken his insanity for my own, and I was afraid. I knew his dread of words. I had thought myself in some special grace of the doomed, the excluded, and now I would find that it had all counted, every word, every evasion, that a choice not made was still a choice, that time’s demons were ineluctable, whatever their form. I would be weighed in their balance and found wanting. Some acid of life they would use on us. In the autoclave, the sterile steel cirque of the vessel, they would parse me, reduce the irreducibles of my genes, and make me new. Death I no longer minded. The prospect of a changed life I did. And the singing in the air was: Choose! And from a small, uncertain reserve of new strength I whispered: —No.

But I raised my arm to signal them. I owed him this.

The glow came down. A hatch opened. I saw the suited figures emerge.

* * * *

I returned to Berkeley two days later. After twenty-four hours in the hospital, they had taken me to Reno, where I caught a flight to Oakland. Peter stayed behind with Murphy, who was still in poor condition.

The house was still and empty. I sat alone in the living room until Kristin came home from work, and I told her what had happened, from the start of the storm until the helicopter picked us up eighteen hours later. When the wind had died, the rangers had swept over the Chalfant Lakes basin, into which we had wandered. It was a common mistake in storms.

Toward the end of my story I broke down and could not finish. I lost control of my voice and began a compulsive, erratic biography. She listened to everything I had so carefully secreted since arriving in Berkeley and to things I had not myself remembered in years. I raved for thirty minutes. Then I ended: —Darwin at the age of sixty received from Marx an inscribed copy of Das Kapital. He never read it. He thought German was ugly. It’s all right now. I’m better. I can stop now. I’m sorry. I can stop now.

But I could not face the cottage. So she slept with me that night, holding me as I had held Murphy in the snow. She said that I woke once, about three, shivered for ten minutes, and then slept unmoving until morning. And once in that night lost to my memory she said I mourned: —My child. My lost child.

In the morning, after Kristin had left for work, I went up to Murphy’s room. But on the floor below his aerie a low hum stopped me. The door to the silent couple’s room was ajar. I pushed it open. The room had been trashed in response to Peter’s decree. Black paint jagged in swaths across walls cracked by hammer blows. Flies made the hum. In the middle of the floor, with a strip of matting round its neck, Peter’s cat lay stretched out dead. Its eyes were alive with ants. I lifted the stiff body and carried it downstairs. I buried it by the cottage. When I was done I squatted and for a while watched a snail climb a shaft of sorrel.

Then I returned to Murphy’s room. Below his windows houses staggered down the hill, each sheltering lives as useless and as precious as my own. In the terrarium a lizard was gulping hamburger. It darted when I tapped the glass. The dirt in the cactus pots was moist. After a minute I went to the far wall and turned over Murphy’s canvas.

It was a Garden, a menagerie. If Rousseau had had the form-haunted medieval mind of Bosch he might have painted it. Disparate limbs conjoined in monsters. Murphy’s draftsmanship had made them seamless wholes: his grammar of line—joining haunch to fin, mandible to bicep—superseded the grammar of reality. There were a hundred beasts or more. The flora was likewise impossible. Tree ferns fruited in birds. The flowers of sprawling cacti bore letters. The canvas was an affront: it denied evolution, the most whole myth we still possessed after the fall of God. I could not judge if Murphy’s aim had been to include these travesties of life in his universe or to exclude them from it.

It was unfinished. The negative space he marshaled so carefully in his drawings was spread throughout the canvas in patches and voids, as if holding off an unthinkable completion. Near the center I found his aliens—insectile, alike, expressionless, presiding over creation. Around them were smears of color, as if he had gone over and over this patch and had not got it right.

A week later he was back. He moved like a ghost. There had been tissue damage in his hands; they had been near to amputation, and now he could barely make a weak fist. He spent his days reading and did not go out at all.

He spoke to me only once more.

—The hospital. There was a peace there, an order. I was willing to do whatever they wanted. I knew it was my last chance to reenter the world.

I tore up my application to the university. I wrote a long account of our trip, ending with the deaths of Murphy and myself, in this fiction I explained that they had indeed taken Murphy back. Then, having as I thought usurped this path, having as I believed rescued him from himself, I felt myself fairly done with denial. I felt strong enough never again to need words to deny anything.

In October I moved, leaving for him only a short farewell verse from Rilke, which I hoped I could myself follow: “There is no place that does not see you; you must change your life.”

But it turned out that I was wrong, that even our most selfless acts have secret motives. In my pack, as I traveled, I discovered his last reply: All life is love, and love perishes. And I knew that he was dead.

So I recognized at last the yoke of self, the cold and mutable equations of being which only laugh at principle and method. Did I think he had used me? No, I had used him, and finally not kept our compact. I had mothered him by cradling my arms to myself and cooing stories for my own benefit. I had not counted the chance of betrayal, and so I ended betraying him as completely as only a parent can betray a child. I had taken from him the fiction he needed in order to live. I had sacrificed him to save myself.

And that I could face even this manifestation of Kirttimukha I took for my own strength and purpose, returning East to fight. And I recognized too that I was hereby due for some congruent betrayal myself. This I accepted. Life is the exchange, the unknowable, unnamable exchange of energies.

The two hikers who passed us had been found dead a hundred yards away.