The Menagerie of Babel

Carter Scholz The Menagerie Of Babel

I was living then in a cottage behind a ramshackle house in the Berkeley hills. Most of my ready cash had gone for three months' rent in advance. I could have had the basement for less, but when I saw it I balked. Half the floor was dirt, the other half worm-eaten boards. Through one filthy window fell the glaucous light of a Manhattan airshaft at dawn. It was a tomb. I knew that my asceticism was not equal to it. And I wanted at most three months. So I took the cottage. It was one room fifteen feet on a side, without electricity or plumbing.

My landlord lived in the main house. He was a law-school dropout with an overbearing manner that collapsed the moment I resisted it. Then he was almost unctuous. His name was Peter Fraser. He rented the house, and sublet rooms in it. I guessed that because of his manner he had trouble filling them. In a week, competition for housing among returning students would be desperate, and he could have named his price, 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, I would say that I meant to complete my master's degree here; after leaving Harvard I spent part of the summer cleaning lab glass at Woods Hole, so it was at least a plausible intention. But in fact I had not even applied for admission, and on the road I took every chance to prolong the trip. On my last ride south from Eugene, when I woke from the shallow dreams peculiar to travel to see with what woe the mud flats of the bay and San Francisco barely visible through a gunmetal haze, I knew that all my intentions had 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, forbidding return. Glimpse this face once, and you live thereafter 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, in the root sense of the word; I mean that his mind was entirely his own, private, unlike any I had known, unique almost to the point of insanity. I do not mean to judge, only to describe him.

The morning after I moved in I met him in the backyard. He sat at an easel, drawing, not looking up but jerking his head sporadically to one side. I had never seen anyone so thin. He was shirtless and pale, though his arms were sunburnt and freckled. In his left hand was a drafting pen which rattled as he shook it. I had stepped out of the cottage before I saw him, and by the excessive politeness I indulged to combat my diffidence I was obliged at least to say hello.

Wait, he replied.

Wait? For what? I made to walk on, but stalled. Perhaps it was the intensity of the sun on the white page and black ink that arrested me. It was a dense, precise nature study. I took it for a sea urchin until, past the easel, I spotted his subject, a withered sunflower. It might have been on the moon, the way he drew it. I could not look at it nor away from it for very long.

The same held true for Murphy, when he turned to me. Where his drawing was severe and remorseless, his features were as spare and pale as his body.

His face was almost without character, except for the eyes. In them was a look I had sometimes surprised in myself: a total faith in the sufficiency of love, a hunger for the touch of another soul so absolute and needful that when repulsed, it turned to reproach and hurtfulness. If eyes reflect the soul then his soul, like mine, was far too eager to believe in any sympathy and too ready to bruise when repulsed. Not to acknowledge what I saw there, again I hedged my territory with a few small lies, and one truth: I said I liked his drawing, sometime I'd have to see more of it. He immediately agreed, and I was caught.

His room was in the crowning cupola of the house. It was filled with potted plants, and with his drawings. They all had the same stark, disconcerting quality. One was of a horseshoe crab; some were of cacti; a few were of the city view through his windows. I glanced at them, away from them, back again, as if expecting some transformation, some unsuspected alternative to emerge from their schematic precision. Even his pencil sketches were without softness.

As I studied them, at once fascinated and impatient to be away, Murphy watered his plants. Here he was in control, his body less nervous, his eyes less vulnerable. He raised the lid of a terrarium, and behind a cactus a dun lizard's tail lashed the sand.

I love these, he said, reaching in 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. Around the edge of each object, tossed onto the white shore of paper by an unfathomable sea, was an intense, obliterating space. Every line in the drawing battled this void. The overdrawn precision was claustrophobic.

He lifted his finger from the spine and regarded serenely the red bead forming on its pad. Briefly he pressed it to his mouth.

Why so many? So many types? Who can explain it?

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

On occasion Murphy took his drawings to Telegraph Avenue for sale. One afternoon I went with him, because his route crossed the campus and I wanted a look at the place. If it became real to me, I thought, I might be moved to act. And I needed to buy an oil lamp. Peter had halfheartedly offered to run an extension cord from the house to the cottage, but I sensed that I would be obligated to him for the favor. I also wondered how real Murphy's business connection was. I thought that parts of his life were fantasy. I had nothing against this, certainly my own life now was largely phantasmal and seemed at times a slow but definite form of ritual suicide, but if I were to know him I would feel more secure knowing the form of his delusions.

My doubts were not unfounded. The rhythms of the house were erratic. It was an odd holdover, or recapitulation, of the communes of the sixties, yet I had more privacy than if I had lived alone. Dinners were shared, so

I gained a quick introduction to the seven tenants, but a nearly pathological avoidance of questions kept me from learning much. One man played bass for a band perpetually about to get work. One woman studied midwifery. Another was a proofreader for a Buddhist press. One couple, specialists in "noetic research," seemed to do nothing but drift in and out at any time of the day or night. Once I came back from a walk to find them peering into my cottage through its one window; they did not return my greeting. Their eyes were like cold oil.

My landlord liked to complain to me about the other tenants, as if thereby forming an alliance. I suspect he tried it on all new tenants. He confided that he was owed thousands in back rents, a pitiable soft touch, yet he spent his time aimlessly and went out in his battered Honda only for tennis, movies, and political meetings. His way of life at least had an easy explanation: he had a trust fund, and sold drugs.

Murphy and I crossed campus. I did not like it. Architecturally it was a hodgepodge. Beaux Artes styles had been lifted and laid with the care of a parvenu moving a castle across the ocean stone by stone. The buildings boldly 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 wrong in this raw clear air, under this luxuriant and primitive flora. Like the defensive edges of Murphy's drawings, the pale granite and red-tiled roofs barely held the corrosive blue sky at bay.

Girls passed, slit skirts from another era swinging, on the plaza that in my childhood had been flooded with riot police and tear gas. Two streetcorner 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. Undergraduates crowded the avenue. Everything looked so new. It was unlike anyplace I had been in the east, and for the first time since my arrival my heart lifted.

I was not after all badly matched, in my motives of denial and escape, to this place of lost connections and shallow history. I still courted the faith that one could start anew.

Murphy's connection was real enough. He was a street vendor with a folding table in front of the Bank of America, stocked with drawings and photos of local scenes. He accepted Murphy's rolled sheaf 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 twenties and pushed them across the table. He left his hand on them.

Listen, you want some coke?

Murphy said no.

All right. The vendor smiled as his hand came off the bills. But don't tell me you do this stuff straight. Take it in trade sometime, okay? I got 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? I said snottily, with superior glee. Even as I groped for some witticism I knew I was being a shit. The Harvard habit dies hard. For apology I was ready to broaden my comment into self-parody, another Harvard habit, but as the cashier rang up the rest of the titles, I was silenced. Flying saucers. Gods. Magic.

It's bullshit, said Murphy pleasantly as we left the store. But it's true bullshit.

I'm sorry, I said uncertainly. It's just my training talking. I'm.

Oh, I know you're a biologist.

How did you know that? I felt violated. The 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 he had known.

Because, 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.

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, stopping in a stand of sequoia, the ground thick with ferns. My sense of time suffered another shift: in the plants, in the shape of these hills, was the sense of a prehistoric Earth. Cars took the curves below us dreamily, their 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. If you look at things, really look, after a while something emerges, and you find th-that things want to change into other things. And y-you can draw that. You can see what they were or what they 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 what to say to others.

I'm sorry, I just meant. but yes. the Greek root of idiot, idios, it means self, private.

That's so. It's a ceding of self to be understood. Do you know much about genetics?

I was still unused to his abrupt shifts. No one does, really. 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. A fantasy.

Yes, but DNA is like the letters of the alphabet, isn't it, the molecules

A C T G and, and if you rearrange them.

You could have a menagerie of Babel.

Yes. Yes, that's right.

No, it's not right. The metaphor of the alphabet is defective. There are laws. And I stopped. For I realized that what he was saying was indeed a corollary of Darwin's idea, 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 of genetics was therefore as fantastic as any of Murphy's, acceptable to scientists only because it fit the historical form of their method. What could give this infinity of possibility any human meaning? No one knew. And not knowing turned the plenum into a chaos.

The function of DNA is to copy itself. Yet it does not, not exactly. There are sports and mutants. So life diversifies, and not, we must believe, aimlessly; but what, if any, are the laws? If we knew them, it would change us.

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

But what happened?

I quit.

But why?

I was eased out. Discouraged from a certain line of research.

You let them? Let them discourage you? But th-this is important! This is my work, too.

What do you mean?

I draw in order to learn. If you draw things, using always the same, the same kinds of lines, you can learn about growth. About form. The b-books I read, they help, they don't all use the same methods, but I can see past that. Look, look at it all! The plants, the animals, the superabundance, and no reason except for nature's h-hunger for new forms. The diversity!

Life is, is nothing but a freak show! Look at it, just look!

I had been following him to learn, as I said, the form of his delusions.

Now he had touched the core of his obsession, and his lean nervous body shook with its zeal, his thin stuttering voice was driven 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, any of a thousand cacti. He spoke of resemblances between the enzymes of sharks and those of grasses. But if all this was a source of wonder to me, to him it was a horror. His world was the fever dream of a mad, insomniac intelligence. I remembered the anthropologist's old saw that intelligence is pathological; the rapid evolution of man's forebrain, that diadem of the species, is anomalous, apparently unique in evolution. More than one scientist, trying to explain it, has likened it to a cancer. I wondered again if Murphy were sane. Certainly if an intelligence governed his cosmos, it was pathological, and its means were those of Darwinism, which limited the mechanism of creation to permutation and mindless competition.

It was strangely touching. He had read widely, if indiscriminately, and his attempts to find an order were like mine in everything but method. My work too was a heresy against the dogmas of science, though constituted by them. So I did not tell him how the idea of an ordered world had always faced contradictions and inadequacies, from Plato through Spinoza, even after Darwin. Its history was a history of failure, though of a kind I aspired to. Such a grand failure. It alone opposed the brute mechanistic vision that the current paradigms of science offered. Was the world indeed an inescapable nightmare of congenital competition, or might there yet prove to be some need for cooperation at the center of being? For my own reasons I needed to believe the latter; I needed also, unlike Murphy, some evidence that I was not deluded in my belief.

And you, he said, you can help me. You've studied this, you can show me. I go to the university library, but there are hundreds of books, th-thousands, I don't know where to start.

Well, first you should get some history. This idea is as old as Plato's

Timaeus.

But history could never help him. Even if he read Plato, he would only seize on the myth of Atlantis. In his way he was as marooned by history as

I by method. So. If Murphy would use me to work out his obsession, then I might use him as proof against my own delusions. With his example before me I might be less likely to fall into error. This cold quid pro quo, perhaps the nearest thing to friendship that I could offer, was at least some form of cooperation.

As we walked back I imagined the beasts of Murphy's fancy taking form in this primal sun that subsumed history, but not on the canvas of his innocence. No, I saw them body forth under the pervasive smutching shadow of method, the issue not of imagination but of these hillside laboratories so busily unlocking the genetic codes, the same burgeoning industry that all my classmates had been so eager to join, a mockery and reproach to all

I had learned and suffered for.

And still Murphy was not done. He spoke of his 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. For

I had thought that at least he had an arena of action in which he felt free.

And is that all it is to you? A means of inquiry? No pride in your art?

He looked stunned. Pride? In c-copies of copies?

I understood. The grandest Chartres could not rival the balance of a bumblebee, nor the finest pigment more than mock the glint of snakeskin.

But you say that life is monstrous, I said.

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?

Because it suffers us to live.

Overhead a firespotting plane droned, crossing and recrossing the grass-brown 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 was uneasy, I wanted to be left out of it. Yes. It is.

I'm at a dead end with my drawings anyway. Maybe there's another way.

.

But I did not want to hear any more just then. I told him that I needed to pick up an application to the university. I would see him later at the house.

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.

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.

And he told me 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 lionheaded 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 through his groin, 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 any 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 the 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, the 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 human cloning and a practical guide to the grafting of cacti.

One evening, more from obligation than desire, I began to fill out my application to the university, as an earnest that a new life could start for me here. Evidently I could still not imagine a life apart from a university. But the first thing the gatekeepers of the future ask is where you come from.

Let me tell you, then, 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 then and is still. In 1926, after a long and distinguished career, Kammerer blew his brains out in disgrace over a badly preserved and ineptly doctored specimen of Alytes obstetricans, the midwife toad, the main evidence for his theory. A discoloration on the toad's hand was supposed to be a nuptial pad, a feature present in most water-mating toads, but normally absent in this landmating species. Forcing his Alytes to mate in water induced the pads, which, after several generations, were passed to their offspring. Or so Kammerer claimed. The specimen was examined by a hostile critic ten years after its preservation. On examination the discoloration proved to be fresh India ink. Kammerer could have had nothing to do with this botch of a hoax, which proved only that some lab assistant had tried clumsily to help him or maliciously to discredit him. But his critics were to tie the validity of all his work to the fraud of this specimen.

No attempt had ever been made to duplicate Kammerer's experiment. 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 that 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 in the effort, was de jure useless surplusage. In itself the theory was flawed, but its analogs were simply appalling. "Survival of the fittest" justified every cutthroat act from personal betrayal to corporate capitalism to genocide. Nor could I return to the moral paradigms that had held good before the Age of Reason and the supposed fall of God; in that, at least, Darwin and entropy and experience agreed: time could not be turned back nor innocence regained. In any case

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 and consoling for me to swallow whole. But I used it as a name for my ignorance.

If the ideas of my science were hard on me, the politics were impossible.

I lost standing I never knew I had. A scholarship student, I was now outcast. The great burnished doors of privilege, power, prestige, and profession commenced to swing shut on their oiled bearings. Notices of picnics, parties, softball games, and seminars ceased to appear in my box; I was snubbed by a professor who two weeks earlier had spent an afternoon with me joyfully criticizing strict Darwinism.

For a year I persisted, walking the two miles from our apartment to the labs almost every night, entering between the two stone rhinoceri, the grates in the quad steaming in all seasons and their mist forming coronae around the lamps. Every time I saw it I fancied that the steam was the eager breath of the gene-splicers, tainting the outer world. Eventually 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.

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 draw on common knowledge. Execution, the creative act, is irremediably isolated and solipsistic: the mind alone with its labor must take unique responsibility for everything it draws on, whether communal, original, learned by design or at hazard. And 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.

Did I really think I could start over? That my being was unpursued by its history? I put aside my application to Berkeley.

An odd coincidence I discovered later was that Kammerer shot himself on my birthday. Another was that the son of Kammerer's harshest critic 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, diminutions, augmentations. I owned an elementary book on topology, and it soothed me to read it. In topology there is no direction, no time, and its forms are greatly mutable. Torus: a coffee cup is congruent with the human body or a doughnut. Mцbius strip, Cantor set, Klein bottle: I loved these names, pure poems of ideal space, tokens of the mind's power. I loved that such irreal forms could have a taxonomy. Names grant power. The true names of things are holy and fearsome. The true name of a thing can keep it at bay. Sometimes I imagined the worst in order to forestall it happening. But there is always something you fail to imagine.

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 still look back on branching paths of possibility now cancelled, an angel at each, that might have led to different selves. What is the number of these accidents? What is the shape of necessity? The notion that everything is possible is monstrous, so we restrict reality by observing, then defining, then excluding what does not fit our definitions. The plenum is reduced to the principle of plenitude. But the excluded remain with us; the bypassed angels haunt us.

To me this was the true menagerie, the myriad acts or failures of will that make us what we are. Since I felt or hoped that creation was a plenum of necessity, I suppose I should have felt the same about my choices. But

I believed my will imperfect and liable to error. Murphy seemed to me different: driven by the need of his delusions, unfree to choose his path and thus to err. This then was the basis of our friendship, as I saw it.

What I needed from him. Life is the exchange of energies.

What Murphy needed from me was still unclear. So I listened. By degrees he opened up to me about himself rather than his ideas. He was born in California. He had never finished high school. He put himself through a trade school by selling commercial illustrations. He worked in numerous small ad agencies, always quitting after a brief time. He had no social life at all, and filled his off hours by reading von Daniken, Velikovsky, Nietzsche, Bergson, Borges, Hegel, Heinlein, Ouspensky, a chaos of interests. He owned no books on art.

Family trees, evolutionary charts, the labyrinth of choice, the drawings in my topology book of Alexander's horned sphere, all had the same shape.

I came to see Murphy's life as congruent in ideal space to my own.

He began a painting. 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 to the wall when he wasn't working on it. It left on the white wall a growing overlap of varicolored lines where the wet top edge had leaned.

Topology, evolution, competition, cooperation, plenitude: these are stories we tell ourselves, as scientists, as politicians, as humans, to hold back what we dare not embrace. But time and the timebound mind are unforgiving; the excluded are with us always.

This is the story I do not want to tell: the real reason I came west.

I came west because of John Lang. He was a year ahead of me at school. We had 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.

The metaphor did not hold in biology. Lysenko had been the great Soviet Lamarckian, a great fraud working against all evidence to vindicate the Marxist idea that life was not a free-market economy. But in time even the Soviets had bowed to their losing scientific competition with Darwinism, and Lysenko was written out of history. I knew that. But as a binding fiction of social life that we can learn, that effort is not lost at death, that cooperation strengthens it was still appealing. It was right.

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

I was living then with Joann, a slim dark beauty. A painter. 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. As the food arrived I fled, nauseated at the part I had to play, at my ineffectualness, my poverty, my pain.

The next week was comedy, if you like, as I moved from the apartment of one friend to the next, sleeping on living-room couches, receiving unsolicited analysis, sympathy, use and abuse. How any human being ever speaks to another remains a deep mystery to me.

I resented that Lang was using her as the flag of his liberation. "Living in sin" was how he phrased it to everyone but me. And I resented that there was that in Joann to respond to his instrumentalism. 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. How had I collaborated in my betrayal?

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 fled lamenting. How could he ever know her as I had?

But if I cannot judge Murphy, how can I possibly judge Lang? He had known what he 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 static. Sometimes I would tune to a talk show. I seldom went to bed before three. It was here, after a month in Berkeley, that I was fully and finally acquainted with the depth of Murphy's neurosis. I was reading a book on phylogeny, listening in the gaps of my attention to the murmur of unseasonable rain and the radio, a 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 grasp 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 needless. We may clone, we may graft, we may splice genes, but we cannot approach the enormity of what they have done here, to us. We mock ourselves by the very attempt. Perhaps they come back to observe us, perhaps not, that doesn't matter. We are theirs. Perhaps it gives them the filthy pleasure of the voyeur. The unspeakable difference between the eye and 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 Law School, conducted a purge of the house on September 23, my uncelebrated birthday. He demanded all back rents by the first of October, or he would start evictions. I drove with him to the Co-op to post For Rent notices, his way of letting the troops know he was serious. Kristin, the student of midwifery, was the only one who took it seriously. 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 so self-involved. She had listened to me once or twice. She said she needed two more months of classes to finish her training, and the expense of moving would mean another year of temp work. Murphy listened to this, then took from his desk a roll of twenties.

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 Nevada. I think he wanted to escape the repercussions of his decree. Murphy and I agreed to go.

We left just after midnight. Peter kept three backpacks ready to go at all times, each equipped for a week's outing. This is earthquake country, he explained. When the Big One hits, I'm heading for the hills for a week until the madness is over.

We drove in Peter's Honda, Murphy in the front passenger seat, me wedged in back with two of the packs. I was still unused to distances in the west. Hours passed and I slept.

Peter stopped at the crest of the Tioga Road. We stumbled out to relieve ourselves under a half-moon high in a sky pale with false dawn. We were alone at a still lake under pines and awesome granite domes. My heart raced, my breath was a moonborne wraith on the thin air.

Day broke as we turned south on 395. Ten miles to our west rose the sheer scarp of the eastern Sierra Nevada. The face of the mountains appeared flat, without perspective. We turned off the highway onto Pine Creek Road, and it seemed that we would run straight into a sheer wall. Then the road veered. Peter downshifted. In a few moments the mountains opened and we were among them. Gray shoulders of the range thrust up so steeply that most of their flesh had been shed on talus slopes. One rugged black monster was striped with branching veins of lighter rock.

The road ended at a deserted pack station. A few horses stood unmoving in the morning air. We unpacked the car. The air was sweet, the chill just leaving it. Near us was a parked van with a kitsch painting of the desert on its side. Peter put his car key into a small magnetic case and conspicuously held it aloft before slapping it inside a wheel well.

There's the key. In an emergency any one of us can go for help. Straight down 395 to the ranger station in Bishop.

I had hiked in the east, but it was nothing like this. The trail from the pack station wandered out through sparse pines and aspens with leaves the colors of flame. We crossed a creek that might have been anywhere in

Vermont. But to raise your head was to see more mountain than sky. Soon we reached a cleared grade, up which a dusty road cut endless switchbacks.

Across the creek drainage to the north was a tungsten mine, its buildings and slurry line silent, ugly, and eerie. As the sun reached us I paused to take off my outer shirt. Where the fire road gave out among timber we stopped to rest.

Now we were in another world. If the lake last night had taken my breath away, like the first glimpse of a beautiful woman, this morning I was in love. Lower Pine Lake was a sparkling indigo, its shore crowded by deep green trees.

At Honeymoon Lake we forded a stream and stopped below falls for a lunch of crackers, sausage, and hard cheese, gazing out over the lake, the distant peaks beyond it. Beyond the lake the trail climbed sharply, the timber gave out, and we were in a vast rock basin. The scale of the place was such that I did not know if it was beautiful. As well call the moon beautiful. I was reminded of a line from Henry Miller: "No analysis can go on in this fight; here the neurotic is either instantly cured, or goes mad." Murphy had not said ten words all day, and I wondered how he was taking it, if he saw this wild desolation as an apotheosis of nature or as the playground of his perverse lifemaking aliens.

We followed a stream uphill that ducked under and over jumbled rocks. The only vegetation was scrub. A long series of switchbacks brought us to Italy Pass. We paused here for the view and to get our wind. Peter passed around a plastic bag of nuts, raisins, seeds.

Delicate succulents, hoarding water in tiny lobes like baby's fingertips, nestled in sand in the lee of rocks. Survival in this zone was hard. The slender reddish grasses, the groping black lichen that seemed to darken the soil around it, grasping for rootholds against the blasting wind and winter snows, these forms seemed made for Murphy and his obsession, but he was impassive. He had not even brought a sketchbook.

In the bowl ahead of us, west of the pass, snow remained from the previous winter. Peter led us a short way down a narrow trail, then struck off cross-country. I was exhausted, and hiked on numbly, following his slow lead over the rough terrain. This entire bowl, from the surrounding ridgeline to the lake far below, was a jumble of gray boulders. Footing was uneven and uncertain. We stayed some five hundred feet below the ridgeline, skirting its snow and impassable rock. I'm making for that notch, said Peter during a pause, pointing to a break in the ridgeline.

There's a gem of a lake just beyond.

Late in the afternoon we made camp at Little Bear Lake, a rockbound pond in a glacial cirque. Peaks ringed us round. For perhaps thirty minutes I sat spent and dumb, my limbs leaden. Then miraculously my fatigue vanished. I helped Peter pitch the three-man tent, and fetched water.

Peter drew off a quart for cooking and shook a few iodine tablets into the remainder. When the water boiled he tore open three foil packs and stirred their contents into the pot. We ate from plastic bowls as light drained swiftly from the sky. With night came a windless silence. I heard my heartbeat, Murphy's breath, the rustle of Peter's jacket, the crack of a rock slipping down a faraway slope.

We stayed up talking, late enough to see Taurus's V climb above the rough silhouette of mountains. The air was cold though the ground still held the sun's warmth. The stars were brilliant. Each moment seemed to bring out more. I pointed out the Dippers and Cassiopeia's W, but it took Murphy to identify most of the others. I remember laughing when he pointed out Camelopardelus, the giraffe. Peter rolled a joint, and he and I smoked and he talked while Murphy lay on his back, looking for meteors.

I found it hard to like Peter. For one thing, he resembled John Lang. Like

Lang, Peter called himself a Marxist, which seemed to mean that he never made large profits on rent or dope deals. Now Peter repined over the evictions. He had been more than fair. But these people had acted in bad faith, and it was no favor to anyone to support the irresponsible. How the responsible differed from those who merely paid their bills I did not ask.

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. I had perhaps heard too many people excusing themselves too often. Still, I shared with Peter some of my own heresies and failures, insofar as they reflected his, and he was a good listener. I was smoking his dope. We all felt fine.

After a while Peter stood. Gonna take a dump. 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. That I was from a star somewhere. They had left me here to grow up as human, to observe and learn, and when I had observed and learned enough, they would take me back. I used this, this fantasy as a reason. I liked to study things and this gave me a reason.

Why did you need a reason?

Because I knew studying would never do me any good. It's okay if you have the money to go to college.

Stung, I said: I was on financial aid. I didn't have any money.

But your friends did.

That was true. I was the token poverty case, the one who would miss outings and parties because of work-study jobs, but still I was part of that world, a world that Murphy never had a chance in. I had willfully turned my back on it; that was a luxury he would not like me for.

Which star? I asked.

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

How long did this. fantasy last? I asked.

A few years. I never told anyone. After a while I just stopped thinking about it.

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

I was here to study Earth things, you see, but then I began to believe in them. I was afraid they would see this, and not come back for me. I was supposed to be just an observer. Not a participant.

Despite myself I felt love for him. I wanted to stretch my arms to him and pull him across the gulf he had created between himself and humanity.

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.

Oh.

I. w-waited for it. He raped my older sister. He was, that is, it was his name too.

Is that why you don't use it?

Oh no. 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 it's not. 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's flashlight beam bobbed closer as he returned.

Did you see that major meteor?

No. We were talking about glaciers, I said.

Oh, yeah. If we had more time, I'd take you to Evolution Valley. There's outstanding glacial stuff there. Mt. Huxley, Mt. Darwin, Lamarck Col.

I'll show you slides sometime. A great place. Nature named after natural historians. You guys coming to bed? I'm fried.

Soon, I told him.

Okay. Don't step on me when you come in.

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?

You think it's all the result of chance, he said.

Not quite. But if it is, is that so bad? Isn't it a relief to think so?

That the universe is indifferent?

Do you believe in sin?

I was 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.

Well, you're right. I do believe in sin. Otherwise evil is the result of misunderstanding, and I don't believe that.

Then what is sin? he asked.

A violation of the natural order.

So there is an order.

I don't know. Despite all the fictions we impose, yes, I tend to think there is one, under it all. So there's sin. You're responsible for your actions. I laughed. So congratulations, you've discovered God. But let me tell you about Occam's razor.

Needless reduplication of entities.

Undercut again, I laughed, benevolent from Peter's dope.

You, you see, that's where the God argument fails. He wouldn't have made.. all this.

Oh, I don't know. He did or he didn't, but anyway why replace him with a race of aliens?

Oh, was I stoned. I could almost see them.

If we're slave to their will, to the fall of ch-chromosomes, the mutations, the defects in material, well, then we can never transcend ourselves, can we, but only aspire to find the controlling form. T-to know them. And I'm still afraid of what I might learn about them. What if they're p-p-perfect, but formed that way by chance.?

Afraid to learn? Then stop, I said blithely.

I, I have no choice!

What reproach. His cosmos was controlled, and he its creature, denied choice, enslaved by a false idea of his own making, just as I was trapped by my idea, the image of an orderly world in which choice could be clear and unencumbered by poor consequence or pain. We were more alike than not.

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 around him an unthinkable chaos of beings boiled, warred, loved, lost, died, endured.

Murphy, listen to me, the stupid and the intelligent accept the imposed orders, because they don't see them or because they know there's no alternative. People like you, you wake up suddenly, you see the imperfections and the fraud, call it monstrous, and think it new. But it's not new. The knowledge does you no good; looking for a new order only takes you deeper into the old. And finally you come to the idea of inherent vice in creation, and even that isn't final, isn't new. You're doomed. There's no help for you.

Of whom are you speaking?

Of myself. Of whatever it is we share. This ineradicable strain. I woke up too. Perhaps it's best for us if we choose it.

Choose to be doomed?

Yes. To be excluded from the charnel house. Each in his own way.

Perhaps, said Murphy, and was then silent. The warmth of the dope left me, and I began to shiver. As I stood up and headed for the tent he said, I'll stay up awhile. Until Orion rises.

We were all up at dawn. I left the tent first and walked to the lakeside.

A fringe of ice extended an inch or two from some rocks. The air was cool and lucid with a slight steady breeze. Overhead pink mare's tails swept.

Peter emerged and regarded the sky critically. He portioned granola into three bowls and laid out his climbing gear. He tried to entice us to tackle a rock face with him, tried against his declared politics to catch us by competition. But that morning Murphy and I were almost like lovers, and cooperatively we demurred. Instead we two mapped a hike for ourselves that went back over Italy Pass, to another lake.

Take a poncho, said Peter. We may get some weather.

Murphy and I traipsed to the pass in silence. He stooped once to examine some lichen, burnt orange and black on the gray rock, that strange collaboration of the lowest animal with the lowest plant. Design of darkness, he murmured.

From the pass we descended into Granite Park, then left the trail. Across another bowl ringed by peaks we hiked. Clouds were scudding in. When we stopped for lunch the sky was overcast. A moist wind came steadily from the west.

An hour later the temperature dropped suddenly. We were about five miles from camp when it started to snow. All at once the indifference of nature was no comfort to me.

Let's get back. This looks bad.

It may blow over, Murphy said.

I don't think so. Look at it come down. Let's get out of this while we can.

Returning, we almost missed the trail. We followed it up toward the pass.

A few inches of snow had fallen there. The surrounding mountains had faded. Wind billowed a thick white curtain all around us. I stopped. Oh Christ.

It's that way, Murphy said calmly.

I know it's that way. But you can't see a hundred yards.

What should we do?

I don't know. Can we hike out?

It must be ten miles to the road.

Half that, from here. It's downhill. Maybe we can get below the snow.

What about Peter? We should go back to the tent.

It's a good four miles back to the tent. We have to climb into the storm, over the pass, do you remember that boulder field? Could we find the notch in this?

Okay. Whatever you think.

His diffidence frightened me into anger. He would make me make the choice.

We should go down. We can make it out by dusk.

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

Something else you find when you go downhill, he said. Do you remember the ford on the way in? What will that be like? Maybe we should go back to the tent.

Maybe, maybe, damn it, we're committed now!

He shrugged.

I could see perhaps thirty yards. Beyond the ford everything was a white blur.

All right, we can't cross here. Give me the map.

He shrugged off his day pack, unzipped it, and handed me the folded map.

Farther on the trail met the stream again. I thought we could traverse the arms of the trail's U and avoid a crossing.

We were not dressed for this. The morning had been mild. I was wearing a shirt, sweater, poncho, and wool cap, Murphy a light hooded parka. Snow, caked around my boots, was seeping into my socks; my toes stung. I could feel my sweat chilling as we stood there.

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 in pockets, hunched, he stared at the rushing stream. It's up to you.

I cursed at him, and we went on. I guessed fifteen minutes until we regained the stream. We slipped and stumbled on snow-covered rocks. Still, it was soothing to have a direction. I marched on and on, occasionally glancing back at Murphy's lagging figure. Then a panic jolted me; I could no longer hear the stream. I stopped and looked at my watch in disbelief: forty minutes had passed since we left the trail.

Murphy, marching numbly on, bumped into me. Staring at the map I tried to think. In a couple of hours it would be dark. We were not yet a third 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 sodden map. It went 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 buffet of wind, the accumulating silence of snow. The light seemed to be failing. Colder, granular snow rustled on my poncho as it fell.

Now? said Murphy.

I chose a direction. After five minutes I felt sure that we were going downhill. We walked close together, 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 moonsharp cliff, impossible to descend. I turned us before Murphy saw. He stumbled against me.

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, you want to die. I took 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.

God, it's enormous!

I saw nothing. There was nothing. I was enraged that he should debase our deaths with his 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. And I had brought him along into it.

He shouted again.

They're here!

He began to sing.

From the dusk emerged two figures. They were hikers. 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 though 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 and 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 neither fictive nor 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 my hand on his forehead. I confusedly thought I could tell if his body had enough heat to keep him alive through the night. It was dark now. The wind had fallen. Sparse large flakes dropped straight down. Above us was a dim light and I could see the ghost of a half-moon racing through clouds. In the obscurity I watched Murphy's lips to see if fresh flakes melted as they touched. I burrowed deeper into the whispering snow. All words were passing from me, words of power, curses, benedictions, stories, 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. Words bowed and broke, vowels scattered ripples across the face of darkness, the armature of my body weakened, and the support of 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, and beyond my choosing.

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. I would not leave the living so easily. The radiance seared me, the mouth of the whisper I was burrowed in broke in a stuttering shriek. My body screamed in pain, and I felt time snap cleanly as a dry twig up its length, two distinct paths and my angels, my demons stood at the crossing. Live or die, they cried. Choose, choose. Their grins were great as stars. The roar heightened. I turned my head to hide, but the light went through me. Next to me I saw Murphy, the bright green of his parka beneath drifted snow, the blue of my sleeve flung over him, his face a 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 tried to banish it by speaking it. But I was sick and weak and I saw that my word had only confirmed it.

In a gust the great ship rocked, its engines labored, its light bit deeper into reality. For now Murphy's reality had intersected mine. I had taken his insanity for my own, and I was afraid. I had imagined myself in some special grace of the doomed and the excluded, but now I knew that it had all counted, every word, every evasion, that a choice not made was still a choice. I would be weighed in their balance and found wanting. Some acid of life they would use on me. 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, that was nothing. The prospect of a changed life, of being forced to live, that was what I feared. And the singing in the air was: Choose!

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 quiet 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 we were picked us up eighteen hours later. When the wind had died, the Forest Service helicopter had swept over the

Chalfant Lakes basin, into which we had wandered.

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 the German language 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, and shivered for ten minutes. 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, 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 broken plaster. Flies made the hum. In the middle of the floor, with a torn strip of sheet round its neck, Peter's cat lay stretched out dead. Its eyes were alive with ants. I carried the small stiff body downstairs and buried it behind the cottage. When I was done I squatted there watching a snail ascend the stalk of a dead sunflower.

I climbed 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 possessed 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: haunch joined to fin, mandible to forearm, by the grammar of his line. There were a hundred beasts or more. The flora were likewise impossible. Tree ferns fruited in birds. The flowers of cacti bore strange 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 our 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 their creation. Around them were smears of color, almost haloes, as if he had gone over and over this patch and had not got it right.

A day 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 fist. He spent his days reading and did not go out at all.

He spoke to me only once more.

The hospital. There was an order there. 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 the snow. In this fiction I explained that the aliens had indeed taken Murphy back. Then, having as I thought usurped this path by naming it, 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 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 selfless acts have secret motives. In my pack, after I left I discovered on a scrap of paper his reply: All life is love, and love perishes. And I knew then that he was dead.

So I recognized at last the yoke of self, the mutable equations of being which only mock principle and method. Did I think he had used me? No, I had used him, and finally I had not kept our compact. I had mothered him by cradling my arms to myself and cooing stories for my own benefit, and ended by betraying him completely. I had taken from him the fiction he needed 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, as I returned east to fight. And recognized that I was hereby due for some congruent betrayal myself. This I accepted. Life is the exchange, the unknowable unnameable exchange of energies.

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