"As my mind came back, I realized the most curious thing had occurred: Every concern, every burden that had brought me to this moment had vanished. I remembered each circumstance of how I had fallen and why, but I no longer cared. In its place, a lightness, a freeing up, a release from gravity. My family, my brother, my private torments. I hear your thoughts, Doyle: He suffered oxygen deprivation. Damage to the brain. Believe what you like; what I had undergone in that cave was nothing less than a second birth. A chance to create a new life. The dead weight of Jack Sparks slipped off me like the skin of a snake: If everyone thought the man was dead—-and why wouldn't they? the terrible fall, credible witnesses—I could quite easily oblige them.
"I saw stars above me in the night sky for the first time uncluttered by my private despair: An interior objectivity I had never suspected was possible—rock, water, tree, meadow, moon; each thing I saw just the thing itself and not some shadow colored by my inner demons—a release from every earthly obligation, every lingering nightmare. A voice spoke inside my head that I had never heard before: This way, it said; follow me. Clear and calming. Promising a peace I'd never known. I listened.
"I walked all night, through an alpine valley following the river. No concern about where I was going; my path assured, every footstep. Sure enough, I happened upon a deserted cabin; a shepherd's roost, stocked with supplies. Stayed there until the food was gone. My strength renewed, with the voice guiding me I walked two hundred miles south, down through the Dolomites, to Padua, then finally to Ravenna on the Adriatic Sea. Spring stirring in the air. I found work on the docks as a laborer and took a room near the canal. Ate at the same cafe every evening; black olives, thick dark bread, red wine. Lots of red wine.
"I'd spent my entire life hunting my brother: I had no idea this was the way most people live. They work, eat, sleep, make love. Never concern themselves with aspects of living they can't control—meaning, purpose; they're never questioned, easier to leave all that in the hands of an employer, the Church, the tax collector. Existing from one day to the next; part of the landscape, never straying far from the ground that produced them. So self-evident but for me an entirely new conception. Living among them gave me an experience of true grace. Days ran into months, spring into summer and fall. I worked my body to exhaustion every day, slept with as many women as I could manage, and worried about exactly nothing.
"Casting off all ties to who I had been allowed me to become anyone I wanted: What are we except what we imagine ourselves to be? One morning I woke with an impulse to move on: I made myself a sailor from the Isle of Man—forged the documents I needed—and signed on a merchant steamer, bound for Portugal. A restlessness wormed its way into my blood: Out of Lisbon, I joined a freighter shipping to Brazil, where I wandered the coast, working smaller ships until I finally found a world to lose myself in.
"Four years in the city of Belem, near the mouth of the Amazon River: an international port, dozens of cultures colliding in a thousand intrigues; equatorial heat, thievery and bad intent. Surrounded by jungle, and its influence seeped into the bloodstream of every human behavior: ruthless, predatory, vampirish. Who would have guessed you could find such authenticity in a city populated exclusively by liars? Not a single soul in the place paid the slightest allegiance to the truth. I felt immediately at home.
"I made myself an Irishman, a relative exotic in that hothouse: I used the name Doyle, an homage to you. My first job; a steamboat traveling up and down the river, transport to a rubber plantation in the Amazon basin beyond Manaus, deep in the interior near the Rio Negro. A local tribe worked the fields there for the Portuguese bosses; the En-aguas, the 'good men.' Fitting name for these people. I thought I had experienced a simple life in Ravenna; the En-aguas embodied simplicity. They live in thatch huts, raised ten feet off the jungle floor as protection from the floods. In spite of their long contact with the whites, they remain uncorrupted: almost no trade; everything they need is taken from the jungle.
"I spent all my spare time with the En-aguas, slowly ingratiating myself with the headman. They had information I wanted about local pharmacology; the breadth of their knowledge about extracted medicines and the properties of herbs astonished me. The tribal shaman, their priest, used a tonic brewed from a root, ayaheusco, in ritual ceremony. After gaining their trust, I eventually took part in one; this substance severs the mind from its natural moorings; as it takes effect, they say, your spirit leaves your body and the priest guides you to enter into the consciousness of an animal, a boa, a jaguar, whichever one you own a true affinity for: your spirit guide. I became an eagle, Doyle, flew above the jungle, felt wings beating at my sides, looked down at the treetops with the same keen vision, felt the sharpness of its hunger; I lived and moved in the body of this bird, every bit as tactile and vivid as any physical experience in my life."
Sparks's eyes glowed with zealotry: Now that Doyle had persuaded Jack to start talking, how painfully eager he seemed to share these experiences. How many years had passed since Jack had spoken a word of this to anyone? How many years since he'd been in the company of anyone he could trust? Doyle felt a sharp twist, realizing the depths of Jack's isolation and loneliness, how far afield he'd wandered from any sense of community. Could any man long survive so cut off and alone—Doyle knew he couldn't—even one as resilient as Jack?
"This experience confirmed the discovery I had been pursuing from my first moment in the darkness of that cave: that this consciousness which moves us is inside every aspect of creation, fluid and malleable, and our experience of it is transferable from any manifestation of life to another. Can you grasp the implications? If everything in man and nature is wrought from the same stuff, whatever you call it—Holy Ghost, the spark of life—if every molecule is informed by the same defining spirit, that means individuals are free to act according to our own private beliefs; there is no universal morality or supernatural authority that governs our behavior, and regardless of our actions we will experience no retribution from anywhere outside the physical realm. Shipwrecked on this earth like Robinson Crusoe.
"For anyone with the courage to liberate their conscious mind from the conforming pressure of society and remove all that conditioned rubbish, all that's left is free will. From that moment, you have the power to define what is good and what is evil. This is purity. A higher moral rigor that answers only to itself. What I needed now was a structure on which to exercise my philosophy."
"How, exactly?"
Jack nodded. "I had acquired a reputation, someone who could get things done. I was asked to work for a man I had heard about in Belem, a local thug, a boss in the underground. A perfect test for my theory; I took the job, admitting me into the secret heart of the city. Within a month, I was supervising the man's smuggling operations: goods lifted from every ship that docked; guns and ammunition stolen from the military. Money flowed but I lived simply, in a shack on the beach. Drugs, drink, every imaginable earthly pleasure available; crime stimulates these low hungers in our nature and depresses the moral impulse. Indulgences. Excesses. Flesh. A cycle that perpetuates criminal behavior. I watched; I did not partake.
"I kept a girl at my little shack, an extraordinarily beautiful girl I found on the beach one day. Her name was Rina; mixed blood, Indian and Portuguese. Sixteen years old. Her mother was a whore; she'd never known her father and she'd never spent a day in school. I had never met anyone like her. Sweet, simple, unquestioning. She had an uncanny ability to make me laugh. Rina intrigued me in a curious way; how any human being could be so utterly and complacently earthbound I found appalling and fascinating. Like her physical beauty, her ignorance had a round, sullen perfection to it that felt obscurely instructive.
"I made love to her every night for six months and began to feel really animalistically connected to the girl. It was then I realized I had never in my life been close to anyone before, certainly not a woman. One morning not too long afterwards I woke, saw the light striking her face a certain way, and de
cided never to see her again. That feeling of intimacy was claustrophobic, intolerable. I gathered my few belongings and left Rina asleep in my bed. That same night, I killed a man who tried to rob me in an alley; broke his neck and left him lying there like a weed. And these two events—leaving Rina, killing this man—linked together in my mind: free will, you see. I hadn't killed anyone in years. I began to think about murder a great deal. How easy it was, how often I'd done it in the past, how little it had ever troubled me. An idea developed that I should commit one murder in particular, with intention, of someone I knew, as an experiment. To see what I would feel."
Doyle took a slow, deep breath, hoping Jack would notice no change in his responses. He had been in the presence of such a fevered and alien personality only once before: Jack had drifted into territory that had entirely deranged his brother. Had their genetic similarities led them to the same divide? Had this kind of evil been inevitable in Jack from the beginning?
"I decided to kill the man who had hired me as his underling: Diego Montes. They called him Ah Aranha, the Spider. Montes had grown to depend on my cunning; he lived like an ignorant beast, little more than a bloodsucking insect, thoroughly corrupted, a despoiler, stealing life from everything he touched; a whoremaster, running strings of girls kidnapped from Indian villages in the interior, selling them until their looks collapsed, then casting them into the street like garbage. His face, the rattle of his septum as he breathed through his mouth, the drugs and liquor he ingested massively, even the stuporous way he ate, disgusted me. Carrying out his death sentence came to represent the supreme expression of my free will.
"I crept into his villa one night and cut his throat with a razor while he slept. It required little effort; I severed the vocal cords first so he couldn't cry out. When he woke, I pinned his body to the bed and watched the life drain out of it."
Lost in cool reflection, Jack looked as if he might be recounting a story about a book he'd read once. Doyle couldn't move.
"I felt calm. Empty. As pitiless as that eagle with a rat clutched in its talons. I sensed the presence of no sacred spirit or a soul leaving the body; no angels watched us from on high. And no remorse. All I felt was the harsh indifference of the jungle. I had the confirmation I was looking for. My experiment was a success.
"With one complication: a witness, a woman who had gone to wash up in the next room. I heard her move as I was about to leave. It was Rina."
Doyle must have looked startled.
"That's right, the same beautiful, ridiculous girl I'd been living with. Terrified by the crime she had seen me do. She was a whore now; Montes had recruited her. She cried and told me how she had fallen into that life in despair when I abandoned her. I should have killed her, too, right then, but her presence seemed so fortuitous, I reasoned it could not be coincidence, it must have a meaning that would eventually reveal itself. I suppose what actually influenced my decision most was a kind of tenderness. So I let her live. Helped her escape the house. Even made plans to take her with me when I left the country, which I intended to do immediately.
"And I was right. My finding her did have meaning. Two days later, twenty men who worked for Diego Montes captured me as I was waiting to board a ship to Belize. Rina was supposed to meet me at the docks; I had left her alone for half an hour to buy a hat and she had betrayed me. She cared nothing for me. But this was her free will at work, you see. Available to us all; no inconsistency.
"They clapped chains on me and threw me into a cage, a pit dug into the clay in the yard of the local prison, its mouth covered with steel plates. Darkness was not exactly the hardship to me that they anticipated. But this time without water, and the temperature during the day reached one hundred and twenty degrees. The guards used it as a latrine. Three days passed before they spoke to me. They wanted a confession; Rina had already identified me as the killer, but they were determined to hear it from my lips.
"When they thought the pit had sufficiently softened me up, they brought me into a room, empty, save for a square block of white marble in its center. Stained red. Arm and leg irons at its base. They secured me kneeling before this stone and laid my hands out across its surface. The guards took turns, stepped up onto the block and walked on my hands. Stomped on them. Some danced. Dropped heavy stones. I could hear the sinews snap, bones cracking, watched one finger as they crushed it beyond recognition, all pulp and matted fiber. This went on for hours. They enjoyed their work; skilled and honest craftsmen. I realized they did not intend to kill me until I had confessed; an odd outburst of fastidiousness.
"But I would not cooperate. The pain somehow remained manageable, and I had grown to fancy this free life of mine; I was in no mood to give it up so easily, so I continued to protest my innocence. Hands are extremely personal parts of our bodies, aren't they? Their abuse made me very, very angry. Finally, when I feigned an unconsciousness from which I couldn't be revived, they slipped the irons off and dragged me from the room.
"I kicked the first one, here, the bridge of the nose. A kill. A second tried to pull his gun; I sent him crashing out a window and followed him out before the others could fire a single shot. His body cushioned my fall. As alarms sounded and shots missed me, I ran to a corner of the yard where they stacked provisions. A stairway of barrels took me to the top of the wall and over.
"The prison was set on a peninsula, ocean on three sides. I made it to the jungle before they cut off the road. They were reluctant to follow me at night; their pursuit fell away the deeper I went. Undergrowth became too thick; I took to the river, upstream with the incoming tide. When dawn broke, I was miles inland; they would never find me. Now the pain began; I gathered medicinal herbs—roots, some bark; using my teeth, primarily—to treat my hands, numb the pain. Infection set in quickly in that dank, humid air. I couldn't chance a return to the city for a doctor; my friends, the En-aguas, the native people upriver, had knowledge of these things. Six days to reach them. By then I was half-dead. Spiking fever. Delirious."
Jack laid his hands out on his knees, fanned the remaining fingers, looked down at them dispassionately.
"Their medicine man cut off the two most damaged fingers.
Saved the others; I have no memory of it. When I woke two days had passed. My hands were covered with salve, bound with a compress of leaves. They asked no questions, I told them nothing; brutality was routine in their view of the outside world. Two months passed before I was strong enough to travel. Three of them paddled me downriver by canoe, disguised as a priest; the birth of Father Devine. They would take me north to Porto Santana, where I would take a tramp steamer to the Indies. But first I had business in Belem.
"With my friends' help, we filled the bottom of a wagon with black powder stolen from the military depot. Then I tracked down Rina in Belem. Working in a brothel. Drugs, looks decaying, her little life already failing towards a sad predictable finish. I took her out of there, tied her to the seat of the wagon, a gag in her mouth. Never said a word to her: What was there to say? There were no words. I looked into her eyes for a long time. She understood perfectly.
"At dark we sent two mules trotting towards the prison with the wagon behind; guards saw Rina on board and took the wagon inside their gates. They didn't see the burning fuse concealed beneath the floorboards and with her screaming no one heard it hiss. But you could hear the explosion for fifty miles."
Sparks paused, swallowed a deep breath. Circles under his eyes, black as paint. Was there regret behind his words? Doyle couldn't hear it, only the throbbing of his own heart.
"I was on board that ship the next morning, carrying papers taken from a man who had died upriver: a Dutch businessman, Jan de Voort. My story: traveling home after an accident ruined my hands. Another white European consumed by the jungle. Shall I go on?"
Doyle nodded: Who knew if Sparks would ever expose this wound again? Hold your tongue, he told himself. Remember how a patient left to ramble so often unwittingly reveals the secret of his ailment. He
refilled his glass, hoping Jack would not notice how severely his hands trembled.
"I took my time moving north through the islands: Curacao Antigua. Hispaniola. No destination in mind. Soaking up sun. Rebuilding my hands, thrusting them again and again into hot sand. Drinking a great deal of rum. A new woman in each place, making conquests. Leaving when I tired of them, which never took long; they all want to heal a man in such a state. So predictable and tiresome. I couldn't bear that first bloom of disappointment on their faces when they realized no part of me was theirs.
"One day I landed in New York. What I'd intended as a brief stay turned into three more years of wandering, one identity folding neatly into the next; people don't ask many questions here. Take a man at his word if he can back it up with work.
"I committed no crimes. Ordinary man again. Six months as a surveyor in the Alleghenies; a groom in a Philadelphia stable. Drove a stage in the Ohio Valley for a year, through this same route we're traveling now. Stevedore on a paddle-wheeler down the Mississippi. One day I was unable to get out of bed. Looked in a mirror, didn't know who I was. An exhaustion of the soul had crept over me so steadily I couldn't put a name to it; every cell in my body depleted, used up. My hands ached constantly, the pain deep, rock hard; haunted by wholeness. I slowly made my way to New York. Enough money saved to last years in the way I'd been subsisting.
"With my brother dead, my only reason for living had been lost. I'd never known another; no compelling purpose for going on had come to me. It didn't occur to me that he might have survived. I no longer had the slightest idea why I'd been left alive. And I didn't care. I touched the bottom of the pit I had dug for myself.
"I went out walking one day, near where we were the other day, Lower East Side. March, this was, clear and blustery. I saw a Chinese man standing on the street. Tall, emaciated; he caught my eye as I walked towards him. Maybe he saw something in me, some obvious or subtle longing. He held up his hand as I approached; his fingers were strange, malformed, bulbous at the tips, like inverted bowling pins.