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.