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.