"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 decided 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?