"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.
"Between his fingers nested a small packet of foil, the size of a silver coin. He didn't look at me; he didn't speak. He didn't turn when I stopped and looked back at him. He lowered his hand and went inside a door. I followed him; down an alley, a narrow flight of stairs. A cheap red paper lantern bouncing in the wind outside a door. Inside: wet brick walls, stale mattresses on the floor, bodies laid out, dozens of them, languid, moving like seaweed. The Chinese man unwrapped the foil and stuffed a dark plug inside into a long black wooden pipe. He asked me for money. I gave him some. He never looked at my face. Showed me to a mattress. Held the pipe for me and lit it with his malformed hands."
"Opium."
Jack nodded; he couldn't meet Doyle's eyes. "I quit the needle after I fell; that was part of my rebirth, part of the hell I faced in that cave as my body gave up the hunger. I'd quit and never gone back. Not even in Belem where it was all around and I had every opportunity. Not once."
Doyle offered no response: After all the rest, why does he so badly want me to think he's telling the truth about this?
"The pipe took away the pain in my hands. It filled the emptiness that had eaten away at me; a warmth, some feeling, anything—"
"You don't need to explain."
"—the pipe became my world; my world became that room. Three years. The most exquisite feeling when the hunger comes on and all you need is to strike a match. The ease of it. Never out of reach. If I'd found darkness before, now I dropped into the center of the earth. The man kept jade figurines by the beds; statues of gods, demons. You hold one in your hands after the pipe and stare at it, let the cool sheen of its surface come into you; patterns, crystalline swirls that solve the deepest mysteries. Peace you can't reach even in dreams. Time erased; only the now, that moment. I felt more love from that pipe than any human being ever gave me. The happiest moments of my life."
"But it was false, a false happiness. It wasn't real," said Doyle, unable to contain the greatest agitation he'd felt since their conversation began.
"Who's to say? It's only our perceptions anyway...."
"Rubbish; it's drug-induced, not a natural state. Surely you haven't gone that far adrift from common sense."
"Bless you, Doyle; consistent to the end. Let's have that feet-planted-firmly-in-the-garden-of-man's-innate-goodness nonsense from you now; I could always depend on you for that____"
Doyle could no longer restrain himself. "Why would you speak to me that way? What harm did I ever do you? You've done it all to yourself."
Sparks turned away: Was that the hint of a smirk or a grimace?
"So you added opium addiction to your curriculum vitae; bravo Jack, I was afraid you might leave it out entirely. What's next on your agenda, rape? Pedophilia? Or did you cover both of those with that Brazilian girl? Heartless murder's already on the list; shame to let a little free will go to waste. Since that's your modus operandi now, why deny yourself anything? It's all defensible the way you've defined the game."
"What is it that offends you: My crimes or their so-called immorality?"
"As if they could be so easily divided. I'll tell you: It's the casual contempt with which you dismiss the efforts of what you call ordinary people to live a life that adheres to a semblance of decency; that you 'discovered' the way human beings live, as if you were observing a colony of ants. What gives you the right to pass such judgments? Where's the virtue that elevates you to such a godlike plane? You think your suffering entitles you to an exclusion from justice? Let me tell you: Everyone suffers and it relieves no one of his responsibility to obey the law. Do you honestly believe you're above the reach of consequences for what you've done?"
"Far from it..."
"I'll tell you to your face, you sound like a lunatic, Jack Sparks, and a menace to any person you might meet, myself included. The truth is you've fallen onto the same road that led your brother to that disastrous ruin of a human life. Or has that been your ambition all along?"
Jack couldn't face him now. "No ..."
"I dispute you. I've built a life for myself these last ten years. I did it with determination and hard work and, yes, through obedience to standards of social order. Without that "contract binding us, every man dedicated to his own pleasure according to an unfixed code of moral conduct, all you have left is unmitigated savagery and a civilization no better off, no more advanced, than the sort lived by jackals. I thought you were a good man once; no, a great man. I wanted nothing more in my life than to be like you. I am shocked. Shocked and I am bitterly disappointed. If you're the result of a life lived to the contrary, then I say thank God for society and thank God for the laws of man. You've left them behind; you're beyond the pale."
Jack turned slowly back in his seat and looked at Doyle: his pale face stark white, the scar lining his jaw livid, radiating tension and despair. His mouth hung open; his eyes sank deep into their sockets.
"I never claimed there were no consequences," he whispered harshly. "Consequences are all I've been describing."
"Then let's be clear about it: Are you telling me all this to ask for my sympathy or approval?"
"No..."
"Because if what you want is absolution, I can tell you I haven't the authority or inclination to give it."
"No, no. I thought... all I had hoped for ... something closer to"—Jack's chest heaved with sudden uncontainable emotion; his breath quivered violently, face contorted in pain-—"to understanding. You, of all people. I thought you might... understand."
Jack inhaled sharply, then he sobbed. "I don't know... who I am. I don't know how ... I don't know how to live...."
Doyle watched in shock as the man before him came disastrously undone. His crippled hands clenched spasmodically at the fabric of the seats, tears splashed from his scarlet eyes; he sat upright for a long moment, rigid as a post, then sagged over as if his spine had collapsed.
"I'm so ... ashamed ... so deeply ashamed, the things I've done ... what I've turned into. Like him. You're right: Like him." Jack's self-hatred so much deeper than any other could have felt for him: Doyle stunned. "Should have died before I let that happen, should have found courage to kill myself but I couldn't... I couldn't. . ."