that it makes me laugh, and that's the only reason to go on living.'
Doyle struggled to keep any judgment or emotion from his voice; any appeal to the man's fellow feeling offered no avenue to reach him now, if he could still be reached at all. 'How did you come to ... this place?'
'Oh, I suppose you want the facts, don't you? Always the facts with you; fine, why shouldn't you have them? I won't spare you a detail. You can use them like bricks and build a wall to hide behind or put them into one of your little stories. I haven't read them, by the way; I gather you've used me as a model of sorts for your dear detective.'
'I suppose that's true, in a way,' said Doyle, feeling a rush of anger.
Jack leaned forward with an almost friendly smile and lowered his voice. 'Then my advice to you is this, old boy: Don't incorporate a breath of what I tell you into your characters. People won't like to hear a word of it; not sentimental enough, no warm and happy turn. You know how to give them what they want: lies, gilded and framed like a hall of mirrors. Beware of telling them the truth: You'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.'
Jack laughed again bitterly. Doyle felt himself go cold inside: to bear this much and now an assault on his dignity. Why should he subject himself to another word of this bullying? What lost quality in the man made him certain he was worth the trouble? The Jack he had so admired was nowhere in evidence; this one sounded like an utter stranger and like no one else now so much as Doyle's memory of his mad brother—and if Edison's moving pictures were to be believed, Alexander Sparks had somehow survived the fight at the waterfall as well. Twin ruptured souls, damned and irredeemable; blood ties run deep. This was not his business: easy enough to walk away and leave them both to burn in their private hell.
But a deeper responsibility rose up in him; if either man posed a danger to other people, to simple common decency, then Doyle knew his obligation to proceed along the path he'd chosen outweighed any wounding to his pride. He possessed reserves of faith and strength they knew nothing about and until proven otherwise he would continue to assume they were a match for the darkness that had flowered inside Jack Sparks. Doyle called on those reserves: If that flower could still be cut, Jack might be redeemed. He needed more information.
'Obviously you both survived the Falls,' said Doyle matter-of-factly, giving him nothing to scorn. 'Why don't you start there?'
Jack smiled as if the memory were fond. 'And what a fall it was; endless, like flight or close to it, a dream of flight. Clutching each other, rocky cliffs whistling by as we dropped.
Pure hatred in my heart; the desire to kill him stronger than any emotion I had ever known.
'I didn't lose hold of him until we hit the river, two hundred feet, that's how far we fell together. Death seemed a certainty, but over thousands of years the Falls had carved a natural pool in the riverbed at its base. I went down into the depth; the concussion of the landing knocked me senseless. I felt a swift current near the bottom take hold and off I went, a leaf bobbing down towards the sea.'
'And your brother?'
'I never saw him again. I came to nestled in a bed of rocks; black night around me. Who knows how much time had gone by? A day might have passed, maybe two. My eyes could make only the slightest adjustment; rock walls around and above me; no sky; in a cave, fed by this underground stream, the mountains there honeycombed with these pockets, as I discovered. I lay on the rocks for the longest time, unable to move, in a twilight state.
'A dullness crept over me, my entire body bruised, battered, but no single outstanding pain to speak of. Plenty of water beside me to drink as I needed. I crawled, then walked, defined the boundaries of my confinement —a space ten feet by twenty; I could barely stand and only in the center. My world reduced to that cramped chamber. Comforting really. Not much difference between a womb and a tomb.
'So at a moment when panic should have taken root I felt increasingly peaceful; when you live in darkness— sleep and move and wake in it—you come close to your own true nature. No distractions with that face in the mirror; dirt under your fingernails, the backs of your hands. Alone with your self, whatever that is. That ruling voice inside: Who am I? What am I? The first few days my journey began with those questions. Eventually I came to question everything. All the basic assumptions lose their potency, until you realize that all you have, all you are, is what is in your mind.
'I would have stayed there but I had no food, and as I explored my cave I realized there was no other way out; I would have to go back into the river. I waited, building my strength, and then took the plunge. The currents were more negotiable in these subterranean channels and I could swim for some distance in a number of directions, but in the pitch dark and not certain of a place to surface I had to constantly return to my cave. I've no idea how many days passed—how dependent on the cycle of light and dark is our perception of time—but my strength had reached as high a peak as it could without sustenance and would soon begin to dissipate. I staked everything on one last attempt.
'I dropped into the river, swam down into the deep, and passed the point of safe return. Living in the dark had raised my other senses to exquisite levels; I could detect the slightest variation of flow in the river so I let the water guide me: nothing to be gained by struggling. Minutes elapsed. Breath used up, I came very near surrender; how tempting to let everything go... at that moment I saw a light in the water and I called on the finishing kick I had held back. I lost consciousness as I broke the surface and drifted to shore. That's where I awoke, in a bed of bulrushes, like some antiquated Moses. Middle of the night, a secluded bend in the river.
'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:
'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:
'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
