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,
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?
'I decided to kill the man who had hired me as his underling: Diego Montes. They called him Ah Aranha, the Spider. Montes had grown to depend on my cunning; he lived like an ignorant beast, little more than a bloodsucking insect, thoroughly corrupted, a despoiler, stealing life from everything he touched; a whoremaster, running strings of girls kidnapped from Indian villages in the interior, selling them until their looks collapsed, then casting them into the street like garbage. His face, the rattle of his septum as he breathed through his mouth, the drugs and liquor he ingested massively, even the stuporous way he ate, disgusted me. Carrying out his death sentence came to represent the supreme expression of my free will.
'I crept into his villa one night and cut his throat with a razor while he slept. It required little effort; I severed the vocal cords first so he couldn't cry out. When he woke, I pinned his body to the bed and watched the life drain out of it.'
Lost in cool reflection, Jack looked as if he might be recounting a story about a book he'd read once. Doyle couldn't move.
'I felt calm. Empty. As pitiless as that eagle with a rat clutched in its talons. I sensed the presence of no sacred spirit or a soul leaving the body; no angels watched us from on high. And no remorse. All I felt was the harsh indifference of the jungle. I had the confirmation I was looking for. My experiment was a success.
'With one complication: a witness, a woman who had gone to wash up in the next room. I heard her move as I was about to leave. It was Rina.'
Doyle must have looked startled.
'That's right, the same beautiful, ridiculous girl I'd been living with. Terrified by the crime she had seen me do. She was a whore now; Montes had recruited her. She cried and told me how she had fallen into that life in despair when I abandoned her. I should have killed her, too, right then, but her presence seemed so fortuitous, I reasoned it could not be coincidence, it must have a meaning that would eventually reveal itself. I suppose what actually influenced my decision most was a kind of tenderness. So I let her live. Helped her escape the house. Even made plans to take her with me when I left the country, which I intended to do immediately.
'And I was right. My finding her did have meaning. Two days later, twenty men who worked for Diego Montes captured me as I was waiting to board a ship to Belize. Rina was supposed to meet me at the docks; I had left her alone for half an hour to buy a hat and she had betrayed me. She cared nothing for me. But this was her free will at work, you see. Available to us all; no inconsistency.
'They clapped chains on me and threw me into a cage, a pit dug into the clay in the yard of the local prison, its mouth covered with steel plates. Darkness was not exactly the hardship to me that they anticipated. But this time without water, and the temperature during the day reached one hundred and twenty degrees. The guards used it as a latrine. Three days passed before they spoke to me. They wanted a confession; Rina had already identified me as the killer, but they were determined to hear it from my lips.
'When they thought the pit had sufficiently softened me up, they brought me into a room, empty, save for a square block of white marble in its center. Stained red. Arm and leg irons at its base. They secured me kneeling before this stone and laid my hands out across its surface. The guards took turns, stepped up onto the block and walked on my hands. Stomped on them. Some danced. Dropped heavy stones. I could hear the sinews snap, bones cracking, watched one finger as they crushed it beyond recognition, all pulp and matted fiber. This went on for hours. They enjoyed their work; skilled and honest craftsmen. I realized they did not intend to kill me until I had confessed; an odd outburst of fastidiousness.
'But I would not cooperate. The pain somehow remained manageable, and I had grown to fancy this free life
