of mine; I was in no mood to give it up so easily, so I continued to protest my innocence. Hands are extremely personal parts of our bodies, aren't they? Their abuse made me very, very angry. Finally, when I feigned an unconsciousness from which I couldn't be revived, they slipped the irons off and dragged me from the room.
'I kicked the first one, here, the bridge of the nose. A kill. A second tried to pull his gun; I sent him crashing out a window and followed him out before the others could fire a single shot. His body cushioned my fall. As alarms sounded and shots missed me, I ran to a corner of the yard where they stacked provisions. A stairway of barrels took me to the top of the wall and over.
'The prison was set on a peninsula, ocean on three sides. I made it to the jungle before they cut off the road. They were reluctant to follow me at night; their pursuit fell away the deeper I went. Undergrowth became too thick; I took to the river, upstream with the incoming tide. When dawn broke, I was miles inland; they would never find me. Now the pain began; I gathered medicinal herbs—roots, some bark; using my teeth, primarily—to treat my hands, numb the pain. Infection set in quickly in that dank, humid air. I couldn't chance a return to the city for a doctor; my friends, the En-aguas, the native people upriver, had knowledge of these things. Six days to reach them. By then I was half-dead. Spiking fever. Delirious.'
Jack laid his hands out on his knees, fanned the remaining fingers, looked down at them dispassionately.
'Their medicine man cut off the two most damaged fingers.
Saved the others; I have no memory of it. When I woke two days had passed. My hands were covered with salve, bound with a compress of leaves. They asked no questions, I told them nothing; brutality was routine in their view of the outside world. Two months passed before I was strong enough to travel. Three of them paddled me downriver by canoe, disguised as a priest; the birth of Father Devine. They would take me north to Porto Santana, where I would take a tramp steamer to the Indies. But first I had business in Belem.
'With my friends' help, we filled the bottom of a wagon with black powder stolen from the military depot. Then I tracked down Rina in Belem. Working in a brothel. Drugs, looks decaying, her little life already failing towards a sad predictable finish. I took her out of there, tied her to the seat of the wagon, a gag in her mouth. Never said a word to her: What was there to say? There were no words. I looked into her eyes for a long time. She understood perfectly.
'At dark we sent two mules trotting towards the prison with the wagon behind; guards saw Rina on board and took the wagon inside their gates. They didn't see the burning fuse concealed beneath the floorboards and with her screaming no one heard it hiss. But you could hear the explosion for fifty miles.'
Sparks paused, swallowed a deep breath. Circles under his eyes, black as paint. Was there regret behind his words? Doyle couldn't hear it, only the throbbing of his own heart.
'I was on board that ship the next morning, carrying papers taken from a man who had died upriver: a Dutch businessman, Jan de Voort. My story: traveling home after an accident ruined my hands. Another white European consumed by the jungle. Shall I go on?'
Doyle nodded: Who knew if Sparks would ever expose this wound again? Hold your tongue, he told himself. Remember how a patient left to ramble so often unwittingly reveals the secret of his ailment. He refilled his glass, hoping Jack would not notice how severely his hands trembled.
'I took my time moving north through the islands: Curacao Antigua. Hispaniola. No destination in mind. Soaking up sun. Rebuilding my hands, thrusting them again and again into hot sand. Drinking a great deal of rum. A new woman in each place, making conquests. Leaving when I tired of them, which never took long; they all want to heal a man in such a state. So predictable and tiresome. I couldn't bear that first bloom of disappointment on their faces when they realized no part of me was theirs.
'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
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
'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
