Highlights from all books

Were such a thought adopted, we should have to imagine some stupendeous whole, wherein all that has ever come into being or will come coexists, which, passing slowly on, leaves in this flickering consciousness of ours, limited to a narrow space and a single moment, a tumultuous record of changes and vicssitudes that are but to us.

Can history then be said to have an Architecture, Hinton? The notion is most glorious and most horrible.

Bargees lives are cold, flat things, doctor. We're not reared to make great displays of sentiment.

We're private sorrows, private mirth and strangers think us cold fish... cold fish with no feelings at all.

In this place (saith Solcardus) long before, was a temple of Apollo, which being overthrown, King Lucius built therein a church of Christ

Despite Masonic denials, Jah-Bul-On is an authentic Masonic deity. How much then, can their denial of Gull's Masonic status be trusted? The problem we face here is that neither Knight nor the assembled ranks of Freemasonry are necessarily telling the truth, at which point an obscuring Victorian fog starts to engulf the facts of our narrative. Given that the tortuous story of the Whitechapel murders is filled with liars, tricksters, and unreliable witnesses, it is a fog we shall encounter often

While on the subject of Prince Eddy, I should perhaps point out for the benefit of confused American readers that almost every male member of the British Royal family during this period seems to be called Albert. The first was Queen Victoria's beloved consort or husband, Prince Albert. Their son, whom William Gull recieved a knighthood for nursing back to health, was also called Albert, commonly referred to by his subjects as Stuttering Berties. He went on to marry the beautiful Princess Alexandra, and by her produced a son named Albert Victor Christian Edward, referred to by his friends as Prince Eddy. One almost suspects that the bereaved Victoria, spent the later decades of her reign in mourning for her departed consort, would have changed her own name to Albert and the name of the country to Alberta if she had thought for a moment she could get away with it.

The expression, in this instance, was passed on to me by Mr. Neil Gaiman, who has a dirty mouth in at least seven centuries.

It would seem that during her four years in Oloffson's employ she became pregnant and was dismissed, althought I should point out that there is no direct evidence to prove that Oloffson was the father of the child, as we have Liz claiming here. This is simply my own surmise, resulting no doubt from a jaundiced view of human nature.

Annie Chapman's reference to having eaten nothing but broken biscuits all day gives pretty much a full and comprehensive account of the diet of East End woman, this being gin and broken biscuits (Broken biscuits, obviously, may be purchased more cheaply than unbroken ones.

There are certain wretched women, Netley, who threaten The Crown. This threat must be removed. Do you understand?

I do, Sir. Done away with, like.

NO, sir! NOT "DOne away with", for that is common murder, only fit for common footpads. I spoke of grand work, Netley.

A great work must have many sides, from which we may consider it. Think of the classic legends, with their layers of significance. Diana, for example: is she, but an ancient FAIRYTALE? a SYMBOL meaning dreams and womanhood? A deified PRINCESS from long ago? A myth? A symbol? History?

Or take this CITY, in itself a great work, you'll agree: a thing of many LEVELS, and COMPLEXITIES. HOw WELL do you know London, Netley?

Like the back o' my hand, Sir.

Ha ha! As grubby, certainly. But London's more besides:

It Too is symbol, history and myth. Turn right, up PANCRAS ROAD.

We must consider our great work in ALL its appects. We'll begin with WOMEN. Tell me, Netley... Do you like them?

Women? Can't get enough, sir.

Not " Do you desire them? ". Netley. Do you LIKE them? As a gender? The way they think? The things they say?

Could you, for instance, tolerate a world where females ruled? With men bound to their whims and governed by their scorn?

Well... no sir, put like that...

No. No, indeed. Then offer up a prayer of thanks to these black tenements, these soot encrusted walls... 'Twas here that Womankind's last hopes and dreams were put to sword.

Women had power once: Back in the caves, life hinged on childbirth's mystery, and we served mother goddesses, not father gods. 'Twas thus, for several million years.

Then men rebelled, perhaps a few at first, a small conspiracy... who by some act of social magic, politics, or force, cast woman down that man might rule.

Time passed, and Kingdoms passed from father unto son. The Matriarchy was forgotten... save by the ICENI, there in Colchester, allowed some independence by the occupying Roman troops. Yet Rome forbade that Boadicea, the Iceni's Queen, should pass her crown to DAUGHTERS and not SONS. When she complained, they raped her and her daughters in contempt.

A grave mistake. She gather the Iceni, howling to her mother goddesses for vengeance, and burned London to the ground, its gutters heaped with steaming heads. She left a stripe of ash, a cold black vein in London's geologic strata, token of one woman's fame. Mark it Netley, Mark it well and fear it.

Rome regrouped; reclaimed the ruined city. Boadicea died upon this spot at Battle Bridge, below Parliament Hill where Druids once made sacrifices to a Father Sun. Come Netley. Back to King's Cross, then down Pentonville.

Do you begin to grasp how truly great a work is London? A veritable textbook we may draw upon in formulating great works of our own. We'll penetrate its metaphors, lay bare its structure and thus come at last upon it's meaning. As befits great work, we'll read it CAREFULLY and with RESPECT.

uh, with respect sir... I can't read.

I remember the MLK competition so fondly. But when I recall the racist speech I gave, I flush with shame.

“What would be Dr. King’s message for the millennium? Let’s visualize an angry seventy-one-year-old Dr. King…” And I began my remix of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

It was joyous, I started, our emancipation from enslavement. But “now, one hundred thirty-five years later, the Negro is still not free.” I was already thundering, my tone angry, more Malcolm than Martin. “Our youth’s minds are still in captivity!”

I did not say our youth’s minds are in captivity of racist ideas, as I would say now.

“They think it’s okay to be those who are most feared in our society!” I said, as if it was their fault they were so feared.

“They think it’s okay not to think!” I charged, raising the classic racist idea that Black youth don’t value education as much as their non-Black counterparts. No one seemed to care that this well-traveled idea had flown on anecdotes but had never been grounded in proof. Still, the crowd encouraged me with their applause. I kept shooting out unproven and disproven racist ideas about all the things wrong with Black youth—ironically, on the day when all the things right about Black youth were on display.

I started pacing wildly back and forth on the runway for the pulpit, gaining momentum.

“They think it’s okay to climb the high tree of pregnancy!” Applause. “They think it’s okay to confine their dreams to sports and music!” Applause.

Had I forgotten that I—not “Black youth”—was the one who had confined his dreams to sports? And I was calling Black youth “they”? Who on earth did I think I was? Apparently, my placement on that illustrious stage had lifted me out of the realm of ordinary—and thus inferior—Black youngsters and into the realm of the rare and extraordinary.

In my applause-stoked flights of oratory, I didn’t realize that to say something is wrong about a racial group is to say something is inferior about that racial group. I did not realize that to say something is inferior about a racial group is to say a racist idea. I thought I was serving my people, when in fact I was serving up racist ideas about my people to my people. The Black judge seemed to be eating it up and clapping me on my back for more. I kept giving more.

“Their minds are being held captive, and our adults’ minds are right there beside them,” I said, motioning to the floor. “Because they somehow think that the cultural revolution that began on the day of my dream’s birth is over.

“How can it be over when many times we are unsuccessful because we lack intestinal fortitude?” Applause.

“How can it be over when our kids leave their houses not knowing how to make themselves, only knowing how to not make themselves?” Applause.

“How can it be over if all of this is happening in our community?” I asked, lowering my voice. “So I say to you, my friends, that even though this cultural revolution may never be over, I still have a dream…”

—————————

I STILL HAVE a nightmare—the memory of this speech whenever I muster the courage to recall it anew. It is hard for me to believe I finished high school in the year 2000 touting so many racist ideas. A racist culture had handed me the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it. Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.

I was a dupe, a chump who saw the ongoing struggles of Black people on MLK Day 2000 and decided that Black people themselves were the problem. This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.

Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us. Many of us who strongly call out Trump’s racist ideas will strongly deny our own. How often do we become reflexively defensive when someone calls something we’ve done or said racist? How many of us would agree with this statement: “ ‘Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, ‘I don’t like you.’ ” These are actually the words of White supremacist Richard Spencer, who, like Trump, identifies as “not racist.” How many of us who despise the Trumps and White supremacists of the world share their self-definition of “not racist”?

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no inbetween safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

I used to be racist most of the time. I am changing. I am no longer identifying with racists by claiming to be “not racist.” I am no longer speaking through the mask of racial neutrality. I am no longer manipulated by racist ideas to see racial groups as problems. I no longer believe a Black person cannot be racist. I am no longer policing my every action around an imagined White or Black judge, trying to convince White people of my equal humanity, trying to convince Black people I am representing the race well. I no longer care about how the actions of other Black individuals reflect on me, since none of us are race representatives, nor is any individual responsible for someone else’s racist ideas. And I’ve come to see that the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing — it requires understanding and snubbing racism based on biology, ethnicity, body, culture, behavior, color, space, and class. And beyond that, it means standing ready to fight at racism’s intersections with other bigotries.

Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals. Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people. To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one’s changing policies, ideas, and personhood.

So let’s set some definitions. What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached.

The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.”

My maternal grandparents, Mary Ann and Alvin, moved their family to New York City in the 1950s on the final leg of the Great Migration, happy to get their children away from violent Georgia segregationists and the work of picking cotton under the increasingly hot Georgia sun. To think, they were also moving their family away from the effects of climate change. Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominantly non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north, even as the Whiter global north is contributing more to its acceleration. Land is sinking and temperatures are rising from Florida to Bangladesh.

Reagan didn’t start this so-called war, as historian Elizabeth Hinton recounts. President Lyndon B. Johnson first put us on the run when he named 1965 “the year when this country began a thorough, intelligent, and effective war on crime.” My parents were in high school when Johnson’s war on crime mocked his undersupported war on poverty, like a heavily armed shooter mocking the underresourced trauma surgeon. President Richard Nixon announced his war on drugs in 1971 to devastate his harshest critics—Black and antiwar activists. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” Nixon’s domestic-policy chief, John Ehrlichman, told a Harper’s reporter years later. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Black people joined in the vilification, convinced that homicidal drug dealers, gun toters, and thieving heroin addicts were flushing “down the drain” all “the hard won gains of the civil rights movement,” to quote an editorial in The Washington Afro-American in 1981. Some, if not most, Black leaders, in an effort to appear as saviors of the people against this menace, turned around and set the Black criminal alongside the White racist as the enemies of the people.

Seemingly contradictory calls to lock up and to save Black people dueled in legislatures around the country but also in the minds of Americans. Black leaders joined with Republicans from Nixon to Reagan, and with Democrats from Johnson to Bill Clinton, in calling for and largely receiving more police officers, tougher and mandatory sentencing, and more jails. But they also called for the end of police brutality, more jobs, better schools, and drug-treatment programs. These calls were less enthusiastically received.

By the time I came along in 1982, the shame about “Black on Black crime” was on the verge of overwhelming a generation’s pride about “Black is beautiful.” Many non-Black Americans looked down on Black addicts in revulsion—but too many Black folk looked down on the same addicts in shame.

My parents followed Norton’s directive: They fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them, and would, in the end, uplift all Black people. My parents—even from within their racial consciousness—were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s policies, which were chopping the ladder they climbed up and then punishing people for falling.

In the same month that Reagan announced his war on drugs on Ma’s birthday in 1982, he cut the safety net of federal welfare programs and Medicaid, sending more low-income Blacks into poverty. His “stronger law enforcement” sent more Black people into the clutches of violent cops, who killed twenty-two Black people for every White person in the early 1980s. Black youth were four times more likely to be unemployed in 1985 than in 1954. But few connected the increase in unemployment to the increase in violent crime.

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. And so my parents turned away from the problems of policy to look at the problems of people—and reverted to striving to save and civilize Black people rather than liberate them. Civilizer theology became more attractive to my parents, in the face of the rise of crack and the damage it did to Black people, as it did to so many children of civil rights and Black power. But in many ways, liberation theology remained their philosophical home, the home they raised me in.

This conceptual duple reflected what W.E.B. Du Bois indelibly voiced in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double- consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois wrote. He would neither “Africanize America” nor “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism.” Du Bois wished “to be both a Negro and an American.” Du Bois wished to inhabit opposing constructs. To be American is to be White. To be White is to not be a Negro.

What Du Bois termed double consciousness may be more precisely termed dueling consciousness. “One ever feels his two-ness,” Du Bois explained, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois also explained how this war was being waged within his own dark body, wanting to be a Negro and wanting to “escape into the mass of Americans in the same way that the Irish and Scandinavians” were doing.

These dueling ideas were there in 1903, and the same duel overtook my parents—and it remains today. The duel within Black consciousness seems to usually be between antiracist and assimilationist ideas. Du Bois believed in both the antiracist concept of racial relativity, of every racial group looking at itself with its own eyes, and the assimilationist concept of racial standards, of “looking at one’s self through the eyes” of another racial group—in his case, White people. In other words, he wanted to liberate Black people from racism but he also wanted to change them, to save them from their “relic of barbarism.” Du Bois argued in 1903 that racism and “the low social level of the mass of the race” were both “responsible” for the “Negro’s degradation.” Assimilation would be part of the solution to this problem.

Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists can position any racial group as the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach. Assimilationists typically position White people as the superior standard. “Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood…who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian…to belittle such aspiration?” Du Bois asked in 1903.

Black self-reliance was a double-edged sword. One side was an abhorrence of White supremacy and White paternalism, White rulers and White saviors. On the other, a love of Black rulers and Black saviors, of Black paternalism. On one side was the antiracist belief that Black people were entirely capable of ruling themselves, of relying on themselves. On the other, the assimilationist idea that Black people should focus on pulling themselves up by their baggy jeans and tight halter tops, getting off crack, street corners, and government “handouts,” as if those were the things partially holding their incomes down. This dueling consciousness nourished Black pride by insisting that there was nothing wrong with Black people, but it also cultivated shame with its implication that there was something behaviorally wrong with Black people…well, at least those other Black people. If the problem was in our own behavior, then Reagan revolutionaries were not keeping Black people down—we were keeping ourselves down.

White people have generally advocated for both assimilationist and segregationist policies. People of color have generally advocated for both antiracist and assimilationist policies. The “history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,” to quote Du Bois—the strife between the assimilationist and the antiracist, between mass civilizing and mass equalizing. In Du Bois’s Black body, in my parents’ Black bodies, in my young Black body, this double desire, this dueling consciousness, yielded an inner strife between Black pride and a yearning to be White. My own assimilationist ideas stopped me from noticing the racist policies really getting high during Reagan’s drug war.

History duels: the undeniable history of antiracist progress, the undeniable history of racist progress. Before and after the Civil War, before and after civil rights, before and after the first Black presidency, the White consciousness duels. The White body defines the American body. The White body segregates the Black body from the American body. The White body instructs the Black body to assimilate into the American body. The White body rejects the Black body assimilating into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.

The Black body in turn experiences the same duel. The Black body is instructed to become an American body. The American body is the White body. The Black body strives to assimilate into the American body. The American body rejects the Black body. The Black body separates from the American body. The Black body is instructed to assimilate into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.

Several public elementary schools resided within walking distance of my house in Queens Village. But Black New Yorkers with the wherewithal to do it were separating their children from poor Black children in poor Black neighborhoods, just like White New Yorkers were separating their children from Black children. The dueling consciousness of White parents did not mind spending more money on housing in order to send their kids to White public schools—and keep them away from the purportedly bad schools and bad children. The dueling consciousness of Black parents did not mind paying for private Black schools to keep their children away from those same public schools and children.

“Are you the only Black teacher?”

“Yes, but—”

I cut her off. “Why are you the only Black teacher?”

Puzzled, she looked away at my parents. My parents exchanged curious looks. I kept staring at the teacher, wondering why she was looking at my parents. Ma ended the awkward silence. “He has been reading biographies of Black leaders.”

Ma was talking about the critically acclaimed Junior Black Americans of Achievement series, promoted by Coretta Scott King. Dad had bought a stack of these biographies, towering over one hundred now. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Mary McLeod Bethune. Richard Allen. Ida B. Wells. Dad kept urging me to pull from the tower for every writing project. These gripping biographies were as exciting to me as new video games on my Sega Genesis. Once I started reading, I could not stop. Discovering through these books the long history of harm done to Black Americans left me seething and brought to life a kind of racial consciousness for the first time.

...In that classroom, on that April day in 1990, my parents discovered that I had entered racial puberty. At seven years old, I began to feel the encroaching fog of racism overtaking my dark body. It felt big, bigger than me, bigger than my parents or anything in my world, and threatening. What a powerful construction race is—powerful enough to consume us. And it comes for us early.

I do not pity my seven-year-old self for identifying racially as Black. I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter. I am among those who have been degraded by racist ideas, suffered under racist policies, and who have nevertheless endured and built movements and cultures to resist or at least persist through this madness.

Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness — even as a construction and mirage—has informed their notions of America and identity and offered them privilege, the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White. I guess I became a criminal at seven years old.

It is one of the ironies of antiracism that we must identify racially in order to identify the racial privileges and dangers of being in our bodies.

Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created, it must be filled in—and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry’s evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings,” Zurara wrote. “They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.”

After Spanish and Portuguese colonizers arrived in the Americas in the fifteenth century, they took to race making all the different indigenous peoples, calling them one people, “Indians,” or negros da terra (Blacks from the land) in sixteenth-century Brazil. Spanish lawyer Alonso de Zuazo in 1510 contrasted the beastly race of Blacks as “strong for work, the opposite of the natives, so weak who can work only in undemanding tasks.” Both racist constructions normalized and rationalized the increased importing of the supposedly “strong” enslaved Africans and the ongoing genocide of the supposedly “weak” Indians in the Americas.

Beginning in 1735, Carl Linnaeus locked in the racial hierarchy of humankind in Systema Naturae. Linnaeus positioned Homo sapiens europaeus at the top of the racial hierarchy, making up the most superior character traits. “Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blond hair. Blue eyes. Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” He made up the middling racial character of Homo sapiens asiaticus: “Melancholy, stern. Black hair; dark eyes. Strict, haughty, greedy. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.” He granted the racial character of Homo sapiens americanus a mixed set of atttributes: “Ill-tempered, impassive. Thick straight black hair; wide nostrils; harsh face; beardless. Stubborn, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Ruled by custom.” At the bottom of the racial hierarchy, Linnaeus positioned Homo sapiens afer: “Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair. Silky skin. Flat nose. Thick lips. Females with genital flap and elongated breasts. Crafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice.”

Prince Henry’s racist policy of slave trading came first—a cunning invention for the practical purpose of bypassing Muslim traders. After nearly two decades of slave trading, King Afonso asked Gomes de Zurara to defend the lucrative commerce in human lives, which he did through the construction of a Black race, an invented group upon which he hung racist ideas. This cause and effect—a racist power creates racist policies out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.

But the name of my White third-grade teacher is lost in my memory like the names of so many racist White people over the years who interrupted my peace with their sirens. Forgetting her may have been a coping mechanism. People of color sometimes cope with abuse from individual Whites by hiding those individuals behind the generalized banner of Whiteness. “She acted that way,” we say, “because she is White.”

But generalizing the behavior of racist White individuals to all White people is as perilous as generalizing the individual faults of people of color to entire races. “He acted that way because he is Black. She acted that way because she is Asian.” We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets. An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals. “She acted that way,” we should say, “because she is racist.”

A tiny and quiet girl — tinier and quieter than me — sat on the other side of the back of the room. The teacher asked a question and I saw her slowly raise her dark-skinned hand, which was a rare occurrence. Her shyness, or something else, generally kept her mouth closed and arm down. But something roused her today. I smiled as I saw her small hand rising for the teacher’s attention.

The teacher looked at her, looked away, and instead called on a White hand as soon as it was raised. As the Black girl’s arm came down, I could see her head going down. As I saw her head going down, I could see her spirits going down. I turned and looked up at the teacher, who, of course, was not looking at me. She was too busy engaging a favored White child to notice what was happening in the back row—neither my fury nor the sadness of the girl registered for her.

Scholars call what I saw a “microaggression,” a term coined by eminent Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in 1970. Pierce employed the term to describe the constant verbal and nonverbal abuse racist White people unleash on Black people wherever we go, day after day. A White woman grabs her purse when a Black person sits next to her. The seat next to a Black person stays empty on a crowded bus. A White woman calls the cops at the sight of Black people barbecuing in the park. White people telling us that our firmness is anger or that our practiced talents are natural. Mistaking us for the only other Black person around. Calling the cops on our children for selling lemonade on the street. Butchering Ebonics for sport. Assuming we are the help. Assuming the help isn’t brilliant. Asking us questions about the entire Black race. Not giving us the benefit of the doubt. Calling the cops on us for running down the street.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that the term “microaggression” emerged in popularity during the so-called post-racial era that some people assumed we’d entered with the election of the first Black president. The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress — Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism.

“Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word.

I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.

What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.

“Ibram, time to go,” she said pleasantly.

“I’m not going anywhere!” I faintly replied, and looked straight ahead at the cross.

“What?”

I looked up at her, eyes wide and burning: “I’m not going anywhere!”

“No! You need to leave, right now.”

Looking back, I wonder, if I had been one of her White kids would she have asked me: “What’s wrong?” Would she have wondered if I was hurting? I wonder. I wonder if her racist ideas chalked up my resistance to my Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior, not distress.

With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults. The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child.

OUR BLACKNESS. I am Black. I looked at the girl’s dark skin and saw my skin color. Saw her kinky hair, split down the middle in cornrows held by barrettes, and saw my kinky hair, my small Afro. Saw her broad nose and saw my nose. Saw her thicker lips and saw my lips. Heard her talk and heard the way I talk. I did not see a mirage. We were the same. Those three favored White kids—they were different to my eight-year-old racial understanding. Their whiter skin color, straighter hair, skinnier noses and lips, their different way of speaking, even the way they wore their uniforms—all marked a different species to me. The difference was not skin deep.

No one taught me that these differences were meaningless to our underlying humanity—the essence of biological antiracism. Adults had in so many ways taught me that these superficial differences signified different forms of humanity—the essence of biological racism.

Biological racial difference is one of those widely held racist beliefs that few people realize they hold—nor do they realize that those beliefs are rooted in racist ideas. I grew up hearing about how Black people had “more natural physical ability,” as half of respondents replied in a 1991 survey. How “Black blood” differed from “White blood.” How “one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro” and “puts out the light of intellect,” as wrote Thomas Dixon in The Leopard’s Spots (1902). How Black people have natural gifts of improvisation. How “if blacks have certain inherited abilities, such as improvisational decision making, that could explain why they predominate in certain fields such as jazz, rap, and basketball, and not in other fields, such as classical music, chess, and astronomy,” suggested Dinesh D’Souza in his 1995 book with the laughably dishonest title The End of Racism. How Black women had naturally large buttocks and Black men had naturally large penises. How the “increase of rape of white women” stems from the “large size of the negro’s penis” and their “birthright” of “sexual madness and excess,” as a doctor wrote in a 1903 issue of Medicine.

How Black people are biologically distinct because of slavery. At the 1988 American Heart Association conference, a Black hypertension researcher said African Americans had higher hypertension rates because only those able to retain high levels of salt survived consuming the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage. “I’ve bounced this off a number of colleagues and…it seems certainly plausible,” Clarence Grim told swooning reporters. Plausibility became proof, and the slavery/ hypertension thesis received the red carpet in the cardiovascular community in the 1990s. Grim did not arrive at the thesis in his research lab. It came to him as he read Roots by Alex Haley. Who needs scientific proof when a biological racial distinction can be imagined by reading fiction? By reading the Bible?

But there is no such thing as racial ancestry. Ethnic ancestry does exist. Camara Jones, a prominent medical researcher of health disparities, explained it this way to bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts: “People are born with ancestry that comes from their parents but are assigned a race.” People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage.

Segregationists like Nicholas Wade figure if humans are 99.9 percent genetically alike, then they must be 0.1 percent distinct. And this distinction must be racial. And that 0.1 percent of racial distinction has grown exponentially over the millennia. And it is their job to search heaven and earth for these exponentially distinct races.

But back in my eighth-grade class, my fellow African Americans did differentiate. Kwame probably bore the nastiest beating of jokes. He was popular, funny, good-looking, athletic, and cool—yet his Ghanaian ethnicity trumped all. We relentlessly joked on Kwame like he was Akeem, from the kingdom of Zamunda, and we were Darryl, Lisa’s obnoxious boyfriend, in the 1988 romantic comedy Coming to America. After all, we lived in Queens, where Akeem came in search of a wife and fell for Lisa in the movie.

In Coming to America, Darryl, Lisa, Akeem, and Patrice (Lisa’s sister) are sitting in the stands, watching a basketball game. “Wearing clothes must be a new experience for you,” Darryl quips with a glance at Akeem. An annoyed Lisa, sitting between the two men, changes the subject. Darryl brings it back. “What kind of games do y’all play in Africa? Chase the monkey?” Darryl grins. African Americans in the audience were expected to grin with Darryl and laugh at Akeem. Back in our classrooms, we paraphrased Darryl’s jokes about barbaric and animalistic Africans to the Kwames in our midst.

These were racist jokes whose point of origin—the slave trade—was no laughing matter. When Black people make jokes that dehumanize other branches of the African diaspora, we allow that horror story to live again in our laughs. Ethnic racism is the resurrected script of the slave trader.

THROUGHOUT THE 1990S, the number of immigrants of color in the United States grew, due to the combined effects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Refugee Act of 1980, and the Immigration Act of 1990. Taken together, these bills encouraged family reunification, immigration from conflict areas, and a diversity visa program that spiked immigration from countries outside Europe. Between 1980 and 2000, the Latinx immigrant population ballooned from 4.2 million to 14.1 million. As of 2015, Black immigrants accounted for 8.7 percent of the nation’s Black population, nearly triple their share in 1980. As an early-eighties baby, I witnessed this upsurge of immigrants of color firsthand.

To be antiracist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences. To be antiracist is to challenge the racist policies that plague racialized ethnic groups across the world. To be antiracist is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups as a problem of policy.

“What are some of the racist ideas the British say about Ghanaians?” I asked.

He offered a blank stare before blurting out, “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Tell me some. It’s okay.”

He was silent for a moment and then started speaking again, now much more slowly and nervously than in his earlier rants, seemingly wondering where this was going. When he finished listing racist ideas, I spoke again.

“Now, are those ideas true?” I asked. “Are the British superior to Ghanaians?”

“No!” he said proudly. I was proud, too, that he had not internalized these racist ideas about his own racialized ethnic group.

“When African Americans repeat British racist ideas about Ghanaians, do you defend your people?”

“Yes. Because they are not true!”

“So these ideas about African Americans: Who did you get these ideas from?”

He thought. “My family, my friends, and my observations,” he said. “Who do you think your fellow Ghanaian Americans got these ideas about African Americans from?”

He thought much longer this time. From the side of his eye he saw another student waiting to speak to me, which seemed to rush his thoughts—he was a polite kid in spite of his urge to lecture. But I did not rush him. The other student was Jamaican and listening intently, maybe thinking about who Jamaicans got their ideas about Haitians from.

“Probably American Whites,” he said, looking me straight in the eye for the first time.

His mind seemed open, so I jumped on in. “So if African Americans went to Ghana, consumed British racist ideas about Ghanaians, and started expressing those ideas to Ghanaians, what would Ghanaians think about that? What would you think about that?”

He smiled, surprising me. “I got it,” he said, turning to walk out of the classroom.

“Are you sure?” I said, raising my voice over the Jamaican student’s head.

He turned back to me. “Yes, sir. Thanks, Prof.”

The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants. In fact, immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the “migrant advantage.” As sociologist Suzanne Model explained in her book on West Indian immigrants, “West Indians are not a black success story but an immigrant success story.” As such, policies from those of Calvin Coolidge to Donald Trump’s limiting immigration to the United States from China or Italy or Senegal or Haiti or Mexico have been self- destructive to the country. With ethnic racism, no one wins, except the racist power at the top. As with all racism, that is the entire point.

As scholar Rosemary Traoré found in a study of an urban high school, “African students wondered why their fellow African American brothers and sisters treated them as second-class citizens, while the African Americans wondered why the African students [seemed] to feel or act so superior to them.” The tensions created by ethnic racism didn’t produce any winners, just confusion and hurt on both sides.

This is the living legacy of racist power, constructing the Black race biologically and ethnically and presenting the Black body to the world first and foremost as a “beast,” to use Gomes de Zurara’s term, as violently dangerous, as the dark embodiment of evil. Americans today see the Black body as larger, more threatening, more potentially harmful, and more likely to require force to control than a similarly sized White body, according to researchers. No wonder the Black body had to be lynched by the thousands, deported by the tens of thousands, incarcerated by the millions, segregated by the tens of millions.

CLINTON DEMOCRATS THOUGHT they had won the political turf war to own crime as an issue—to war on the Black body for votes. But it took little time for racist Americans to complain that even the most expensive crime bill in human history was not enough to stop the beast, the devil, the gun, Smurf, me. Around Thanksgiving in 1995, Princeton political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. warned of the “coming of the super-predators,” especially young bodies like mine in “Black inner-city neighborhoods.”

In my mind I tried to devise a strategy for the poor kid, imagining myself in his place. I had a bit of a gift for staying calm and defusing potentially volatile situations, which served me well whether I was dealing with the violently finicky Smurfs of the world or capriciously violent police officers. I learned to disarm or avoid the Smurfs around town—kids bent on mayhem. But I also saw that strangers were doing the same calculations when they saw me coming—I’d see the fear in their eyes. They’d see me and decide they were looking at Smurf. We scared them just the same—all they saw were our dangerous Black bodies. Cops seemed especially fearful. Just as I learned to avoid the Smurfs of the world, I had to learn to keep racist police officers from getting nervous. Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.

A study that used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1976 to 1989 found that young Black males engaged in more violent crime than young White males. But when the researchers compared only employed young males of both races, the differences in violent behavior vanished. Or, as the Urban Institute stated in a more recent report on long-term unemployment, “Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.”

It helps to dig back into the origins of Ebonics. Enslaved Africans formulated new languages in nearly every European colony in the Americas, including African American Ebonics, Jamaican Patois, Haitian Creole, Brazilian Calunga, and Cubano. In every one of these countries, racist power—those in control of government, academia, education, and media—has demeaned these African languages as dialects, as “broken” or “improper” or “nonstandard” French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, or English. Assimilationists have always urged Africans in the Americas to forget the “broken” languages of our ancestors and master the apparently “fixed” languages of Europeans—to speak “properly.” But what was the difference between Ebonics and so-called “standard” English? Ebonics had grown from the roots of African languages and modern English just as modern English had grown from Latin, Greek, and Germanic roots. Why is Ebonics broken English but English is not broken German? Why is Ebonics a dialect of English if English is not a dialect of Latin? The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed.

WHEN THE REACTION to the Nazi Holocaust marginalized biological racism, cultural racism stepped into its place. “In practically all its divergences,” African American culture “is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture,” Gunnar Myrdal wrote in An American Dilemma, his 1944 landmark treatise on race relations, which has been called the “bible” of the civil-rights movement.

Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist, did not see us or our disciples in the twenty-first century as fresh cultural innovators. “Black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it to the point where black youths have adopted jail fashion in the form of baggy, low-slung pants and oversize T-shirts.” But there was a solution. “If blacks can close the civilization gap, the race problem in this country is likely to become insignificant,” Dinesh D’Souza once reasoned. “Civilization” is often a polite euphemism for cultural racism.

It is difficult to find the survival and revival of African cultural forms using our surface-sighted cultural eyes. Those surface-sighted eyes assess a cultural body by its skin. They do not look behind, inside, below. Those surface-sighted eyes have historically looked for traditional African religions, languages, foods, fashion, and customs to appear in the Americas just as they appear in Africa. When they did not find them, they assumed African cultures had been overwhelmed by the “stronger” European cultures. Surface-sighted people have no sense of what psychologist Wade Nobles calls “the deep structure of culture,” the philosophies and values that change outward physical forms. It is this “deep structure” that transforms European Christianity into a new African Christianity, with mounting spirits, calls and responses, and Holy Ghost worship; it changes English into Ebonics, European ingredients into soul food. The cultural African survived in the Americans, created a strong and complex culture with Western “outward” forms “while retaining inner [African] values,” anthropologist Melville Herskovits avowed in 1941. The same cultural African breathed life into the African American culture that raised me.

As an urban Black Northerner, I looked down on the cultures of non-urban Blacks, especially Southerners, the very people I was now surrounded by. I measured their beloved go-go music—then popular in D.C. and Virginia—against what I considered to be the gold standard of Black music, Queens hip-hop, and despised it like C. Delores Tucker despised hip-hop. The guys in Virginia could not dress. I hated their Ebonics. I thought the basketball players were scrubs who I had to patronize, a belief that cost me the spot on the JV squad. I walked around during those early months at Stonewall Jackson with an unspoken arrogance. I suspect potential friends heard my nonverbal cues of snobbery and rightly stayed away.

As legal scholar James Forman Jr. documents, the civil-rights generation usually evoked Martin Luther King Jr. to shame us. “Did Martin Luther King successfully fight the likes of Bull Connor so that we could ultimately lose the struggle for civil rights to misguided or malicious members of our own race?” asked Washington, D.C., prosecutor Eric Holder at an MLK birthday celebration in 1995. “You are costing everybody’s freedom,” Jesse Jackson told a group of Alabama prisoners that year. “You can rise above this if you change your mind,” he added. “I appeal to you. Your mother appealed to you. Dr. King died for you.”

My problems with personal irresponsibility were exacerbated—or perhaps even caused—by the additional struggles that racism added to my school life, from a history of disinterested, racist teachers, to overcrowded schools, to the daily racist attacks that fell on young Black boys and girls. There’s no question that I could have hurdled that racism and kept on running. But asking every nonathletic Black person to become an Olympic hurdler, and blaming them when they can’t keep up, is racist. One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive—and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy. This shouldn’t be surprising: One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary Black people.

How do we think about my young self, the C or D student, in antiracist terms? The truth is that I should be critiqued as a student—I was undermotivated and distracted and undisciplined. In other words, a bad student. But I shouldn’t be critiqued as a bad Black student. I did not represent my race any more than my irresponsible White classmates represented their race. It makes racist sense to talk about personal irresponsibility as it applies to an entire racial group. Racial-group behavior is a figment of the racist’s imagination. Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequities.

But what about the argument that clusters of Black people in the South, or Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown, or White people in the Texas suburbs seem to behave in ways that follow coherent, definable cultural practices? Antiracism means separating the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior. Culture defines a group tradition that a particular racial group might share but that is not shared among all individuals in that racial group or among all racial groups. Behavior defines the inherent human traits and potential that everyone shares. Humans are intelligent and lazy, even as that intelligence and laziness might appear differently across the racialized cultural groups.

Abolitionists—or, rather, progressive assimilationists—conjured what I call the oppression-inferiority thesis. In their well-meaning efforts to persuade Americans about the horrors of oppression, assimilationists argue that oppression has degraded the behaviors of oppressed people.

This belief extended into the period after slavery. In his address to the founding meeting of Alexander Crummell’s American Negro Academy in 1897, W.E.B. Du Bois pictured “the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races…lies in the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage of slavery.” This framing of slavery as a demoralizing force was the mirror image of the Jim Crow historian’s framing of slavery as a civilizing force. Both positions led Americans toward behavioral racism: Black behavior demoralized by freedom—or freed Black behavior demoralized by slavery.

Black individuals have, of course, suffered trauma from slavery and ongoing oppression. Some individuals throughout history have exhibited negative behaviors related to this trauma. DeGruy is a hero for ushering the constructs of trauma, damage, and healing into our understanding of Black life. But there is a thin line between an antiracist saying individual Blacks have suffered trauma and a racist saying Blacks are a traumatized people. There is similarly a thin line between an antiracist saying slavery was debilitating and a racist saying Blacks are a debilitated people. The latter constructions erase whole swaths of history: for instance, the story of even the first generation of emancipated Black people, who moved straight from plantations into the Union army, into politics, labor organizing, Union leagues, artistry, entrepreneurship, club building, church building, school building, community building—buildings more commonly razed by the fiery hand of racist terrorism than by any self- destructive hand of behavioral deficiencies derived from the trauma of slavery.

AS A STRUGGLING Black teenager in the nineties, I felt suffocated by a sense of being judged, primarily by the people I was closest to: other Black people, particularly older Black people who worried over my entire generation. The Black judge in my mind did not leave any room for the mistakes of Black individuals—I didn’t just have to deal with the consequences of my personal failings, I had the added burden of letting down the entire race. Our mistakes were generalized as the mistakes of the race. It seemed that White people were free to misbehave, make mistakes. But if we failed—or failed to be twice as good—then the Black judge handed down a hard sentence. No probation or parole. There was no middle ground—we were either King’s disciples or thugs killing King’s dream.

Whenever we say something just feels right or wrong we’re evading the deeper, perhaps hidden, ideas that inform our feelings. But in those hidden places, we find what we really think if we have the courage to face our own naked truths. I did not look within myself to see why Florida A&M just felt right—a reason beyond my desire to be around Black excellence. The truth is, I wanted to flee misbehaving Black folk.

Florida A&M became for me the best of Blackness, all right. I never could have imagined the enrapturing sound of Blackness at its peak. Two weeks after landing on campus, I heard it in all its glory.

Before arriving at FAMU, I’d started wearing “honey” contact lenses, or “orange eyes,” as my friends called them. My colored contacts were hard to miss on me. Hazel contacts were perhaps the most popular colored contact lens among Black folk, but I picked one shade even lighter. It seemed okay to me to play with my eye color. I knew some Black people who wore blue or green contacts, which I thought was shameful. I saw them—but not me—as straining to look White.

Above my orange eyes, Clarence did not see a low haircut, sometimes with fading up the back and sides, all times a brush flattening the kinks that struggled to stand and band in freedom before the next killa haircut. I started cornrowing my hair in college, twisting them up in small locs, or letting the kinks stretch out, hardly caring that racists judged these hairstyles as the unprofessional uniform of thugs. My cornrows signified an antiracist idea. My honey eyes a capitulation to assimilation. Together, they braided the assimilationist and antiracist ideas of my dueling consciousness.

Did I think my honey eyes meant I was striving to be White? No way. I was simply refining a cuter version of myself, which studies show is the explanation of most buyers of artificial eyes, complexion, hair, or facial features. I never asked myself the antiracist question. Why? Why did I think lighter eyes were more attractive on me? What did I truly want?

Because inequities between the races overshadow inequities within the races, Dark people often fail to see colorism as they regularly experience it. Therefore, Dark people rarely protest policies that benefit Light people, a “skin color paradox,” as termed by political scientists Jennifer L. Hochschild and Vesla Weaver. Anti-Dark colorism follows the logic of behavioral racism, linking behavior to color, studies show. White children attribute positivity to lighter skin and negativity to Dark skin, a colorism that grows stronger as they get older. White people usually favor lighter-skinned politicians over darker-skinned ones. Dark African Americans are disproportionately at risk of hypertension. Dark African American students receive significantly lower GPAs than Light students. Maybe because racist Americans have higher expectations for Light students, people tend to remember educated Black men as Light-skinned even when their skin is Dark. Is that why employers prefer Light Black men over Dark Black men regardless of qualifications? Even Dark Filipino men have lower incomes than their lighter peers in the United States. Dark immigrants to the United States, no matter their place of origin, tend to have less wealth and income than Light immigrants. When they arrive, Light Latinx people receive higher wages, and Dark Latinx people are more likely to be employed at ethnically homogeneous jobsites.

Dark sons and Light daughters receive higher-quality parenting than Light sons and Dark daughters. Skin color influences perceptions of attractiveness most often for Black women. As skin tone lightens, levels of self-esteem among Black women rise, especially among low- and middle- income Black women.

Dark African Americans receive the harshest prison sentences and more time behind bars. White male offenders with African facial features receive harsher sentences than their all-European peers. Dark female students are nearly twice as likely to be suspended as White female students, while researchers found no disparity between Light and White female students. Inequities between Light and Dark African Americans can be as wide as inequities between Black and White Americans.

They are right about the darkness—if not the abyss. That first Light college girlfriend ended up being the last at FAMU. I pledged to date only Dark women. Only my Light friend Terrell did not think I had lost my mind. He preferred Dark women, too. I looked down on the rest—anyone who did not prefer Dark women, as well. I hardly realized my own racist hypocrisy: I was turning the color hierarchy upside down, but the color hierarchy remained. Dark people degraded and alienated Light people with names: light bright, high yellow, redbone. “You’re never Black enough,” a Light woman once told Oprah about her feelings of rejection. Light people constantly report their struggle to integrate with Dark people, to prove their Blackness to Dark people, as if Dark people are the judge and standard of Blackness. The irony is that many Dark people— read me, circa 2000—do think of themselves as the judge and standard of Blackness, while at the same time meekly aspiring to the standard of Lightness or Whiteness.

In the 1980s, Light children were adopted first, had higher incomes, and were less likely to be trapped in public housing and prisons. “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence” became a popular antiracist saying as the era of mass incarceration surged in the 1990s. In 2007, MSNBC’s Don Imus compared Rutgers’s Dark basketball players—“that’s some nappy-headed hos there”—to Tennessee’s Light players—“they all look cute”—after they played in the NCAA women’s championship. In a 2014 casting call for the movie Straight Outta Compton, the Sandi Alesse Agency ranked extras: “A GIRLS: …Must have real hair…B GIRLS: …You should be light-skinned…C GIRLS: These are African American girls, medium to light skinned with a weave…D GIRLS: These are African American girls…Medium to dark skin tone. Character types.”

By then, singer Michael Jackson had paved the skin-bleaching boulevard traveled by rapper Lil’ Kim, baseball player Sammy Sosa, and so many more. Skin-bleaching products were raking in millions for U.S. companies. In India, “fairness” creams topped $200 million in 2014. Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea.

The next morning, I awoke to learn that George W. Bush somehow held a narrow lead in Florida of 1,784 votes. Too close to call, and Jeb Bush’s appointees were overseeing the recount.

The unfairness of it all crashed on me that November. My anti-Black racist ideas were no consolation. I walked out of my dorm room that morning into a world of anguish. In the weeks that followed, I heard and overheard, read and reread, angry, tearful, first- and secondhand stories of FAMU students and their families back home not being able to vote. Complaints from Black citizens who’d registered but never received their registration cards. Or their voting location had been changed. Or they were unlawfully denied a ballot without a registration card or ordered to leave the long line when polls closed. Or they were told that as convicted felons they could not vote. Earlier in the year, Florida purged fifty-eight thousand alleged felons from the voting rolls. Black people were only 11 percent of registered voters but comprised 44 percent of the purge list. And about twelve thousand of those people purged were not convicted felons.

Reporters and campaign officials seemed more focused on Floridians whose votes were not counted or counted the wrong way. Palm Beach County used confusing ballots that caused about nineteen thousand spoiled ballots and perhaps three thousand Gore voters to mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan. Gadsden County, next to Tallahassee, had Florida’s highest percentage of Black voters and the highest spoilage rate. Blacks were ten times more likely than Whites to have their ballots rejected. The racial inequity could not be explained by income or educational levels or bad ballot design, according to a New York Times statistical analysis. That left one explanation, one that at first I could not readily admit: racism. A total of 179,855 ballots were invalidated by Florida election officials in a race ultimately won by 537 votes.

On November 9, 2000, FAMU’s courageous student-government leaders directed a silent march of two thousand students from campus to Florida’s nearby capitol, where they conducted a sit-in. The sit-in lasted for about twenty-four hours, but the witch hunt we launched back at campus lasted for weeks, if not months. We hunted out those thousands of FAMU students who did not vote. We shamed those nonvoters with stories of people who marched so we could vote. I participated in this foolish hunt—one seems to recur every time an election is lost. The shaming ignores the real source of our loss and heartbreak. The fact was that Black people delivered enough voters to win, but those voters were sent home or their votes spoiled. Racist ideas often lead to this silly psychological inversion, where we blame the victimized race for their own victimization.

White people became devils to me, but I had to figure out how they came to be devils. I read “The Making of Devil,” a chapter in Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America, written in 1965. Muhammad led the unorthodox Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1934 until his death in 1975. According to the theology he espoused, more than six thousand years ago, in an all-Black world, a wicked Black scientist named Yakub was exiled alongside his 59,999 followers to an island in the Aegean Sea. Yakub plotted his revenge against his enemies: “to create upon the earth a devil race.”

Yakub established a brutal island regime of selective breeding— eugenics meeting colorism. He killed all Dark babies and forced Light people to breed. When Yakub died, his followers carried on, creating the Brown race from the Black race, the Red race from the Brown race, the Yellow race from the Red race, and the White race from the Yellow race. After six hundred years, “on the island of Patmos was nothing but these blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils—savages.”

White people invaded the mainland and turned “what had been a peaceful heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting.” Black authorities chained the White criminals and marched them to the prison caves of Europe. When the Bible says, “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” NOI theologians say the “serpent is symbolic of the devil white race Moses lifted up out of the caves of Europe, teaching them civilization” to rule for the next six thousand years.

The NOI’s history of White people was the racist history of Black people in Whiteface.

ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S WHITE creation story made so much sense to me. Half a century earlier, it also made sense to a calculating, cursing, and crazy young Black prisoner nicknamed “Satan.” One day, in 1948, Satan’s brother, Reginald, whispered to him during a visit, “The white man is the devil.” When he returned to his Massachusetts cell, a line of White people appeared before his eyes. He saw White people lynching his activist father, committing his activist mother to an insane asylum, splitting up his siblings, telling him being a lawyer was “no realist goal for a n*****,” degrading him on eastern railroads, trapping him for the police, sentencing him to eight to ten years for robbery because his girlfriend was White. His brothers and sisters, clutching their sore necks from a similar rope of White racism, had already converted to the Nation of Islam. In no time, they turned Satan back into Malcolm Little, and Malcolm Little into Malcolm X.

Malcolm X left prison in 1952 and quickly began to grow Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, through his powerful speaking and organizing. The suddenly resurgent NOI caught the attention of the media, and in 1959 Louis Lomax and Mike Wallace produced a television documentary on the NOI, The Hate That Hate Produced, which ran on CBS. It made Malcolm X a household name.

On September 22, 1964, Malcolm made no mistake about his conversion. “I totally reject Elijah Muhammad’s racist philosophy, which he has labeled ‘Islam’ only to fool and misuse gullible people, as he fooled and misused me,” he wrote. “But I blame only myself, and no one else for the fool that I was, and the harm that my evangelic foolishness in his behalf has done to others.”

Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people. The NOI’s White-devil idea is a classic example. Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea.

The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people. They are not one and the same, as the resistance within White nations shows, resistance admittedly often tempered by racist ideas.

Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kids’ business-class schools could resemble the first- class prep schools of today’s superrich. Where high-quality universal healthcare could save millions of White lives. Where they could no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and exploitation.

Racist power, hoarding wealth and resources, has the most to lose in the building of an equitable society. As we’ve learned, racist power produces racist policies out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies.

And yet racist power thrives on anti-White racist ideas—more hatred only makes their power greater. When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power or racist policymakers. In losing focus on racist power, they fail to challenge anti- Black racist policies, which means those policies are more likely to flourish. Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life. In the end, anti-White racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-Black. In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.

I kept reading, trying to find the source of White evil. I found more answers in Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop’s two-cradle theory, long before I learned about his antiracist work on the African ancestry of the ancient Egyptians. Diop’s two-cradle theory suggested the harsh climate and lack of resources in the northern cradle nurtured in Europeans barbaric, individualistic, materialist, and warlike behaviors, which brought destruction to the world. The amenable climate and abundance of resources in the southern cradle nurtured the African behaviors of community, spirituality, equanimity, and peace, which brought civilization to the world.

“You know, I have a nice car,” he said slowly, “and I hate it when I get pulled over and I’m treated like I am one of them n*****s.”

I took a deep inaudible breath, turned my lips inside, licked them, and mentally ordered my silence. “Them n*****s” hung in the air between our probing eye contact. He waited for my response. I stayed silent.

I wanted to stand up and point and yell, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I would have cut off his answer: “Clearly you don’t think you are a n*****! What makes them n*****s and you not a n*****? Am I one of ‘them n*****s’?” My air quotes struck the air over his head.

He separated himself from “them n*****s,” racialized them, looked down on them. He directed his disdain not toward the police officers who racially profiled him, who mistreated him, but to “them n*****s.”

And after all that, we self-identified as “not-racist,” like White racists, as Black racists.

Chris Rock met Black Americans where all too many of us were at the turn of the millennium, stationed within the dueling consciousness of assimilationist and antiracist ideas, distinguishing ourselves from them n*****s as White racists were distinguishing themselves from us n*****s. We felt a tremendous antiracist pride in Black excellence and a tremendously racist shame in being connected to them n*****s. We recognized the racist policy we were facing and were ignorant of the racist policy them n*****s were facing. We looked at them n*****s as felons of the race when our anti-Black racist ideas were the real Black on Black crime.

Clearly, a large percentage of Black people hold anti-Black racist ideas. But I still wanted to believe Stewart’s “them n*****s” comment was abnormal. The truth is, though, Stewart had put up a mirror. I had to face it. I hated what I saw. He was saying what I had been thinking for years. He had the courage to say it. I hated him for that.

Every time I say something is wrong with Black people, I am simultaneously separating myself from them, essentially saying “them n*****s.” When I do this, I am being a racist.

This powerless defense, as I call it, emerged in the wake of racist Whites dismissing antiracist policies and ideas as racist in the late 1960s. In subsequent decades, Black voices critical of White racism defended themselves from these charges by saying, “Black people can’t be racist, because Black people don’t have power.”

Quietly, though, this defense shields people of color in positions of power from doing the work of antiracism, since they are apparently powerless, since White people have all the power. This means that people of color are powerless to roll back racist policies and close racial inequities even in their own spheres of influence, the places where they actually do have some power to effect change. The powerless defense shields people of color from charges of racism even when they are reproducing racist policies and justifying them with the same racist ideas as the White people they call racist. The powerless defense shields its believers from the history of White people empowering people of color to oppress people of color and of people of color using their limited power to oppress people of color for their own personal gain.

Like every other racist idea, the powerless defense underestimatesBlack people and overestimates White people. It erases the small amountof Black power and expands the already expansive reach of White power.The powerless defense does not consider people at all levels of power,from policymakers like politicians and executives who have the power toinstitute and eliminate racist and antiracist policies, to policy managerslike officers and middle managers empowered to execute or withholdracist and antiracist policies. Every single person actually has the power toprotest racist and antiracist policies, to advance them, or, in some smallway, to stall them. Nation-states, sectors, communities, institutions arerun by policymakers and policies and policy managers. “Institutionalpower” or “systemic power” or “structural power” is the policymaking andmanaging power of people, in groups or individually. When someone saysBlack people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have “institutionalpower,” they are flouting reality.

The powerless defense strips Black policymakers and managers of all their power. The powerless defense says the more than 154 African Americans who have served in Congress from 1870 to 2018 had no legislative power. It says none of the thousands of state and local Black politicians have any lawmaking power. It says U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas never had the power to put his vote to antiracist purposes. The powerless defense says the more than seven hundred Black judges on state courts and more than two hundred Black judges on federal courts have had no power during the trials and sentencing processes that built our system of mass incarceration. It says the more than fifty-seven thousand Black police officers do not have the power to brutalize and kill the Black body. It says the three thousand Black police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and commanders have no power over the officers under their command. The powerless defense says the more than forty thousand full- time Black faculty at U.S. colleges and universities in 2016 did not have the power to pass and fail Black students, hire and tenure Black faculty, or shape the minds of Black people. It says the world’s eleven Black billionaires and the 380,000 Black millionaire families in the United States have no economic power, to use in racist or antiracist ways. It says the sixteen Black CEOs who’ve run Fortune 500 companies since 1999 had no power to diversify their workforces. When a Black man stepped into the most powerful office in the world in 2009, his policies were often excused by apologists who said he didn’t have executive power. As if none of his executive orders were carried out, neither of his Black attorneys general had any power to roll back mass incarceration, or his Black national security adviser had no power. The truth is: Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited.

THE RECORDED HISTORY of Black racists begins in 1526 in Della descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa), authored by a Moroccan Moor who was kidnapped after he visited sub-Saharan Africa. His enslavers presented him to Pope Leo X, who converted him to Christianity, freed him, and renamed him Leo Africanus. Description of Africa was translated into multiple European languages and emerged as the most influential book of anti-Black racist ideas in the sixteenth century, when the British, French, and Dutch were diving into slave trading. “Negroes…leade a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterities of wit, and of all arts,” Africanus wrote. “They so behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a Forrest among wild beasts.” Africanus may have made up his travels to sub- Saharan Africa to secure favor from the Italian court.

Black people would be betrayed by Black on Black criminals again and again in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the diversifying of America’s police forces was supposed to alleviate the scourge of police brutality against Black victims. The fruit of decades of antiracist activism, a new crop of Black officers were expected to treat Black citizens better than their White counterparts did. But reports immediately surfaced in the 1960s that Black officers were as abusive as White officers. One report noted “in some places, low-income Negroes prefer white policemen because of the severe conduct of Negro officers.” A 1966 study found Black officers were not as likely to be racist as Whites, but a significant minority expressed anti-Black racist ideas like, “I’m telling you these people are savages. And they’re real dirty.” Or the Black officer who said, “There have always been jobs for Negroes, but the f—— people are too stupid to go out and get an education. They all want the easy way out.”

To color police racism as White on the pretext that only White people can be racist is to ignore the non-White officer’s history of profiling and killing “them n*****s.” It is to ignore that the police killer in 2012 of Brooklyn’s Shantel Davis was Black, that three of the six officers involved in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray were Black, that the police killer in 2016 of Charlotte’s Keith Lamont Scott was Black, and that one of the police killers in 2018 of Sacramento’s Stephon Clark was Black. How can the White officers involved in the deaths of Terence Crutcher, Sandra Bland, Walter L. Scott, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, and Decynthia Clements be racist but their Black counterparts be antiracist?

To be fair, one survey of nearly eight thousand sworn officers in 2017 makes strikingly clear that White officers are far and away more likely to be racist than Black officers these days. Nearly all (92 percent) of White officers surveyed agreed with the post-racial idea that “our country has made the changes needed to give Blacks equal rights with Whites.” Only 6 percent of White officers co-signed the antiracist idea that “our country needs to continue making changes to give Blacks equal rights with Whites,” compared to 69 percent of Black officers. But the disparity shrinks concerning deadly police encounters. Black officers (57 percent) are only twice as likely as White officers (27 percent) to say “the deaths of Blacks during encounters with police in recent years are signs of a broader problem.”

I unpacked myself in the “ghetto,” as people flippantly called my new neighborhood. The ghetto had expanded in the twentieth century as it swallowed millions of Black people migrating from the South to Western and Northern cities like Philadelphia. White flight followed. The combination of government welfare—in the form of subsidies, highway construction, and loan guarantees—along with often racist developers opened new wealth-building urban and suburban homes to the fleeing Whites, while largely confining Black natives and new Black migrants to the so-called ghettos, now overcrowded and designed to extract wealth from their residents. But the word “ghetto,” as it migrated to the Main Street of American vocabulary, did not conjure a series of racist policies that enabled White flight and Black abandonment—instead, “ghetto” began to describe unrespectable Black behavior on the North Broad Streets of the country.

“The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology; it is chronic, self- perpetuating pathology; and it is the futile attempt by those with power to confine that pathology so as to prevent the spread of its contagion to the ‘larger community,’ ” wrote psychologist Kenneth Clark in his 1965 book, Dark Ghetto. “Pathology,” meaning a deviation from the norm. Poor Blacks in the “ghetto” are pathological, abnormal? Abnormal from whom? What group is the norm? White elites? Black elites? Poor Whites? Poor Latinx? Asian elites? The Native poor?

I saw poor Blacks as the product of racism and not capitalism, largely because I thought I knew racism but knew I did not know capitalism. But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism. As Martin Luther King said in his critique of capitalism in 1967, “It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”

Socialist and communist spaces are not automatically antiracist. Some socialists and communists have pushed a segregationist or post-racial program in order not to alienate racist White workers. For example, delegates at the founding meeting of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1901 refused to adopt an anti-lynching petition. Assimilationist leaders of some socialist and communist organizations have asked people of color to leave their racial identities and antiracist battle plans at the door, decrying “identity politics.” Some of these socialists and communists may not be familiar with their ideological guide’s writings on race. “The discovery of gold and silver in America,” Karl Marx once wrote, “the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black- skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Marx recognized the birth of the conjoined twins.

MY PARENTS WERE worried. I felt alive when I moved into this Black neighborhood. I felt I needed to live around Black people in order to study and uplift Black people. Not just any Black people: poor Black people. I considered poor Blacks to be the truest and most authentic representatives of Black people. I made urban poverty an entryway into the supposedly crime riddled and impoverished house of authentic Blackness.

For Lerone Bennett Jr., the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine, my identifying of poverty, hustling, criminality, sex, and gambling in the urban world as the most authentic Black world probably would have reminded him of the blaxploitation films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Black Power movement of the era, in shattering the White standard of assimilationist ideas, sent creative Black people on a mission to erect Black standards, a new Black aesthetic. Blaxploitation films arrived right on time, with Black casts, urban settings, and Black heroes and heroines: pimps, gangsters, prostitutes, and rapists.

I thought I was so real, so Black, in choosing this apartment in this neighborhood. In truth, I was being racist, playing poor Blacks cheap as human beings. While others had fled from poor Blacks in racist fear of their dangerous inferiority, I was fleeing to poor Blacks in racist assurance of the superiority conferred by their danger, their superior authenticity. I was the Black gentrifier, a distinct creature from the White gentrifier. If the White gentrifier moves to the poor Black neighborhood to be a developer, the Black gentrifier is moving back to the poor Black neighborhood to be developed.

To be antiracist is to recognize neither poor Blacks nor elite Blacks as the truest representative of Black people. But at the time I believed culture filtered upward, that Black elites, in all our materialism, individualism, and assimilationism, needed to go to the “bottom” to be civilized. I understood poor Blacks as simultaneously the bottom and the foundation of Blackness. I wanted their authenticity to rub off on me, a spoiled—in both senses—middle-income Black man. Rap music made by people from “the bottom” was no longer enough to keep me stuck on the realness.

I was in full agreement with E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, published in 1957. Situating White elites as the norm, Frazier dubbed Black elites as inferior: as quicker racial sellouts, as bigger conspicuous consumers, as more politically corrupt, as more exploitative, as more irrational for looking up to the very people oppressing them. This inverted class racism about inferior Black elites quickly became a religious belief, joining the religious belief about the Black masses being more pathological. In the bestselling Beyond the Melting Pot, written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963, sociologist Nathan Glazer argued that, unlike the other middle classes, “the Negro middle class contributes very little…to the solution of Negro social programs.” Without any supporting data, Glazer positioned the Black bourgeoisie as inferior, in the scale of social responsibility, to other bourgeoisies. These racist ideas were wrong, of course—a decade earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. and a generation of elite Black youngsters from the Black bourgeoisie began the epic struggle for civil rights, economic justice, and desegregation. My generation of elite Black youngsters rushed into our own struggle—into Black studies, a Black space.

WE CALLED OUR African American studies space a Black space—it was, after all, governed primarily by Black bodies, Black thoughts, Black cultures, and Black histories. Of course, the spaces at Temple University governed primarily by White bodies, White thoughts, White cultures, and White histories were not labeled White. They hid the Whiteness of their spaces behind the veil of color blindness.

The most prominent person in our Black space at Temple had been piercing this unspoken veil since 1970, when he first printed the Journal of Black Studies. Molefi Kete Asante, who in 1980 would publish the seminal work Afrocentricity, railed against assimilationist ideas and called for Afrocentric Black people. There were multiple ways of seeing the world, he argued. But too many Black people were “looking out” at the world from a European “center,” which was taken as the only point from which to see the world—through European cultures masquerading as world cultures, European religions masquerading as world religions, European history masquerading as world history. Theories gleamed from European subjects masquerading as universal theories. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” Professor Asante wrote. In 1987, he established the nation’s first African American studies doctoral program at Temple to wage the struggle, the program I entered twenty years later.

In my first course with Mazama, she lectured on Asante’s contention that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.”

It was the sort of simple idea that shifted my view of the world immediately. It made so much sense to me as I recalled the subjective choices I’d made as an aspiring journalist and scholar. If objectivity was dead, though, I needed a replacement. I flung up my hand like an eighth-grader.

“Yes?”

“If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” She stared at me as she gathered her words. Not a woman of many words, it did not take long.

“Just tell the truth. That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”

She closed up. Class started, but I could not let it go. How could she use one horrible error from one person in one office to condemn the entire university—my university—as horrible? But I had said it all, heard it all before. I heard and heaped blame on HBCU administrators for the scarcity of resources. I heard Black students and faculty at historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs) say they could never go to HBCUs, those poorly run ghettos. I heard HBCU faculty and staff talk about escaping the dark ghettos and moving to HWCUs.

I heard my uncle say, like Dartmouth alum Aisha Tyler, that HBCUs do not represent “the real world.” The argument: Black students are better served learning how to operate in a majority-White nation by attending a majority-White university. The reality: A large percentage of—perhaps most—Black Americans live in majority-Black neighborhoods, work in majority-Black sites of employment, organize in majority-Black associations, socialize in majority-Black spaces, attend majority-Black churches, and send their children to majority-Black schools. When people contend that Black spaces do not represent reality, they are speaking from the White worldview of Black people in the minority. They are conceptualizing the real American world as White. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews.

Riley had pulled out the familiar weapon safeguarding space racism and menacing Black spaces: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces. The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale. The racial wealth gap produces a giving gap. For public HBCUs, the giving gap extends to state-funding gaps, as racist policies steer more funds to HWCUs, like the current “performance based” state models.

Resources define a space, resources the conjoined twins divvy up. People make spaces from resources. Comparing spaces across race-classes is like matching fighters of different weight classes, which fighting sports consider unfair. Poor Black neighborhoods should be compared to equally poor White neighborhoods, not to considerably richer White neighborhoods. Small Black businesses should be compared to equally small White businesses, not to wealthy White corporations. Indeed, when researchers compare HBCUs to HWCUs of similar means and makeup, HBCUs tend to have higher Black graduation rates. Not to mention, Black HBCU graduates are, on average, more likely than their Black peers from HWCUs to be thriving financially, socially, and physically.

A financial-aid officer had stolen thousands from her as an undergraduate student at a White university, but she still held that university in high regard. A botched transcript and she condemned her Black university. What hypocrisy. At the time, I could not be angry at her without being angrier at myself. How many times did I individualize the error in White spaces, blaming the individual and not the White space? How many times did I generalize the error in the Black space—in the Black church or at a Black gathering—and blame the Black space instead of the individual? How many times did I have a bad experience at a Black business and then walk away complaining about not the individuals involved but Black businesses as a whole?

The integrationist strategy—the placing of White and non-White bodies in the same spaces—is thought to cultivate away the barbarism of people of color and the racism of White people. The integrationist strategy expects Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites who haven’t yet stopped fighting them. After enduring slavery’s violence, Frazier and his brethren had enough. They desired to separate, not from Whites but from White racism. Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Blacks.

Whenever Black people voluntarily gather among themselves, integrationists do not see spaces of Black solidarity created to separate Black people from racism. They see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy.

When integrationists use segregation and separation interchangeably, they are using the vocabulary of Jim Crow. Segregationists blurred the lines between segregation and separation by projecting their policies as standing “on the platform of equal accommodations for each race but separate,” to quote Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady in 1885. The U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned this spoken veil in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Separate but equal covered up the segregationist policies that diverted resources toward exclusively White spaces. In 1930, segregationist Alabama spent $37 for each White student, compared to $7 for each Black student; Georgia, $32 to $7; and South Carolina, $53 to $5. High school was unavailable for my maternal grandparents around this time in Georgia.

Justice Warren did not judge White schools to be having a detrimental effect upon White children. He wrote the “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.” It retards their “education and mental development,” Warren explained. “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

What really made the schools unequal were the dramatically unequal resources provided to them, not the mere fact of racial separation. The Supreme Court justices deciding both Plessy and Brown avowed the segregationist lie that the “Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized,” to quote Justice Warren. By 1973, when the resource inequities between the public schools had become too obvious to deny, the Supreme Court ruled, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, that property-tax allocations yielding inequities in public schools do not violate the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

THE 1973 SUPREME Court ruling reified the only solution emanating from the Brown decision in 1954: busing Black bodies from detrimental Black spaces to worthwhile White spaces. Since “there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions, then there is nothing different except the presence of white people,” wrote an insulted Zora Neale Hurston in the Orlando Sentinel in 1955. Martin Luther King Jr. also privately disagreed. “I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel….I think integration in our public schools is different,” King told two Black teachers in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959. “White people view black people as inferior….People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.”

King had a nightmare that came to pass. Non-White students fill most of the seats in today’s public school classrooms but are taught by an 80 percent White teaching force, which often has, however unconsciously, lower expectations for non-White students. When Black and White teachers look at the same Black student, White teachers are about 40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school. Low- income Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are 29 percent less likely to drop out of school, 39 percent less likely among very low-income Black boys.

After Brown, the integrated White space came to define the ideal integrated space where inferior non-White bodies could be developed. The integrated Black space became a de facto segregated space where inferior Black bodies were left behind. Integration had turned into “a one-way street,” a young Chicago lawyer observed in 1995. “The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around,” Barack Obama wrote. “Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial.” Integration (into Whiteness) became racial progress.

The integrationist transformation of King as color-blind and race- neutral erases the actual King. He did not live to integrate Black spaces and people into White oblivion. If he did, then why did he build low- income Atlanta apartments “using Negro workmen, Negro architects, Negro attorneys, and Negro financial institutions throughout,” as he proudly reported in 1967? Why did he urge Black people to stop being “ashamed of being Black,” to invest in their own spaces? The child of a Black neighborhood, church, college, and organization lived to ensure equal access to public accommodations and equal resources for all racialized spaces, an antiracist strategy as culture-saving as his nonviolence was body-saving.

Americans have seen the logical conclusion of segregationist strategy, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and border walls. The logical conclusion of antiracist strategy is open and equal access to all public accommodations, open access to all integrated White spaces, integrated Middle Eastern spaces, integrated Black spaces, integrated Latinx spaces, integrated Native spaces, and integrated Asian spaces that are as equally resourced as they are culturally different. All these spaces adjoin civic spaces of political and economic and cultural power, from a House of Representatives to a school board to a newspaper editorial board where no race predominates, where shared antiracist power predominates. This is diversity, something integrationists value only in name.

For too many Black men, the Black Power movement that emerged after the Moynihan report became a struggle against White men for Black power over Black women. Dad witnessed this power struggle, after being raised by a single Black mother who never called him or his brother the head of the household, like other patriarchal single moms did. One day in 1969, Dad had been singing inside a storefront church. He stepped outside for air and confronted a Black Panther assaulting his girlfriend. On another day, in the summer of 1971, Dad and a girlfriend before Ma ventured up to the Harlem Temple of the Nation of Islam. The Nation had piqued Dad’s interest. They were eating with one of the ministers. Dad’s girlfriend said something. The minister smacked her and smacked from his mouth, “Women are not to speak in the presence of men.” Dad sprang out of his chair and had to be restrained and strong-armed out of the temple.

In spite of everything, Dad and Ma could not help but join the interracial force policing the sexuality of young Black mothers. They were two of the millions of liberals and conservatives aghast at the growing percentage of Black children being born into single-parent households in the 1970s and 1980s—aghast even though my dad turned out just fine. The panic around the reported numbers of single-parent households was based on a host of faulty or untested premises: that two bad parents would be better than one good one, that the presence of an abusive Black father is better for the child than his absence, that having a second income for a child trumps all other factors, that all of the single parents were Black women, that none of these absent fathers were in prison or the grave, that Black mothers never hid the presence of Black fathers in their household to keep their welfare for the child.

In time for the midterm elections in 1994, political scientist Charles Murray made sure Americans knew the percentage of Black children born into single-parent households “has now reached 68 percent.” Murray blamed the “welfare system.” My parents and other liberals blamed sexual irresponsibility, a shameful disregard for the opportunities born of 1960s activism, pathologizing poverty, and a disconnect from the premarital abstinence of Christ. They were all wrong on so many levels. The increasing percentage of Black babies born into single-parent households was not due to single Black mothers having more children but to married Black women having fewer children over the course of the twentieth century. Ma could see that decline in her family. Ma’s married paternal grandmother had sixteen children in the 1910s and 1920s. Ma’s married mother had six children in the 1940s and 1950s. My mother had two children in the early 1980s—as did two of her three married sisters.

Ma and Dad and countless Americans were disconnected from racial reality and leapt to demonize this class of single mothers. Only Black feminists like Dorothy Roberts and Angela Davis defended them.

But 1991 — the year Anita Hill accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment—proved to be the pivotal year of Black feminist scholars. They constructed terminology that named the specific oppression facing Black women, which Black feminists from Maria Stewart to Anna Julia Cooper to Angela Davis had been identifying for more than a century. Behind the scenes of what Thomas mind- bogglingly called a “high-tech lynching” and Black feminists’ frontline defense of Hill, Afro-Dutch scholar Philomena Essed worked on a project that would help define what was happening. She published her reflections on in-depth interviews she’d conducted with Black women in the United States and the Netherlands in Understanding Everyday Racism. “In discussing the experiences of Black women, is it sexism or is it racism?” Essed asked. “These two concepts narrowly intertwine and combine under certain conditions into one, hybrid phenomenon. Therefore, it is useful to speak of gendered racism.”

In 1991, UCLA critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw further explored this notion of “intersectionality.” That year, she published “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” in the Stanford Law Review, based on her address at the Third National Conference on Women of Color and the Law in 1990. “Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains,” Crenshaw theorized. “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices.”

Racist (and sexist) power distinguishes race-genders, racial (or gender) groups at the intersection of race and gender. Women are a gender. Black people are a race. When we identify Black women, we are identifying a race-gender. A sexist policy produces inequities between women and men. A racist policy produces inequities between racial groups. When a policy produces inequities between race-genders, it is gendered racism, or gender racism for short.

Gender racism was behind the growing number of involuntary sterilizations of Black women by eugenicist physicians—two hundred thousand cases in 1970, rising to seven hundred thousand in 1980. Gender racism produced the current situation of Black women with some collegiate education making less than White women with only high school degrees; Black women having to earn advanced degrees before they earn more than White women with bachelor’s degrees; and the median wealth of single White women being $42,000 compared to $100 for single Black women. Native women and Black women experience poverty at a higher rate than any other race-gender group. Black and Latinx women still earn the least, while White and Asian men earn the most. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than are White women. A Black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a White woman with less than an eighth-grade education. Black women remain twice as likely to be incarcerated as White women.

“CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST AND antiracist discourses have failed to consider intersectional identities such as women of color,” Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote in 1991. All racial groups are a collection of intersectional identities differentiated by gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, skin color, nationality, and culture, among a series of other identifiers. Black women first recognized their own intersectional identity. Black feminists first theorized the intersection of two forms of bigotry: sexism and racism. Intersectional theory now gives all of humanity the ability to understand the intersectional oppression of their identities, from poor Latinx to Black men to White women to Native lesbians to transgender Asians. A theory for Black women is a theory for humanity. No wonder Black feminists have been saying from the beginning that when humanity becomes serious about the freedom of Black women, humanity becomes serious about the freedom of humanity.

Intersectional Black identities are subjected to what Crenshaw described as the intersection of racism and other forms of bigotry, such as ethnocentrism, colorism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. My journey to being an antiracist first recognized the intersectionality of my ethnic racism, and then my bodily racism, and then my cultural racism, and then my color racism, and then my class racism, and, when I entered graduate school, my gender racism and queer racism.

I thought about Black gay men running around having unprotected sex all the time. But Weckea did not seem sex-crazed or reckless. I thought about this hypersexuality and recklessness causing so many Black gay men to contract HIV. I thought wrong. Black gay men are less likely to have condomless sex than White gay men. They are less likely to use drugs like poppers or crystal methamphetamine during sex, which heighten the risk of HIV infections.

I had been around gay Black men before, in FACES, a modeling troupe I’d joined at FAMU. But the gay Black men in the troupe (or, better yet, the ones I thought were gay) had what I thought of as a feminine streak to them: the way they moved, their makeup, the way they struggled to dap me up. They pinged my gaydar. Everything about my modeling troupe pinged the gaydar of my friends. My modeling ended up being the only thing my friends joked on more than my orange eyes. But they thought my orange eyes were “gay,” too.

I assumed Black gay men performed femininity. I did not know that some gay men, like Weckea, perform masculinity and actually prefer gay men who perform femininity for partners. I did not know (and feminists like Kaila and Yaba were teaching me) about gender being an authentic performance; that the ways women and men traditionally act are not tied to their biology; that men can authentically perform femininity as effectively as women can authentically perform masculinity. Authentically, meaning they are not acting, as the transphobic idea assumes. They are being who they are, defying society’s gender conventions.

Queer antiracism is equating all the race-sexualities, striving to eliminate the inequities between the race-sexualities. We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic. We must continue to “affirm that all Black lives matter,” as the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Opal Tometi, once said. All Black lives include those of poor transgender Black women, perhaps the most violated and oppressed of all the Black intersectional groups. The average U.S. life expectancy of a transgender woman of color is thirty-five years.

I binge-read every author they mentioned in their public exchanges and in their private exchanges with me. I gobbled up Audre Lorde, E. Patrick Johnson, bell hooks, Joan Morgan, Dwight McBride, Patricia Hill Collins, and Kimberlé Crenshaw like my life depended on it. My life did depend on it. I wanted to overcome my gender racism, my queer racism. But I had to be willing to do for Black women and queer Blacks what I had been doing for Black men and Black heterosexuals, which meant first of all learning more—and then defending them like my heroes had.

Over time, they let me join them in long talk, unnerving me the most. It is best to challenge ourselves by dragging ourselves before people who intimidate us with their brilliance and constructive criticism. I didn’t think about that. I wanted to run away. They did not let me run away, and I am grateful now because of it.

To understand why racism lives is to understand the history of antiracist failure—why people have failed to create antiracist societies. To understand the racial history of failure is to understand failed solutions and strategies. To understand failed solutions and strategies is to understand their cradles: failed racial ideologies.

Terms and sayings like “I’m not racist” and “race neutral” and “post-racial” and “color-blind” and “only one race, the human race” and “only racists speak about race” and “Black people can’t be racist” and “White people are evil” are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy. Stratagems flouting intersectionality are bound to fail the most degraded racial groups. Civilizing programs will fail since all racial groups are already on the same cultural level. Behavioral-enrichment programs, like mentoring and educational programs, can help individuals but are bound to fail racial groups, which are held back by bad policies, not bad behavior. Healing symptoms instead of changing policies is bound to fail in healing society. Challenging the conjoined twins separately is bound to fail to address economic-racial inequity. Gentrifying integration is bound to fail non-White cultures. All of these ideas are bound to fail because they have consistently failed in the past. But for some reason, their failure doesn’t seem to matter: They remain the most popular conceptions and strategies and solutions to combat racism, because they stem from the most popular racial ideologies.

I grew up on this same failed strategy more than one hundred fifty years later. Generations of Black bodies have been raised by the judges of “uplift suasion.” The judges strap the entire Black race on the Black body’s back, shove the burdened Black body into White spaces, order the burdened Black body to always act in an upstanding manner to persuade away White racism, and punish poor Black conduct with sentences of shame for reinforcing racism, for bringing the race down. I felt the burden my whole Black life to be perfect before both White people and the Black people judging whether I am representing the race well. The judges never let me just be, be myself, be my imperfect self.

We dined near the window at Buddakan, an Asian fusion restaurant in Old City, Philadelphia. On the opposite wall, a massive gold statue of Buddha sat on a tiny stage at almost table level, against a red background that faded into a black center. Eyes closed. Hands clasped. At peace. Not bothering anyone. Certainly not Sadiqa. But the statue attracted a middle- aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha before his laughing audience of drunk friends at a nearby table. I had learned a long time ago to tune out the antics of drunk White people doing things that could get a Black person arrested. Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.

His loud laughs summoned Sadiqa’s look. “Oh, my God!” she said quietly. “What is this guy doing?”

She turned back to her plate, took a bite, and looked up as she swallowed. “At least he’s not Black.”

I was taken aback but immediately recognized myself—my own thoughts—in Sadiqa’s face.

“How would you feel if he was Black?” I asked her, and myself. “I’d be really embarrassed,” she said, speaking for me and for so many of us trapped on the plantation of uplift suasion. “Because we don’t need anyone making us look bad.”

“In front of White people?” I asked her.

“Yes. It makes them look down on us. Makes them more racist.”

We thought on a false continuum, from more racist to less racist to not racist. We believed good Black behavior made White people “less racist,” even when our experiences told us it usually did not. But that night, we thought about it together and shared a few critiques of uplift suasion for the first time.

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. admitted, “We’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power.” But our generation ignores King’s words about the “problem of power, a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo.” The same way King’s generation ignored Du Bois’s matured warning. The same way Du Bois’s generation ignored Garrison’s matured warnings. The problem of race has always been at its core the problem of power, not the problem of immorality or ignorance.

To fight for mental and moral changes after policy is changed means fighting alongside growing benefits and the dissipation of fears, making it possible for antiracist power to succeed. To fight for mental and moral change as a prerequisite for policy change is to fight against growing fears and apathy, making it almost impossible for antiracist power to succeed.

The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.

A somber energy settled inside the classroom, like the darkness outside. Our goal, BSU officers told each other, was to free the Jena 6. But were we willing to do anything? Were we willing to risk our freedom for their freedom? Not if our primary purpose was making ourselves feel better. We formulate and populate and donate to cultural and behavioral and educational enrichment programs to make ourselves feel better, feeling they are helping racial groups, when they are only helping (or hurting) individuals, when only policy change helps groups.

What if instead of a feelings advocacy we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish? What if we focused our human and fiscal resources on changing power and policy to actually make society, not just our feelings, better?

“What? No! People take car caravans all the time,” I replied. I spoke on, painting the beautiful, ugly picture. “When the car caravans arrived in D.C., they would park their cars in the middle of Constitution Avenue and join the informal march to the Department of Justice. Thousands of cars would be sitting-in on Constitution Avenue and surrounding streets as we presented our six demands of freedom to the Bush administration. When they came with the tow trucks, we would be ready to flatten truck tires. When police units started protecting the tow trucks, we would come with reinforcements of cars. When they blocked off Constitution Avenue, we would strike another street with our cars. When and if they barricaded all the downtown streets, we would wait them out and ride back into downtown Washington whenever they lifted the barricades. We would refuse to stop the sit-in of cars until the Bush administration leaned on the Louisiana governor to lean on Jena officials to drop the charges against the Jena Six.”

“This is illegal. They will throw us in prison,” someone rebutted with alook of fear.

I should have stopped but I continued my failure, hardly caring that the more I spoke, the more fear I spread—the more fear I spread, the more I alienated people from the 106 Campaign.

“Damn right we could go to prison!” I shot back, feeling like myself. “But I don’t care! We’re already in prison. That’s what America means: prison.”

I used the Malcolm X line out of context. But who cared about context when the shock and awe sounded so radical to my self-identified radical ears? When I lashed out at well-meaning people who showed the normal impulse of fear, who used the incorrect racial terminology, who asked the incorrect question—oh, did I think I was so radical. When my scorched- earth words sent attendees fleeing at BSU rallies and meetings, when my scorched-earth writings sent readers fleeing, oh, did I think I was so radical. When in fact, if all my words were doing was sounding radical, then those words were not radical at all. What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people, by how the speech liberates the antiracist power within? What if we measure the conservatism of speech by how intensely it keeps people the same, keeps people enslaved by their racist ideas and fears, conserving their inequitable society? At a time when I thought I was the most radical, I was the most conservative. I was a failure. I failed to address the fears of my BSU peers.

I WALKED OUT of that classroom building alone. I walked to the train station on the edge of campus, deciding on the long escalator down into the subway station that the BSU officers who voted down the 106 Campaign must be ignorant about racism, kind of like the White people supporting the Jena 6’s incarceration. Deciding on the screeching train ride up to North Philadelphia that the “ultimate evil was ignorance” and “the ultimate good was education.” Deciding as I lay flat on my couch and looked up at the ceiling mirror that a life of educational suasion would be more impactful than any other life I could choose.

I ran back down the lit path of educational suasion on the very night I failed to persuade my BSU peers. I failed at changing minds (let alone policy). But in all my enlightenment, I did not see myself as the failure. I saw my BSU peers as the failure. I did not look in the mirror at my “failure doctrine,” the doctrine of failing to make change and deflecting fault. When we fail to open the closed-minded consumers of racist ideas, we blame their closed-mindedness instead of our foolish decision to waste time reviving closed minds from the dead. When our vicious attacks on open-minded consumers of racist ideas fail to transform them, we blame their hate rather than our impatient and alienating hate of them. When people fail to consume our convoluted antiracist ideas, we blame their stupidity rather than our stupid lack of clarity. When we transform people and do not show them an avenue of support, we blame their lack of commitment rather than our lack of guidance. When the politician we supported does not change racist policy, we blame the intractability of racism rather than our support of the wrong politician. When we fail to gain support for a protest, we blame the fearful rather than our alienating presentation. When the protest fails, we blame racist power rather than our flawed protest. When our policy does not produce racial equity, we blame the people for not taking advantage of the new opportunity, not our flawed policy solution. The failure doctrine avoids the mirror of self- blame. The failure doctrine begets failure. The failure doctrine begets racism.

What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods, studied our ideologies and methods, refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked? When will we finally stop the insanity of doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result? Self-critique allows change. Changing shows flexibility. Antiracist power must be flexible to match the flexibility of racist power, propelled only by the craving for power to shape policy in their inequitable interests. Racist power believes in by any means necessary. We, their challengers, typically do not, not even some of those inspired by Malcolm X. We care the most about the moral and ideological and financial purity of our ideologies and strategies and fundraising and leaders and organizations. We care less about bringing equitable results for people in dire straits, as we say we are purifying ourselves for the people in dire straits, as our purifying keeps the people in dire straits. As we critique the privilege and inaction of racist power, we show our privilege and inaction by critiquing every effective strategy, ultimately justifying our inaction on the comfortable seat of privilege. Anything but flexible, we are too often bound by ideologies that are bound by failed strategies of racial change.

We use the terms “demonstration” and “protest” interchangeably, at our own peril, like we interchangeably use the terms “mobilizing” and “organizing.” A protest is organizing people for a prolonged campaign that forces racist power to change a policy. A demonstration is mobilizing people momentarily to publicize a problem. Speakers and placards and posts at marches, rallies, petitions, and viral hashtags demonstrate the problem. Demonstrations are, not surprisingly, a favorite of suasionists. Demonstrations annoy power in the way children crying about something they will never get annoy parents. Unless power cannot economically or politically or professionally afford bad press—as power could not during the Cold War, as power cannot during election season, as power cannot close to bankruptcy—power typically ignores demonstrations.

The most effective demonstrations (like the most effective educational efforts) help people find the antiracist power within. The antiracist power within is the ability to view my own racism in the mirror of my past and present, view my own antiracism in the mirror of my future, view my own racial groups as equal to other racial groups, view the world of racial inequity as abnormal, view my own power to resist and overtake racist power and policy. The most effective demonstrations (like the most effective educational efforts) provide methods for people to give their antiracist power, to give their human and financial resources, channeling attendees and their funds into organizations and protests and power- seizing campaigns. The fundraising behind the scenes of the Jena 6 demonstrations secured better defense attorneys, who, by June 26, 2009, quietly got the charges reduced to simple battery, to guilty pleas, to no jail time for the accused.

As important as finding the antiracist power within and financial support, demonstrations can provide emotional support for ongoing protests. Nighttime rallies in the churches of Montgomery, Alabama, rocking with the courage-locking words of Martin Luther King Jr., sustained those courageous Black women who primarily boycotted the public buses and drained that revenue stream for the city throughout 1956.

SUCCESS. THE DARK road we fear. Where antiracist power and policy predominate. Where equal opportunities and thus outcomes exist between the equal groups. Where people blame policy, not people, for societal problems. Where nearly everyone has more than they have today. Where racist power lives on the margins, like antiracist power does today. Where antiracist ideas are our common sense, like racist ideas are today.

Asking antiracists to change their perspective on racism can be as destabilizing as asking racists to change their perspective on the races. Antiracists can be as doctrinaire in their view of racism as racists can be in their view of not-racism. How can antiracists ask racists to open their minds and change when we are closed-minded and unwilling to change? I ignored my own hypocrisy, as people customarily do when it means giving up what they hold dear. Giving up my conception of racism meant giving up my view of the world and myself. I would not without a fight. I would lash out at anyone who “attacked” me with new ideas, unless I feared and respected them like I feared and respected Kaila and Yaba.

I DERIVED MY perspective on racism from a book I first read in graduate school. When both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spoke of “institutional racism” on the presidential campaign trail in 2016, when the activists who demonstrated at their events spoke of “institutional racism,” they were using, whether they realized it or not, a formulation coined in 1967 by Black Power activist Kwame Toure and political scientist Charles Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.

The perpetrators behind the five hundred Black babies dying each year in Birmingham “because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities” were no less overt than the “white terrorists” who killed four Black girls in a Birmingham church in 1963. In the way investigators can figure out exactly who those church bombers were, investigators can figure out exactly what policies caused five hundred Black babies to die each year and exactly who put those policies in place. In the way people have learned to see racist abuse coming out of the mouths of individual racists, people can learn to see racial inequities emerging from racist policies. All forms of racism are overt if our antiracist eyes are open to seeing racist policy in racial inequity.

But we do not see. Our eyes have been closed by racist ideas and the unacknowledged bond between the institutional antiracist and the post- racialist. They bond on the idea that institutional racism is often unseen and unseeable. Because it is covert, the institutional antiracist says. Because it hardly exists, the post-racialist says.

A similar bond exists between implicit bias and post-racialism. They bond on the idea that racist ideas are buried in the mind. Because they are implicit and unconscious, implicit bias says. Because they are dead, post-racialism says.

TOURE AND HAMILTON could not have foreseen how their concepts of overt and covert racism would be used by people across the ideological board to turn racism into something hidden and unknowable. Toure and Hamilton were understandably focused on distinguishing the individual from the institutional. They were reacting to the same moderate and liberal and assimilationist forces that all these years later still reduce racism to the individual acts of White Klansmen and Jim Crow politicians and Tea Party Republicans and N-word users and White nationalist shooters and Trumpian politicos. “ ‘Respectable’ individuals can absolve themselves from individual blame: they would never plant a bomb in a church; they would never stone a black family,” Toure and Hamilton wrote. “But they continue to support political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.”

HEARTBROKEN, ALICIA GARZA typed “Black Lives Matter” into the mourning nights, into the Black caskets piling up before her as people shouted all those names from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to Sandra Bland to Korryn Gaines. The deaths and accusations and denials and demonstrations and deaths—it all gave me the strength each day to research for Stamped from the Beginning.

By the summer of 2012, I was finding and tagging every racist idea I could find from history. Racist ideas piled up before me like trash at a landfill. Tens of thousands of pages of Black people being trashed as natural or nurtured beasts, devils, animals, rapists, slaves, criminals, kids, predators, brutes, idiots, prostitutes, cheats, and dependents. More than five hundred years of toxic ideas on the Black body. Day after week, week after month, month after year, oftentimes twelve hours a day for three horrifically long years, I waded through this trash, consumed this trash, absorbed its toxicity, before I released a tiny portion of this trash onto the page.

All that trash, ironically, cleansed my mind if it did not cleanse my gut. While collecting this trash, I realized I had been unwittingly doing so my whole life. Some I had tossed away after facing myself in the mirror. Some trash remained. Like the dirty bags or traces of “them n*****s” and “White people are devils” and “servile Asians” and “terrorist Middle Easterners” and “dangerous Black neighborhoods” and “weak Natives” and “angry Black women” and “invading Latinx” and “irresponsible Black mothers” and “deadbeat Black fathers.” A mission to uncover and critique America’s life of racist ideas turned into a mission to uncover and critique my life of racist ideas, which turned into a lifelong mission to be antiracist. It happens for me in successive steps, these steps to be an antiracist. I stop using the “I’m not a racist” or “I can’t be racist” defense of denial.

I admit the definition of racist (someone who is supporting racist policies or expressing racist ideas).

I confess the racist policies I support and racist ideas I express.

I accept their source (my upbringing inside a nation making us racist).

I acknowledge the definition of antiracist (someone who is supporting antiracist policies or expressing antiracist ideas).

I struggle for antiracist power and policy in my spaces. (Seizing a policymaking position. Joining an antiracist organization or protest. Publicly donating my time or privately donating my funds to antiracist policymakers, organizations, and protests fixated on changing power and policy.)

I struggle to remain at the antiracist intersections where racism is mixed with other bigotries. (Eliminating racial distinctions in biology and behavior. Equalizing racial distinctions in ethnicities, bodies, cultures, colors, classes, spaces, genders, and sexualities.)

I struggle to think with antiracist ideas. (Seeing racist policy in racial inequity. Leveling group differences. Not being fooled into generalizing individual negativity. Not being fooled by misleading statistics or theories that blame people for racial inequity.)

I did not need to forsake antiracist research and education. I needed to forsake my orientation to antiracist research and education. I had to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds. I had to start researching and educating to change policy. The former strategy produces a public scholar. The latter produces public scholarship.

OUR WORLD IS suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations; shutting down essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations’ racial inequities, their neighborhoods’ racial inequities, their occupations’ racial inequities, their institutions’ racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is the signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial—like the popular strategy of suasion—is suicidal.

Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward. Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward. Racist power is not godly. Racist policies are not indestructible. Racial inequities are not inevitable. Racist ideas are not natural to the human mind. Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.

But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.

A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin of Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories, although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces and windy light.

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.

It has been said, and I think the Japanese were the first to say it, that the four essential virtues are to be generous among the weak, and truthful among one's friends, and brave among one's enemies, and courteous at all times; and if we understand by courtesy not merely the gentleness the story-tellers have celebrated, but a delight in courtly things, in beautiful clothing and in beautiful verse, one understands that it was no formal succession of trials that bound the Fianna to one another. Only the Table Round, that is indeed, as it seems, a rivulet from the same river, is bound in a like fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the abstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and joyful knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But when Oisin or some kingly forerunner—Bran, son of Febal, or the like—rides or sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but looks for a more delighted companionship, or to be in love with faces that will never fade. No thought of any life greater than that of love, and the companionship of those that have drawn their swords upon the darkness of the world, ever troubles their delight in one another as it troubles Iseult amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles.

It sometimes seems to one as if there is a kind of day and night of religion, and that a period when the influences are those that shape the world is followed by a period when the greater power is in influences that would lure the soul out of the world, out of the body. When Oisin is speaking with S. Patrick of the friends and the life he has outlived, he can but cry out constantly against a religion that has no meaning for him. He laments, and the country-people have remembered his words for centuries: "I will cry my fill, but not for God, but because Finn and the Fianna are not living."

Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by the artist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to, but by adding a little to something which it has taken generations to invent, has always had a popular literature. One cannot say how much that literature has done for the vigour of the race, for one cannot count the hands its praise of kings and high-hearted queens made hot upon the sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it made lustful for strength and beauty. One remembers indeed that when the farming people and the labourers of the towns made their last attempt to cast out England by force of arms they named themselves after the companions of Finn.

And they had a well below the sea where the nine hazels of wisdom were growing; that is, the hazels of inspiration and of the knowledge of poetry. And their leaves and their blossoms would break out in the same hour, and would fall on the well in a shower that raised a purple wave. And then the five salmon that were waiting there would eat the nuts, and their colour would come out in the red spots of their skin, and any person that would eat one of those salmon would know all wisdom and all poetry. And there were seven streams of wisdom that sprang from that well and turned back to it again; and the people of many arts have all drank from that well.

Badb and Macha and the Morrigu, went to Teamhair where the Firbolgs were making their plans. And by the power of their enchantments they brought mists and clouds of darkness over the whole place, and they sent showers of fire and of blood over the people, the way they could not see or speak with one another through the length of three days.

to the north of the Hill of the Hostages was the stone, the Lia Fail, and it used to roar under the feet of every king that would take possession of Ireland.

But if Nuada won the battle, he lost his own arm in it, that was struck off by Sreng; and by that loss there came troubles and vexation on his people.

For it was a law with the Tuatha de Danaan that no man that was not perfect in shape should be king. And after Nuada had lost the battle he was put out of the kingship on that account.

And as to Bres himself, he put a tax on every house in Ireland of the milk of hornless dun cows, or of the milk of cows of some other single colour, enough for a hundred men. And one time, to deceive him, Nechtan singed all the cows of Ireland in a fire of fern, and then he smeared them with the ashes of flax seed, the way they were all dark brown. He did that by the advice of the Druid Findgoll, son of Findemas. And another time they made three hundred cows of wood with dark brown pails in place of udders, and the pails were filled with black bog stuff. Then Bres came to look at the cows, and to see them milked before him, and Cian, father of Lugh, was there. And when they were milked it was the bog stuff that was squeezed out; and Bres took a drink of it thinking it to be milk, and he was not the better of it for a long time.

And as to the Dagda, he was put to build raths, for he was a good builder, and he made a trench round Rath Brese. And he used often to be tired at the work, and one time he nearly gave in altogether for want of food, and this is the way that happened. He used to meet in the house an idle blind man, Cridenbel his name was, that had a sharp tongue, and that coveted the Dagda's share of food, for he thought his own to be small beside it. So he said to him: "For the sake of your good name let the three best bits of your share be given to me." And the Dagda gave in to that every night; but he was the worse of it, for what the blind man called a bit would be the size of a good pig, and with his three bits he would take a full third of the whole.

But one day, as the Dagda was in the trench, he saw his son, Angus Og, coming to him. "That is a good meeting," said Angus; "but what is on you, for you have no good appearance to-day?" "There is a reason for that," said the Dagda, "for every evening, Cridenbel, the blind man, makes a demand for the three best bits of my share of food, and takes them from me." "I will give you an advice," said Angus. He put his hand in his bag then, and took out three pieces of gold and gave them to him.

"Put these pieces of gold into the three bits you will give this evening to Cridenbel," he said, "and they will be the best bits in the dish, and the gold will turn within him the way he will die."

So in the evening the Dagda did that; and no sooner had Cridenbel swallowed down the gold than he died. Some of the people said then to the king: "The Dagda has killed Cridenbel, giving him some deadly herb." The king believed that, and there was anger on him against the Dagda, and he gave orders he should be put to death. But the Dagda said: "You are not giving the right judgment of a prince." And he told all that had happened, and how Cridenbel used to say, "Give me the three best bits before you, for my own share is not good to-night." "And on this night," he said, "the three pieces of gold were the best things before me, and I gave them to him, and he died."

The king gave orders then to have the body cut open. And they found the gold inside it, and they knew it was the truth the Dagda had told.

Now as to Nuada: after his arm being struck off, he was in his sickness for a while, and then Diancecht, the healer, made an arm of silver for him, with movement in every finger of it, and put it on him. And from that he was called Nuada Argat-lamh, of the Silver Hand, for ever after.

Now Miach, son of Diancecht, was a better hand at healing than his father, and had done many things. He met a young man, having but one eye, at Teamhair one time, and the young man said: "If you are a good physician you will put an eye in the place of the eye I lost." "I could put the eye of that cat in your lap in its place," said Miach. "I would like that well," said the young man. So Miach put the cat's eye in his head; but he would as soon have been without it after, for when he wanted to sleep and take his rest, it is then the eye would start at the squeaking of the mice, or the flight of the birds, or the movement of the rushes; and when he was wanting to watch an army or a gathering, it is then it was sure to be in a deep sleep.

And Miach was not satisfied with what his father had done to the king, and he took Nuada's own hand that had been struck off, and brought it to him and set it in its place, and he said: "Joint to joint, and sinew to sinew." Three days and three nights he was with the king; the first day he put the hand against his side, and the second day against his breast, till it was covered with skin, and the third day he put bulrushes that were blackened in the fire on it, and at the end of that time the king was healed.

But Diancecht was vexed when he saw his son doing a better cure than himself, and he threw his sword at his head, that it cut the flesh, but the lad healed the wound by means of his skill. Then Diancecht threw it a second time, that it reached the bone, but the lad was able to cure the wound. Then he struck him the third time and the fourth, till he cut out the brain, for he knew no physician could cure him after that blow; and Miach died, and he buried him.

And herbs grew up from his grave, to the number of his joints and sinews, three hundred and sixty-five. And Airmed, his sister, came and spread out her cloak and laid out the herbs in it, according to their virtue. But Diancecht saw her doing that, and he came and mixed up the herbs, so that no one knows all their right powers to this day.

Then when the Tuatha de Danaan saw Nuada as well as he was before, they gathered together to Teamhair, where Bres was, and they bade him give up the kingship, for he had held it long enough. So he had to give it up, though he was not very willing, and Nuada was put back in the kingship again.

There was sorrow on his father then, and he said: "What was it drove you out of the country you were king over?" And Bres said: "Nothing drove me out but my own injustice and my own hardness; I took away their treasures from the people, and their jewels, and their food itself. And there were never taxes put on them before I was their king."

"That is bad," said his father; "it is of their prosperity you had a right to think more than of your own kingship. And their good-will would be better than their curses," he said; "and what is it you are come to look for here?" "I am come to look for fighting men," said Bres, "that I may take Ireland by force." "You have no right to get it by injustice when you could not keep it by justice," said his father. "What advice have you for me then?" said Bres.

And Elathan bade him go to the chief king of the Fomor, Balor of the Evil Eye, to see what advice and what help would he give him.

And a young man came to the door where one of them was, and bade him bring him in to the king. "Who are you yourself?" said the door-keeper. "I am Lugh, son of Cian of the Tuatha de Danaan, and of Ethlinn, daughter of Balor, King of the Fomor," he said; "and I am foster-son of Taillte, daughter of the King of the Great Plain, and of Echaid the Rough, son of Duach." "What are you skilled in?" said the door-keeper; "for no one without an art comes into Teamhair." "Question me," said Lugh; "I am a carpenter." "We do not want you; we have a carpenter ourselves, Luchtar, son of Luachaid." "Then I am a smith." "We have a smith ourselves, Colum Cuaillemech of the Three New Ways." "Then I am a champion." "That is no use to us; we have a champion before, Ogma, brother to the king." "Question me again," he said; "I am a harper." "That is no use to us; we have a harper ourselves, Abhean, son of Bicelmos, that the Men of the Three Gods brought from the hills." "I am-a poet," he said then, "and a teller of tales." "That is no use to us; we have a teller of tales ourselves, Ere, son of Ethaman." "And I am a magician." "That is no use to us; we have plenty of magicians and people of power." "I am a physician," he said. "That is no use; we have Diancecht-for our physician." "Let me be a cup-bearer," he said. "We do not want you; we have nine cup-bearers ourselves." "I am a good worker in brass." "We have a worker in brass ourselves, that is Credne Cerd."

Then Lugh said: "Go and ask the king if he has any one man that can do all these things, and if he has, I will not ask to come into Teamhair." The door-keeper went into the king's house then and told him all that. "There is a young man at the door," he said, "and his name should be the Ildánach, the Master of all Arts, for all the things the people of your house can do, he himself is able to do every one of them." "Try him with the chess-boards," said Nuada. So the chess-boards were brought out, and every game that was played, Lugh won it. And when Nuada was told that, he said: "Let him in, for the like of him never came into Teamhair before."

It is the reason he was called "of the Evil Eye," there was a power of death in one of his eyes, so that no person could look at it and live. It is the way it got that power, he was passing one time by a house where his father's Druids were making spells of death, and the window being open he looked in, and the smoke of the poisonous spells was rising up, and it went into his eye. And from that time he had to keep it closed unless he wanted to be the death of some enemy, and then the men that were with him would lift the eyelid with a ring of ivory.

And it is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan.

But as to the Tuatha de Danaan after they were beaten, they would not go under the sway of the sons of Miled, but they went away by themselves. And because Manannan, son of Lir, understood all enchantments, they left it to him to find places for them where they would be safe from their enemies. So he chose out the most beautiful of the hills and valleys of Ireland for them to settle in; and he put hidden walls about them, that no man could see through, but they themselves could see through them and pass through them.

Caoilte went to a cairn that was near and that was full up of gold, that was wages earned by Conan Maol and hidden there, and he gave the gold to Bodb Dearg's daughter. And the people that were there wondered to see the girl so young and comely, and Caoilte so grey and bent and withered. "There is no wonder in that," said Caoilte, "for I am of the sons of Miled that wither and fade away, but she is of the Tuatha de Danaan that never change and that never die."

But however great a house the Dagda had, Angus got it away from him in the end, through the help of Manannan, son of Lir. For Manannan bade him to ask his father for it for the length of a day and a night, and that he by his art would take away his power of refusing. So Angus asked for the Brugh, and his father gave it to him for a day and a night. But when he asked it back again, it is what Angus said, that it had been given to him for ever, for the whole of life and time is made up of a day and a night, one following after the other.

It chanced one time Corrgenn, a great man of Connacht, came to visit him, and his wife along with him. And while they were there, Corrgenn got it in his mind that there was something that was not right going on between his wife and Aedh, one of the sons of the Dagda. And great jealousy and anger came on him, and he struck at the young man and killed him before his father's face.

Every one thought the Dagda would take Corrgenn's life then and there in revenge for his son's life. But he would not do that, for he said if his son was guilty, there was no blame to be put on Corrgenn for doing what he did. So he spared his life for that time, but if he did, Corrgenn did not gain much by it. For the punishment he put on him was to take the dead body of the young man on his back, and never to lay it down till he would find a stone that would be its very fit in length and in breadth, and that would make a gravestone for him; and when he had found that, he could bury him in the nearest hill.

So Corrgenn had no choice but to go, and he set out with his load; but he had a long way to travel before he could find a stone that would fit, and it is where he found one at last, on the shore of Loch Feabhail. So then he left the body up on the nearest hill, and he went down and raised the stone and brought it up and dug a grave and buried the Dagda's son. And it is many an Ochone! he gave when he was putting the stone over him, and when he had that done he was spent, and he dropped dead there and then.

And the Dagda brought his two builders, Garbhan and Imheall, to the place, and he bade them build a rath there round the grave. It was Garbhan cut the stones and shaped them, and Imheall set them all round the house till the work was finished, and then he closed the top of the house with a slab. And the place was called the Hill of Aileac, that is, the Hill of Sighs and of a Stone, for it was tears of blood the Dagda shed on account of the death of his son.

One time Bran, son of Febal, was out by himself near his dun, and he heard music behind him. And it kept always after him, and at last he fell asleep with the sweetness of the sound. And when he awoke from his sleep he saw beside him a branch of silver, and it having white blossoms, and the whiteness of the silver was the same as the whiteness of the blossoms.

And he brought the branch in his hand into the royal house, and when all his people were with him they saw a woman with strange clothing standing in the house.

And she began to make a song for Bran, and all the people were looking at her and listening to her, and it is what she said:

"I bring a branch of the apple-tree from Emhain, from the far island around which are the shining horses of the Son of Lir. A delight of the eyes is the plain where the hosts hold their games; curragh racing against chariot in the White Silver Plain to the south.

"There are feet of white bronze under it, shining through life and time; a comely level land through the length of the world's age, and many blossoms falling on it.

"There is an old tree there with blossoms, and birds calling from among them; every colour is shining there, delight is common, and music, in the Gentle-Voiced Plain, in the Silver Cloud Plain to the south.

"Keening is not used, or treachery, in the tilled familiar land; there is nothing hard or rough, but sweet music striking on the ear.

"To be without grief, without sorrow, without death, without any sickness, without weakness; that is the sign of Emhain; it is not common wonder that is.

"There is nothing to liken its mists to, the sea washes the wave against the land; brightness falls from its hair.

"There are riches, there are treasures of every colour in the Gentle Land, the Bountiful Land. Sweet music to be listening to; the best of wine to drink.

"Golden chariots in the Plain of the Sea, rising up to the sun with the tide; silver chariots and bronze chariots on the Plain of Sports.

"Gold-yellow horses on the strand, and crimson horses, and others with wool on their backs, blue like the colour of the sky.

"It is a day of lasting weather, silver is dropping on the land; a pure white cliff on the edge of the sea, getting its warmth from the sun.

"The host race over the Plain of Sports; it is beautiful and not weak their game is; death or the ebbing of the tide will not come to them in the Many-Coloured Land.

"There will come at sunrise a fair man, lighting up the level lands; he rides upon the plain that is beaten by the waves, he stirs the sea till it is like blood.

"An army will come over the clear sea, rowing to the stone that is in sight, that a hundred sounds of music come from.

"It sings a song to the army; it is not sad through the length of time; it increases music with hundreds singing together; they do not look for death or the ebb-tide.

"There are three times fifty far islands in the ocean to the west of us, and every one of them twice or three times more than Ireland.

"It is not to all of you I am speaking, though I have made all these wonders known. Let Bran listen from the crowd of the world to all the wisdom that has been told him.

"Do not fall upon a bed of sloth; do not be overcome by drunkenness; set out on your voyage over the clear sea, and you may chance to come to the Land of Women."

And when they had been rowing for two days and two nights, they saw a man coming towards them in a chariot, over the sea. And the man made himself known to them, and he said that he was Manannan, son of Lir.

And then Manannan spoke to him in a song, and it is what he said:

"It is what Bran thinks, he is going in his curragh over the wonderful, beautiful clear sea; but to me, from far off in my chariot, it is a flowery plain he is riding on.

"What is a clear sea to the good boat Bran is in, is a happy plain with many flowers to me in my two-wheeled chariot.

"It is what Bran sees, many waves beating across the clear sea; it is what I myself see, red flowers without any fault.

"The sea-horses are bright in summer-time, as far as Bran's eyes can reach; there is a wood of beautiful acorns under the head of your little boat.

"A wood with blossom and with fruit, that has the smell of wine; a wood without fault, without withering, with leaves of the colour of gold.

"Let Bran row on steadily, it is not far to the Land of Women; before the setting of the sun you will reach Emhain, of many-coloured hospitality."

It was not long after that they reached to the Land of Women. And they saw the chief one of the women at the landing-place, and it is what she said: "Come hither to land, Bran, son of Febal, it is welcome your coming is." But Bran did not dare to go on shore. Then the woman threw a ball of thread straight to him, and he caught it in his hand, and it held fast to his palm, and the woman kept the thread in her own hand, and she pulled the curragh to the landing-place.

On that they went into a grand house, where there was a bed for every couple, three times nine beds. And the food that was put on every dish never came to an end, and they had every sort of food and of drink they wished for.

And it seemed to them they were only a year there when the desire of home took hold on one of them, Nechtan, son of Collbrain, and his kinsmen were begging and praying Bran to go back with him to Ireland. The woman said there would be repentance on them if they went; but in spite of that they set out in the end. And the woman said to them not to touch the land when they would come to Ireland, and she bade them to visit and to bring with them the man they left in the Island of Joy.

So they went on towards Ireland till they came to a place called Srub Bruin. And there were people on the strand that asked them who they were that were coming over the sea. And Bran said: "I am Bran, son of Febal." But the people said: "We know of no such man, though the voyage of Bran is in our very old stories."

Then Nechtan, son of Collbrain, made a leap out of the curragh, and no sooner did he touch the shore of Ireland than he was a heap of ashes, the same as if he had been in the earth through hundreds of years.

And then Bran told the whole story of his wanderings to the people, from the beginning. And after that he bade them farewell, and his wanderings from that time are not known.

It chanced one day he was with his father Conn, King of Teamhair, on the Hill of Uisnach, and he saw a woman having wonderful clothing coming towards him. "Where is it you come from?" he asked her. "I come," she said, "from Tir-nam-Beo, the Land of the Ever-Living Ones, where no death comes. We use feasts that are lasting," she said, "and we do every kind thing without quarrelling, and we are called the people of the Sidhe." "Who are you speaking to, boy?" said Conn to him then, for no one saw the strange woman but only Connla. "He is speaking to a high woman that death or old age will never come to," she said. "I am asking him to come to Magh Mell, the Pleasant Plain where the triumphant king is living, and there he will be a king for ever without sorrow or fret. Come with me, Connla of the Red Hair," she said, "of the fair freckled neck and of the ruddy cheek; come with me, and your body will not wither from its youth and its comeliness for ever."

They went on then west to Loch Dairbhreach, the Lake of the Oaks, and the horses were stopped there. And Aoife bade the children of Lir to go out and bathe in the lake, and they did as she bade them. And as soon as Aoife saw them out in the lake she struck them with a Druid rod, and put on them the shape of four swans, white and beautiful. And it is what she said: "Out with you, children of the king, your luck is taken away from you for ever; it is sorrowful the story will be to your friends; it is with flocks of birds your cries will be heard for ever."

And Fionnuala said: "Witch, we know now what your name is, you have struck us down with no hope of relief; but although you put us from wave to wave, there are times when we will touch the land. We shall get help when we are seen; help, and all that is best for us; even though we have to sleep upon the lake, it is our minds will be going abroad early."

And then the four children of Lir turned towards Aoife, and it is what Fionnuala said: "It is a bad deed you have done, Aoife, and it is a bad fulfilling of friendship, you to destroy us without cause; and vengeance for it will come upon you, and you will fall in satisfaction for it, for your power for our destruction is not greater than the power of our friends to avenge it on you; and put some bounds now," she said, "to the time this enchantment is to stop on us." "I will do that," said Aoife, "and it is worse for you, you to have asked it of me. And the bounds I set to your time are this, till the Woman from the South and the Man from the North will come together. And since you ask to hear it of me," she said, "no friends and no power that you have will be able to bring you out of these shapes you are in through the length of your lives, until you have been three hundred years on Loch Dairbhreach, and three hundred years on Sruth na Maoile between Ireland and Alban, and three hundred years at Irrus Domnann and Inis Gluaire; and these are to be your journeys from this out," she said.

But then repentance came on Aoife, and she said: "Since there is no other help for me to give you now, you may keep your own speech; and you will be singing sweet music of the Sidhe, that would put the men of the earth to sleep, and there will be no music in the world equal to it; and your own sense and your own nobility will stay with you, the way it will not weigh so heavy on you to be in the shape of birds. And go away out of my sight now, children of Lir," she said, "with your white faces, with your stammering Irish. It is a great curse on tender lads, they to be driven out on the rough wind. Nine hundred years to be on the water, it is a long time for any one to be in pain; it is I put this on you through treachery, it is best for you to do as I tell you now.

The teaching of Manannan without deceit, the talk of Bodb Dearg on the pleasant ridge; the voice of Angus, his sweet kisses; it is by their side I used to be without grief.

So they set out flying through the air lightly till they came to Sidhe Fionnachaidh; and it is how they found the place, empty before them, and nothing in it but green hillocks and thickets of nettles, without a house, without a fire, without a hearthstone. And the four pressed close to one another then, and they gave out three sorrowful cries, and Fionnuala made this complaint:—

"It is a wonder to me this place is, and it without a house, without a dwelling-place. To see it the way it is now, Ochone! it is bitterness to my heart.

"Without dogs, without hounds for hunting, without women, without great kings; we never knew it to be like this when our father was in it.

"Without horns, without cups, without drinking in the lighted house; without young men, without riders; the way it is to-night is a foretelling of sorrow.

"The people of the place to be as they are now, Ochone! it is grief to my heart! It is plain to my mind to-night the lord of the house is not living.

"Och, house where we used to see music and playing and the gathering of people! I think it a great change to see it lonely the way it is to-night.

It was about that time it happened them to meet with a young man of good race, and his name was Aibric; and he often took notice of the birds, and their singing was sweet to him and he loved them greatly, and they loved him. And it is this young man that told the whole story of all that had happened them, and put it in order.

And the story he told of what happened them in the end is this.

It was after the faith of Christ and blessed Patrick came into Ireland, that Saint Mochaomhog came to Inis Gluaire. And the first night he came to the island, the children of Lir heard the voice of his bell, ringing near them. And the brothers started up with fright when they heard it "We do not know," they said, "what is that weak, unpleasing voice we hear."

They came to the land after that, and they put trust in Mochaomhog, and he brought them to his own dwelling-place, and they used to be hearing Mass with him. And he got a good smith and bade him make chains of bright silver for them, and he put a chain between Aodh and Fionnuala, and a chain between Conn and Fiachra. And the four of them were raising his heart and gladdening his mind, and no danger and no distress that was on the swans before put any trouble on them now.

Now the king of Connacht at that time was Lairgnen, son of Colman, son of Cobthach, and Deoch, daughter of Finghin, was his wife. And that was the coming together of the Man from the North and the Woman from the South, that Aoife had spoken of.

And the woman heard talk of the birds, and a great desire came on her to get them, and she bade Lairgnen to bring them to her, and he said he would ask them of Mochaomhog.

And she gave her word she would not stop another night with him unless he would bring them to her. And she set out from the house there and then. And Lairgnen sent messengers after her to bring her back, and they did not overtake her till she was at Cill Dun. She went back home with them then, and Lairgnen sent messengers to ask the birds of Mochaomhog, and he did not get them.

There was great anger on Lairgnen then, and he went himself to the place Mochaomhog was, and he asked was it true he had refused him the birds. "It is true indeed," said he. At that Lairgnen rose up, and he took hold of the swans, and pulled them off the altar, two birds in each hand, to bring them away to Deoch. But no sooner had he laid his hand on them than their bird skins fell off, and what was in their place was three lean, withered old men and a thin withered old woman, without blood or flesh.

And Lairgnen gave a great start at that, and he went out from the place. It is then Fionnuala said to Mochaomhog: "Come and baptize us now, for it is short till our death comes; and it is certain you do not think worse of parting with us than we do of parting with you. And make our grave afterwards," she said, "and lay Conn at my right side and Fiachra on my left side, and Aodh before my face, between my two arms. And pray to the God of Heaven," she said, "that you may be able to baptize us."

The children of Lir were baptized then, and they died and were buried as Fionnuala had desired; Fiachra and Conn one at each side of her, and Aodh before her face. And a stone was put over them, and their names were written in Ogham, and they were keened there, and heaven was gained for their souls.

And that is the fate of the children of Lir so far.

And then he said farewell to Crimall, and went on to learn poetry from Finegas, a poet that was living at the Boinn, for the poets thought it was always on the brink of water poetry was revealed to them. And he did not give him his own name, but he took the name of Deimne. Seven years, now, Finegas had stopped at the Boinn, watching the salmon, for it was in the prophecy that he would eat the salmon of knowledge that would come there, and that he would have all knowledge after. And when at the last the salmon of knowledge came, he brought it to where Finn was, and bade him to roast it, but he bade him not to eat any of it. And when Finn brought him the salmon after a while he said: "Did you eat any of it at all, boy?" "I did not," said Finn; "but I burned my thumb putting down a blister that rose on the skin, and after doing that, I put my thumb in my mouth." "What is your name, boy?" said Finegas. "Deimne," said he. "It is not, but it is Finn your name is, and it is to you and not to myself the salmon was given in the prophecy." With that he gave Finn the whole of the salmon, and from that time Finn had the knowledge that came from the nuts of the nine hazels of wisdom that grow beside the well that is below the sea.

And besides the wisdom he got then, there was a second wisdom came to him another time, and this is the way it happened. There was a well of the moon belonging to Beag, son of Buan, of the Tuatha de Danaan, and whoever would drink out of it would get wisdom, and after a second drink he would get the gift of foretelling. And the three daughters of Beag, son of Buan, had charge of the well, and they would not part with a vessel of it for anything less than red gold. And one day Finn chanced to be hunting in the rushes near the well, and the three women ran out to hinder him from coming to it, and one of them that had a vessel of the water in her hand, threw it at him to stop him, and a share of the water went into his mouth. And from that out he had all the knowledge that the water of that well could give.

Every year, now, at Samhain time, for nine years, there had come a man of the Tuatha de Danaan out of Sidhe Finnachaidh in the north, and had burned up Teamhair. Aillen, son of Midhna, his name was, and it is the way he used to come, playing music of the Sidhe, and all the people that heard it would fall asleep. And when they were all in their sleep, he would let a flame of fire out of his mouth, and would blow the flame till all Teamhair was burned.

The king rose up at the feast after a while, and his smooth horn in his hand, and it is what he said: "If I could find among you, men of Ireland, any man that would keep Teamhair till the break of day to-morrow without being burned by Aillen, son of Midhna, I would give him whatever inheritance is right for him to have, whether it be much or little."

But the men of Ireland made no answer, for they knew well that at the sound of the sweet pitiful music made by that comely man of the Sidhe, even women in their pains and men that were wounded would fall asleep.

It is then Finn rose up and spoke to the King of Ireland. "Who will be your sureties that you will fulfil this?" he said. "The kings of the provinces of Ireland," said the king, "and Cithruadh with his Druids." So they gave their pledges, and Finn took in hand to keep Teamhair safe till the breaking of day on the morrow.

Now there was a fighting man among the followers of the King of Ireland, Fiacha, son of Conga, that Cumhal, Finn's father, used to have a great liking for, and he said to Finn: "Well, boy," he said, "what reward would you give me if I would bring you a deadly spear, that no false cast was ever made with?" "What reward are you asking of me?" said Finn. "Whatever your right hand wins at any time, the third of it to be mine," said Fiacha, "and a third of your trust and your friendship to be mine." "I will give you that," said Finn. Then Fiacha brought him the spear, unknown to the sons of Morna or to any other person, and he said: "When you will hear the music of the Sidhe, let you strip the covering off the head of the spear and put it to your forehead, and the power of the spear will not let sleep come upon you."

Then Finn rose up before all the men of Ireland, and he made a round of the whole of Teamhair. And it was not long till he heard the sorrowful music, and he stripped the covering from the head of the spear, and he held the power of it to his forehead. And Aillen went on playing his little harp, till he had put every one in their sleep as he was used; and then he let a flame of fire out from his mouth to burn Teamhair. And Finn held up his fringed crimson cloak against the flame, and it fell down through the air and went into the ground, bringing the four-folded cloak with it deep into the earth.

And when Aillen saw his spells were destroyed, he went back to Sidhe Finnachaidh on the top of Slieve Fuad; but Finn followed after him there, and as Aillen was going in at the door he made a cast of the spear that went through his heart. And he struck his head off then, and brought it back to Teamhair, and fixed it on a crooked pole and left it there till the rising of the sun over the heights and invers of the country.

And as to Finn himself, he was a king and a seer and a poet; a Druid and a knowledgeable man; and everything he said was sweet-sounding to his people. And a better fighting man than Finn never struck his hand into a king's hand, and whatever any one ever said of him, he was three times better. And of his justice it used to be said, that if his enemy and his own son had come before him to be judged, it is a fair judgment he would have given between them. And as to his generosity it used to be said, he never denied any man as long as he had a mouth to eat with, and legs to bring away what he gave him; and he left no woman without her bride-price, and no man without his pay; and he never promised at night what he would not fulfil on the morrow, and he never promised in the day what he would not fulfil at night, and he never forsook his right-hand friend. And if he was quiet in peace he was angry in battle, and Oisin his son and Osgar his son's son followed him in that. There was a young man of Ulster came and claimed kinship with them one time, saying they were of the one blood. "If that is so," said Oisin, "it is from the men of Ulster we took the madness and the angry heart we have in battle." "That is so indeed," said Finn.

This, now, is the story of the birth of Bran.

Finn's mother, Muirne, came one time to Almhuin, and she brought with her Tuiren, her sister. And Iollan Eachtach, a chief man of the Fianna of Ulster, was at Almhuin at the time, and he gave his love to Tuiren, and asked her in marriage, and brought her to his own house. But before they went, Finn made him gave his word he would bring her back safe and sound if ever he asked for her, and he bade him find sureties for himself among the chief men of the Fianna. And Iollan did that, and the sureties he got were Caoilte and Goll and Lugaidh Lamha, and it was Lugaidh gave her into the hand of Iollan Eachtach.

But before Iollan made that marriage, he had a sweetheart of the Sidhe, Uchtdealb of the Fair Breast; and there came great jealousy on her when she knew he had taken a wife. And she took the appearance of Finn's woman-messenger, and she came to the house where Tuiren was, and she said: "Finn sends health and long life to you, queen, and he bids you to make a great feast; and come with me now," she said, "till I speak a few words with you, for there is hurry on me."

So Tuiren went out with her, and when they were away from the house the woman of the Sidhe took out her dark Druid rod from under her cloak and gave her a blow of it that changed her into a hound, the most beautiful that was ever seen. And then she went on, bringing the hound with her, to the house of Fergus Fionnliath, king of the harbour of Gallimh. And it is the way Fergus was, he was the most unfriendly man to dogs in the whole world, and he would not let one stop in the same house with him. But it is what Uchtdealb said to him: "Finn wishes you life and health, Fergus, and he says to you to take good care of his hound till he comes himself; and mind her well," she said, "for she is with young, and do not let her go hunting when her time is near, or Finn will be no way thankful to you." "I wonder at that message," said Fergus, "for Finn knows well there is not in the world a man has less liking for dogs than myself. But for all that," he said, "I will not refuse Finn the first time he sent a hound to me."

And when he brought the hound out to try her, she was the best he ever knew, and she never saw the wild creature she would not run down; and Fergus took a great liking for hounds from that out.

And when her time came near, they did not let her go hunting any more, and she gave birth to two whelps.

And as to Finn, when he heard his mother's sister was not living with Iollan Eachtach, he called to him for the fulfilment of the pledge that was given to the Fianna. And Iollan asked time to go looking for Tuiren, and he gave his word that if he did not find her, he would give himself up in satisfaction for her. So they agreed to that, and Iollan went to the hill where Uchtdealb was, his sweetheart of the Sidhe, and told her the way things were with him, and the promise he had made to give himself up to the Fianna. "If that is so," said she, "and if you will give me your pledge to keep me as your sweetheart to the end of your life, I will free you from that danger." So Iollan gave her his promise, and she went to the house of Fergus Fionnliath, and she brought Tuiren away and put her own shape on her again, and gave her up to Finn. And Finn gave her to Lugaidh Lamha that asked her in marriage.

And as to the two whelps, they stopped always with Finn, and the names he gave them were Bran and Sceolan.

It happened one time Finn and his men were coming back from the hunting, a beautiful fawn started up before them, and they followed after it, men and dogs, till at last they were all tired and fell back, all but Finn himself and Bran and Sceolan. And suddenly as they were going through a valley, the fawn stopped and lay down on the smooth grass, and Bran and Sceolan came up with it, and they did not harm it at all, but went playing about it, licking its neck and its face.

There was wonder on Finn when he saw that, and he went on home to Almhuin, and the fawn followed after him playing with the hounds, and it came with them into the house at Almhuin. And when Finn was alone late that evening, a beautiful young woman having a rich dress came before him, and she told him it was she herself was the fawn he was after hunting that day. "And it is for refusing the love of Fear Doirche, the Dark Druid of the Men of Dea," she said, "I was put in this shape. And through the length of three years," she said, "I have lived the life of a wild deer in a far part of Ireland, and I am hunted like a wild deer. And a serving-man of the Dark Druid took pity on me," she said, "and he said that if I was once within the dun of the Fianna of Ireland, the Druid would have no more power over me. So I made away, and I never stopped through the whole length of a day till I came into the district of Almhuin. And I never stopped then till there was no one after me but only Bran and Sceolan, that have human wits; and I was safe with them, for they knew my nature to be like their own."

"While you were away fighting, your likeness, and the likeness of Bran and of Sceolan appeared before the dun, and we thought we heard the sweet call of the Dord Fiann. And Sadbh, that was so good and so beautiful, came out of the house," they said, "and she went out of the gates, and she would not listen to us, and we could not stop her." "Let me go meet my love," she said, "my husband, the father of the child that is not born." And with that she went running out towards the shadow of yourself that was before her, and that had its arms stretched out to her. But no sooner did she touch it than she gave a great cry, and the shadow lifted up a hazel rod, and on the moment it was a fawn was standing on the grass. Three times she turned and made for the gate of the dun, but the two hounds the shadow had with him went after her and took her by the throat and dragged her back to him. "And by your hand of valour, Finn," they said, "we ourselves made no delay till we went out on the plain after her. But it is our grief, they had all vanished, and there was not to be seen woman, or fawn or Druid, but we could hear the quick tread of feet on the hard plain, and the howling of dogs. And if you would ask every one of us in what quarter he heard those sounds, he would tell you a different one."

And through the length of seven years from that time, whenever he was not out fighting against the enemies of Ireland, he went searching and ever searching in every far corner for beautiful Sadbh. And there was great trouble on him all the time, unless he might throw it off for a while in hunting or in battle. And through all that time he never brought out to any hunting but the five hounds he had most trust in, Bran and Sceolan and Lomaire and Brod and Lomluath, the way there would be no danger for Sadbh if ever he came on her track.

But after the end of seven years, Finn and some of his chief men were hunting on the sides of Beinn Gulbain, and they heard a great outcry among the hounds, that were gone into some narrow place. And when they followed them there, they saw the five hounds of Finn in a ring, and they keeping back the other hounds, and in the middle of the ring was a young boy, with high looks, and he naked and having long hair. And he was no way daunted by the noise of the hounds, and did not look at them at all, but at the men that were coming up. And as soon as the fight was stopped Bran and Sceolan went up to the little lad, and whined and licked him, that any one would think they had forgotten their master. Finn and the others came up to him then, and put their hands on his head, and made much of him. And they brought him to their own hunting cabin, and he ate and drank with them, and before long he lost his wildness and was the same as themselves. And as to Bran and Sceolan, they were never tired playing about him.

And it is what Finn thought, there was some look of Sadbh in his face, and that it might be he was her son, and he kept him always beside him. And little by little when the boy had learned their talk, he told them all he could remember. He used to be with a deer he loved very much, he said, and that cared and sheltered him, and it was in a wide place they used to be, having hills and valleys and streams and woods in it, but that was shut in with high cliffs on every side, that there was no way of escape from it. And he used to be eating fruits and roots in the summer, and in the winter there was food left for him in the shelter of a cave. And a dark-looking man used to be coming to the place, and sometimes he would speak to the deer softly and gently, and sometimes with a loud angry voice. But whatever way he spoke, she would always draw away from him with the appearance of great dread on her, and the man would go away in great anger. And the last time he saw the deer, his mother, the dark man was speaking to her for a long time, from softness to anger. And at the end he struck her with a hazel rod, and with that she was forced to follow him, and she looking back all the while at the child, and crying after him that any one would pity her. And he tried hard to follow after her, and made every attempt, and cried out with grief and rage, but he had no power to move, and when he could hear his mother no more he fell on the grass and his wits went from him. And when he awoke it is on the side of the hill he was, where the hounds found him. And he searched a long time for the place where he was brought up, but he could not find it.

And the name the Fianna gave him was Oisin, and it is he was their maker of poems, and their good fighter afterwards.

Then they drew lots, and the lot fell to Dubh to go on the first watch. So he set fire to his log, and he went out around the place, and Bran with him. He went farther and farther till at last he saw a bright light, and when he came to the place where it was, he saw a large house. He went inside, and there was a great company of very strange-looking men in it, and they drinking out of a single cup. One of the men, that seemed to be the highest, gave the cup to the man nearest him; and after he had drunk his fill he passed it on to the next, and so on to the last. And while it was going round, he said: "This is the great cup that was taken from Finn, son of Cumhal, a hundred years ago, and however many men may be together, every man of them can drink his fill from it, of whatever sort of drink he has a mind for."

Dubh was sitting near the door, on the edge of the crowd, and when the cup came to him he took a drink from it, and then he slipped away in the dark, bringing it with him. And when he came to the place where Finn was, his log was burned out.

Then it was the turn of Dun to go out, for the second lot had fallen on him, and he put a light to his log, and went out, and Bran with him.

He walked on through the night till he saw a fire that was shining from a large house, and when he went in he saw a crowd of men, and they fighting. And a very old man that was in a high place above the rest called out: "Stop fighting now, for I have a better gift for you than the one you lost to-night." And with that he drew a knife out of his belt and held it up, and said: "This is the wonderful knife, the small knife of division, that was stolen from Finn, son of Cumhal, a hundred years ago; and you have but to cut on a bone with that knife and you will get your fill of the best meat in the world." Then he gave the knife to the man nearest him, and a bare bone with it, and the man began to cut, and there came off the bone slices of the best meat in the world.

The knife and the bone were sent round then from man to man till they came to Dun, and as soon as he had the knife in his hand he slipped out unknown and hurried back, and he had just got to the well where Finn was, when his part of the log burned out.

Then Glasan lighted his log and went out on his watch till he came to the house, the same way the others did. And he looked in and he saw the floor full of dead bodies, and he thought to himself: "There must be some great wonder here. And if I lie down on the floor and put some of the bodies over me," he said, "I will be able to see all that happens."

So he lay down and pulled some of the bodies over him, and he was not long there till he saw an old hag coming into the house, having one leg and one arm and one upper tooth, that was long enough to serve her in place of a crutch. And when she came inside the door she took up the first dead body she met with, and threw it aside, for it was lean. And as she went on, she took two bites out of every fat body she met with, and threw away every lean one.

She had her fill of flesh and blood before she came to Glasan, and she dropped down on the floor and fell asleep, and Glasan thought that every breath she drew would bring down the roof on his head. He rose up then and looked at her, and wondered at the bulk of her body. And at last he drew his sword and hit her a slash that killed her; but if he did, three young men leaped out of her body. And Glasan made a stroke that killed the first of them, and Bran killed the second, but the third made his escape.

Glasan made his way back then, and just when he got to where Finn was, his log of wood was burned out, and the day was beginning to break.

And when Finn rose up in the morning he asked news of the three watchers, and they gave him the cup and the knife and told him all they had seen, and he gave great praise to Dubh and to Dun; but to Glasan he said: "It might have been as well for you to have left that old hag alone, for I am in dread the third young man may bring trouble on us all."

the Red-Haired Man served Finn well through the length of twenty years. But in the twenty-first year he began to waste and to wither away, and he died.

And when he was dead, the Fianna were no way inclined to go to Inis Caol to bury him. But Finn said he would break his word for no man, and that he himself would bring his body there. And he took an old white horse that had been turned loose on the hills, and that had got younger and not older since it was put out, and he put the body of the Red-Haired Man on its back, and let it take its own way, and he himself followed it, and twelve men of the Fianna.

And when they came to Inis Caol they saw no trace of the horse or of the body. And there was an open house on the island, and they went in. And there were seats for every man of them inside, and they sat down to rest for a while.

But when they tried to rise up it failed them to do it, for there was enchantment on them. And they saw the Red-Haired Man standing before them in that moment.

"The time is come now," he said, "for me to get satisfaction from you for the death of my mother and my two brothers that were killed by Glasan in the house of the dead bodies." He began to make an attack on them then, and he would have made an end of them all, but Finn took hold of the Dord Fiann, and blew a great blast on it.

And before the Red-Haired Man was able to kill more than three of them, Diarmuid, grandson of Duibhne, that had heard the sound of the Dord Fiann, came into the house and made an end of him, and put an end to the enchantment. And Finn, with the nine that were left of the Fianna, came back again to Almhuin.

And all the armies of the strangers gave a great shout of laughter, for they thought all Finn's men had been made an end of, when he sent a young lad like that against their best champion. And when the boy heard that, his courage grew the greater, and he fell on Dolar Durba and gave him many wounds before he knew he was attacked at all. And they fought a very hard fight together, till their shields and their swords were broken in pieces. And that did not stop the battle, but they grappled together and fought and wrestled that way, till the tide went over them and drowned them both. And when the sea went over them the armies on each side gave out a great sorrowful cry.

And after the ebb-tide on the morrow, the two bodies were found cold and quiet, each one held fast by the other. But Dolar Durba was beneath the king's son, so they knew it was the young lad was the best and had got the victory. And they buried him, and put a flag-stone over his grave, and keened him there.

the creatures of the high air answered to the battle, foretelling the destruction that would be done that day; and the sea chattered of the losses, and the waves gave heavy shouts keening them, and the water-beasts roared to one another, and the rough hills creaked with the danger of the battle, and the woods trembled mourning the heroes, and the grey stones cried out at their deeds, and the wind sobbed telling them, and the earth shook, foretelling the slaughter; and the cries of the grey armies put a blue cloak over the sun, and the clouds were dark; and the hounds and the whelps and the crows, and the witches of the valley, and the powers of the air, and the wolves of the forests, howled from every quarter and on every side of the armies, urging them against one another.

By my word," he said, "the tree-tops of the thickest forest in the whole of the western world are not closer together than the armies are now. For the bosses of their shields are in one another's hands. And there is fire coming from the edges of their swords," he said, "and blood is raining down like a shower on a day of harvest; and there were never so many leaves torn by the wind from a great forest as there are locks of long golden hair, and of black curled hair, cut off by sharp weapons, blowing into the clouds at this time. And there is no person could tell one man from another, now," he said, "unless it might be by their voices." With that he went into the very middle of the fight to praise and to hearten the men of the Fianna.

With that the woman-fighter came towards him. "O Finn," she said, "it is little satisfaction you are to me for all the kings and lords that have fallen by you and by your people; but for all that," she said, "there is nothing better for me to get than your own self and whatever is left of your people." "You will not get that," said Finn, "for I will lay your head in its bed of blood the same as I did to every other one." Then those two attacked one another like as if there had risen to smother one another the flooded wave of Cliodna, and the seeking wave of Tuaigh, and the big brave wave of Rudraighe. And though the woman-warrior fought for a long time, a blow from Finn reached to her at last and cut through the royal crown, and with a second blow he struck her head off. And then he fell himself in his bed of blood, and was the same as dead, but that he rose again.

And after that great battle of the White Strand, that lasted a year and a day, there was many a sword and shield left broken, and many a dead body lying on the ground, and many a fighting man left with a foolish smile on his face.

And the great name that was on the armies of the World went from them to the Fianna of Ireland; and they took the ships and the gold and the silver and all the spoils of the armies of the World. And from that time the Fianna had charge of the whole of Ireland, to keep it from the Fomor and from any that might come against it.

And they never lost power from that time until the time of their last battle, the sorrowful battle of Gabhra.

Finn called for a great hunt one time on the plains of Magh Chonaill and in the forest parts of Cairbre of the Nuts. And he himself went up to the top of Ceiscoran, and his two dogs Bran and Sceolan with him.

And the Fianna were shouting through the whole country where they were hunting, the way the deer were roused in their wild places and the badgers in their holes, and foxes in their wanderings, and birds on the wing.

And Conaran, son of Imidd, of the Tuatha de Danaan, had the sway in Ceiscoran at that time, and when he heard the shouting and the cry of the hounds all around, he bade his three daughters that had a great share of enchantments, to do vengeance on Finn for his hunting.

The three women went then to the opening of a cave that was in the hills, and there they sat down together, and they put three strong enchanted hanks of yarn on crooked holly-sticks, and began to reel them off outside the cave.

They were not long there till Finn and Conan came towards them, and saw the three ugly old hags at their work, their coarse hair tossed, their eyes red and bleary, their teeth sharp and crooked, their arms very long, their nails like the tips of cows' horns, and the three spindles in their hands.

Finn and Conan passed through the hanks of yarn to get a better look at the hags. And no sooner had they done that, than a deadly trembling came on them and a weakness, and the bold hags took hold of them and put them in tight bonds.

besides his sword, Mac an Luin, Finn had a shield was called Sgiath Gailbhinn, the Storm Shield; and when it called out it could be heard all through Ireland.

And whether or not it was the Storm Shield, Finn had a wonderful shield that he did great deeds with, and the story of it is this:

At the time of the battle of the Great Battle of Magh Tuireadh, Lugh, after he had struck the head off Balor of the Evil Eye, hung it in the fork of a hazel-tree. And the tree split, and the leaves fell from it with the dint of the poison that dropped from the head. And through the length of fifty years that tree was a dwelling-place of crows and of ravens. And at the end of that time Manannan, son of Lir, was passing by, and he took notice of the tree that it was split and withered, and he bade his men to dig it up. And when they began to dig, a mist of poison rose up from the roots, and nine of the men got their death from it, and another nine after them, and the third nine were blinded. And Luchtaine the Carpenter made a shield of the wood of that hazel for Manannan. And after a while Manannan gave it, and a set of chessmen along with it, to Tadg, son of Nuada; and from him it came to his grandson, Finn, son of Muirne and of Cumhal.

They came around him then, and raised him up gently on their shields, and brought him on their shoulders to the hill of the Sidhe in Cuailgne, but no one came out to meet them. Then the seven battalions began digging and rooting up the whole hill, and they went on digging through the length of three nights and three days. And at the end of that time Cuilinn of Cuailgne, that some say was Manannan, son of Lir, came out of the hill, holding in his hand a vessel of red gold, and he gave the vessel into Finn's hand. And no sooner did Finn drink what was in the vessel than his own shape and his appearance came back to him. But only his hair, that used to be so fair and so beautiful, like the hair of a woman, never got its own colour again, for the lake that Cuilinn's daughter had made for Finn would have turned all the men of the whole world grey if they had gone into it.

And one time Finn was holding a feast at Almhuin, and he asked the chief men of the Fianna that were there what was the music they thought the best. "To be playing at games," said Conan, "that is the best music I ever heard;" for though Conan was a good hand against an enemy, there never was a man had less sense. "The music I like the best is to be talking with a woman," said Diarmuid. "My music is the outcry of my hounds, and they putting a deer to its last stand," said Lugaidh's Son. "The music of the woods is best to me," said Oisin; "the sound of the wind and of the cuckoo and the blackbird, and the sweet silence of the crane."

And then Osgar was asked, and he said: "The best music is the striking of swords in a battle." And it is likely he took after Finn in that, for in spite of all the sweet sounds he gave an account of the time he was at Conan's house, at Ceann Slieve, it used to be said by the Fianna that the music that was best with Finn was what happened.

Diarmuid's face reddened when he heard those words, and he took hold of Manannan's staves of power that were with him, and he reddened again, and he rose on the staves and gave a leap, and got a standing-place for his two feet on the overhanging rock. He looked down from that on Finn and his people, but whatever wish he had to bring them up to where he was, he was not able to do it.

He left the rock behind him then, and he was not gone far when he saw a wild tangled place before him, with thick woods that were of all he had ever walked the most leafy and the fullest of the sounds of wind and streams and birds, and of the humming of bees.

He went on walking the plain, and as he was looking about him, he saw a great tree with many twigs and branches, and a rock beside it, and a smooth-pointed drinking-horn on it, and a beautiful fresh well at its foot. And there was a great drouth on Diarmuid after the sea-journey, and he had a mind to drink a hornful of the water. But when he stooped to it he heard a great noise coming towards him, and he knew then there was enchantment in the water.

"I will drink my fill of it for all that," he said. And it was not long after that till he saw a Man of Enchantments coming towards him armed, having no friendly look. And it was in no friendly way he spoke to Diarmuid when he came up to him, but he gave him great abuse. "It is no right thing," he said, "to be walking through my thickets and to be drinking up my share of water." With that they faced one another angrily, and they fought till the end of the day.

The Enchanter thought it well to leave off fighting then, and he made a leap into the bottom of the well away from him, but there was vexation on Diarmuid to be left like that.

He looked around him then, and he saw a herd of deer coming through the scrub, and he went towards them, and threw a spear that went through the nearest stag and drove the bowels out of him. He kindled a fire then, and he cut thin bits of the flesh and put them on spits of white hazel, and that night he had his fill of meat and of the water of the well.

He rose up early on the morrow, and he found the Enchanter at the well before him. "It seems to me, Grandson of Duibhne," he said, "that it is not enough for you to be walking my scrub and my woods without killing my deer as well." With that they started again, giving one another blow for blow, thrust for thrust, and wound for wound till the end of the day came on them. And Diarmuid killed another great deer that night, and in the morning the fight began again. But in the evening, when the Enchanter was making his leap into the well, Diarmuid threw his arms about his neck, thinking to stop him, but it is what happened, he fell in himself. And when he was at the bottom of the well the Enchanter left him.

Diarmuid went then following after the Enchanter, and he found before him a beautiful wide flowery plain, and a comely royal city in the plain, and on the green before the dun he saw a great army; and when they saw Diarmuid following after the Enchanter, they left a way and a royal road for the Enchanter to pass through till he got inside the dun. And then they shut the gates, and the whole army turned on Diarmuid.

But that put no fear or cowardice on him, but he went through them and over them like a hawk would go through little birds, or a wild dog through a flock of sheep, killing all before him, till some of them made away to the woods and wastes, and another share of them through the gates of the dun, and they shut them, and the gates of the city after them. And Diarmuid, all full of hurts and wounds after the hard fight, lay down on the plain. A very strong daring champion came then and kicked at him from behind, and at that Diarmuid roused himself up, and put out his brave ready hand for his weapons.

"Wait a while, Grandson of Duibhne," the champion said then; "it is not to do you any hurt or harm I am come, but to say to you it is a bad sleeping-place for you to have, and it on your ill-wisher's lawn. And come now with me," he said, "and I will give you a better resting-place."

Diarmuid followed him then, and they went a long, long way from that, till they came to a high-topped city, and three times fifty brave champions in it, three times fifty modest women, and another young woman on a bench, with blushes in her cheeks, and delicate hands, and having a silken cloak about her, and a dress sewed with gold threads, and on her head the flowing veil of a queen...

Three days and three nights Diarmuid stopped in that city, and the best feast he ever found was given to him all through. And at the end of that time he asked what was the place he was in, and who was head of it. And the champion that brought him there told him it was Land-Under-Wave, and that the man that had fought with him was its king. "And he is an enemy of the Red Hand to me," he said. "And as to myself," he said, "I was one time getting wages from Finn, son of Cumhal, in Ireland, and I never put a year over me that pleased me better. And tell me now," he said, "what is the journey or the work that is before you?"

And it is often the Fianna would have been badly off without the help of Diarmuid. It was he came to their help the time Miodac, the son of the King of Lochlann, brought them into the enchanted House of the Quicken Trees.

It was by treachery he brought them in, giving himself out to be a poet, and making poems for Finn to make out the meaning of. A verse he made about a great army that he saw riding over the plains to victory, and robbing all before it, and the riders of it having no horses but plants and branches. "I understand that," said Finn, "it was an army of bees you saw, that was gathering riches from the flowers as it went." And another verse Miodac made was about a woman in Ireland that was swifter than the swiftest horse. "I know that," said Finn, "that woman is the River Boinn; and if she goes slow itself, she is swifter in the end than the swiftest horse, for her going never stops." And other verses he made about Angus' house at Brugh na Boinn, but Finn made them all out.

And after that he said he had a feast ready for them, and he bade them go into his House of the Quicken Trees till he would bring it. And they did that, and went in, and it was a beautiful house, having walls of every colour, and foreign coverings of every colour on the floor, and a fire that gave out a very pleasant smoke. And they sat down there, and after a while Finn said: "It is a wonder such a beautiful house to be here." "There is a greater wonder than that," said Goll; "that fire that was so pleasant when we came in is giving out now the worst stench in the world." "There is a greater wonder than that," said Glas; "the walls that were of all colours are now but rough boards joined together." "There is a greater wonder than that," said Fiacha; "where there were seven high doors to the house there is now but one little door, and it shut." "Indeed, there is a more wonderful thing than that," said Conan; "for we sat down on beautiful coverings, and now there is nothing between us and the bare ground, and it as cold as the snow of one night." And he tried to rise up, but he could not stir, or any of the rest of them, for there was enchantment that kept them where they were.

"What is the cause of your early rising, Finn?" said Oisin. "It is not without cause, indeed, I rise early," said Finn, "for I am without a wife or a companion since Maighneis, daughter of Black Garraidh, died from me; for quiet sleep is not used to come to a man that is without a fitting wife." "Why would you be like that?" said Oisin, "for there is not a woman in all green Ireland you would throw a look on but we would bring her to you, willing or unwilling." "I myself could find a wife would be fitting for you," said Diorraing. "Who is that?" said Finn. "It is Grania, daughter of the High King of Ireland," said Diorraing; "and she is the woman of the best make and shape and the best speech of the women of the whole world."

...And then Finn gathered together the seven battalions of the Fianna from every part where they were to Almhuin. And they set out in great bands and troops till they came to Teamhair.

The king was out on the green before them, and the great people of the men of Ireland, and there was a great welcome before Finn and the Fianna.

But when Grania saw grey-haired Finn, she said: "It is a great wonder it was not for Oisin Finn asked me, for he would be more fitting for me than a man that is older than my father."

Now Diarmuid was used to keep his cap always over the love-spot the woman had left on his forehead, for no woman could see that spot but she would give him her love. And it chanced, while he was driving the dogs apart, the cap fell from him, and Grania was looking cut at him as it fell, and great love for him came on her there and then. And she called her serving-maid to her, and bade her bring the great golden cup that held drink for nine times nine men from the sunny house. And when the serving-maid brought the cup, she filled it with wine that had enchantment in it, and she said: "Give the cup first to Finn, and bid him take a drink from it, and tell him it is I myself sent it to him." So the serving-maid did that, and Finn took the cup and drank out of it, and no sooner did he drink than he fell into a deep sleep. And then the cup was given to the king, and the queen, and the sons of kings, and the whole company, but only Oisin and Osgar and Caoilte and Diarmuid, and Diorraing the Druid. And all that drank of it fell into the same heavy sleep.

And when they were all in their sleep, Grania rose up softly from the seat where she was, and she turned her face to Diarmuid, and she said: "Will you take my love, Diarmuid, son of Duibhne, and will you bring me away out of this house to-night?"

"I will not," said Diarmuid; "I will not meddle with the woman that is promised to Finn." "If that is so," said Grania, "I put you under Druid bonds, to bring me out of this house to-night before the awaking of Finn and of the King of Ireland from their sleep."

"It is under bad bonds you are putting me, Grania," said Diarmuid.

"What are those berries Finn is asking?" said Grania, "that they cannot be got for him?"

Diarmuid told her then the whole story of the berry the Tuatha de Danaan had lost, and of the tree that had sprung up from it, and of the man of Lochlann that was keeping the tree. "And at the time Finn sent me hiding here and became my enemy," he said, "I got leave from the Surly One to hunt, but he bade me never to meddle with the berries. And now, sons of Morna," he said, "there is your choice, to fight with me for my head, or to go asking the berries of the Surly One." "I swear by the blood of my people," said each of them, "I will fight with yourself first."

With that the two young men made ready for the fight. And it is what they chose, to fight with the strength of their hands alone. And Diarmuid put them down and bound the two of them there and then. "That is a good fight you made," said Grania. "But, by my word," she said, "although the children of Morna do not go looking for those berries, I will not lie in a bed for ever till I get a share of them; and I will not live if I do not get them," she said. "Do not make me break my peace with the Surly One," said Diarmuid, "for he will not let me take them." "Loose these tyings from us," said the two young men, "and we will go with you, and we will give ourselves for your sake." "You must not come with me," said Diarmuid; "for if you got the full of your eyes of that terrible one, you would be more likely to die than to live." "Well, do us this kindness," they said then; "loosen these bonds on us, and give us time to go by ourselves and see the fight before you strike off our heads." So Diarmuid did that for them.

Then Diarmuid went to the Surly One, and he chanced to be asleep before him, and he gave him a stroke of his foot the way he lifted his head and looked up at him, and he said: "Have you a mind to break our peace, Grandson of Duibhne?" "That is not what I want," said Diarmuid; "but it is Grania, daughter of the High King," he said, "has a desire to taste those berries, and it is to ask a handful of them I am come." "I give my word," said he, "if she is to die for it, she will never taste a berry of those berries." "I would not do treachery on you," said Diarmuid; "and so I tell you, willing or unwilling, I will take those berries from you."

When the Surly One heard that, he rose up on his feet and lifted his club and struck three great blows on Diarmuid, that gave him some little hurt in spite of his shield. But when Diarmuid saw him not minding himself, he threw down his weapons, and made a great leap and took hold of the club with his two hands. And when he had a hold of the club he struck three great blows on him that put his brains out through his head. And the two young men of the sons of Morna were looking at the whole fight; and when they saw the Surly One was killed they came out. And Diarmuid sat down, for he was spent with the dint of the fight, and he bid the young men to bury the body under the thickets of the wood, the way Grania would not see it. "And after that," he said, "let you go back to her and bring her here." So they dragged away the body and buried it, and they went then for Grania and brought her to Diarmuid.

"There are the berries you were asking, Grania," he said, "and you may take what you like of them now." "I give my word," said Grania, "I will not taste a berry of those berries but the one your own hand will pluck, Diarmuid." Diarmuid rose up then and plucked the berries for Grania, and for the children of Morna, and they ate their fill of them. And he said then to the young men: "Take all you can of these berries, and bring them with you to Finn, and tell him it was yourselves made an end of the Surly One of Lochlann." "We give you our word," said they, "we begrudge giving any of them to Finn."

But Diarmuid plucked a load of the berries for them, and they gave him great thanks for all he had done; and they went back to where Finn was with the Fianna. And Diarmuid and Grania went up into the top of the tree where the bed of the Surly One was. And the berries below were but bitter berries beside the ones above in the tree. And when the two young men came to Finn, he asked news of them. "We have killed the Surly One of Lochlann," they said; "and we have brought you berries from the quicken-tree of Dubhros, in satisfaction for your father, that we may get peace from you." They gave the berries then into Finn's hand, and he knew them, and he said to the young men: "I give you my word," he said, "it was Diarmuid himself plucked those berries, for I know the smell of his hand on them; and I know well it was he killed the Surly One, and I will go now and see is he himself alive at the quicken-tree."

After that he called for the seven battalions of the Fianna, and he set out and went forward to Dubhros. And they followed the track of Diarmuid to the foot of the quicken-tree, and they found the berries without protection, so they ate their fill of them. And the great heat of the day came on them, and Finn said they would stop where they were till the heat would be past; "for I know well," he said, "Diarmuid is up in the quicken-tree." "It is a great sign of jealousy in you, Finn," said Oisin, "to think that Diarmuid would stop there up in the quicken-tree and he knowing you are wanting to kill him."

Finn asked for a chess-board after that, and he said to Oisin: "I will play a game with you now on this." They sat down then, Oisin and Osgar and Lugaidh's Son and Diorraing on the one side of the board, and Finn on the other side.

And they were playing that game with great skill and knowledge, and Finn pressed Oisin so hard that he had no move to make but the one, and Finn said: "There is one move would win the game for you, Oisin, and I defy all that are with you to show you that move." Then Diarmuid said up in the tree where he was, and no one heard him but Grania: "It is a pity you be in straits, and without myself to show you that move." "It is worse off you are yourself," said Grania, "to be in the bed of the Surly One of Lochlann in the top of the quicken-tree, and the seven battalions of the Fianna round about it to take your life."

But Diarmuid took a berry of the tree, and aimed at the one of the chessmen that ought to be moved, and Oisin moved it and turned the game against Finn by that move. It was not long before the game was going against Oisin the second time, and when Diarmuid saw that he threw another berry at the chessman it was right to move, and Oisin moved it and turned the game against Finn in the same way. And the third time Finn was getting the game from Oisin, and Diarmuid threw the third berry on the man that would give the game to Oisin, and the Fianna gave a great shout when the game was won. Finn spoke then, and it is what he said: "It is no wonder you to win the game, Oisin, and you having the help of Osgar, and the watchfulness of Diorraing, and the skill of Lugaidh's Son, and the teaching of the grandson of Duibhne with you." "That is a great sign of jealousy in you, Finn," said Osgar, "to think Diarmuid would stop in this tree, and you so near him." "Which of us has the truth, Diarmuid, grandson of Duibhne," Finn said out then, "myself or Osgar?" "You never lost your good judgment, Finn," said Diarmuid then; "and I myself and Grania are here, in the bed of the Surly One of Lochlann." Then Diarmuid rose up and gave three kisses to Grania in the sight of Finn and the Fianna. And a scorching jealousy and a weakness came on Finn when he saw that, and he said: "It was worse to me, Diarmuid, the seven battalions of the Fianna to see what you did at Teamhair, taking away Grania the night you were yourself my guard. But for all that," he said, "you will give your head for the sake of those three kisses."

And then she and Diarmuid set out again, and they went and stopped for a while in a cave that was near the sea.

And one night while they were there a great storm came on, so that they went into the far part of the cave. But bad as the night was, a man of the Fomor, Ciach, the Fierce One, his name was, came over the western ocean in a currach, with two oars, and he drew it into the cave for shelter. And Diarmuid bade him welcome, and they sat down to play chess together. And he got the best of the game, and what he asked as his winnings was Grania to be his wife, and he put his arms about her as if to bring her away. And Grania said: "I am this long time going with the third best man of the Fianna, and he never came as near as that to me."

And Diarmuid took his sword to kill Ciach, and there was anger on Grania when she saw that, and she had a knife in her hand and she struck it into Diarmuid's thigh. And Diarmuid made an end of the Fomor, and he said no word to Grania, but ran out and away through the storm.

And Grania went following after him, and calling to him, but there was great anger on him and he would not answer her. And at last at the break of day she overtook him, and after a while they heard the cry of a heron, and she asked him what was it made the heron cry out.

"Tell me that," she said, "Grandson of Duibhne, to whom I gave my love." And Diarmuid said: "O Grania, daughter of the High King, woman who never took a step aright, it is because she was frozen to the rocks she gave that cry." And Grania was asking forgiveness of him, and he was reproaching her, and it is what he said: "O Grania of the beautiful hair, though you are more beautiful than the green tree under blossom, your love passes away as quickly as the cold cloud at break of day. And you are asking a hard thing of me now," he said, "and it is a pity what you said to me, Grania, for it was you brought me away from the house of my lord, that I am banished from it to this day; and now I am troubled through the night, fretting after its delight in every place.

"I am like a wild deer, or a beast that is astray, going ever and always through the long valleys; there is great longing on me to see one of my kindred from the host.

"I left my own people that were brighter than lime or snow; their heart was full of generosity to me, like the sun that is high above us; but now they follow me angrily, to every harbour and every strand.

"I lost my people by you, and my lord, and my large bright ships on every sea; I lost my treasure and my gold; it is hunger you gave me through your love.

"I lost my country and my kindred; my men that were used to serve me; I lost quietness and affection; I lost the men of Ireland and the Fianna entirely.

"I lost delight and music; I lost my own right doing and my honour; I lost the Fianna of Ireland, my great kinsmen, for the sake of the love you gave me.

"O Grania, white as snow, it would have been a better choice for you to have given hatred to me, or gentleness to the Head of the Fianna."

And Grania said: "O Diarmuid of the face like snow, or like the down of the mountains, the sound of your voice was dearer to me than all the riches of the leader of the Fianna.

"Your blue eye is dearer to me than his strength, and his gold and his great hall; the love-spot on your forehead is better to me than honey in streams; the time I first looked on it, it was more to me than the whole host of the King of Ireland.

"My heart fell down there and then before your high beauty; when you came beside me, it was like the whole of life in one day.

"O Diarmuid of the beautiful hands, take me now the same as before; it was with me the fault was entirely; give me your promise not to leave me."

But Diarmuid said: "How can I take you again, you are a woman too fond of words; one day you give up the Head of the Fianna, and the next day myself, and no lie in it.

"It is you parted me from Finn, the way I fell under sorrow and grief; and then you left me yourself, the time I was full of affection."

And Grania said: "Do not leave me now this way, and my love for you ever growing like the fresh branches of the tree with the kind long heat of the day."

But Diarmuid would not give in to her, and he said: "You are a woman full of words, and it is you have put me under sorrow. I took you with myself, and you struck at me for the sake of the man of the Fomor."

They came then to a place where there was a cave, and water running by it, and they stopped to rest; and Grania said: "Have you a mind to eat bread and meat now, Diarmuid?"

"I would eat it indeed if I had it," said Diarmuid.

"Give me a knife, so," she said, "till I cut it." "Look for the knife in the sheath where you put it yourself," said Diarmuid.

She saw then that the knife was in his thigh where she had struck it, for he would not draw it out himself. So she drew it out then; and that was the greatest shame that ever came upon her.

They stopped then in the cave. And the next day when they went on again, Diarmuid did not leave unbroken bread like he had left every other day as a sign to Finn that he had kept his faith with him, but it was broken bread he left after him.

They stopped then in the cave. And the next day when they went on again, Diarmuid did not leave unbroken bread like he had left every other day as a sign to Finn that he had kept his faith with him, but it was broken bread he left after him.

Then Diarmuid went out of Rath Grania, and made no delay till he came to the top of Beinn Gulbain, and he found Finn before him there, without any one at all in his company. Diarmuid gave him no greeting, but asked him was it he was making that hunt. Finn said it was not a hunt he was making, but that he and some of the Fianna had gone out after midnight; "and one of our hounds that was loose beside us, came on the track of a wild boar," he said, "and they were not able to bring him back yet. And there is no use following that boar he is after," he said, "for it is many a time the Fianna hunted him, and he went away from them every time till now, and he has killed thirty of them this morning. And he is coming up the mountain towards us," he said, "and let us leave this hill to him now."

"I will not leave the hill through fear of him," said Diarmuid. "It would be best for you, Diarmuid," said Finn, "for it is the earless Green Boar of Beinn Gulbain is in it, and it is by him you will come to your death, and Angus knew that well when he put bonds on you not to go hunting pigs." "I never knew of those bonds," said Diarmuid; "but however it is, I will not quit this through fear of him. And let you leave Bran with me now," he said, "along with Mac an Chuill." "I will not," said Finn, "for it is often he met this boar before and could do nothing against him." He went away then and left Diarmuid alone on the top of the hill. "I give my word," said Diarmuid, "you made this hunt for my death, Finn; and if it is here I am to find my death," he said, "I have no use in going aside from it now."

The boar came up the face of the mountain then, and the Fianna after him. Diarmuid loosed Mac an Chuill from his leash then, but that did not serve him, for he did not wait for the boar, but ran from him. "It is a pity not to follow the advice of a good woman," said Diarmuid, "for Grania bade me this morning to bring the Mor-alltach and the Gae Dearg with me." Then he put his finger into the silken string of the Gae Buidhe, and took a straight aim at the boar and hit him full in the face; but if he did, the spear did not so much as give him a scratch. Diarmuid was discouraged by that, but he drew the Beag-alltach, and made a full stroke at the back of the boar, but neither did that make a wound on him, but it made two halves of the sword. Then the boar made a brave charge at Diarmuid, that cut the sod from under his feet and brought him down; but Diarmuid caught hold of the boar on rising, and held on to him, having one of his legs on each side of him, and his face to his hinder parts. And the boar made away headlong down the hill, but he could not rid himself of Diarmuid; and he went on after that to Ess Ruadh, and when he came to the red stream he gave three high leaps over it, backwards and forwards, but he could not put him from his back, and he went back by the same path till he went up the height of the mountain again. And at last on the top of the mountain he freed himself, and Diarmuid fell on the ground. And then the boar made a rush at him, and ripped him open, that his bowels came out about his feet. But if he did, Diarmuid made a cast at him with the hilt of his sword that was in his hand yet, and dashed out his brains, so that he fell dead there and then. And Rath na h-Amhrann, the Rath of the Sword Hilt, is the name of that place to this day.

It was not long till Finn and the Fianna of Ireland came to the place, and the pains of death were coming on Diarmuid at that time. "It is well pleased I am to see you that way, Diarmuid," said Finn; "and it is a pity all the women of Ireland not to be looking at you now, for your great beauty is turned to ugliness, and your comely shape to uncomeliness." "For all that, you have power to heal me, Finn," said Diarmuid, "if you had a mind to do it." "What way could I heal you?" said Finn. "Easy enough," said Diarmuid, "for the time you were given the great gift of knowledge at the Boinn, you got this gift with it, that any one you would give a drink to out of the palms of your hands would be young and well again from any sickness after it." "You are not deserving of that drink from me," said Finn. "That is not true," said Diarmuid; "it is well I deserve it from you; for the time you went to the house of Dearc, son of Donnarthadh, and your chief men with you for a feast, your enemies came round the house, and gave out three great shouts against you, and threw fire and firebrands into it. And you rose up and would have gone out, but I bade you to stop there at drinking and pleasure, for that I myself would go out and put them down. And I went out, and put out the flames, and made three red rushes round the house, and I killed fifty in every rush, and I came in again without a wound. And it is glad and merry and in good courage you were that night, Finn," he said, "and if it was that night I had asked a drink of you, you would have given it; and it would be right for you to give it to me now." "That is not so," said Finn; "it is badly you have earned a drink or any good thing from me; for the night you went to Teamhair with me, you took Grania away from me in the presence of all the men of Ireland, and you being my own guard over her that night."

"Do not blame me for that, Finn," said Diarmuid, "for what did I ever do against you, east or west, but that one thing; and you know well Grania put bonds on me, and I would not fail in my bonds for the gold of the whole world. And you will know it is well I have earned a drink from you, if you bring to mind the night the feast was made in the House of the Quicken Tree, and how you and all your men were bound there till I heard of it, and came fighting and joyful, and loosed you with my own blood, and with the blood of the Three Kings of the Island of the Floods; and if I had asked a drink of you that night, Finn, you would not have refused it. And I was with you in the smiting of Lon, son of Liobhan, and you are the man that should not forsake me beyond any other man. And many is the strait has overtaken yourself and the Fianna of Ireland since I came among you, and I was ready every time to put my body and my life in danger for your sake, and you ought not to do this unkindness on me now. And besides that," he said, "there has many a good champion fallen through the things you yourself have done, and there is not an end of them yet; and there will soon come great misfortunes on the Fianna, and it is few of their seed will be left after them. And it is not for yourself I am fretting, Finn," he said, "but for Oisin and Osgar, and the rest of my dear comrades, and as for you, Oisin, you will be left lamenting after the Fianna. And it is greatly you will feel the want of me yet, Finn," he said; "and if the women of the Fianna knew I was lying in my wounds on this ridge, it is sorrowful their faces would be at this time."

And Osgar said then: "Although I am nearer in blood to you, Finn, than to Diarmuid, grandson of Duibhne, I will not let you refuse him this drink; and by my word," he said, "if any prince in the world would do the same unkindness to Diarmuid that you have done, it is only the one of us that has the strongest hand would escape alive. And give him a drink now without delay," he said.

"I do not know of any well at all on this mountain," said Finn. "That is not so," said Diarmuid, "for there is not nine footsteps from you the well that has the best fresh water that can be found in the world."

Then Finn went to the well, and he took the full of his two hands of the water. But when he was no more than half-way back, the thought of Grania came on him, and he let the water slip through his hands, and he said he was not able to bring it. "I give my word," said Diarmuid, "it was of your own will you let it from you." Then Finn went back the second time to get the water, but coming back he let it through his hands again at the thought of Grania. And Diarmuid gave a pitiful sigh of anguish when he saw that. "I swear by my sword and by my spear," said Osgar, "that if you do not bring the water without any more delay, Finn, there will not leave this hill but yourself or myself." Finn went back the third time to the well after what Osgar said, and he brought the water to Diarmuid, but as he reached him the life went out of his body. Then the whole company of the Fianna that were there gave three great heavy shouts, keening for Diarmuid.

"High Queen," said Finn then, "for all they were so complete and quick and strong, the three you are asking for fell in fight."

And when the queen-woman heard that, she cried out aloud, and she went to the place where her husband and her two sons were lying, and she stood over their bodies, and her golden hair hanging, and she keened them there. And her own people raised a sharp lamentation listening to her, and the Fianna themselves were under grief.

And it is what she said: "O Meargach," she said, "of the sharp green spears, it is many a fight and many a heavy battle your hard hand fought in the gathering of the armies or alone.

"I never knew any wound to be on your body after them; and it is full sure I am, it was not strength but treachery got the upper hand of you now.

"It is long your journey was from far off, from your own kind country to Inisfail, to come to Finn and the Fianna, that put my three to death through treachery.

"My grief! to have lost my husband, my head, by the treachery of the Fianna; my two sons, my two men that were rough in the fight.

"My grief! my food and my drink; my grief! my teaching everywhere; my grief! my journey from far off, and I to have lost my high heroes.

"My grief! my house thrown down; my grief! my shelter and my shield; my grief! Meargach and Ciardan; my grief! Liagan of the wide chest.

"My grief! my protection and my shelter; my grief! my strength and my power; my grief! there is darkness come from this thing; my grief to-night you to be in your weakness.

"My grief! my gladness and my pleasure; my grief! my desire in every place; my grief! my courage is gone and my strength; my grief from this night out for ever.

"My grief! my guide and my going; my grief! my desire to the day of my death; my grief! my store and my sway; my grief! my heroes that were open-handed.

"My grief! my bed and my sleep; my grief! my journey and my coming; my grief! my teacher and my share; my sorrowful grief! my three men.

"My grief! my beauty and my ornaments; my grief! my jewels and my riches; my grief! my treasures and my goods; my grief! my three Candles of Valour.

"My grief! my friends and my kindred; my grief! my people and my friends. My grief! my father and my mother; my grief and my trouble! you to be dead.

"My grief my portion and my welcome; my grief! my health at every time; my grief! my increase and my light; my sore trouble, you to be without strength.

"My grief! your spear and your sword; my grief! your gentleness and your love; my grief! your country and your home; my grief! you to be parted from my reach.

"My grief! my coasts and my harbours; my grief! my wealth and my prosperity; my grief! my greatness and my kingdom; my grief and my crying are until death.

"My grief! my luck altogether; my grief for you in time of battle; my grief! my gathering of armies; my grief! my three proud lions.

"My grief! my games and my drinking; my grief! my music and my delight; my grief! my sunny house and my women; my crying grief, you to be under defeat.

"My grief! my lands and my hunting; my grief! my three sure fighters; Och! my grief! they are my sorrow, to fall far off by the Fianna.

"I knew by the great host of the Sidhe that were fighting over the dun, giving battle to one another in the valleys of the air, that destruction would put down my three.

"I knew by the noise of the voices of the Sidhe coming into my ears, that a story of new sorrow was not far from me; it is your death it was foretelling.

"I knew at the beginning of the day when my three good men went from me, when I saw tears of blood on their cheeks, that they would not come back to me as winners.

"I knew by the voice of the battle-crow over your dun every evening, since you went from me comely and terrible, that misfortune and grief were at hand.

"It is well I remember, my three strong ones, how often I used to be telling you that if you would go to Ireland, I would not see the joy of victory on your faces.

"I knew by the voice of the raven every morning since you went from me, that your fall was sure and certain; that you would never come back to your own country.

"I knew, my three great ones, by your forgetting the thongs of your hounds, that you would not gain the day or escape from the treachery of the Fianna.

"I knew, Candles of Valour, by the stream near the dun turning to blood when you set out, that there would be treachery in Finn.

"I knew by the eagle coming every evening over the dun, that it would not be long till I would hear a story of bad news of my three.

"I knew by the withering of the tree before the dun, that you would never come back as conquerors from the treachery of Finn, son of Cumhal."

"Do not be faulting Finn," said Grania then, "however vexed your heart may be. And leave off now," she said, "speaking against the Fianna and against himself; for if your men had stopped in their own country," she said, "without coming to avenge the son of Treon, there would no harm have happened them." "I would not put any reproach on the Fianna, Grania," said Ailne, "if my three men had been put down in fair battle, but they are not living to bear witness to me," she said; "and it is likely they were put under Druid spells at the first, or they would never have given in." "If they were living, Queen," said Grania, "they would not be running down the Fianna, but they would tell you it was by bravery and the strong hand they fell." "I do not believe you or the Fianna when you say that," said Ailne; "for no one that came to meet them ever got the sway over them by the right of the sword." "If you do not believe what I am saying, beautiful Ailne," said Grania, "I tell you more of your great army will fall by the Fianna, and that not by treachery." "That is not so," said Ailne, "but I have good hopes that my own army will do destruction on the Fianna, for the sake of the men that are dead." "Well, Ailne," said Grania, "I know it is a far journey you have come. And come now and eat and drink," she said, "with myself and with the Fianna."

But Ailne would not do that, but she said it would not be fitting for her to take food from people that did such deeds, and what she wanted was satisfaction for the death of her husband and her two sons.

And first it was settled for two men of each side to go out against one another; and then Ailne said that there should be thirty men on each side, and then she said she would not be satisfied to go back to her own country till she brought the head of Finn with her, or till the last of his men had fallen. And there was a great battle fought in the end, and it is seldom the Fianna fought so hard a battle as that.

And it would be too long to tell, and it would tire the hearers, how many good men were killed on each side. But in the end Ailne of the Bright Face was worsted, and she went back with what were left of her men to their own country, and no one knew where they went.

And the hill in the west those battles were fought on got the name of Cnoc-an-Air, the Hill of Slaughter.

So they went on, and before long they came to a hill, and they heard sleepy music of the Sidhe beside them. And after that there came shouts and noises, and then the music began again, and heavy sleep came on Finn and Daire. And when they awoke from their sleep they saw a very large lighted house before them, and a stormy blue sea around it. Then they saw a very big grey man coming through the waves, and he took hold of Finn and of Daire, and all their strength went from them, and he brought them across the waves and into the house, and he shut the door of the house with iron hooks. "My welcome to you, Finn of the great name," he said then in a very harsh voice; "it is long we are waiting here for you."

They sat down then on the hard side of a bed, and the woman of the house came to them, and they knew her to be Ailne, wife of Meargach. "It is long I am looking for you, Finn," she said, "to get satisfaction for the treachery you did on Meargach and on my two comely young sons, and on Tailc, son of Treon, and all his people. And do you remember that, Finn?" she said. "I remember well," said Finn, "that they fell by the swords of the Fianna, not by treachery but in fighting." "It was by treachery they fell," said the Grey Man then; "and it is our witness to it, pleasant Ailne to be the way she is, and many a strong army under grief on account of her." "What is Ailne to you, man of the rough voice?" said Finn. "I am her own brother," said the man.

Now as to the Grey Man, he heard them talking of the Fianna, and they were saying that Daire had a great name for the sweetness of his music. "I have a mind to hear that sweet music," said he. So he went to the place where they were, and he bade Daire to let him hear what sort of music he could make. "My music pleased the Fianna well," said Daire; "but I think it likely it would not please you." "Play it for me now, till I know if the report I heard of you is true," said the Grey Man. "Indeed, I have no mind for music," said Daire, "being weak and downhearted the way I am, through your spells that put down my courage." "I will take my spells off you for so long as you play for me," said the Grey Man. "I could never make music seeing Finn in bonds the way he is," said Daire; "for it is worse to me, he to be under trouble than myself." "I will take the power of my spells off Finn till you play for me," said the Grey Man.

He weakened the spells then, and gave them food and drink, and it pleased him greatly the way Daire played the music, and he called to Glanluadh and to Ailne to come and to listen to the sweetness of it. And they were well pleased with it, and it is glad Glanluadh was, seeing them not so discouraged as they were.

Now as to the Fianna, they were searching for Finn and for Daire in every place they had ever stopped in. And when they came to this place they could hear Daire's sweet music; and at first they were glad when they heard it, and then when they knew the way he himself and Finn were, they made an attack on Ailne's dun to release them.

But the Grey Man heard their shouts, and he put the full power of his spells again on Finn and on Daire. And the Fianna heard the music as if stammering, and then they heard a great noise like the loud roaring of waves, and when they heard that, there was not one of them but fell into a sleep and clouds of death, under those sorrowful spells.

And then the Grey Man and Ailne came out quietly from where they were, and they brought the whole of the men of the Fianna that were there into the dun. And they put hard bonds on them, and put them where Finn and Daire were. And there was great grief on Finn and Daire when they saw them, and they were all left there together for a while.

Then Glanluadh said to the Grey Man: "If Daire's music is pleasing to you, let him play it to us now." "If you have a mind for music," said the Grey Man, "Daire must play it for us, and for Finn and his army as well."

They went then to where they were, and bade Daire to play. "I could never play sweet music," said Daire, "the time the Fianna are in any trouble; for when they are in trouble, I myself am in trouble, and I could not sound any sweet string," he said, "while there is trouble on any man of them." The Grey Man weakened the spells then on them all, and Daire played first the strings of sweetness, and of the noise of shouting, and then he sang his own grief and the grief of all the Fianna. And at that the Grey Man said it would not be long before he would put the whole of the Fianna to death; and then Daire played a tune of heavy shouts of lamentation. And then at Finn's bidding he played the music of sweet strings for the Fianna.

They were kept, now, a long time in that prison, and they got very hard treatment; and sometimes Ailne's brother would come in and strike the heads off some of them, for none of them could rise up from the seats they were sitting on through his enchantments. But one time he was going to strike the bald head off Conan, and Conan made a great leap from the seat; but if he did, he left strips of his skin hanging to it, that his back was left bare. And then he came round the Grey Man with his pitiful words: "Stop your hand now," he said, "for that is enough for this time; and do not send me to my death yet awhile, and heal me of my wounds first," he said, "before you make an end of me." And the reason he said that was because he knew Ailne to have an enchanted cup in the dun, that had cured Glanluadh.

And the Grey Man took pity on his case, and he brought him out and bade Ailne to bring the cup to him and to cure his wounds. "I will not bring it," said Ailne, "for it would be best give no time at all to him or to the Fianna, but to make an end of them." "It is not to be saved from death I am asking, bright-faced Ailne," said Conan, "but only not to go to my death stripped bare the way I am." When Ailne heard that, she brought a sheepskin and she put it on Conan's back, and it fitted and grew to him, and covered his wounds. "I will not put you to death, Conan," said the Grey Man then, "but you can stop with myself to the end of your life." "You will never be without grief and danger and the fear of treachery if you keep him with you," said Ailne; "for there is treachery in his heart the same as there is in the rest of them." "There is no fear of that," said her brother, "or I will make no delay until I put the whole of the Fianna to death." And with that he brought Conan to where the enchanted cup was, and he put it in his hand. And just at that moment they heard Daire playing very sweet sorrowful music, and the Grey Man went to listen to it, very quick and proud. And Conan followed him there, and after a while the Grey Man asked him what did he do with the enchanted cup. "I left it where I found it, full of power," said Conan.

The Grey Man hurried back then to the place where the treasures of the dun were. But no sooner was he gone than Conan took out the cup that he had hidden, and he gave a drink from it to Finn and to Osgar and to the rest of the Fianna. And they that were withered and shaking, without strength, without courage, got back their own appearance and their strength again on the moment.

And when the Grey Man came back from looking for the cup, and saw what had happened, he took his sword and made a stroke at Conan. But Conan called to Osgar to defend him, and Osgar attacked the Grey Man, and it was not long till he made him acquainted with death.

And when Ailne saw that, with the grief and the dread that came on her, she fell dead then and there.

Then all the Fianna made a feast with what they found of food and of drink, and they were very joyful and merry. But when they rose up in the morning, there was no trace or tidings of the dun, but it was on the bare grass they were lying.

But as to Conan, the sheepskin never left him; and the wool used to grow on it every year, the same as it would on any other skin.

One time when the Fianna were gone here and there hunting, Black Garraidh and Caoilte were sitting beside Finn, and they were talking of the battle where Finn's father was killed. And Finn said then to Garraidh: "Tell me now, since you were there yourself, what way was it you brought my father Cumhal to his death?" "I will tell you that since you ask me," said Garraidh; "it was my own hand and the hands of the rest of the sons of Morna that made an end of him." "That is cold friendship from my followers the sons of Morna," said Finn. "If it is cold friendship," said Garraidh, "put away the liking you are letting on to have for us, and show us the hatred you have for us all the while." "If I were to lift my hand against you now, sons of Morna," said Finn, "I would be well able for you all without the help of any man." "It was by his arts Cumhal got the upper hand of us," said Garraidh; "and when he got power over us," he said, "he banished us to every far country; a share of us he sent to Alban, and a share of us to dark Lochlann, and a share of us to bright Greece, parting us from one another; and for sixteen years we were away from Ireland, and it was no small thing to us to be without seeing one another through that time. And the first day we came back to Ireland," he said, "we killed sixteen hundred men, and no lie in it, and not a man of them but would be keened by a hundred. And we took their duns after that," he said, "and we went on till we were all around one house in Munster of the red walls. But so great was the bravery of the man in that house, that was your father, that it was easier to find him than to kill him. And we killed all that were of his race out on the hill, and then we made a quick rush at the house where Cumhal was, and every man of us made a wound on his body with his spear. And I myself was in it, and it was I gave him the first wound. And avenge it on me now, Finn, if you have a mind to," he said.

And when Finn saw that, he said: "How long is it, Goll, you have this rent on the men of Lochlann, and my own rent being on them always with it, and one of my own men, Ciaran son of Latharne, and ten hundred men of his household, guarding it and guarding my right of hunting?" And Goll saw there was anger on Finn, and he said: "It is a long time, Finn, I have that rent on the men of Lochlann, from the time your father put war and quarrels on me, and the King of Ireland joined with him, and I was made to quit Ireland by them. And I went into Britain," he said, "and I took the country and killed the king himself and did destruction on his people, but Cumhal put me out of it; and from that I went to Fionnlochlann, and the king fell by me, and his household, and Cumhal put me out of it; and I went from that to the country of the Saxons, and the king and his household fell by me, and Cumhal put me out of it. But I came back then to Ireland, and I fought a battle against your father, and he fell by me there. And it was at that time I put this rent upon the men of Lochlann. And, Finn," he said, "it is not a rent of the strong hand you have put on them, but it is a tribute for having the protection of the Fianna of Ireland, and I do not lessen that. And you need not begrudge that tribute to me," he said, "for if I had more than that again, it is to you and to the men of Ireland I would give it."

One day Finn was hunting, and Bran went following after a fawn. And they were coming towards Finn, and the fawn called out, and it said: "If I go into the sea below I will never come back again; and if I go up into the air above me, it will not save me from Bran." For Bran would overtake the wild geese, she was that swift.

"Go out through my legs," said Finn then. So the fawn did that, and Bran followed her; and as Bran went under him, Finn squeezed his two knees on her, that she died on the moment.

And there was great grief on him after that, and he cried tears down the same as he did when Osgar died.

And some said it was Finn's mother the fawn was, and that it was to save his mother he killed Bran. But that is not likely, for his mother was beautiful Muirne, daughter of Tadg, son of Nuada of the Tuatha de Danaan, and it was never heard that she was changed into a fawn. It is more likely it was Oisin's mother was in it.

But some say Bran and Sceolan are still seen to start at night out of the thicket on the hill of Almhuin.

One time a smith made his way into a cave he saw, that had a door to it, and he made a key that opened it. And when he went in he saw a very wide place, and very big men lying on the floor. And one that was bigger than the rest was lying in the middle, and the Dord Fiann beside him; and he knew it was Finn and the Fianna were in it.

And the smith took hold of the Dord Fiann, and it is hardly he could lift it to his mouth, and he blew a very strong blast on it, and the sound it made was so great, it is much the rocks did not come down on him. And at the sound, the big men lying on the ground shook from head to foot. He gave another blast then, and they all turned on their elbows.

And great dread came on him when he saw that, and he threw down the Dord Fiann and ran from the caye and locked the door after him, and threw the key into the lake. And he heard them crying after him, "You left us worse than you found us." And the cave was not found again since that time.

But some say the day will come when the Dord Fiann will be sounded three times, and that at the sound of it the Fianna will rise up as strong and as well as ever they were. And there are some say Finn, son of Cumhal, has been on the earth now and again since the old times, in the shape of one of the heroes of Ireland.

And as to the great things he and his men did when they were together, it is well they have been kept in mind through the poets of Ireland and of Alban. And one night there were two men minding sheep in a valley, and they were saying the poems of the Fianna while they were there. And they saw two very tall shapes on the two hills on each side of the valley, and one of the tall shapes said to the other: "Do you hear that man down below? I was the second doorpost of battle at Gabhra, and that man knows all about it better than myself."

As to Oisin, it was a long time after he was brought away by Niamh that he came back again to Ireland. Some say it was hundreds of years he was in the Country of the Young, and some say it was thousands of years he was in it; but whatever time it was, it seemed short to him.

And whatever happened him through the time he was away, it is a withered old man he was found after coming back to Ireland, and his white horse going away from him, and he lying on the ground.

And it was S. Patrick had power at that time, and it was to him Oisin was brought; and he kept him in his house, and used to be teaching him and questioning him. And Oisin was no way pleased with the way Ireland was then, but he used to be talking of the old times, and fretting after the Fianna.

"The Country of the Young, the Country of Victory, it was," said Oisin. "And O Patrick," he said, "there is no lie in that name; and if there are grandeurs in your Heaven the same as there are there, I would give my friendship to God.

"And I did not feel the time passing, and it was a long time I stopped there," he said, "till the desire came on me to see Finn and my comrades again. And I asked leave of the king and of Niamh to go back to Ireland. 'You will get leave from me,' said Niamh; 'but for all that,' she said, 'it is bad news you are giving me, for I am in dread you will never come back here again through the length of your days.' But I bade her have no fear, since the white horse would bring me safe back again from Ireland. 'Bear this in mind, Oisin,' she said then, 'if you once get off the horse while you are away, or if you once put your foot to ground, you will never come back here again. And O Oisin,' she said, 'I tell it to you now for the third time, if you once get down from the horse, you will be an old man, blind and withered, without liveliness, without mirth, without running, without leaping. And it is a grief to me, Oisin,' she said, 'you ever to go back to green Ireland; and it is not now as it used to be, and you will not see Finn and his people, for there is not now in the whole of Ireland but a Father of Orders and armies of saints; and here is my kiss for you, pleasant Oisin,' she said, 'for you will never come back any more to the Country of the Young.'

"And that is my story, Patrick, and I have told you no lie in it," said Oisin. "And O Patrick," he said, "if I was the same the day I came here as I was that day, I would have made an end of all your clerks, and there would not be a head left on a neck after me."

"Go on with your story," said Patrick, "and you will get the same good treatment from me you got from Finn, for the sound of your voice is pleasing to me."

So Oisin went on with his story, and it is what he said: "I have nothing to tell of my journey till I came back into green Ireland, and I looked about me then on all sides, but there were no tidings to be got of Finn. And it was not long till I saw a great troop of riders, men and women, coming towards me from the west. And when they came near they wished me good health; and there was wonder on them all when they looked at me, seeing me so unlike themselves, and so big and so tall.

"I asked them then did they hear if Finn was still living, or any other one of the Fianna, or what had happened them. 'We often heard of Finn that lived long ago,' said they, 'and that there never was his equal for strength or bravery or a great name; and there is many a book written down,' they said, 'by the sweet poets of the Gael, about his doings and the doings of the Fianna, and it would be hard for us to tell you all of them. And we heard Finn had a son,' they said, 'that was beautiful and shining, and that there came a young girl looking for him, and he went away with her to the Country of the Young.'

"And when I knew by their talk that Finn was not living or any of the Fianna, it is downhearted I was, and tired, and very sorrowful after them. And I made no delay, but I turned my face and went on to Almhuin of Leinster. And there was great wonder on me when I came there to see no sign at all of Finn's great dun, and his great hall, and nothing in the place where it was but weeds and nettles."

And there was grief on Oisin then, and he said: "Och, Patrick! Och, ochone, my grief! It is a bad journey that was to me; and to be without tidings of Finn or the Fianna has left me under pain through my lifetime."

"Leave off fretting, Oisin," said Patrick, "and shed your tears to the God of grace. Finn and the Fianna are slack enough now, and they will get no help for ever." "It is a great pity that would be," said Oisin, "Finn to be in pain for ever; and who was it gained the victory over him, when his own hand had made an end of so many a hard fighter?"

"It is God gained the victory over Finn," said Patrick, "and not the strong hand of an enemy; and as to the Fianna, they are condemned to hell along with him, and tormented for ever."

"O Patrick," said Oisin, "show me the place where Finn and his people are, and there is not a hell or a heaven there but I will put it down. And if Osgar, my own son, is there," he said, "the hero that was bravest in heavy battles, there is not in hell or in the Heaven of God a troop so great that he could not destroy it."

"Let us leave off quarrelling on each side now," said Patrick; "and go on, Oisin, with your story. What happened you after you knew the Fianna to be at an end?"

"I will tell you that, Patrick," said Oisin. "I was turning to go away, and I saw the stone trough that the Fianna used to be putting their hands in, and it full of water. And when I saw it I had such a wish and such a feeling for it that I forgot what I was told, and I got off the horse. And in the minute all the years came on me, and I was lying on the ground, and the horse took fright and went away and left me there, an old man, weak and spent, without sight, without shape, without comeliness, without strength or understanding, without respect.

"Little Nut, little Nut of my heart, the little dwarf that was with Finn, when he would make tunes and songs he would put us all into deep sleep.

"The twelve hounds that belonged to Finn, the time they would be let loose facing out from the Siuir, their cry was sweeter than harps and than pipes.

"I have a little story about Finn; we were but fifteen men; we took the King of the Saxons of the feats, and we won a battle against the King of Greece.

"We fought nine battles in Spain, and nine times twenty battles in Ireland; from Lochlann and from the eastern world there was a share of gold coming to Finn.

"My grief! I to be stopping after him, and without delight in games or in music; to be withering away after my comrades; my grief it is to be living. I and the clerks of the Mass books are two that can never agree.

"If Finn and the Fianna were living, I would leave the clerks and the bells; I would follow the deer through the valleys, I would like to be close on his track.

"Ask Heaven of God, Patrick, for Finn of the Fianna and his race; make prayers for the great man; you never heard of his like."

OISIN. "There is a greater story of Finn than of us, or of any that have lived in our time; all that are gone and all that are living, Finn was better to give out gold than themselves."

PATRICK. "All the gold you and Finn used to be giving out, it is little it does for you now; he is in Hell in bonds because he did treachery and oppression."

OISIN. "It is little I believe of your truth, man from Rome with the white books, Finn the open-handed head of the Fianna to be in the hands of devils or demons."

PATRICK. "Finn is in bonds in Hell, the pleasant man that gave out gold; in satisfaction for his disrespect to God, he is under grief in the house of pain."

OISIN. "If the sons of Morna were within it, or the strong men of the sons of Baiscne, they would take Finn out of it, or they would have the house for themselves."

PATRICK. "If the five provinces of Ireland were within it, or the strong seven battalions of the Fianna, they would not be able to bring Finn out of it, however great their strength might be."

OISIN. "If Faolan and Goll were living, and brown-haired Diarmuid and brave Osgar, Finn of the Fianna could not be held in any house that was made by God or devils."

PATRICK. "If Faolan and Goll were living, and all the Fianna that ever were, they could not bring out Finn from the house where he is in pain."

OISIN. "What did Finn do against God but to be attending on schools and on armies? Giving gold through a great part of his time, and for another while trying his hounds."

PATRICK. "In payment for thinking of his hounds and for serving the schools of the poets, and because he gave no heed to God, Finn of the Fianna is held down."

OISIN. "You say, Patrick of the Psalms, that the Fianna could not take out Finn, or the five provinces of Ireland along with them.

"I have a little story about Finn. We were but fifteen men when we took the King of Britain of the feasts by the strength of our spears and our own strength.

"We took Magnus the great, the son of the King of Lochlann of the speckled ships; we came back no way sorry or tired, we put our rent on far places.

"O Patrick, the story is pitiful, the King of the Fianna to be under locks; a heart without envy, without hatred, a heart hard in earning victory.

"It is an injustice, God to be unwilling to give food and riches; Finn never refused strong or poor, although cold Hell is now his dwelling-place.

I am a shaking tree, my leaves gone from me; an empty nut, a horse without a bridle; a people without a dwelling-place, I Oisin, son of Finn.

On the day I received Deborah’s e-mail inviting me to the Costa Coffee I was in the midst of quite a bad anxiety attack. I had been interviewing a man named Dave McKay. He was the charismatic leader of a small Australian religious group called The Jesus Christians and had recently suggested to his members that they each donate their spare kidney to a stranger. Dave and I had got on pretty well at first — he’d seemed engagingly eccentric and I was consequently gathering good material for my story, enjoyably nutty quotes from him, etc. But when I proposed that group pressure, emanating from Dave, was perhaps the reason why some of his more vulnerable members might be choosing to give up a kidney, he exploded. He sent me a message saying that to teach me a lesson he was putting the brakes on an imminent kidney donation. He would let the recipient die and her death would be on my conscience.

James’s department was a crushingly unattractive concrete slab just off Russell Square, the University College London school of psychology. Fading photographs on the corridor walls from the 1960s and 1970s showed children strapped to frightening-looking machines, wires dangling from their heads. They smiled at the camera in uncomprehending excitement as if they were at the beach.

A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn’t see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

In a third office I saw a woman with a Little Miss Brainy book on her shelf. She seemed cheerful and breezy and good-looking.

“Who’s that?” I asked James.

“Essi Viding,” he said.

“What does she study?” I asked.

“Psychopaths,” said James.

I peered in at Essi. She spotted us, smiled and waved.

“That must be dangerous,” I said.

“I heard a story about her once,” said James. “She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.”

I had a Skype video conversation with Levi Shand, who, it was soon revealed, wasn’t an invention of Douglas Hofstadter’s but an actual student from Indiana University.

He was a handsome young man with black hair, doleful eyes, and a messy student bedroom. He had been easy to track down. I e-mailed him via his Facebook page. He got back to me straightaway (he’d been online at the time) and within seconds we were face-to-face. He told me it was all true. He really did find the books in a box under a railway viaduct and Douglas Hofstadter really did have a harem of French women living at his home.

“Tell me exactly what happened when you visited him,” I said.

“I was really nervous,” Levi said, “given his prominence on the cognitive science scene. A beautiful young French girl answered the door. She told me to wait. I looked through into the next room, and there were more beautiful French girls in there.”

“How many in total?” I asked.

“There were at least six of them,” said Levi. “They had brown hair, blond hair, all standing there between the kitchen and the dining room. All of them stunningly beautiful.”

“Is this true?” I asked him.

“Well, they might have been Belgian,” said Levi.

“What happened then?” I asked.

“Professor Hofstadter came out from the kitchen,” he said, “looking thin but healthy. Charismatic. He took the books, thanked me, and I left. And that’s it.”

“And every word of this is true?” I asked.

“Every word,” said Levi.

I have a great deal of experience with people who are smart but unbalanced, people who think they have found the key to the universe, etc. It’s a sad thing, but there are many of them out there, and often they are extremely obsessive. This particular case was exceedingly transparent because it was so exceedingly obsessive. There was a missing piece of the puzzle, Douglas Hofstadter was saying, but the recipients had gotten it wrong. They assumed the endeavor was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational, and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a crackpot.

Aren’t you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man’s brain? It’s as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter’s brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.”

The thought of this suddenly excited me hugely: Petter Nordlund’s craziness had had a huge influence on the world. It caused intellectual examination, economic activity, and formed a kind of community. Disparate academics, scattered across continents, had become intrigued and paranoid and narcissistic because of it. They’d met on blogs and message boards and had debated for hours, forming conspiracy theories about shadowy Christian organizations, etc. One of them had felt motivated to rendezvous with me in a Costa Coffee. I’d flown to Sweden in an attempt to solve the mystery. And so on.

I thought about my own overanxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality? I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?

The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99. It sits on the shelves of psychiatry offices all over the world and lists every known mental disorder. There are currently 374 known mental disorders. I bought the book soon after I’d returned from my coffee with Deborah and leafed through it, searching for disorders that might compel the sufferer to try to achieve a position of power and influence over others. [...]

I closed the manual.

“I wonder if I’ve got any of the 374 mental disorders,” I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.

“I’m Tony,” he said. He sat down.

“So Brian says you faked your way in here,” I said.

“That’s exactly right,” said Tony.

He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man.

“I’d committed GBH [Grievous Bodily Harm],” he said. “After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, ‘I’m looking at five, seven years.’ So I asked the other prisoners what to do. They said, ‘Easy! Tell them you’re mad! They’ll put you in a county hospital. You’ll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will bring you pizzas.’ But they didn’t send me to some cushy hospital. They sent me to bloody BROADMOOR.”

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

“Twelve years ago,” said Tony.

I involuntarily grinned.

Tony grinned back.

After Tony read that report, he said, he stopped being well behaved. He started a kind of war of noncooperation instead. This involved staying in his room a lot. He really wasn’t fond of hanging around with rapists and pedophiles anyway. It was unsavory and also quite frightening. On an earlier occasion, for instance, he had gone into the Stockwell Strangler’s room and asked for a cup of lemonade.

“Of course! Take the bottle!” said the Stockwell Strangler.

“Honestly, Kenny, a cup’s fine,” said Tony.

“Take the bottle,” he said.

“Really, I just want a cup,” said Tony.

“TAKE THE BOTTLE!” hissed the Stockwell Strangler.

There had been sustained negative media reports about the Church those past weeks and someone high up had clearly decided that I may be the journalist to turn the tide. What had happened was three former high-ranking staff members — Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder, and Amy Scobee — had a few weeks earlier made some startling accusations against their leader, and L. Ron Hubbard’s successor, David Miscavige. They said he routinely punished his top executives for being unsatisfactory Ideas People by slapping them, punching them, “beating the living fuck” out of them, kicking them when they were on the floor, hitting them in the face, choking them until their faces went purple, and unexpectedly forcing them to play an extreme all-night version of musical chairs.

“The fact is,” said the Church’s chief spokesperson, Tommy Davis, who had flown from Los Angeles to see me, “yes, people were hit. Yes, people were kicked while they were on the floor and choked until their faces went purple, but the perpetrator wasn’t Mr. Miscavige. It was Marty Rathbun himself!”

(Marty Rathbun has, I later learned, admitted to committing those acts of violence, but says he was ordered to by David Miscavige. The Church denies that claim.)

Tommy said that I, unlike most journalists, was a freethinker, not in the pay of anti-Scientologist-vested interests and willing to entertain unexpected realities. He handed me a copy of the in-house Scientology magazine, Freedom, which referred to the three people who had made the accusations against David Miscavige as The Kingpin, The Conman, and The Adulteress. The Adulteress was in fact “a repeat adulteress” who refused to “curb her wanton sexual behavior,” perpetrated “five incidents of extramarital indiscretions,” and “was removed from the Church for ecclesiastical crimes.”

I looked up from the magazine.

“What about the extreme all-night version of musical chairs?” I asked.

There was a short silence.

“Yes, well, Mr. Miscavige did make us do that,” said Tommy. “But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was reported. Anyway. Let’s give you a tour so we can educate you on what Scientology is really about.”

Tony,” his e-mail read, “did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.” He was sure of it, he said, and so were many other psychiatrists who’d met Tony during the past few years. It was now the consensus. Tony’s delusions — the ones he’d presented when he had been on remand in jail — just, in retrospect, didn’t ring true. They were too lurid, too clichéd. Plus the minute he got admitted to Broadmoor and he looked around and saw what a hellhole he’d got himself into, the symptoms just vanished.

“Oh!” I thought, pleasantly surprised. “Good! That’s great!”

I had liked Tony when I met him but I’d found myself feeling warier of him those past days so it was nice to have his story verified by an expert. But then I read Professor Maden’s next line: “Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy.”

I looked at the e-mail. “Tony’s a psychopath?” I thought.

Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

“There is no doubt about Tony’s diagnosis,” Professor Maden’s e-mail concluded.

Tony rang again. I didn’t answer.

“Classic psychopath!” said Essi Viding.

There was a silence.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah!” she said. “How he turned up to meet you! It’s classic psychopath!”

After I received my e-mail from Professor Maden, I called Essi to see if she’d meet with me. I had just told her about the moment I’d first seen Tony, how he had strolled purposefully across the Broadmoor Wellness Centre in a pin-striped suit, like someone from The Apprentice, his arm outstretched.

“That’s classic psychopath?” I asked.

“I was visiting a psychopath at Broadmoor one time,” Essi said. “I’d read his dossier. He’d had a horrific history of raping women and killing them and biting their nipples off. It was just hideous, harrowing reading. Another psychologist said to me, ‘You’ll meet this guy and you’ll be totally charmed by him.’ I thought, ‘No way!’ And you know what? Totally! To the point that I found him a little bit fanciable. He was really good-looking, in peak physical condition, and had a very macho manner. It was raw sex appeal. I could completely understand why the women he had killed went with him.

“Do you feel remorse?” he asked.

“My remorse,” Tony instantly replied, leaning forward, too, “is that I’ve not only screwed up my victim’s life but also my own life and my family’s lives and that’s my remorse. All the things that could have been done in my life. I feel bad about that every day.”

Tony looked at me.

“Did his remorse sound a bit rattled off?” I thought. I looked at Tony.

“Did they rehearse this? Was this a show for me? And, also, if he really felt remorse, wouldn’t he have said, ‘My remorse is that I’ve not only screwed up my life but also my victim’s life . . .’? Wouldn’t he have put his statement of remorse in that order? Or maybe it was in the right order. I don’t know. Should I want him released? Shouldn’t I? How do I know?” I crossed my mind that perhaps I should be campaigning for his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn’t quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Subtle.

In Palm Springs, California, he heard about nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of a psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim.

The hotel the sessions took place in combined (as the advertising material back then stated) “abundant trees and wildlife” with the facilities of a “high class resort.” There, Bindrim would ask his fully clothed clients, who were strangers to one another and usually middle- to upper-class California freethinkers and movie stars, first to “eyeball” each other, and then hug, and wrestle, and then, in the dark and to the accompaniment of New Age music, remove their “tower of clothes.” They would sit naked in a circle, perform a “meditation-like hum,” and then dive head long into a twenty-four-hour nonstop nude psychotherapy session, an emotional and mystical roller coaster during which participants would scream and yell and soband confess their innermost fears and anxieties.

“Physical nakedness,” Bindrim would explain to visiting journalists, “facilitates emotional nakedness and therefore speeds up psychotherapy.” Bindrim’s most divisive idea was what he termed “crotch eyeballing.” He’d instruct a participant to sit in the center of the circle with legs in the air. Then he’d command the others to stare at that person’s genitals and anus, sometimes for hours, while he sporadically yelled, “This is where it’s at! This is where we are so damned negatively conditioned!”

Sometimes he’d direct participants to address their genitals directly. One journalist who attended a session—Life magazine’s Jane Howard — reported in her 1970 book Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement a conversation between Bindrim and a participant named Lorna.

“Tell Katy what things happen in your crotch,” Bindrim ordered her. Katy was Lorna’s vagina. “Say, ‘Katy, this is where I shit, fuck, piss and masturbate.’ ”

There was an embarrassed silence.

“I think Katy already knows that,” Lorna eventually replied.

“The point about Kingsley Hall,” he said, “was that people could go there and work through their madness. My father believed that if you allowed madness to take its natural course without intervention — without lobotomies and drugs and straitjackets and all the awful things they were doing at the time in mental hospitals — it would burn itself out, like an LSD trip working its way through the system.”

“What kind of thing might Elliott Barker have seen on his visit to Kingsley Hall?” I asked.

“Some rooms were, you know, beguilingly draped in Indian silks,”

Adrian said. “Schizophrenics like Ian Spurling—who eventually became Freddie Mercury’s costume designer—would dance and sing and paint and recite poetry and rub shoulders with visiting freethinking celebrities like Timothy Leary and Sean Connery.” Adrian paused. “And then there were other, less beguiling rooms, like Mary Barnes’s shit room down in the basement.”

“Mary Barnes’s shit room?” I asked. “You mean like the worst room in the house?”

“I was seven when I first visited Kingsley Hall,” Adrian said. “My father said to me, ‘There’s a very special person down in the basement who wants to meet you.’ So I went down there and the first thing I said was, ‘What’s that smell of shit?’”

The smell of shit was—Adrian told me—coming from a chronic schizophrenic by the name of Mary Barnes. She represented a conflict at Kingsley Hall. Laing held madness in great esteem. He believed the insane possessed a special knowledge—only they understood the true madness that permeated society. But Mary Barnes, down in the basement, hated being mad. It was agony for her, and she desperately wanted to be normal.

Her needs won out. Laing and his fellow Kingsley Hall psychiatrists encouraged her to regress to the infantile state in the hope that she might grow up once again, but sane. The plan wasn’t going well. She was constantly naked, smearing herself and the walls in her own excreta, communicating only by squeals and refusing to eat unless someone fed her from a bottle.

“The smell of Mary Barnes’s shit was proving a real ideological problem,” Adrian said. “They used to have long discussions about it. Mary needed to be free to roll around in her own shit, but the smell of it would impinge upon other people’s freedom to smell fresh air. So they spent a lot of time trying to formulate a shit policy.”

“And what about your father?” I asked. “What was he like in the midst of all this?”

Adrian coughed. “Well,” he said, “the downside of having no barriers between doctors and patients was that everyone became a patient.”

There was a silence. “When I envisaged Kingsley Hall, I imagined everyone becoming a doctor,” I said. “I suppose I was feeling quite optimistic about humanity.”

“Nope,” Adrian said. “Everyone became a patient. Kingsley Hall was very wild. There was an unhealthy respect for madness there. The first thing my father did was lose himself completely, go crazy, because there was a part of him that was totally fucking mad. In his case, it was a drunken, wild madness.”

“That’s an incredibly depressing thought,” I said, “that if you’re in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity, it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.”

Adrian nodded. He said visitors like Elliott Barker would have been kept away from the darkest corners, like Mary Barnes’s shit room and his father’s drunken insanity, and instead steered toward the Indian silks and the delightful poetry evenings with Sean Connery in attendance.

“By the way,” I said, “did they ever manage to formulate a successful shit policy?”

“Yes,” Adrian said. “One of my dad’s colleagues said, ‘She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints.’ And it worked.”

Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and widely exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired in the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colorful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic.

“And it got rid of the smell of shit,” Adrian said.

Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.

He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.

In the mid-1960s, just as Elliott Barker was first conceiving his Total Encounter Capsule over in Ontario, Bob Hare was in Vancouver working as a prison psychologist. His was the maximum-security British Columbia Penitentiary. Nowadays it is a prisonthemed bar and diner where the servers wear striped prison uniforms and dishes are named after famous inmates, but back then it was a tough facility with a brutal reputation. Like Elliott, Bob believed that the psychopaths in his care buried their madness beneath a façade of normality. But Bob was less idealistic. He was interested in detection, not cure. He’d been tricked so many times by devious psychopaths. On his very first day working at the prison, for example, the warden had told him he needed a uniform and he should give his measurements to the inmate who was the prison tailor. So Bob did, and was glad to observe how assiduously the man took them. He spent a long time getting everything just right: the feet, the inside leg. Bob felt moved by the sight. Even in this awful prison, here was a man who took pride in his work.

But then, when the uniform arrived, Bob found that one trouser leg rode up to his calf while the other trailed along the ground. The jacket sleeves were equally askew. It couldn’t have been human error. The man was obviously trying to make him look like a clown.

At every turn, psychopaths were making his life unpleasant. One even cut the brake cables of his car while it was in the prison’s auto repair shop. Bob could have been killed. And so he started devising tests to determine if psychopaths could somehow be rooted out.

He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers. There was no shortage. Prisoners were always looking to relieve the boredom. He strapped them up, one by one, to various EEG and sweat and blood-pressure measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and he explained to them that he was going to count backward from ten and when he reached one, they’d receive a very painful electric shock.

The difference in the responses stunned Bob. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock was just the penance they deserved, and as the countdown continued, the monitors revealed dramatic increases in their perspiration rates. They were, Bob noted and documented, scared.

“And what happened when you got to one?” I asked.

“I gave them an electric shock,” Bob said. He smiled. “We used really painful electric shocks,” he said.

“And the psychopaths?” I asked.

“They didn’t break a sweat,” said Bob. “Nothing.”

I looked at him.

“Sure,” he added, “at the exact moment the unpleasant thing occurred.”

“The electric shock?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Bob. “When the unpleasant thing occurred, the psychopaths gave a response...”

“Like a shriek?” I asked.

“Yes, I suppose like a shriek,” said Bob. But the tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn’t functioning as it should.

It was an enormous breakthrough for Bob, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains. But he was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they’d be in when he reached one, and still: nothing. No sweat. Bob learned something that Elliott Barker wouldn’t for years: psychopaths were likely to re-offend.

“They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had occurred just moments before,” Bob said. “So what’s the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them.”

He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.

Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we’re on the edge of our seats anyway. If we’re watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise, we leap in terror. But if we’re engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren’t horrified. They’re absorbed.

It seemed from Bob’s experiments that psychopaths see blown-apart faces the same way we journalists see mysterious packages sent in the mail, or the same way we see Broadmoor patients who might or might not have faked madness—as fascinating puzzles to be solved.

Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to Science magazine. “The editor returned them unpublished,” he said. “He wrote me a letter. I’ll never forget it. He wrote: ‘Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people.’”

Bob paused and chuckled.

“Couldn’t have come from real people,” he repeated.

We took our places. Bob flicked a switch. And onto the screen came a video of an empty room. It was a drab, municipal-looking room painted in a blue so dull it was barely a color. There was a plywood desk, a chair. The only splash of cheerfulness was a bright red button on the wall. Into the room walked a man. He was good-looking, neatly dressed. He had a bit of a twinkle in his eye. He moved his chair until it was underneath the red button. It made a slight scraping noise as he pulled it across the floor.

“Do you see what he just did?” said Bob. “He moved his chair to right below the panic button. He did it to intimidate my researcher, who’s standing behind the camera. Just a little display of control. That feeling of control is important to them.”

Psychopaths, Bob said, will invariably argue that their victims had no right to complain. They had insurance. Or they learned a valuable life lesson getting beaten up like that. Or it was their own fault anyway. One time Bob interviewed a man who had impulsively killed another man over a bar tab.

“He only had himself to blame,” the killer told Bob. “Anybody could have seen I was in a rotten mood that night.”

Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions.

And so passed the three days. And as they did, my skepticism drained away entirely and I became a Bob Hare devotee, bowled over by his discoveries. I think the other skeptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon, the kind of power that heroes of TV dramas about brilliant criminal profilers display — the power to identify a psychopath merely by spotting certain turns of phrase, certain sentence constructions, certain ways of being. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I’d been hanging around with Tony and the Scientologists.

Instead I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths, contemptuous of, for instance, Norman Mailer.

When I heard this story back in the late 1990s, I decided to approach Toto Constant for an interview. I wanted to learn how a man used to wielding such tremendous, malevolent power was adapting to life back home in the suburbs with his mother.

[...] That day in Queens was strange and memorable. Well-dressed men came and went. They sometimes huddled in corners and talked about things I couldn’t hear, although I strained to eavesdrop. Maybe they were planning a military coup or something.

I asked him how he was adjusting to everyday life. What did he do to pass the time? Did he have hobbies? He smiled slightly. “I’ll show you,” he said.

He led me from his mother’s house and down an alleyway, and then down another alleyway, and into a cluster of apartment blocks.

“Nearly there,” he said. “Don’t worry!”

We climbed the stairs. I looked apprehensively behind me. We reached a doorway. He opened it. I took in the room.

On every table, every surface, there were the kinds of tiny plastic figures that come free with McDonald’s and Burger King promotions — little Dumbos and Goofys and Muppets from Space and Rugrats and Batmen and Powerpuff Girls and Men in Black and Luke Skywalkers and Bart Simpsons and Fred Flintstones and Jackie Chans and Buzz Lightyears and on and on.

We looked at each other.

“What impresses me most about them is the artistry,” he said.

“Do you arrange them into battalions?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

There was a silence.

“Shall we go?” he murmured, I think regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.

A few minutes later we were back in his mother’s house, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table. His mother shuffled in and out. He was telling me that one day the people of Haiti would call him back to lead them —“They adore me in Haiti,” he said—and, yes, when that day came, he would do his duty for the people.

I asked him about Cité Soleil and Raboteau and the other charges against him.

“There’s not even smoke to those claims,” he said. “Not even smoke!”

“Is that it?” I thought. “Is that all you’re going to say on the subject?”

“The lies they tell about me break my heart,” he said.

And then I heard a strange noise coming from Constant. His body was shaking. The noise I could hear was something like sobbing. But it wasn’t quite sobbing. It was an approximation of sobbing. His face was screwed up like a face would be if it were crying, but it was weird, like bad acting.

A grown man in a dapper suit was pretending to cry in front of me. This would have been awkward enough if he was actually crying—I find displays of overt emotion not at all pleasant—but this was a man palpably simulating crying, which made the moment at once awkward, surreal, and quite disturbing.

The first obviously strange thing about Al Dunlap’s grand Florida mansion and lavish, manicured lawns—he lives a ten-hour drive from Shubuta—was the unusually large number of ferocious sculptures there were of predatory animals. They were everywhere: stone lions and panthers with teeth bared, eagles soaring downward, hawks with fish in their talons, and on and on, across the grounds, around the lake, in the swimming pool/health club complex, in the many rooms. There were crystal lions and onyx lions and iron lions and iron panthers and paintings of lions and sculptures of human skulls.

Like Toto Constant’s army of plastic Burger King figurines but huge and vicious and expensive, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad. “Lions,” said Al Dunlap, showing me around. He was wearing a casual jacket and slacks and looked tanned, healthy. His teeth were very white. “Lions. Jaguars. Lions. Always predators. Predators. Predators. Predators. I have a great belief in and a great respect for predators. Everything I did I had to go make happen.”

Item 5: Conning/Manipulative, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad. His statements may reveal a belief that the world is made up of “predators and prey,” or that it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses in others.

And so the morning continued, with Al redefining a great many psychopathic traits as Leadership Positives. Impulsivity was “just another way of saying Quick Analysis. Some people spend a week weighing up the pros and cons. Me? I look at it for ten minutes. And if the pros outweigh the cons? Go!” Shallow Affect (an inability to feel a deep range of emotions) stops you from feeling “some nonsense emotions.” A lack of remorse frees you up to move forward and achieve more great things. What’s the point in drowning yourself in sorrow?

And then, finally, underlined and circled with an exclamation mark:

P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X

“P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X” was the cruelest line in the paper, Jack had said. I found it incomprehensible. When I see phrases like that my brain collapses in on itself. But, this being the secret formula to the brutality, the equation that led to the death of Shubuta, I asked some financial experts to translate it.

“So,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak, of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California, “the PE is the average price of the stock divided by next year’s forecasted earnings. The increase in the PE means that the stock price was expected to rise faster than the increase in earnings. This means the investment house expected that the Draconian cuts would produce higher earnings for years to come, and next year’s stock price would reflect that higher earnings for years in the future.”

“For a company making low-priced appliances,” e-mailed John A. Byrne of BusinessWeek, “it’s a very high PE. The analyst is assuming that if Dunlap can squeeze out overhead and expenses, the earnings will shoot up and investors who get in early will make a killing.”

“Bottom line,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak. “One investment house thought that most investors would cheer mass layoffs at Sunbeam. This is a remorseless view of people losing jobs. The only upside of this is that whomever followed this advice was seriously pissed at the investment house a year later when the stock tanked.”

As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

“You’re like a medieval monk,” Adam said, “stitching together a tapestry of people’s craziness. You take a little bit of craziness from up there and a little bit of craziness from over there and then you stitch it all together.”

There was another short silence.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

Why was Adam criticizing my journalistic style, questioning my entire project? “Adam is such a contrarian,” I thought. “Such a polemicist. If he starts picking apart my thesis after I’ve been working on this big story for so long now, I’m not going to listen because he’s a known contrarian. Yes. If Adam picks apart my thesis, I won’t listen.”

(Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions—He usually has some excuse for his behavior, including rationalization and putting the blame on others.)

“We all do it,” Adam was continuing. “All journalists. We create stories out of fragments. We travel all over the world, propelled onwards by something, we sit in people’s houses, our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness—the extreme, outermost aspects of that person’s personality—the irrational anger, the anxiety, the paranoia, the narcissism, the things that would be defined within DSM as mental disorders. We’ve dedicated our lives to it. We know what we do is odd but nobody talks about it. Forget psychopathic CEOs. My question is, what does all this say about our sanity?”

Plenty of people dehumanize others—find ways to eradicate empathy and remorse from their day jobs—so they can perform their jobs better. That’s presumably why medical students tend to throw human cadavers at each other for a joke, and so on.

The thing that made Charlotte truly unusual was the brainwave she came up with one day. It had dawned on her from early on in her career that, yes, the shows’ best guests were the ones who were mad in certain ways. And one day she realized that there was a brilliantly straightforward way of seeking them out. Her method was far more rudimentary than the Bob Hare Checklist, but just as effective for her requirements. It was this:

“I’d ask them what medication they were on. They’d give me a list. Then I’d go to a medical website to see what [the medications] were for. And I’d assess if they were too mad to come onto the show or just mad enough.”

“Just mad enough?” I asked.

“Just mad enough,” said Charlotte.

“What constituted too mad?” I asked.

“Schizophrenia,” said Charlotte. “Schizophrenia was a no-no. So were psychotic episodes. If they’re on lithium for psychosis, we probably wouldn’t have had them on. We wouldn’t want them to come on and then go off and kill themselves.” Charlotte paused. “Although if the story was awesome—and by awesome I mean a far-reaching mega family argument that’s going to make a really charged show—they would have to be pretty mad to be stopped.”

“So what constituted ‘just mad enough’?” I asked.

“Prozac,” said Charlotte. “Prozac’s the perfect drug. They’re upset. I say, ‘Why are you upset?’ ‘I’m upset because my husband’s cheating on me, so I went to the doctor and he gave me Prozac.’ Perfect! I know she’s not THAT depressed, but she’s depressed enough to go to a doctor and so she’s probably angry and upset.”

On the drive back to London from Devon it hit me: David was right. A lot of people are scared they’re going mad. Late at night, after a few drinks, they admit it. One or two of my friends swear they don’t mind. One woman I know says she secretly wills a nervous breakdown on so she can get admitted to a psychiatric hospital, away from the tensions of modern life, where she’ll be able to have long lie-ins and be looked after by nurses.

But most of my friends do mind, they say. It scares them. They just want to be normal. I’m one of them, forever unpleasurably convinced my wife is dead because I can’t reach her on the phone, letting out involuntary yelps on claustrophobic Ryanair flights, becoming debilitatingly anxious that psychopaths might want to kill me. And we spend our evenings watching Wife Swap and Come Dine with Me and Supernanny and the early rounds of X Factor and Big Brother. TV is just troubled people being booed these days.

There’s a load of films being made where filmmakers go to a council estate and 90 percent of the people there are functional—getting their kids ready for school, paying their taxes, working. And 10 percent are dysfunctional—and they go, “That’s what we’re going to make a film about.” —ACTOR EDDIE MARSAN, INTERVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY IN The Independent, MAY 2, 2010

Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.

David Shayler’s tragedy is that his madness has spiraled into something too outlandish, too out-of-the-ball-park, and consequently useless. We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

Lizzie’s “dark secret”—as she finally informed Colin in Hyde Park, a large team of undercover officers monitoring their every move—was that when she was a teenager, she’d gotten involved with some “special people”—satanic people—and when she was with them, “a baby had had its throat cut. And then the baby’s blood was put into a cup, and everybody had a drink, and it was the most electrifying atmosphere.” After they drank the baby’s blood, they killed its mother: “She was laid out naked and these knives were brought out and this man handed me one of the knives and he asked me to cut the woman’s throat, and I did, and then there was this big orgy, and I was with this man, well, this man was the best ever.”

Lizzie looked at Colin and said she could truly love only a man who had done a similar thing. Colin replied, “I think you’re aiming a bit high.

David Rosenhan was a psychologist from Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, and Princeton. Like Spitzer, he’d grown tired of the pseudoscientific, ivory-tower world of the psychoanalyst. He wanted to demonstrate that they were as useless as they were idolized, and so he devised an experiment. He co-opted seven friends, none of whom had ever had any psychiatric problems. They gave themselves pseudonyms and fake occupations and then, all at once, they traveled across America, each to a different mental hospital. As Rosenhan later wrote: They were located in five different states on the East and West coasts. Some were old and shabby, some were quite new. Some had good staff-patient ratios, others were quite understaffed. Only one was a strict private hospital. All of the others were supported by state or federal funds or, in one instance, by university funds.

At an agreed time, each of them told the duty psychiatrist that they were hearing a voice in their head that said the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” That was the only lie they would be allowed to tell. Otherwise they had to behave completely normally.

All eight were immediately diagnosed as insane and admitted into the hospitals. Seven were told they had schizophrenia; one, manic depression. Rosenhan had expected the experiment would last a couple of days. That’s what he’d told his family: that they shouldn’t worry and he’d see them in a couple of days. The hospital didn’t let him out for two months.

In fact, they refused to let any of the eight out, for an average of nineteen days each, even though they all acted completely normally from the moment they were admitted. When staff asked them how they were feeling, they said they were feeling fine. They were all given powerful antipsychotic drugs.

Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane. Simply telling the staff they were sane wasn’t going to cut it. Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label.

There was only one way out. They had to agree with the psychiatrists that they were insane and then pretend to get better. When Rosenhan reported the experiment, there was pandemonium. He was accused of trickery. He and his friends had faked mental illness! You can’t blame a psychiatrist for misdiagnosing someone who presented himself with fake symptoms! One mental hospital challenged Rosenhan to send some more fakes, guaranteeing they’d spot them this time. Rosenhan agreed, and after a month, the hospital proudly announced they had discovered forty-one fakes. Rosenhan then revealed he’d sent no one to the hospital.

What nobody knew was that Spitzer had a plan—to remove, as much as he could, human judgment from psychiatry. For the next six years, from 1974 to 1980, he held a series of DSM-III editorial meetings inside a small conference room at Columbia University. They were, by all accounts, chaos. As The New Yorker’s Alix Spiegel later reported, the psychiatrists Spitzer invited would yell over each other. The person with the loudest voice tended to get taken the most seriously. Nobody took minutes.

“Of course we didn’t take minutes,” Spitzer told me. “We barely had a typewriter.” Someone would yell out the name of a potential new mental disorder and a checklist of its overt characteristics, there’d be a cacophony of voices in assent or dissent, and if Spitzer agreed, which he almost always did, he’d hammer it out then and there on an old typewriter, and there it would be, sealed in stone.

It seemed a foolproof plan. He would eradicate from psychiatry all that crass sleuthing around the unconscious. There’d be no more silly polemicizing. Human judgment hadn’t helped his mother. Instead it would be like science. Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual they were creating—DSM-III—and if the patient’s overt symptoms tallied with the checklist, they’d get the diagnosis.

And that’s how practically every disorder you’ve ever heard of or have been diagnosed with came to be invented, inside that chaotic conference room, under the auspices of Robert Spitzer, who was taking his inspiration from checklist pioneers like Bob Hare.

“Give me some examples,” I asked him.

“Oh . . .” He waved his arm in the air to say there were just so many. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder”. Then there was Autism, Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia, Panic Disorder... every one a brand-new disorder with its own checklist of symptoms.

When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he’d inadvertently created a world in which some ordinary behaviors were being labeled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”

“Do you ever think about it?” I asked him.

“I guess the answer is I don’t really,” he said. “Maybe I should. But I don’t like the idea of speculating how many of the DSM-III categories are describing normal behavior.”

“Why don’t you like speculating on that?” I asked.

“Because then I’d be speculating on how much of it is a mistake,” he said.

There was another long silence.

“Some of it may be,” he said.

“Oh, by the way,” said Tony on the phone to me now. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. A favor.” “Oh yes?” I said. “When you write about me in your book,” he said, “please name me. My real name. None of that stupid ‘Tony’ business. My real name.”

It was time. We entered the tribunal room. The hearing lasted all of five minutes, one of which involved the magistrates telling me that if I reported the details of what happened inside the room—who said what—I would be imprisoned. So I won’t. But the upshot—Tony was to be free. He looked as if he’d been hit by a bus. Back out in the corridor his barrister, and Brian, and some independent psychiatrists he’d co-opted to his side, surrounded him, congratulating him. The process would take three months—either to find him a bed for a transitional period in a medium-secure unit, or to get him straight out onto the street—but there was no doubt. He smiled, hobbled over to me, and handed me a sheaf of papers.

They were independent reports, written for the tribunal by various psychiatrists who’d been invited to assess him. They told me things I didn’t know about Tony, about how his mother had been an alcoholic and used to regularly beat him up and kick him out of the house, how he’d be homeless for a few days at a time and then his mother would let him back in, how most of her boyfriends were drug addicts and criminals, how he was expelled from school for threatening his dinner lady with a knife, how he was sent to boarding and special schools but ran away because he was homesick and missed his mother.

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

“Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I’ve believed that psychopaths are monsters,” I said. “They’re just psychopaths, it’s what defines them, it’s what they are.” I paused. “But isn’t Tony kind of a semi-psychopath? A gray area? Doesn’t his story prove that people in the middle shouldn’t necessarily be defined by their maddest edges?”

“I think that’s right,” he replied. “Personally I don’t like the way Bob Hare talks about psychopaths almost as if they are a different species.”

when I’d doorstepped him back in Gothenburg, I had dismissed him as just eccentric and obsessive. I had reduced him in that manner. But now I could see that it was his eccentricities and his obsessions that had led him to produce and distribute Being or Nothingness in the most intriguing ways. There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

He e-mailed me back: “I can get a little obsessive—that I must admit...”

And then, as he’d promised he would, he shut off all e-mail contact.

A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality. Each of us is ensnared within numerous all-encompassing spiderwebs, which on the one hand restrict our movements, but at the same time transmit our tiniest jiggle to faraway destinations. Our daily routines influence the lives of people and animals halfway across the world, and some personal gestures can unexpectedly set the entire world ablaze, as happened with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, which ignited the Arab Spring, and with the women who shared their stories ofsexual harassment and sparked the #MeToo movement.

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group and nation has its owntales and myths. But during the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. The Second World War knocked out the fascist story, and from the late 1940s to the late 1980s the world became a battleground between just two stories: communism and liberalism. Then the communist story collapsed, and the liberal story remained the dominant guide to the human past and the indispensable manual for the future of the world – or so it seemed to the global elite. The liberal story celebrates the value and power of liberty. It says that for thousands of years humankind lived under oppressive regimes which allowed people few political rights, economic opportunities or personal liberties, and which heavily restricted the movements of individuals, ideas and goods. But people fought for their freedom, and step by step, liberty gained ground. Democratic regimes took the place of brutal dictatorships. Free enterprise overcame economic restrictions. People learned to think for themselves and follow their hearts, instead of blindly obeying bigoted priests and hidebound traditions. Open roads, stout bridges and bustling airports replaced walls, moats and barbed-wire fences.

If we just continue to liberalise and globalise our political and economic systems, we will produce peace and prosperity for all. Countries that join this unstoppable march of progress will be rewarded with peace and prosperity sooner. Countries that try to resist the inevitable will suffer the consequences, until they too see the light, open their borders and liberalise their societies, their politics and their markets. It may take time, but eventually even North Korea, Iraq and El Salvador will look like Denmark or Iowa.

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail; in 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, have entered a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Everything is perfectly clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying. Nothing makes any sense. A bit like the Soviet elite in the 1980s, liberals don’t understand how history deviated from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism to interpret reality. Disorientation causes them to think in apocalyptic terms, as if the failure of history to come to its envisioned happy ending can only mean that it is hurtling towards Armageddon. Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches on to catastrophic scenarios. Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor, many liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilisation.

Governments might therefore need to invent entirely new taxes – perhaps a tax on information (which will be both the most important asset in the economy, and the only thing exchanged in numerous transactions). Will the political system manage to deal with the crisis before it runs out of money?

In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation, and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Trump might thus demonstrate an opposite trajectory to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital for the economy, but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power, but who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more. This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed ‘the End of History’, confidently asserting that all the big political and economic questions of the past had been settled, and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets and government welfare services remained the only game in town. This package seemed destined to spread around the whole world, overcome all obstacles, erase all national borders, and turn humankind into one free global community. But history has not ended, and following the Franz Ferdinand moment, the Hitler moment, and the Che Guevara moment, we now find ourselves in the Trump moment. This time, however, the liberal story is not faced by a coherent ideological opponent like imperialism, fascism, or communism. The Trump moment is far more nihilistic.

Whereas the major movements of the twentieth century all had a vision for the entire human species – be it global domination, revolution or liberation – Donald Trump offers no such thing. Just the opposite. His main message is that it’s not America’s job to formulate and promote any global vision. Similarly, the British Brexiteers barely have a plan for the future of the Disunited Kingdom – the future of Europe and of the world is far beyond their horizon. Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety – they lost faith mainly in its globalising part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border. Indeed, they believe that in order to preserve liberty and prosperity in Yorkshire or Kentucky, it is best to build a wall on the border, and adopt illiberal policies towards foreigners.

Russia does offer an alternative model to liberal democracy, but this model is not a coherent political ideology. Rather, it is a political practice in which a number of oligarchs monopolise most of a country’s wealth and power, and then use their control of the media to hide their activities and cement their rule. Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’. If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats – either real or imaginary. When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.

This might imply that the present crisis of faith is less severe than its predecessors. Any liberal who is driven to despair by the events of the last few years should just recollect how much worse things looked in 1918, 1938 or 1968. At the end of the day, humankind won’t abandon the liberal story, because it doesn’t have any alternative. People may give the system an angry kick in the stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back. Alternatively, people may completely give up on having a global story of any kind, and instead seek shelter with local nationalist and religious tales. In the twentieth century, nationalist movements were an extremely important political player, but they lacked a coherent vision for the future of the world other than supporting the division of the globe into independent nation states. Thus Indonesian nationalists fought against Dutch domination, and Vietnamese nationalists wanted a free Vietnam, but there was no Indonesian or Vietnamese story for humanity as a whole. When it came time to explain how Indonesia, Vietnam and all the other free nations should relate to one another, and how humans should deal with global problems such as the threat of nuclear war, nationalists invariably turned to either liberal or communist ideas.

But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts. Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the faithful with the atheists, the natives with the immigrants, and the Europeans with the Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. However, economic growth will not save the global ecosystem – just the opposite, it is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption – it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.

AI not only stands poised to hack humans and outperform them in what were hitherto uniquely human skills. It also enjoys uniquely non-human abilities, which make the difference between an AI and a human worker one of kind rather than merely of degree. Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability. Since humans are individuals, it is difficult to connect them to one another and to make sure that they are all up to date. In contrast, computers aren’t individuals, and it is easy to integrate them into a single flexible network. Hence what we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers. Rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network. When considering automation it is therefore wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.

For example, many drivers are unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations, and they often violate them. In addition, since every vehicle is an autonomous entity, when two vehicles approach the same junction at the same time, the drivers might miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, in contrast, can all be connected to one another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they are not really two separate entities – they are part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate and collide are therefore far smaller. And if the Ministry of Transport decides to change some traffic regulation, all self-driving vehicles can be easily updated at exactly the same moment, and barring some bug in the program, they will all follow the new regulation to the letter.

At least in the short term, AI and robotics are unlikely to completely eliminate entire industries. Jobs that require specialisation in a narrow range of routinised activities will be automated. But it will be much more difficult to replace humans with machines in less routine jobs that demand the simultaneous use of a wide range of skills, and that involve dealing with unforeseen scenarios. The human care industry – which takes care of the sick, the young and the elderly – is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time. Indeed, as people live longer and have fewer children, care of the elderly will probably be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the human labour market.

Emotions are not some mystical phenomenon – they are the result of a biochemical process. Hence, in the not too distant future a machine-learning algorithm could analyse the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the emotional impact that a particular song – even a particular musical key – is likely to have on you. Will all this result in great art? That depends on the definition of art. If beauty is indeed in the ears of the listener, and if the customer is always right, then biometric algorithms stand a chance of producing the best art in history. If art is about something deeper than human emotions, and should express a truth beyond our biochemical vibrations, biometric algorithms might not make very good artists. But nor do most humans. In order to enter the art market and displace many human composers and performers, algorithms won’t have to begin by straightaway surpassing Tchaikovsky. It will be enough if they outperform Britney Spears.

In 2050, a cashier or textile worker losing their job to a robot will hardly be able to start working as a cancer researcher, as a drone operator, or as part of a human–AI banking team. They will not have the necessary skills. In the First World War it made sense to send millions of raw conscripts to charge machine guns and die in their thousands. Their individual skills mattered little. Today, despite the shortage of drone operators and data analysts, the US Air Force is unwilling to fill the gaps with Walmart dropouts. You wouldn’t like an inexperienced recruit to mistake an Afghan wedding party for a high-level Taliban conference. Consequently, despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new ‘useless’ class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labour. Even if we could constantly invent new jobs and retrain the workforce, we may wonder whether the average human will have the emotional stamina necessary for a life of such endless upheavals. Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the early twenty-first century has produced a global epidemic of stress.21 As the volatility of the job market and of individual careers increases, would people be able to cope? We would probably need far more effective stress-reduction techniques – ranging from drugs through neuro-feedback to meditation – to prevent the Sapiens mind from snapping. By 2050 a ‘useless’ class might emerge not merely because of an absolute lack of jobs or lack of relevant education, but also because of insufficient mental stamina.

A forty-year-old unemployed Walmart cashier who by dint of superhuman efforts manages to reinvent herself as a drone pilot might have to reinvent herself again ten years later, because by then the flying of drones may also have been automated. This volatility will also make it more difficult to organise unions or secure labour rights. Already today, many new jobs in advanced economies involve unprotected temporary work, freelancing and one-time gigs. How do you unionise a profession that mushrooms and disappears within a decade?

even if enough government help is forthcoming, it is far from clear whether billions of people could repeatedly reinvent themselves without losing their mental balance. Hence, if despite all our efforts a significant percentage of humankind is pushed out of the job market, we would have to explore new models for post-work societies, post-work economies, and post- work politics. The first step is to honestly acknowledge that the social, economic and political models we have inherited from the past are inadequate for dealing with such a challenge.

Some may argue that humans could never become economically irrelevant, because even if they cannot compete with AI in the workplace, they will always be needed as consumers. However, it is far from certain that the future economy will need us even as consumers. Machines and computers could do that too. Theoretically, you can have an economy in which a mining corporation produces and sells iron to a robotics corporation, the robotics corporation produces and sells robots to the mining corporation, which mines more iron, which is used to produce more robots, and so on. These corporations can grow and expand to the far reaches of the galaxy, and all they need are robots and computers – they don’t need humans even to buy their products.

So if humans are needed neither as producers nor as consumers, what will safeguard their physical survival and their psychological well-being? We cannot wait for the crisis to erupt in full force before we start looking for answers. By then it will be too late. In order to cope with the unprecedented technological and economic disruptions of the twenty-first century, we need to develop new social and economic models as soon as possible. These models should be guided by the principle of protecting humans rather than jobs. Many jobs are uninspiring drudgery, not worth saving. Nobody’s life- dream is to be a cashier. What we should focus on is providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their social status and self-worth.

It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise). Both options have advantages and drawbacks. But no matter which paradise you choose, the real problem is in defining what ‘universal’ and ‘basic’ actually mean.

??? with the rise of AI, robots and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labour would become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the US, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon, and print it in New York. The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3-D printing centres in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home.

n the past, cheap unskilled labour has served as a secure bridge across the global economic divide, and even if a country advanced slowly, it could expect to reach safety eventually. Taking the right steps was more important than making speedy progress. Yet now the bridge is shaking, and soon it might collapse. Those who have already crossed it – graduating from cheap labour to high-skill industries – will probably be OK. But those lagging behind might find themselves stuck on the wrong side of the chasm, without any means of crossing over. What do you do when nobody needs your cheap unskilled labourers, and you don’t have the resources to build a good education system and teach them new skills?

Although they are poor and unemployed, in survey after survey these ultra-Orthodox Jewish men report higher levels of life satisfaction than any other section of Israeli society. This is due to the strength of their community bonds, as well as to the deep meaning they find in studying scriptures and performing rituals. A small room full of Jewish men discussing the Talmud might well generate more joy, engagement and insight than a huge textile sweatshop full of hard-working factory hands. In global surveys of life satisfaction, Israel is usually somewhere near the top, thanks in part to the contribution of these jobless poor people.31 Secular Israelis often complain bitterly that the ultra-Orthodox don’t contribute enough to society, and live off other people’s hard work. Secular Israelis also tend to argue that the ultra-Orthodox way of life is unsustainable, especially as ultra-Orthodox families have seven children on average.32 Sooner or later, the state will not be able to support so many unemployed people, and the ultra-Orthodox will have to go to work. Yet it might be just the reverse. As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model of the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to the yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and for community might eclipse the quest for a job.

In the wake of the Brexit vote, eminent biologist Richard Dawkins protested that the vast majority of the British public – including himself – should never have been asked to vote in the referendum, because they lacked the necessary background in economics and political science. ‘You might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right, or let passengers vote on which runway the pilot should land.’

However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They are about what we feel. And when it comes to feelings, Einstein and Dawkins are no better than anyone else. Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound ‘free will’, that this ‘free will’ is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free. Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, hence on election day her feelings – represented by her vote – count just as much as anybody else’s.

The liberal belief in the feelings and free choices of individuals is neither natural nor very ancient. For thousands of years people believed that authority came from divine laws rather than from the human heart, and that we should therefore sanctify the word of God rather than human liberty. Only in the last few centuries did the source of authority shift from celestial deities to flesh-and-blood humans. Soon authority might shift again – from humans to algorithms. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was justified by the liberal story, so the coming technological revolution might establish the authority of Big Data algorithms, while undermining the very idea of individual freedom.

People will enjoy the best healthcare in history, but for precisely this reason they will probably be sick all the time. There is always something wrong somewhere in the body. There is always something that can be improved. In the past, you felt perfectly healthy as long as you didn’t sense pain or you didn’t suffer from an apparent disability such as limping. But by 2050, thanks to biometric sensors and Big Data algorithms, diseases may be diagnosed and treated long before they lead to pain or disability. As a result, you will always find yourself suffering from some ‘medical condition’ and following this or that algorithmic recommendation. If you refuse, perhaps your medical insurance would become invalid, or your boss would fire you – why should they pay the price of your obstinacy?

Even in allegedly free societies, algorithms might gain authority because we will learn from experience to trust them on more and more issues, and will gradually lose our ability to make decisions for ourselves. Just think of the way that within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust the Google search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: searching for relevant and trustworthy information. We no longer search for information. Instead, we google. And as we increasingly rely on Google for answers, so our ability to search for information by ourselves diminishes.

Already today, ‘truth’ is defined by the top results of the Google search. This has also been happening with physical abilities, such as navigating space. People ask Google to guide them around. When they reach an intersection, their gut feeling might tell them ‘turn left’, but Google Maps says ‘turn right’. At first they listen to their gut feeling, turn left, get stuck in a traffic jam, and miss an important meeting. Next time they listen to Google, turn right, and make it on time. They learn from experience to trust Google. Within a year or two, they blindly rely on whatever Google Maps tells them, and if the smartphone fails, they are completely clueless. In March 2012 three Japanese tourists in Australia decided to take a day trip to a small offshore island, and drove their car straight into the Pacific Ocean.

Once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and who to marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making. Democratic elections and free markets will make little sense. So would most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking the Facebook algorithm whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favourite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions taken by the Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth will have much more comfortable lives, but what kind of life will it be exactly? Do we have models for making sense of such a life?

As authority shifts from humans to algorithms, we may no longer see the world as the playground of autonomous individuals struggling to make the right choices. Instead, we might perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data- processing system – and then merge into it. Already today we are becoming tiny chips inside a giant data-processing system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, tweets and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, tweets and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering all these emails.

If you program a self-driving car to stop and help strangers in distress, it will do so come hell or high water (unless, of course, you insert an exception clause for infernal or high-water scenarios). Similarly, if your self-driving car is programmed to swerve to the opposite lane in order to save the two kids in its path, you can bet your life this is exactly what it will do. Which means that when designing their self-driving car, Toyota or Tesla will be transforming a theoretical problem in the philosophy of ethics into a practical problem of engineering.

Granted, the philosophical algorithms will never be perfect. Mistakes will still happen, resulting in injuries, deaths and extremely complicated lawsuits. (For the first time in history, you might be able to sue a philosopher for the unfortunate results of his or her theories, because for the first time in history you could prove a direct causal link between philosophical ideas and real-life events.) However, in order to take over from human drivers, the algorithms won’t have to be perfect. They will just have to be better than the humans. Given that human drivers kill more than a million people each year, that isn’t such a tall order. When all is said and done, would you rather the car next to you was driven by a drunk teenager, or by the Schumacher–Kant team?

AI often frightens people because they don’t trust the AI to remain obedient. We have seen too many science-fiction movies about robots rebelling against their human masters, running amok in the streets and slaughtering everyone. Yet the real problem with robots is exactly the opposite. We should fear them because they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel.

On 16 March 1968 a company of American soldiers went berserk in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, and massacred about 400 civilians. This war crime resulted from the local initiative of men who had been involved in jungle guerrilla warfare for several months. It did not serve any strategic purpose, and contravened both the legal code and the military policy of the USA. It was the fault of human emotions.24 If the USA had deployed killer robots in Vietnam, the massacre of My Lai would never have occurred. Nevertheless, before we rush to develop and deploy killer robots, we need to remind ourselves that the robots always reflect and amplify the qualities of their code. If the code is restrained and benign – the robots will probably be a huge improvement over the average human soldier. Yet if the code is ruthless and cruel – the results will be catastrophic. The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence, but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb troops massacred more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks around the town of Srebrenica. Unlike the haphazard My Lai massacre, the Srebrenica killings were a protracted and well-organised operation that reflected Bosnian Serb policy to ‘ethnically cleanse’ Bosnia of Muslims.25 If the Bosnian Serbs had had killer robots in 1995, it would likely have made the atrocity worse rather than better. Not one robot would have had a moment’s hesitation carrying out whatever orders it received, and would not have spared the life of a single Muslim child out of feelings of compassion, disgust, or mere lethargy.

A ruthless dictator armed with such killer robots will never have to fear that his soldiers will turn against him, no matter how heartless and crazy his orders. A robot army would probably have strangled the French Revolution in its cradle in 1789, and if in 2011 Hosni Mubarak had had a contingent of killer robots he could have unleashed them on the populace without fear of defection. Similarly, an imperialist government relying on a robot army could wage unpopular wars without any concern that its robots might lose their motivation, or that their families might stage protests. If the USA had had killer robots in the Vietnam War, the My Lai massacre might have been prevented, but the war itself could have dragged on for many more years, because the American government would have had fewer worries about demoralised soldiers, massive anti-war demonstrations, or a movement of ‘veteran robots against the war’ (some American citizens might still have objected to the war, but without the fear of being drafted themselves, the memory of personally committing atrocities, or the painful loss of a dear relative, the protesters would probably have been both less numerous and less committed).

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.

When discrimination is directed against entire groups, such as women or black people, these groups can organise and protest against their collective discrimination. But now an algorithm might discriminate against you personally, and you have no idea why. Maybe the algorithm found something in your DNA, your personal history or your Facebook account that it does not like. The algorithm discriminates against you not because you are a woman, or an African American – but because you are you. There is something specific about you that the algorithm does not like. You don’t know what it is, and even if you knew, you cannot organise with other people to protest, because there are no other people suffering the exact same prejudice. It is just you. Instead of just collective discrimination, in the twenty-first century we might face a growing problem of individual discrimination.

Unfortunately, at present we are not doing much to research and develop human consciousness. We are researching and developing human abilities mainly according to the immediate needs of the economic and political system, rather than according to our own long-term needs as conscious beings. My boss wants me to answer emails as quickly as possible, but he has little interest in my ability to taste and appreciate the food I am eating. Consequently, I check my emails even during meals, while losing the ability to pay attention to my own sensations. The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentives to expand and diversify my compassion. So I strive to understand the mysteries of the stock exchange, while making far less effort to understand the deep causes of suffering.

In this, humans are similar to other domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious and less resourceful.34 We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data- processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximise the human potential. Indeed we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. And yet we hardly invest much in exploring the human mind, and instead focus on increasing the speed of our Internet connections and the efficiency of our Big Data algorithms. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

Instead of globalisation resulting in global unity, it might actually result in ‘speciation’: the divergence of humankind into different biological castes or even different species. Globalisation will unite the world horizontally by erasing national borders, but it will simultaneously divide humanity vertically. Ruling oligarchies in countries as diverse as the United States and Russia might merge and make common cause against the mass of ordinary Sapiens. From this perspective, current populist resentment of ‘the elites’ is well founded. If we are not careful, the grandchildren of Silicon Valley tycoons and Moscow billionaires might become a superior species to the grandchildren of Appalachian hillbillies and Siberian villagers. In the long run, such a scenario might even de-globalise the world, as the upper caste congregates inside a self-proclaimed ‘civilisation’ and builds walls and moats to separate it from the hordes of ‘barbarians’ outside. In the twentieth century, industrial civilisation depended on the ‘barbarians’ for cheap labour, raw materials and markets. Therefore it conquered and absorbed them. But in the twenty-first century, a post-industrial civilisation relying on AI, bioengineering and nanotechnology might be far more self- contained and self-sustaining. Not just entire classes, but entire countries and continents might become irrelevant. Fortifications guarded by drones and robots might separate the self-proclaimed civilised zone, where cyborgs fight one another with logic bombs, from the barbarian lands where feral humans fight one another with machetes and Kalashnikovs.

At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It is a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colourful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on, ordinary people decide to try and block the flow of data, they might find it increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival. Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be connected from the womb, and if later in life you choose to disconnect, insurance agencies might refuse to insure you, employers might refuse to employ you, and healthcare services might refuse to take care of you. In the big battle between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down.

Private ownership of one’s own data may sound more attractive than either of these options, but it is unclear what it actually means. We have had thousands of years of experience in regulating the ownership of land. We know how to build a fence around a field, place a guard at the gate, and control who can go in. Over the past two centuries we have become extremely sophisticated in regulating the ownership of industry – thus today I can own a piece of General Motors and a bit of Toyota by buying their shares. But we don’t have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task, because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as you want.

Unfortunately, over the past two centuries intimate communities have indeed been disintegrating. The attempt to replace small groups of people who actually know one another with the imagined communities of nations and political parties could never succeed in full. Your millions of brothers in the national family and your millions of comrades in the Communist Party cannot provide you with the warm intimacy that a single real sibling or friend can. Consequently people live ever more lonely lives in an ever more connected planet. Many of the social and political disruptions of our time can be traced back to this malaise.

Humans have bodies. During the last century technology has been distancing us from our bodies. We have been losing our ability to pay attention to what we smell and taste. Instead we are absorbed in our smartphones and computers. We are more interested in what is happening in cyberspace than in what is happening down the street. It is easier than ever to talk to my cousin in Switzerland, but it is harder to talk to my husband over breakfast, because he constantly looks at his smartphone instead of at me.

In the past, humans could not afford such carelessness. Ancient foragers were always alert and attentive. Wandering in the forest in search of mushrooms, they watched the ground for any telltale bulge. They listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. When they found an edible mushroom, they ate it with the utmost attention to distinguish it from its poisonous cousins. Members of today’s affluent societies don’t need such keen awareness. We can wander between the supermarket aisles while texting messages, and we can buy any of a thousand dishes, all supervised by the health authorities. But whatever we choose, we might end up eating it in haste in front of a screen, checking emails or watching television, while hardly paying attention to the actual taste.

Facebook’s crucial test will come when an engineer invents a new tool that causes people to spend less time buying stuff online and more time in meaningful offline activities with friends. Will Facebook adopt or suppress such a tool? Will Facebook take a true leap of faith, and privilege social concerns over financial interests? If it does so – and manages to avoid bankruptcy – that will be a momentous transformation.

Historically, corporations were not the ideal vehicle for leading social and political revolutions. A real revolution sooner or later demands sacrifices that corporations, their employees and their shareholders are not willing to make. That’s why revolutionaries establish churches, political parties and armies. The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas. If Facebook now aims to instigate a global revolution, it will have to do a much better job in bridging the gap between online and offline. It and the other online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals – a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step towards uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.

While Mark Zuckerberg dreams of uniting humankind online, recent events in the offline world seem to breathe fresh life into the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis. Many pundits, politicians and ordinary citizens believe that the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, the Brexit mayhem and the instability of the European Union all result from a clash between ‘Western Civilisation’ and ‘Islamic Civilisation’. Western attempts to impose democracy and human rights on Muslim nations resulted in a violent Islamic backlash, and a wave of Muslim immigration coupled with Islamic terrorist attacks caused European voters to abandon multicultural dreams in favour of xenophobic local identities.

According to this thesis, humankind has always been divided into diverse civilisations whose members view the world in irreconcilable ways. These incompatible world views make conflicts between civilisations inevitable. Just as in nature different species fight for survival according to the remorseless laws of natural selection, so throughout history civilisations have repeatedly clashed and only the fittest have survived to tell the tale. Those who overlook this grim fact – be they liberal politicians or head-in- the-clouds engineers – do so at their peril.

the analogy between history and biology that underpins the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis is false. Human groups – all the way from small tribes to huge civilisations – are fundamentally different from animal species, and historical conflicts greatly differ from natural selection processes. Animal species have objective identities that endure for thousands upon thousands of generations. Whether you are a chimpanzee or a gorilla depends on your genes rather than your beliefs, and different genes dictate distinct social behaviours.

In truth, European civilisation is anything Europeans make of it, just as Christianity is anything Christians make of it, Islam is anything Muslims make of it, and Judaism is anything Jews make of it. And they have made of it remarkably different things over the centuries. Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills. No matter what revolutions they experience, they can usually weave old and new into a single yarn.

People often refuse to see these changes, especially when it comes to core political and religious values. We insist that our values are a precious legacy from ancient ancestors. Yet the only thing that allows us to say this, is that our ancestors are long dead, and cannot speak for themselves. Consider, for example, Jewish attitudes towards women. Nowadays ultra-Orthodox Jews ban images of women from the public sphere. Billboards and advertisements aimed at ultra-Orthodox Jews usually depict only men and boys – never women and girls.

Nowhere is the ban on seeing women stricter than in the synagogue. In Orthodox synagogues women are carefully segregated from the men, and must confine themselves to a restricted zone where they are hidden behind a curtain, so that no men will accidentally see the shape of a woman as he says his prayers or reads scriptures. Yet if all this is backed by thousands of years of Jewish tradition and immutable divine laws, how to explain the fact that when archaeologists excavated ancient synagogues in Israel from the time of the Mishnah and Talmud, they found no sign of gender segregation, and instead uncovered beautiful floor mosaics and wall paintings depicting women, some of them rather scantily dressed? The rabbis who wrote the Mishnah and Talmud regularly prayed and studied in these synagogues, but present-day Orthodox Jews would consider them blasphemous desecrations of ancient traditions.

Historians often argue that globalisation reached a first peak in 1913, then went into a long decline during the era of the world wars and the Cold War, and recuperated only after 1989.11 This may be true of economic globalisation, but it ignores the different but equally important dynamic of military globalisation. War spreads ideas, technologies and people far more quickly than commerce. In 1918 the United States was more closely linked to Europe than in 1913, the two then drifted apart in the interwar years, only to have their fates meshed together inextricably by the Second World War and the Cold War.

The Islamic State has recently stood out in its complete rejection of the [global political] package, and in its attempt to establish an entirely different kind of political entity – a universal caliphate. But precisely for this reason it has failed. Numerous guerrilla forces and terror organisations have managed to establish new countries or to conquer existing ones. But they have always done so by accepting the fundamental principles of the global political order. Even the Taliban sought international recognition as the legitimate government of the sovereign country of Afghanistan. No group rejecting the principles of global politics has so far gained any lasting control of any significant territory.

let’s go back 1,000 years. Suppose you wanted to hold the Medieval Olympic Games in Rio in 1016. Forget for a moment that Rio was then a small village of Tupi Indians,12 and that Asians, Africans and Europeans were not even aware of America’s existence. Forget the logistical problems of bringing all the world’s top athletes to Rio in the absence of airplanes. Forget too that few sports were shared throughout the world, and even if all humans could run, not everybody could agree on the same rules for a running competition. Just ask yourself how to group the competing delegations. Today’s International Olympic Committee spends countless hours discussing the Taiwan question and the Palestine question. Multiply this by 10,000 to estimate the number of hours you would have to spend on the politics of the Medieval Olympics.

For starters, in 1016 the Chinese Song Empire recognised no political entity on earth as its equal. It would therefore be an unthinkable humiliation to give its Olympic delegation the same status as that granted to the delegations of the Korean kingdom of Koryo or of the Vietnamese kingdom of Dai Co Viet – not to mention the delegations of primitive barbarians from across the seas.

The caliph in Baghdad also claimed universal hegemony, and most Sunni Muslims recognised him as their supreme leader. In practical terms, however, the caliph barely ruled the city of Baghdad. So would all Sunni athletes be part of a single caliphate delegation, or would they be separated into dozens of delegations from the numerous emirates and sultanates of the Sunni world? But why stop with the emirates and sultanates? The Arabian Desert was teaming with free Bedouin tribes, who recognised no overlord save Allah. Would each be entitled to send an independent delegation to compete in archery or camel racing? Europe would give you any number of similar headaches. Would an athlete from the Norman town of Ivry compete under the banner of the local Count of Ivry, of his lord the Duke of Normandy, or perhaps of the feeble King of France?

Many of these political entities appeared and disappeared within a matter of years. As you made your preparations for the 1016 Olympics, you could not know in advance which delegations would show up, because nobody could be sure which political entities would still exist next year. If the kingdom of England had sent a delegation to the 1016 Olympics, by the time the athletes came home with their medals they would have discovered that the Danes had just captured London, and that England was being absorbed into the North Sea Empire of King Cnut the Great, together with Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden. Within another twenty years, that empire disintegrated, but thirty years later England was conquered again, by the Duke of Normandy.

Needless to say, the vast majority of these ephemeral political entities had neither anthem to play nor flag to hoist. Political symbols were of great importance, of course, but the symbolic language of European politics was very different from the symbolic languages of Indonesian, Chinese or Tupi politics. Agreeing on a common protocol to mark victory would have been well-nigh impossible.

In premodern times humans have experimented not only with diverse political systems, but also with a mind-boggling variety of economic models. Russian boyars, Hindu maharajas, Chinese mandarins and Amerindian tribal chiefs had very different ideas about money, trade, taxation and employment. Nowadays, in contrast, almost everybody believes in slightly different variations on the same capitalist theme, and we are all cogs within a single global production line. Whether you live in Congo or Mongolia, in New Zealand or Bolivia, your daily routines and economic fortunes depend on the same economic theories, the same corporations and banks, and the same currents of capital. If the finance ministers of Israel and Iran were to meet for lunch, they would have a common economic language, and could easily understand and sympathise with each other’s woes. When the Islamic State conquered large parts of Syria and Iraq, it murdered tens of thousands of people, demolished archaeological sites, toppled statues, and systematically destroyed the symbols of previous regimes and of Western cultural influence.13 But when its fighters entered the local banks and found there stashes of American dollars covered with the faces of American presidents and with slogans in English praising American political and religious ideals – they did not burn these symbols of American imperialism. For the dollar bill is universally venerated across all political and religious divides. Though it has no intrinsic value – you cannot eat or drink a dollar bill – trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords and North Korean tyrants.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry, and that in order to regain your health, you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you, and that she could cast the demon out using song, dance and the blood of a black cockerel.

Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar- looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably, even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.

The people we fight most often are our own family members. Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreements. What does it mean to be European in 2018? It doesn’t mean to have white skin, to believe in Jesus Christ, or to uphold liberty. Rather, it means to argue vehemently about immigration, about the EU, and about the limits of capitalism. It also means to obsessively ask yourself ‘what defines my identity?’ and to worry about an ageing population, about rampant consumerism and about global warming. In their conflicts and dilemmas, twenty-first-century Europeans are different from their ancestors in 1618 and 1940, but are increasingly similar to their Chinese and Indian trade partners.

It is a dangerous mistake to imagine that without nationalism we would all be living in a liberal paradise. More likely, we would be living in tribal chaos. Peaceful, prosperous and liberal countries such as Sweden, Germany and Switzerland all enjoy a strong sense of nationalism. The list of countries lacking robust national bonds includes Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo and most other failed states.

Events in recent years proved, however, that nationalism still has a powerful hold even on the citizens of Europe and the USA, not to mention Russia, India and China. Alienated by the impersonal forces of global capitalism, and fearing for the fate of national systems of health, education and welfare, people all over the world seek reassurance and meaning in the bosom of the nation.

True, in the nineteenth century countries played the nationalist game without destroying human civilisation. But that was in the pre-Hiroshima era. Since then, nuclear weapons have raised the stakes and changed the fundamental nature of war and politics. As long as humans know how to enrich uranium and plutonium, their survival depends on privileging the prevention of nuclear war over the interests of any particular nation. Zealous nationalists who cry ‘Our country first!’ should ask themselves whether their country by itself, without a robust system of international cooperation, can protect the world – or even itself – from nuclear destruction.

Nationalist isolationism is probably even more dangerous in the context of climate change than of nuclear war. An all-out nuclear war threatens to destroy all nations, so all nations have an equal stake in preventing it. Global warming, in contrast, will probably have a different impact on different nations. Some countries, most notably Russia, might actually benefit from it. Russia has relatively few coastline assets, hence it is far less worried than China or Kiribati about rising sea levels. And whereas higher temperatures are likely to turn Chad into a desert, they might simultaneously turn Siberia into the breadbasket of the world. Moreover, as the ice melts in the far north, the Russian-dominated Arctic sea lanes might become the artery of global commerce, and Kamchatka might replace Singapore as the crossroads of the world.

Particularly in a xenophobic dog-eat-dog world, if even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological path, other countries will be forced to do the same, because nobody can afford to remain behind. In order to avoid such a race to the bottom, humankind will probably need some kind of global identity and loyalty.

Countries locked in armed competition are unlikely to agree on restricting the development of AI, and countries striving to outstrip the technological achievements of their rivals will find it very difficult to agree on a common plan to stop climate change. As long as the world remains divided into rival nations, it will be very hard to simultaneously overcome all three challenges – and failure on even a single front might prove catastrophic.

In premodern times religions were responsible for solving a wide range of technical problems in mundane fields such as agriculture. Divine calendars determined when to plant and when to harvest, while temple rituals secured rainfall and protected against pests. When an agricultural crisis loomed as a result of drought or a plague of locusts, farmers turned to the priests to intercede with the gods. Medicine too fell within the religious domain. Almost every prophet, guru and shaman doubled as a healer. Thus Jesus spent much of his time making the sick well, the blind see, the mute talk, and the mad sane. Whether you lived in ancient Egypt or in medieval Europe, if you were ill you were likely to go to the witch doctor rather than to the doctor, and to make a pilgrimage to a renowned temple rather than to a hospital.

The victory of science has been so complete that our very idea of religion has changed. We no longer associate religion with farming and medicine. Even many zealots now suffer from collective amnesia, and prefer to forget that traditional religions ever laid claim to these domains. ‘So what if we turn to engineers and doctors?’ say the zealots. ‘That proves nothing. What has religion got to do with agriculture or medicine in the first place?’

The true expertise of priests and gurus has never really been rainmaking, healing, prophecy or magic. Rather, it has always been interpretation. A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.

Yet it is precisely their genius for interpretation that puts religious leaders at a disadvantage when they compete against scientists. Scientists too know how to cut corners and twist the evidence, but in the end, the mark of science is the willingness to admit failure and try a different tack. That’s why scientists gradually learn how to grow better crops and make better medicines, whereas priests and gurus learn only how to make better excuses. Over the centuries, even the true believers have noticed the difference, which is why religious authority has been dwindling in more and more technical fields. This is also why the entire world has increasingly become a single civilisation. When things really work, everybody adopts them.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Christian thinkers railed against modern materialism, against soulless capitalism, and against the excesses of the bureaucratic state. They promised that if they were only given a chance, they would solve all the ills of modernity and establish a completely different socio-economic system based on the eternal spiritual values of their creed. Well, they have been given quite a few chances, and the only noticeable change they have made to the edifice of modern economies is to redo the paintwork and place a huge crescent, cross, Star of David or Om on the roof.

Just as in the case of rainmaking, so also when it comes to economics, it is the long-honed expertise of religious scholars in reinterpreting texts that makes religion irrelevant. No matter which economic policy Khamenei chooses, he could always square it with the Quran. Hence the Quran is degraded from a source of true knowledge to a source of mere authority. When you face a difficult economic dilemma, you read Marx and Hayek closely, and they help you understand the economic system better, see things from a new angle, and think about potential solutions. Having formulated an answer, you then turn to the Quran, and you read it closely in search of some surah that, if interpreted imaginatively enough, can justify the solution you got from Hayek or Marx. No matter what solution you found there, if you are a good Quranic scholar you will always be able to justify it.

To that end, Japan upheld the native religion of Shinto as the cornerstone of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘State Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas of nationality and race, which the Japanese elite picked from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all, State Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.

Knowingly or not, numerous governments today follow the Japanese example. They adopt the universal tools and structures of modernity while relying on traditional religions to preserve a unique national identity. The role of State Shinto in Japan is fulfilled to a lesser or greater degree by Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Catholicism in Poland, Shiite Islam in Iran, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Judaism in Israel. No matter how archaic a religion might look, with a bit of imagination and reinterpretation it can almost always be married to the latest technological gadgets and the most sophisticated modern institutions.

Cultural relativists argue that difference doesn’t imply hierarchy, and we should never prefer one culture over another. Humans may think and behave in various ways, but we should celebrate this diversity, and give equal value to all beliefs and practices. Unfortunately, such broad-minded attitudes cannot stand the test of reality. Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but few would see witch-burning, infanticide or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and coca-colonialism.

Moreover, even when two cultural norms are equally valid in theory, in the practical context of immigration it might still be justified to judge the host culture as better. Norms and values that are appropriate in one country just don’t work well under different circumstances. Let’s look closely at a concrete example. In order not to fall prey to well-established prejudices, let’s imagine two fictional countries: Coldia and Warmland. The two countries have many cultural differences, among which is their attitude to human relations and interpersonal conflict. Coldians are educated from infancy that if you get into conflict with somebody at school, at work, or even in your family, the best thing is to repress it. You should avoid shouting, expressing rage, or confronting the other person – angry outbursts just make things worse. It’s better to work with your own feelings, while allowing things to cool down. In the meantime, limit your contact with the person in question, and if contact is unavoidable, be terse but polite, and avoid sensitive issues.

Warmlanders, by contrast, are educated from infancy to externalise conflicts. If you find yourself in conflict, don’t let it simmer and don’t repress anything. Use the first opportunity to vent your emotions openly. It is OK to get angry, to shout, and to tell the other person exactly how you feel. This is the only way to work things through together, in an honest and direct way. One day of shouting can resolve a conflict that may otherwise fester for years, and though head-on confrontation is never pleasant, you will all feel much better afterwards.

Both these methods have their pros and cons, and it is hard to say that one is always better than the other. What might happen, though, when a Warmlander emigrates to Coldia, and gets a job in a Coldian firm? Whenever a conflict arises with a co-worker, the Warmlander bangs on the table and yells at the top of his voice, expecting that this will focus attention on the problem and help to resolve it quickly. Several years later a senior position falls vacant. Though the Warmlander has all the necessary qualifications, the boss prefers to give the promotion to a Coldian employee. When asked about it, she explains: ‘Yes, the Warmlander has many talents, but he also has a serious problem with human relations. He is hot-tempered, creates unnecessary tensions around him, and disturbs our corporate culture.’ The same fate befalls other Warmlander immigrants to Coldia. Most of them remain in junior positions, or fail to find any job at all, because managers presuppose that if they are Warmlanders, they would probably be hot- tempered and problematic employees. Since the Warmlanders never reach senior positions, it is difficult for them to change the Coldian corporate culture.

Much the same thing happens to Coldians who emigrate to Warmland. A Coldian starting to work in a Warmland firm quickly acquires the reputation of a snob or a cold fish, and makes few if any friends. People think that he is insincere, or that he lacks basic human-relation skills. He never advances to senior positions, and he therefore never gets the opportunity to change the corporate culture. Warmland managers conclude that most Coldians are unfriendly or shy, and prefer not to hire them to positions that require contact with customers or close cooperation with other employees.

Both these cases may seem to smack of racism. But in fact, they are not racist. They are ‘culturist’. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of ‘culturists’. Traditional racism was firmly grounded in biological theories. In the 1890s or 1930s it was widely believed in countries such as Britain, Australia and the USA that some heritable biological trait makes Africans and Chinese people innately less intelligent, less enterprising and less moral than Europeans. The problem was in their blood. Such views enjoyed political respectability as well as widespread scientific backing. Today, in contrast, while many individuals still make such racist assertions, they have lost all their scientific backing and most of their political respectability – unless they are rephrased in cultural terms. Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.

Terrorists undertake an impossible mission: to change the political balance of power through violence, despite having no army. To achieve their aim, terrorists present the state with an impossible challenge of their own: to prove that it can protect all its citizens from political violence, anywhere, any time. The terrorists hope that when the state tries to fulfil this impossible mission, it will reshuffle the political cards, and hand them some unforeseen ace.

Once in a while the political storm created by counter-terrorist campaigns does benefit the terrorists, which is why the gamble makes sense. A terrorist is like a gambler holding a particularly bad hand, who tries to convince his rivals to reshuffle the cards. He cannot lose anything, and he may win everything.

None of the religions or nations of today existed when humans colonised the world, domesticated plants and animals, built the first cities, or invented writing and money. Morality, art, spirituality and creativity are universal human abilities embedded in our DNA. Their genesis was in Stone Age Africa. It is therefore crass egotism to ascribe to them a more recent place and time, be they China in the age of the Yellow Emperor, Greece in the age of Plato, or Arabia in the age of Muhammad.

Personally, I am all too familiar with such crass egotism, because the Jews, my own people, also think that they are the most important thing in the world. Name any human achievement or invention, and they will quickly claim credit for it. And knowing them intimately, I also know they are genuinely convinced of such claims. I once went to a yoga teacher in Israel, who in the introductory class explained in all seriousness that yoga was invented by Abraham, and that all the basic yoga postures derive from the shape of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet! (Thus the trikonasana posture imitates the shape of the Hebrew letter aleph, tuladandasana imitates the letter daled, etc.) Abraham taught these postures to the son of one of his concubines, who went to India and taught yoga to the Indians. When I asked for some evidence, the master quoted a biblical passage: ‘And to the sons of his concubines Abraham gave gifts, and while he was still living he sent them away from his son Isaac, eastward to the east country’ (Genesis 25:6). What do you think these gifts were? So you see, even yoga was actually invented by the Jews.

Scientists nowadays point out that morality in fact has deep evolutionary roots pre-dating the appearance of humankind by millions of years. All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation. For example, when wolf cubs play with one another, they have ‘fair game’ rules. If a cub bites too hard, or continues to bite an opponent that has rolled on his back and surrendered, the other cubs will stop playing with him.

In chimpanzee bands dominant members are expected to respect the property rights of weaker members. If a junior female chimpanzee finds a banana, even the alpha male will usually avoid stealing it for himself. If he breaks this rule, he is likely to lose status.5 Apes not only avoid taking advantage of weak group members, but sometimes actively help them. A pygmy chimpanzee male called Kidogo, who lived in the Milwaukee County Zoo, suffered from a serious heart condition that made him feeble and confused. When he was first moved to the zoo, he could neither orient himself nor understand the instructions of the human caretakers. When the other chimpanzees understood his predicament, they intervened. They often took Kidogo by the hand, and led him wherever he needed to go. If Kidogo became lost, he would utter loud distress signals, and some ape would rush to help.

One of Kidogo’s main helpers was the highest-ranking male in the band, Lody, who not only guided Kidogo, but also protected him. While almost all group members treated Kidogo with kindness, one juvenile male called Murph would often tease him mercilessly. When Lody noticed such behaviour, he often chased the bully away, or alternatively put a protective arm around Kidogo.

An even more touching case occurred in the jungles of Ivory Coast. After a young chimpanzee nicknamed Oscar lost his mother, he struggled to survive on his own. None of the other females was willing to adopt and take care of him, because they were burdened with their own young. Oscar gradually lost weight, health and vitality. But when all seemed lost, Oscar was ‘adopted’ by the band’s alpha male, Freddy. The alpha made sure that Oscar ate well, and even carried him around on his back. Genetic tests proved that Freddy was not related to Oscar.7 We can only speculate what drove the gruff old leader to take care of the orphaned toddler, but apparently ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, needy and fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not ‘mistreat any widow or fatherless child’ (Exodus 22:21), and before the prophet Amos complained about social elites ‘who oppress the poor and crush the needy’ (Amos 4:1).

Prior to 1800, the Jewish impact on science was limited. Naturally enough, Jews played no significant role in the progress of science in China, in India or in the Mayan civilisation. In Europe and the Middle East some Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides had considerable influence on their Gentile colleagues, but the overall Jewish impact was more or less proportional to their demographic weight. During the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Judaism was hardly instrumental in the outbreak of the Scientific Revolution. Except for Spinoza (who was excommunicated for his trouble by the Jewish community), you can hardly name a single Jew who was critical to the birth of modern physics, chemistry, biology or the social sciences. We don’t know what Einstein’s ancestors were doing in the days of Galileo and Newton, but in all likelihood they were far more interested in studying the Talmud than in studying light.

The great change occurred only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when secularisation and the Jewish Enlightenment caused many Jews to adopt the world view and lifestyle of their Gentile neighbours. Jews then began to join the universities and research centres of countries such as Germany, France and the United States. Jewish scholars brought from the ghettos and shtetls important cultural legacies. The central value of education in Jewish culture was one of the main reasons for the extraordinary success of Jewish scientists. Other factors included the desire of a persecuted minority to prove its worth, and the barriers that prevented talented Jews from advancement in more anti-Semitic institutions such as the army and the state administration.

Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind. The cosmic mystery or the worldly lawgiver? Sometimes when people talk about God, they talk about a grand and awesome enigma, about which we know absolutely nothing. We invoke this mysterious God to explain the deepest riddles of the cosmos. Why is there something rather than nothing? What shaped the fundamental laws of physics? What is consciousness, and where does it come from? We do not know the answers to these questions, and we give our ignorance the grand name of God. The most fundamental characteristic of this mysterious God is that we cannot say anything concrete about Him. This is the God of the philosophers; the God we talk about when we sit around a campfire late at night, and wonder what life is all about.

On other occasions people see God as a stern and worldly lawgiver, about whom we know only too much. We know exactly what He thinks about fashion, food, sex and politics, and we invoke this Angry Man in the Sky to justify a million regulations, decrees and conflicts. He gets upset when women wear short-sleeved shirts, when two men have sex with one another, or when teenagers masturbate. Some people say He does not like us to ever drink alcohol, whereas according to others He positively demands that we drink wine every Friday night or every Sunday morning. Entire libraries have been written to explain in the minutest details exactly what He wants and what He dislikes. The most fundamental characteristic of this worldly lawgiver is that we can say extremely concrete things about Him. This is the God of the crusaders and jihadists, of the inquisitors, the misogynists and the homophobes. This is the God we talk about when we stand around a burning pyre, hurling stones and abuses at the heretics being grilled there.

When the faithful are asked whether God really exists, they often begin bytalking about the enigmatic mysteries of the universe and the limits of humanunderstanding. ‘Science cannot explain the Big Bang,’ they exclaim, ‘so thatmust be God’s doing.’ Yet like a magician fooling an audience byimperceptibly replacing one card with another, the faithful quickly replacethe cosmic mystery with the worldly lawgiver. After giving the name of‘God’ to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they then use this to somehowcondemn bikinis and divorces. ‘We do not understand the Big Bang –therefore you must cover your hair in public and vote against gay marriage.’Not only is there no logical connection between the two, but they are in factcontradictory. The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it isthat whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codesor human sexual behaviour.

The missing link between the cosmic mystery and the worldly lawgiver is usually provided through some holy book. The book is full of the most trifling regulations, but is nevertheless attributed to the cosmic mystery. The creator of space and time supposedly composed it, but He bothered to enlighten us mainly about some arcane temple rituals and food taboos. In truth, we haven’t got any evidence whatsoever that the Bible or the Quran or the Book of Mormon or the Vedas or any other holy book was composed by the force that determined that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, and that protons are 1,837 times more massive than electrons. To the best of our scientific knowledge, all these sacred texts were written by imaginative Homo sapiens. They are just stories invented by our ancestors in order to legitimise social norms and political structures.

Every religion, ideology and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naïve reassurance that ‘it cannot happen to us’.

The liberal belief in individual rationality may itself be the product of liberal groupthink. In one of the climactic moments of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a huge crowd of starry-eyed followers mistakes Brian for the Messiah. Brian tells his disciples that ‘You don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals! You’re all different!’ The enthusiastic crowd then chants in unison ‘Yes! We’re all individuals! Yes, we are all different!’ Monty Python were parodying the counterculture orthodoxy of the 1960s, but the point may be true of the belief in rational individualism in general. Modern democracies are full of crowds shouting in unison, ‘Yes, the voter knows best! Yes, the customer is always right!’

In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’ Can any present-day fake-news peddler improve on that?

Have you any idea how many movies, novels and poems you have consumed over the years, and how these artefacts have carved and sharpened your idea of love? Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war. And if you think you can press some delete button and wipe out all trace of Hollywood from your subconscious and your limbic system, you are deluding yourself.

The Hindu epic the Bhagavadgita relates how, in the midst of a murderous civil war, the great warrior prince Arjuna is consumed with doubts. Seeing his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he hesitates to fight and kill them. He begins to wounder what are good and evil, who decided it, and what is the purpose of human life. The god Krishna then explains to Arjuna that within the great cosmic cycle each being possesses a unique ‘dharma’, the path you must follow and the duties you must fulfil. If you realise your dharma, no matter how hard the path may be, you enjoy peace of mind and liberation from all doubts. If you refuse to follow your dharma, and try to adopt somebody else’s path – or to wander about with no path at all – you will disturb the cosmic balance, and will never be able to find either peace or joy. It makes no difference what your particular path is, as long as you follow it. A washerwoman who devotedly follows the way of the washerwoman is far superior to a prince who strays off the way of the prince. Having understood the meaning of life, Arjuna duly proceeds to follow his dharma as a warrior. He kills his friends and relatives, leads his army to victory, and becomes one of the most esteemed and beloved heroes of the Hindu world.

The 1994 Disney epic The Lion King repackaged this ancient story for modern audiences, with the young lion Simba standing in for Arjuna. When Simba wants to know the meaning of existence, his father – the lion king Mufasa – tells him about the great Circle of Life. Mufasa explains that the antelopes eat the grass, the lions eat the antelopes, and when the lions die their body decomposes and feeds the grass. This is how life continues from generation to generation, provided each animal plays its part in the drama. Everything is connected, and everyone depends on everyone else, so if even a blade of grass fails to fulfil its vocation, the entire Circle of Life might unravel. Simba’s vocation, says Mufasa, is to rule the lion kingdom after Mufasa’s death, and keep the other animals in order.

However, when Mufasa is prematurely murdered by his evil brother Scar, young Simba blames himself for the catastrophe, and racked with guilt he leaves the lion kingdom, shuns his royal destiny, and wanders off into the wilderness. There he meets two other outcasts, a meerkat and a warthog, and together they spend a few carefree years off the beaten path. Their antisocial philosophy means that they answer every problem by chanting Hakuna matata – no worries.

But Simba cannot escape his dharma. As he matures, he becomes increasingly troubled, not knowing who he is and what he should do in life. At the climactic moment of the movie, the spirit of Mufasa reveals himself to Simba in a vision, and reminds Simba of the Circle of Life and of his royal identity. Simba also learns that in his absence, the evil Scar has assumed the throne and mismanaged the kingdom, which now suffers greatly from disharmony and famine. Simba finally understands who he is and what he should do. He returns to the lion kingdom, kills his uncle, becomes king, and re-establishes harmony and prosperity. The movie ends with a proud Simba presenting his newly born heir to the assembled animals, ensuring the continuation of the great Circle of Life.

The Circle of Life presents the cosmic drama as a circular story. For all Simba and Arjuna know, lions ate antelopes and warriors fought battles for countless aeons and will continue to do so for ever and ever. The eternal repetition gives power to the story, implying that this is the natural course of things, and that if Arjuna shuns combat or if Simba refuses to become king, they will be rebelling against the very laws of nature.

If I believe in some version of the Circle of Life story, it means that I have a fixed and true identity that determines my duties in life. For many years I may be doubtful or ignorant of this identity, but one day, in some great climactic moment, it will be revealed, and I will understand my role in the cosmic drama, and though I may subsequently encounter many trials and tribulations, I will be free of doubts and despair

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them.

Sometime between 1599 and 1602, William Shakespeare wrote his version of The Lion King, better known as Hamlet. Yet unlike Simba, Hamlet doesn’t complete the Circle of Life. He remains sceptical and ambivalent to the very end, never discovering what life is all about, and never making up his mind whether it is better to be or not to be. In this, Hamlet is the paradigmatic modern hero. Modernity didn’t reject the plethora of stories it inherited from the past. Instead, it opened a supermarket for them. The modern human is free to sample them all, choosing and combining whatever fits his or her taste.

The dead gray cap looked like every other gray cap. Except for the one glaring lack.

The exposed cross section, cut almost precisely at the waist, fascinated Finch. He almost forgot himself, poked at the tissue with his pen.

The cut had been so clean, so precise, that there was no tearing. No hemorrhaging. Finch could see layers. Gray. Yellow. Green. A core of dark red. (A question he was too cautious to ask: Was it always that dark, or only in death?) Within the core, Finch saw a hint of organs.

Gray caps bled. Finch knew that. Not like a stream or a gout, even when you cut them deep, but a steady drip from a leaky faucet. Puncture wounds healed almost immediately. It took a long time and a lot of patience to kill a gray cap.

Heretic seemed to take it for a smile. As he walked past on his way to the door, he patted Finch’s elbow. Finch shivered. A touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.

Harsh blue sprawl of the bay, bled from the River Moth. Carved from nothing. The first thing the gray caps did when they Rose, flooding Ambergris and killing thousands. Now the city, riddled through with canals, is like a body that was once drowned. Parts bleached, parts bloated. Metal and stone for flesh. Places that stick out and places that barely touch the surface.

Midafternoon. A soft, wet, sucking sound came from the memory hole beside his desk. Finch shuddered, put aside his notes. A message had arrived.

Some detectives positioned their desks so they could see their memory holes. Finch positioned his desk so he couldn’t see it without leaning over. Tried never to look at it when he walked into the station in the morning. Still, the memory hole was better than the dead cat reanimated on Skinner’s doorstep, message delivered in screeched rhyming couplets. Or the mushroom that walked onto Dapple’s desk, turning itself inside out. To reveal the message.

Exhaled sharply. Peered around the left edge of the desk. Glanced down at the glistening hole. It was about twice the size of a man’s fist. Lamprey-like teeth.

Gasping, pink-tinged maw. Foul. The green tendrils lining the gullet had pushed up the dirty black spherical pod until it lay atop the mouth. Finch sat up. Couldn’t see it. Just heard its breathing. Which was worse.

Sometimes the overlay of reality seemed a sham. One day, he would turn a corner on a rubble-strewn street. Pass through an archway into a courtyard. Be back in that other, simpler world. When he worked in the same building but as a Hoegbotton courier. Not as a detective. When he worked for Wyte, not with him. Am I dead? he thought sometimes, walking down that green carpet he remembered from a different city, a different time. Am I a ghost?

On the back of the photograph, his father had scrawled a few lines: “Sometimes a man will see in his own image a desert, and it is the need to make that desert bloom which drives him again and again to action, as hopelessness compels us to our end. Sometimes, too, a man will flee in the enemy’s direction, eager to weather any punishment—physical or mental—that proves he is still alive. Or, he does so from a pride that lies to him, tells him he can change what seems unchangeable.”

Each time he ate a memory bulb, he became someone else. Different when he returned. These would be his fourth and fifth. The first had belonged to a girl of ten and had given him nightmares for a year. Montages of a ragged doll. Soup made with dog bones. A bleak apartment without even wallpaper. Turned out there’d been no foul play. Her parents dead, she’d starved to death. The second had been a young man, the third a young woman. A double suicide unspooled in his head. Left him with longings he didn’t know he had. Regrets that weren’t his. Memories of people he didn’t know.

Or want to know.

Finch had never eaten two in one night. How many would change him by just a little too much?

Fuck it. Opened his mouth wide. Placed the bulb on his tongue. The taste of the gray cap bulb was dry. Like dirt and sand. The worst part was you had to eat them whole.

Crunch down on the ridiculous size of it until your jaw ached. No good cutting them up, grinding them down to paste, adding them to food or water. Ruined the effect. His skin prickled as his mouth took in the strange texture, the taste. An odd, sickening blend of cinnamon-pepper-lime. Sour breath. Dread, and yet also a thin layer of anticipation. To be taken out of his own life. If only for a little while. He stumbled into the chair. Feral butted his head up against his slack arm.

Memories didn’t come out the way one might expect. Nothing logical or ordered about them. Almost as if you were standing on a street corner as a motored vehicle raced by. As it passed you, a thousand pieces of confetti flew up. You had to try to catch as many of them as you could before they hit the ground.

Finch closed his eyes.

Leaned back.

Let it hit him all at once.

Come to: At the bottom of a well. Layers of rough stone spiraled up to a distant pale light. A wriggling mass of worms or insects or something thick and strange pushing down through the light, extinguishing it. Sudden image of a monstrous City, balanced atop a single building greater than anything ever built in Ambergris, and it all housed in a cavern so huge that the ceiling is lost in blue-tinged darkness.

Come to (faster now): A stumbling, jerky run through a tunnel. A surrounding mob of gray caps click and whistle with insane speed. A glimpse of blue sky, winking out. A burning motored vehicle, ancient model. A parade with a huge black cat caged and orange-yellow-green lights spread out along the route. Superimposed: an enormous grub drowning in a sack of its own liquid skin. A dark-green frond of fungus five stories high. Blood, lots of blood, pooling out across the ground. A man’s face, in extreme agony, suddenly gone black in silhouette, turning into a huge door made half of volcanic rock and half charred book cover. And on top of the door a smaller door, and a small door set into that one. Hand on the doorknob. Opening …

Come to (slower now): A stone fortress in a desert. Spinning out into open space—falling, falling, falling. And then a face Finch recognizes, the dead man’s, smiling. Beatifically. More mud and dirt and the smell-sound of a river nearby. Side view of water flowing, ear to the grass. Something licks the moisture from his eyes before huffing and going on its way. Falling again, through black fabric studded with stars. The dead man falling, too, staring right at Finch, expression oddly calm. Words from the man’s mouth in the clicks and whistles of the gray caps’ language. And then, a sudden and monstrous clarity that can never be put into words.

Come to: Moving slowly among a thousand swaying fungal trees in a thousand vision-shattering shades of green. Nearby, a rotting tank with the insignia of the Houses on its side, asleep under the fruiting bodies. The sound of footsteps. A hint of movement other than spores, strained through the heavy sky. Hunting for something. But what? A man. Moving in front of them. Night. Strange numbers and words spilling out emerald against a field of darkness. Shadowing the man. The orange sky dominated by the shambling hulks of floating fungal fortresses. Things crawl and fly and swim between the fortresses. Running now, just yards behind the man. But the man was turning to face them. The man was looking right at him when he disappeared. Winked out. Leaving only the smile. And that only for an instant. An intense feeling of confusion and surprise. Then: falling through cold air and couldn’t feel his legs.

Returned whining. Keening. A low, animal sound from deep in his throat. Lay curled up on the chair. Sweating. Things crawled around inside his skull. Didn’t know how much time had passed.

Finch forced the second bulb into his mouth. Chewed it into a dull paste as he moved from the chair to the couch. Lay down. Swallowed. The room spun a little. Righted itself. The ceiling had a few odd discolorations but nothing to suggest infiltration. Invisible spies. Who lived upstairs, anyway? Sometimes lately he had heard a person pacing across the floorboards in the middle of the night.

After a minute or two, Finch sat up. Nothing seemed to be happening. Nothing at all.

The dead man sat in the chair next to him, smiling.

“Uhhh!” Finch leapt to his feet.

The man was flanked by a Feral grown large as a pony. A Sidle grown as large as a Feral. They both looked at him the way Sidle had been looking at the moths. “Sit down,” the man said. An order, not a suggestion. In a strange accent. The man looked much younger than he had on the floor of the apartment. Had lost the fungal beard.

Finch sat down slowly. Didn’t take his eyes off the man. Left hand groping across the cushions. Where was his gun?

“I’ve been waiting for someone like you,” the man said. “You won’t understand it, but I’m going to give you what I know. Just in case.”

The window behind the man no longer showed the city. What it did show was so impossible and disturbing Finch had to look away. And yet the image entered into him.

The man said Finch’s name. Except he didn’t say “John Finch.” He used Finch’s real name. The one buried for eight long years.

Finch tried to slow his breathing. Failed. Chest felt like something was going to explode.

He must be inside the man’s memories.

Then why is the man sitting across from you?

“Who are you?” An obvious question. But it kept pounding against the inside of his skull. So he had to let it out.

The man laughed.

“I didn’t say anything funny.”

“More to the point,” the man said, “who are you? And who are you with?”

“Shut up. This is just one of your memories. Manifesting in me. It isn’t real.”

Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it. Through the tear: a turquoise sea roiling with ever-changing patterns.

“You don’t have to understand it. Not now,” the man said.

Didn’t know if he was inside a mushroom or outside the universe. Glimpses of the city from on high: each street, each canal, an artery filled with blood. Hadn’t known there could be so many shades of red. Spiking into his eyes. “Be careful,” the man said, echoing Rathven, and took Finch’s hand. The man’s hand was warm. Callused. Real. “Don’t lose yourself, no matter what happens.”

The man and Feral and Sidle disappeared. The window became a huge mouth, and they were all nothing more or less than memory bulbs within it. Finch fell through the same skein of stars he had seen in the gray cap’s memory.

Woke up: Teetering on the battlements of an ancient fortress, looking out over a desert, the sand flaring out for miles under the seethe of dusk. Moments from someone else’s childhood. A parent’s death. Sitting in a blind. Crawling through tunnels.

Woke up: A cavern glittering with veins of some blue metal, huge mushrooms slowly breathing in and out. Seen in a flash of light that faded and kept fading but never went out: more caverns, an old woman’s face, framed by white hair; another woman, in her twenties, her thirties, her forties. A shadowy figure hobbling down a street.

Woke up: The insane jungle of the HFZ, almost floating above it, through it, coming out into a clearing ringed by twelve green men planted in the ground, arms at their sides, their mouths opening and closing soundlessly. And the jungle was made of fungus, not trees, poured over trucks and tanks and other heavy machinery junked and rusted out and infested with mushrooms, some of it still slowly, slowly moving. And back to the fortress, at the edge of a man-made cliff, many hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and out in the desert a thousand green lights held by a thousand shadows motionless, watching. A sound of metal locking into place. A kind of mirror. An eye. Pulling back to see a figure that seemed oddly familiar, and then a name: Ethan Bliss. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered with gray cap symbols. And, finally, jumping out into the desert air, toward a door hovering in the middle of the sky, pursued by the gray cap, before the world went dark.

Wake up... Came out of it seconds, centuries, later. To find Feral and Sidle watching him. Feral on the floor near the couch. Sidle on the windowsill, a large black moth trapped between his clockwork jaws.

“They’re here and then they’re there, and sometimes they don’t know the difference, and if you let them, they’ll keep making that the whole point of everything they’re doing to the city. They’ll break you down by not telling you what you already know, should already know, because that’s the way they operate. Knowledge is the lack they seek in us, and when they find it, they turn the key, open a window, and it’s all back to where we started.”

They passed addicts with the familiar purple stains across their skin. Men in the ill-fitting uniforms of janitors for the camps. Somebody pissing in an alley. Faded posters on a long crumbling wall, showing pictures of members of the short-lived puppet government. Another blood-red mushroom looming over them big as a tree. Every week there seemed to be more of them. Next to it, a blossoming flower of a building atop the squashed remains of the local grocery store. Soft humming sounds came from an interior obscured by fleshy window flaps.

He’d gone to investigate a death about a year ago. By himself. No one else in the station. The call sounded simple. A man found dead beneath a tree, beginning to smell. Could someone take a look? Most days, not worth bothering with. But it was a slow morning, and Wyte took the job seriously. The woman seemed upset, like it was personal.

The body was down near the bay. Beside a cracked stone sign that used to welcome visitors to Ambergris. Holy city, majestic, banish your fears. No one was around. Not the woman who had called it in. No one.

The man lay on his back. Connected to the “tree,” which was a huge mushroom. Connected by tendrils. The smell, vile. The man’s eyes open and flickering.

Wyte should have left. Wyte should have known better. But maybe Wyte was bored. Or wanted a change. Or just didn’t care. He hadn’t seen his kids since they’d been sent out of the city. He’d been fighting with his wife a lot.

He leaned over the body. Maybe he thought he saw something floating in those eyes. Something moving. Maybe movement meant life to him.

“Who knows? Just know that it’s a dumb move.”

A dumb move. That’s how the detectives would say it during the retell. At their little refuge, not far from the station. When they told the story. A dumb move. Like they were experts.

“Point is,” Albin would say, because Albin usually told the story, “he leaned over, and the man’s head exploded into spores. And those spores got into Wyte’s head.”

White spores for Wyte. Through the nose. Through any exposed cuts. Through the ears. Through the eyes.

Although he fought it. Twisted furiously. Jumped up and down. Cursed like the end of the world. So at least he didn’t just stand there and let it happen.

“But by that time, it was too late. A few minutes later and he’s just somebody’s puppet.”

Wyte became someone else. The “dead” man. Someone who didn’t understand what had happened to him. Wyte ran down the street. Taken over. Screaming. “Screaming a name over and over. ‘Otto! I’m Otto!’ because that was the dead man’s name. Wyte thought he was Otto.”

Or most of him did. Wyte, deep inside, still knew who he was, and that was worse.

Sometimes, out of a casual cruelty, a kind of boredom, one of the other detectives, usually Blakely, will call Wyte “Otto.” Until Finch makes him stop.

“Well, they found him a day later. Once they figured out who the dead body was.

Cowering in a closet. Saying ‘Otto’ over and over again.”

In the dead man’s apartment.

“A caution to us all.”

Wyte got Otto out of his head. Eventually. Most of Otto. But not the fungus. That became worse. The gray caps couldn’t or wouldn’t help. Maybe they saw it as some kind of perverse improvement.

Five times he’d stayed after hours. Survived each encounter. But talking to a single gray cap during the day was different from being among many of them after dusk. It brought back memories of the war. It reminded him of night duty in the trenches, the crude defenses House Hoegbotton had created for its soldiers. Sighting through the scope at some pile of rubble opposite. Hoping not to see anything. Feeling the sweat and fear of the others to each side. The flinch and intake of breath at the slightest movement.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Moving past him. Soft rustle of robes. Hushed sigh of their breathing, as if they slept even while awake. Oddly heavy footfalls. A smell that ranged from sweet like syrup to rank and disgusting. Did they control it? Were there signals they gave off humans could never read? Those eyes. That mouth. The ragged claws on the doughy hands.

Sitting at the desks like distorted reflections of their daytime counterparts. He had never learned their names. Thought of them only by the names of the humans who’d been assigned the same desks. Or once had. So there sat Dorn, and there sat Wyte, and there were Skinner and Albin.

The fifth was Heretic. He’d brought something with him. On a leash. Finch didn’t know what it was. Couldn’t tell where it started or ended. It had no face, just a sense of wet, uncoiling darkness. Like an endless fall off a bridge at night, under a starless sky, into deep water. That one glimpse and Finch never looked at it directly again. The light in the room had faded to the dark green preferred by the gray caps.

“Do you like my skery, Finch? Do you find my skery pleasing to the eye?” Heretic asked in a voice rough yet reedy, standing in front of Finch. Emphasis on pleasing to the eye. As usual when Heretic tried out a turn of phrase. “No? That’s a shame. The skery is a new thing, and useful to us. Very soon, it will save us a lot of effort, allow the Partials to do other work.”

“You have withheld information from me. You haven’t even finished with the list. From now on, you will report every day. You are to tell me everything. Do not leave it to your judgment.”

Finch opened his mouth to speak. Heretic said words that sounded like kith vrisdresn zorn. Snapped his fingers. The skery wound itself around Finch’s legs and tightened. Sudden tingling paralysis. He could not move away. Could not fall. Choking on his own breath. The paralysis brought with it an image of an endless field of dim stars, one by one extinguished. A gulf and a void. Finch was as afraid as he had ever been in his life. Because he didn’t know what he was looking at, or why.

Try to breathe. Slowly. Breathe slowly.

The skery curled its way up to his chest. Around his neck. It pulled tight so he was gasping in his motionlessness. He felt something like sharp leaves or thorns up against his neck. An impression of lips. A sharp, smoky scent. Half the field of stars had gone out. There was more darkness than light.

From behind Finch’s desk, from a thousand miles away, from behind a thick wall: Heretic. Saying, “A skery is not as bad for you as what I could bring with me.” The skery curled back down Finch’s body. Released him. He stumbled forward, hands on the desk to stop from falling. The field of stars so bright he almost passed out. Then the desk came into focus. Prickles of sensation came back into his legs. Neck already sore and throbbing.

Finch stood at the prow of the gray cap boat, the only kind allowed out on the bay. Wyte beside him, skin on his arms green. Not from being seasick. The boat was big enough for eight or ten. Empty with just the two of them. Slight upward lurching push as it expelled water below the surface to propel them forward. Looked like any other boat from afar. Except it acts like it’s alive. Route preplanned by the gruff Partial who had met them on the shore. Who had shoved a mushroom into an orifice on the hull that looked uncannily like a memory hole. Somehow the boat knew where to go. How to return. Finch’s shoes were sinking into the loamy sponge of the “planks.” Tried to remember to bend his knees to keep his balance.

The wrongness of the railing at the prow suddenly got through to Finch. Should be grainy, splinters needling his hands. Instead: soft, fleshy. He took his hand away like the railing was boiling hot.

They turned to watch the city at dusk. The unexpected phosphorescence in places. As if the sun’s death throes. The now-dull green glow rippling from the bay. The towers were still being worked on nonstop. Finch could almost imagine them complete now.

“What do you think the towers are for?” Finch asked the Photographer.

A gleam of interest entered the Photographer’s dead black eyes. “Sometimes I dream. I dream it’s a giant camera. And it’s taking pictures of places we can’t see.”

The weather had gotten surly. Grayish. A strange hot wind dashed itself against the street rubble. Blew up into his face. Off to the northeast: the Religious Quarter. A still- distant series of broken towers, steeples, and domes. Wrapped in a haze of contrasting, layered shades of green. Looking light as mist. Like something out of a dream from afar. Up close, Finch knew, it reflected only hints of the Ambergris from before, the place once ruled by an opera composer, shaped by the colors red and green.

As ever, Wyte hid himself in a bulky, tightly buttoned overcoat. An angry red splotch had drifted down his forehead. Had colonized half of one eye. Cheek. Chin. The splotch had elongated and widened his face. Made his head more like a porous marble bust. He wore black gloves over his hands. Red and white threads had emerged from his sleeves. Wandered of their own accord.

As Wyte trod heavily closer, he extended his hand. Gave Finch a thankful look as they shook. Wyte’s grip was strong but gave. Like the glove was full of moist bread. Finch suppressed a shudder from the sense of things moving inside each finger.

Tripping over the things crawling off Wyte’s legs. Wyte exploding out from their shelter, overcoat thrown aside to reveal a body become other. A garden of fungus. Arms ballooning out into sudden wings of brilliant purple-red-orange. Legs lost in shelves and plateaus and spikes of green and blue. Back broader and insanely strong and gray. Head suddenly elongated and widened. As he ran a high-pitched scream came from his mouth that frightened Finch and bloodied the ears of the Partials.

“Look,” the Lady in Blue said, pointing out past the ruined hulks of tanks. Toward the dull orange dome.

“What am I looking for?”

“Just wait.”

As she spoke, the dome exploded. A thousand streamers rising in intense shades of red and orange. Like some kind of land-bound sun. The tendrils arched into the sky. Hung there. Then disintegrated into a vast cloud. A roiling mass of particles. Discharging light until a steady humming glow suffused the city in a kind of dawn.

There came in reply from the city a hundredfold bestial roar. Strange fractal creatures began to grow at a frenetic pace across every surface. Straining up toward the light. While the orange dome, much reduced, seemed to breathe in and out. Beyond the particle cloud the darkness continued unabated.

“Dawn, Finch,” the Lady in Blue said. “That’s the kind of dawn they have here.” “Yes, but what is this place?” Finch asked, almost pleading. “Where am I?”

“It’s a place where the echo of the HFZ—just the echo of it—destroyed a city. Subjected it to this perpetual artificial dawn. There’s no one living down there now. No one. Just flesh that serves as fertile soil … for something else. The HFZ is like a wound where the knife cut through more than one layer. And that’s really all you needed to see. No, it hasn’t been fun out here for six years, Finch. Not really.”

What it took to kill a man transformed that way was almost what it took to kill a gray cap. Finch had killed a gray cap once. Before the Rising. When he was James Crossley. Crossley was in charge of the patrol that night.

They had only the light of a half-moon and the reluctant streetlamps burning a hundred feet away. But Crossley caught sight of something moving herky-jerky through the junkyard.

Seven in the patrol. Exposed. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing at first, because gray caps rarely came out into the open. It was like seeing a dolphin in a public pond.

So he’d given the signal to spread out without knowing what they faced. Circle round. Converge.

He crept up, over broken girders and garbage, to find: a gray cap. Wandering in a circle. Talking to itself. No obvious injury. But something wrong. Like it was drunk.

When the gray cap saw them, it broke off its wandering dance. Tried to escape. But they had it hemmed in by then. Its teeth, needle sharp. Claws on its fingers. It expelled a fungal mist, but they were already wearing gas masks.

Crossley was the first to shoot it. It lurched. Righted itself. Ran toward another point of the compass. Two bullets. Another lurch. But absorbed. A cry. A leap like a dancer, then. As if finally realizing the danger. Crossley-Finch would never forget. It whirled past one man and then another. But instead of escaping, it turned to close the distance. As if enraged. Or sick. The light in its eyes green and everlasting. Tore into one man with its claws, slapping away his rifle. Took another bullet for its efforts, but scooped out the Irregular’s throat. The man crumpled to the ground. Crossley, scrambling to aim and fire, thought he saw a glint of a smile from the creature.

Darted. Flitted. Was gone. Then back again. Far then close. Each of them struggling to keep up with that speed. Grunting and cursing and sweating, as if it were something normal. Like digging a ditch or a grave. Too invested now. Knowing they couldn’t retreat, and that the gray cap had decided to fight.

Wherever the thing stepped, a golden dust rose up from its tread. Clouds of red-and-green spores radiated out from it like steam. Their gas masks protected them. Low on ammo. They kept shooting it, and it kept taking the bullets. Knives out. Finch shouted the order to fix bayonets. Down to four. Against one.

Reminded them not to let the bayonets get stuck in gray cap flesh. It would reel them in, finish each of them off. But, still—one man’s rifle got stuck. Forgot to let it go. The gray cap jerked him forward, disemboweled him, then turned, stung by fresh cuts from all sides. Down to three men. Flesh sloughed off its body, but no blood. It did not wince. Kept shouting in its language. Sometimes mixing in human words. In a hissing, sibilant voice.

They kept at their task. Too busy to be afraid. Too busy to scream. Inside, its flesh was black, accordioned. Crossley saw as he came in close at its back. As it bit and kept biting another man. Finch brought his hunter’s knife down across the back of the gray cap’s leg. Felt the blade cut through something hard and thick. He pulled it out, taking a wedge of black flesh with it. The gray cap limped away. No longer as agile. A snarl.

Finch and the others shot it in the face, the chest, the arms, the legs. Still, it kept coming. Dancing in and out, its face a discolored mess. Eyes peeking out from the ruined flesh. Crossley lunging, driving his blade deeper into the leg as it turned to face one of his men. Dashed out as the creature tried to turn.

There was a give, and a wash of purple blood.

He stood back. Saw the gray cap standing on one leg.

“Murderers,” the gray cap crooned. “Murderers. In our city.”

Crossley wanted it dead in that moment. To shut it up. Caught in a bloodlust so primal that the enemy looked fey and beautiful in the moonlight. Distant and removed from what they were doing to it.

Now they converged, the three of them. It couldn’t evade them. Did it weep as they tore it to pieces? Did it make any human sound to make them stop? No. All it did was stare up at the hard stars as if they were but an extension of its eyes. Arms hacked and pulled off. Cut at. Peeled away. Tossed to the side. The red of its leg. While still it stared. While a cloud of spores erupted from the top of its head, puffing away, disappearing. Hacked, too, at the torso until there was just a head attached to awreckage of neck. Still the thing smiled. Still it seemed to live. The reflexive life of a gecko’s tail.

Now they cursed and sobbed. Unable, as the bloodlust left them, to understand how they had been brought to this. How they could have done this. Even as they still wanted to kill it. Screaming. Shouting. Not caring if an enemy could hear them. Just wanting to keep on killing it until it was dead.

Finally, they burnt it, until it was just dead eyes laughing, asking if it had been worth it. Soon even that burst into spores.

“You have to choose a side, Finch. Eventually you have to choose a side, even if you pretend to be neutral. Even if you think giving out information is like selling smokes or food packets.”

Rocking. Rocking. Back and forth.

Finch sat on the upper deck of a houseboat in the Spit. From the towers across the bay, green fire gathered. It leapt out at them. Became huge and sparkling over their heads. Burned into boats all around them. Splintered timbers. Sent up waves of flame.

A fire that never seemed to reach them. And yet was inside him. Wyte and Finch’s father sat on a whitewashed bench opposite him. His father was the hunched-over specter he’d been at the clinic, in the last days. Coughing up blood. Wyte was, mercifully, as he’d been before the vainglorious charge from the chapel.

“Getting close,” his father said.

“Getting close,” said Wyte.

“Hang on,” his father said.

“Soon it will be your turn,” Wyte said. “Will you be ready?”

“Ready for what?” Finch said.

“Never lost.” Now it wasn’t Wyte sitting beside his father, but Finch as James Crossley. Youthful. Neatly trimmed beard. Eyes bright with confidence. The James Crossley who’d worked as a courier for Wyte.

Finch smiled. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. Could’ve used you earlier, James.”

His father had disappeared. Duncan Shriek was sitting next to James now.

Flickering in and out like a faulty bulb.

Finch stared at them both. While the Spit burned down around them.

Shriek said, “You can’t survive much more of this. You’ve got to find a way out.

Finch grinned painfully. With each new bolt of green light another part of him was disintegrating. Falling away.

“Easy for a dead man to say. I’m still in the world,” he said.

Something was calling. Some noise was exploding in his head.

“You’ll be back,” Shriek promised, fading into darkness.

Back on the Spit. On the roof of the houseboat. Dusk now, the sun almost gone, but lingering.

The Spit smoldered. Thick with flame and smoke. The towers were silent. From that angle, he couldn’t see what lay between them. But strange birds flew out between them. Like parrots, but different. Flashes of green-blue-orange. Beyond that, the city, in an agony of bronzing light.

Opposite him on the bench sat Duncan Shriek. This time he had a long gray beard, white hair down to his shoulders. His beard writhed, alive. His overcoat wasn’t made of cloth at all. Concealed a mountain of a body, reminding Finch of Wyte. No shoes. Shriek’s feet seemed to blend into the wood of the floorboards as if rooted there. His image flickered in and out. Could not seem to settle into flesh and blood.

“Hello again, Finch,” Shriek said.

Finch, bitter: “They burned your body. Spread your ashes over the towers. You’re dead,” Finch said. “You failed us. Thousands and thousands of people are going to die because of you.” Angry at himself.

Shriek said, “Your body is shutting down, Finch. You cannot take more torture. You have to do something. All I can do for now is numb the pain.”

Finch’s legs were on fire. He couldn’t put out the flames.

“There’s nothing I can do.”

Shriek pulled him close. Until his face was inches from Finch’s. Drawn into the power of those eyes that were both more and less than eyes. Into the magisterial force of the experience and pain there. “Find a way. And when you’ve done it, drink the vial you brought with you. Even if you do kill the Partial you’ll die there on the floor, otherwise.”

“The Photographer said the vial is poison.”

“It is. But it’s life as well. You’ll die, and then I’ll bring you back.”

“You can’t do anything,” Finch said. “You’re just in my head.”

“So are you,” Shriek said.

Felt an immense pressure in his skull. A kind of pulse. “That’s me,” Shriek said. “Me, trying to get out.” His eyes burned with a deep and abiding fire. “I was still regenerating. Healing. But I altered the memory bulb. I encoded it with a copy of me. When you ate it, I entered your brain. If my body had lived, if the real me had lived, I would have eventually become less than an echo. A stray thought. An impulse for tea instead of coffee. Unexpected sadness or joy. You would have carried me, decaying, for the rest of your life. But that didn’t happen. They’ve killed me and I’m all that’s left. Now it’s my mission.”

“There is no mission now.”

“You’re wrong, Finch. Very wrong.”

Finch, disgusted: “Like Wyte and Otto. I’ll die and you’ll come out of me. Like a fucking parasite.”

Shriek frowned. “No. Not like Wyte and Otto. Not like that at all. Otto ate Wyte from the inside out. I’m just a passenger, gone soon enough. If you help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“Manifest in the real world. Become flesh and blood. Complete the mission while there’s still time.”

“But you’re just a … an imitation.”

“It’s not the best way. It’s just the only way now.”

Shriek hesitated. Then said, “I won’t lie to you. It’s a sacrifice. I will be doing things to your body to make my own. Stealing from your tissue. Robbing you while you’re already weak. You won’t be the same afterward. Even after you recover from the torture. You’ll have dizzy spells. Headaches. You may not sleep for a while. When you do sleep, there will be nightmares as your mind flushes out my memories. But you’ll be setting me free. And I won’t take it from you unless you let me.”

“What are you waiting for? Start shoveling this stuff into the fire,” his father said. Still, he hesitated. Watched the smoky flames rising into the darkness, the sparks mimicking the flares in the distance.

“If we burn all of the photographs, I’ll forget what you look like.”

His father didn’t miss a beat. “But not who I am. And if you don’t do it, there’s no clean break, son.”

His father reached down, picked up a handful of documents and IDs. Shoved them into the fire. Which flared up for a moment.

“This is the best way.” John Crossley had said it a dozen times that day. Anything else of value that couldn’t tie the son to the father had been put in a storeroom on the edge of the merchant district. A neutral area. James could retrieve it at any time. The whiskey. The cigars. The books. The map. The ceremonial scimitar his father had gotten while fighting against the Kalif. “Keep it hidden, son, but use it when you have to.”

They’ll never forget, never forgive, no matter who the enemy is, son. Better just to start a new life. Be someone else.”

“Is there anyone you want me to contact,” he’d asked his father. “No, no one,” the old man had insisted.

The towers were complete. They shone with green fire in the light. Between them, impossible scenes flashed so fast he caught only glimpses. A vast blue dome like an observatory. Replaced by a mountain topped by a tower. A city of gleaming buildings taller than any he’d ever seen. A forest of vine-like trees. A roiling sea over which egg-shaped balloons floated, trailing lines of shimmering light. And on it went. Almost beyond comprehension.

what do the Dogghe want? What do they want out of Ambergris?”

Anger in her voice. Desire and need, too. Just not for him. “This was our place, John. Before your people came. Before the gray caps. And maybe it will be again.”

From the towers, an ungodly roar and cacophony. Lines of light reach out from the tops of the towers into the city. Toward the blood-red mushroom stations. As if helping to hold them up. In front of the towers, the tiny shadows of rows of gray caps lined up on the bridge. As if in worship.

In that space between the towers, the gate—the door—has finally found what it was searching for. A weak white disk in a porous pale sky, poor mimic of the sun beyond the towers. Framed in gray, gigantic living citadels rise in a swirl of glittering dust motes so tightly packed they can only be spores. Two, three hundred feet the citadels rise. Circular. Studded with tiny eyes for windows. A hundred curving causeways run between them. Rising from below, a thick forest of tendrils in constant, rippling motion. Waves of color washing across them, strobing from greens to reds to blues, and back again. Through this landscape, great beasts stride in perpetual gloom. Hunched over. Half seen, half heard. Cities of fungus rising from their backs. But at the bottom of this scene, a tear or rip. Like a photograph with a flame burning through it in a rough triangle. Turning it to ash.

A green-gold door rising.

Having begun this account as an afterword, ended it as a dirge, and made of it a fevered family chronicle in the middle, all I can say now, as the time to write comes to an end, is that I did the best I could, and am gone. Nothing in this city we call Ambergris lasts for long.

It was Duncan who took the letter from Dad’s hand and, after the doctor had goneand the mortician had removed the body, sat down at the kitchen table to read it. First, he read it to himself. Then, he read it to us, Mom staring vacant-eyed from the living room couch, not hearing a word of it. The letter confused Duncan in ways that did not occur to my mother, to me. It bent the surface of his world and let in a black vein of the irrational, the illogical, the nonsensical. To me, my father was dead, and it didn’t matter how or why, because he was dead regardless. But to Duncan, it made all the difference. Safely anchored in place and family, he had been a madly fearless child—an explorer of tunnels and dank, dark places. He had never encountered the brutal dislocation of chance and irony. Until now. (Did it make a difference? I don’t know. My resolve has always seemed something fiercely internal.)

For our father, Jonathan Shriek, minor historian, had died in the grasp of a great and terrible joy. The letter, which bore the seal of the Kalif himself, congratulated him “for having won that most Magnificent Award, the Laskian Historical Prize,” for a paper published in the Ambergrisian Historical Society Newsletter. The letter asked my father to accept an all-expenses-paid trip to the Court of the Kalif, and there study books unread for five centuries, including the holiest-of-holies, The Journal of Samuel Tonsure.

Fifty mushroom dwellers now spilled out from the alcove gateway, macabre in their very peacefulness and the even hum-thrum of their breath: stunted in growth, wrapped in robes the pale gray-green of a frog’s underbelly, their heads hidden by wide-brimmed gray felt hats that, like the hooded tops of their namesakes, covered them to the neck. Their necks were the only exposed part of them—incredibly long, pale necks; at rest, they did indeed resemble mushrooms.

(Dare I deprive the reader of that first glimpse of Ambergris? That first teasing glimpse during the carriage ride from the docks? That glimpse, and then the sprawl of Albumuth Boulevard, half staid brick, half lacquered timber? The dirt of it, the stench of it, half perfume, half ribald rot. And another smell underneath it—the tantalizing scent of fungi, of fruiting bodies, of spores entangled with dust and air, spiraling down like snow. The cries of vendors, the cries of the newly robbed, or the newly robed. The first contact of shoe on street out of the carriage—the resounding solidity of that ground, and the humming vibration of coiled energy beneath the pavement, conveyed up through shoe into foot, and through foot into the rest of a body suddenly energized and woken up. The sudden hint of heat to the air—the possibilities!—and, peeking from the storm drains, from the alleyways, the enticing, lingering darkness that spoke of tunnels and sudden exploration. One cannot mention our move to Ambergris without setting that scene, surely! That boulevard became our touchstone, in those early years, as it had to countless people before us. It was how you traveled into Ambergris, and it was how they carried you out when you finally left.)

To say Duncan studied hard would be to understate the ardor of his quest for knowledge. He devoured texts as he devoured food, to savor after it had been swallowed whole. In short, Duncan became overzealous. Obsessed. Driven. All of those (double-edged) (s)words.

Duncan reintroduced himself to me six months later with a knock on my door late one night in the spring. The prudent Ambergrisian does not eagerly open doors at night.

I locked the door behind him and turned to greet him, but any words I might have spoken died in my throat. For he held his overcoat open like the wings of some great bird, and what I saw I could not at first believe. Just brightly colored vest and pants, I thought, but protruding, like barnacles on a ship’s hull. How unlike my brother to wear anything that outlandish. I took a step closer...

“That’s right,” Duncan said, “step closer and really see .”

He tossed his hat onto a chair. He had shaved off his hair, and his scalp was stippled and layered in a hundred shades of blue, yellow, green, orange.

“Mushrooms. Hundreds of mushrooms. I had to wear the overcoat and hat or every casual tourist on Albumuth Boulevard would have stared at me.” He looked down at his body. “Look how they glow. What a shame to be rid of them.” He saw me staring unabashedly. “Stare all you like, Janice. I’m a dazzling butterfly, not a moth … well, for another hour or two.” (A butterfly could not compare. I was magnificent. Every part of my body was receiving. I could “hear” things through my body, feel them, that no human short of Samuel Tonsure could understand.) He did not lie. From the collar of his shirt to the tips of his shoes, Duncan was covered in mushrooms and other fungi, in such a riot and welter and rash of colors that I was speechless. I walked up to him to examine him more closely. His eyelashes and eyebrows were lightly dusted with purple spores. The fungi had needled his head, burrowed into the skin, forming whorls of brightness that hummed with fecundity. I took his right hand in mine, examined the palm, the fingers. The palms had a vaguely greenish hue to them. The half-moons of his fingernails had turned a luminous purple. His skin was rubbery, as if unreal. Looking up into his eyes, I saw that the spark there came from pale red ringing the pupil. Suddenly, I was afraid. (To be honest, to dull the pain a bit, I’d had a few drinks at a tavern before stumbling to your door. That might have contributed to the condition of my eyes.) “Don’t be,” he said. “Don’t be afraid,” scaring me even more. “It’s a function of diet. It’s a function of disguise. I haven’t changed. I’m still your brother. You are still my sister. All of this will wash away. It’s just the layers added to me the past three months. I need help scraping them off.”

I had opened a window to get the smell of mushrooms out and now, by the wet, glistening outdoor lamps, I could see the beginning of a vast, almost invisible spore migration from the broken remains at our feet, from the burgundy bell-shaped fungi, from the inverted wineglasses, from the yellow-green nodules. Like ghosts, like spirits, a million tiny bodies in a thousand intricate shapes, like terrestrial jellyfish—oh what am I trying to say so badly except that they were gorgeous, as they fled out the window to be taken by the wind. In the faint light. Soundlessly. Like souls.

“Look,” I said, pointing to the spores.

“I know,” my brother said. “I know, Janice.”

Such regret in that voice, mixed with a last, lingering joy.

“I’m less than I was, but I’ve captured it all here.” He tapped his head, which still bore the scars of its invaders in the vague echo of color, in the scrubbed redness of it.

“The spores are part of the record. They will float back to where I’ve been, navigating by wind and rain and by ways we cannot imagine, and they will report to the gray caps. Who I was. Where I was. What I did. It will make it all the more dangerous next time.”

“Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress, humbled by the holes in its ancient walls, Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.”

As the fire behind them began to die, Gaudy smiled and broke the silence. He spoke in a “perfectly calm voice, level and smooth. He stared at the fireplace as he spoke, and steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. He appeared not to draw a single extra breath.”

He said: “You need not sit and thus defile my perfectly good chair because it will take no time at all to say what needs to be said to you. Once I have said what I am going to say to you, I would like you to leave immediately and never return. You are no longer welcome here and never will be welcome again. Your manuscript has performed the useful function of warming us, a function a thousand times more beneficial than anything it might have hoped to accomplish as a series of letters strung together into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The fire has purified it, in much the same manner as I would like at this moment—and will desire at all moments in the future—to purify you, were it not outside of the legal, if not moral, boundaries placed upon us by the law and society in general. By this time it ought to be clear to you, Mr. Shriek, that we do not intend to buy the rights to your ‘book’—and I use the word ‘book’ in its loosest possible sense—nor to its ashes, although I would sooner buy the rights to its ashes than to its unblemished pages.

As I would have hoped you had guessed by now, although you have not yet left this office never to return, we do not like your new book very much. In fact, to say I do not like your book would be like calling a mighty tree a seedling. I loathe your book, Mr. Shriek, and yet the word ‘loathe’ cannot convey in even a thousandth part the full depths of my hatred for this book, and by extension, you. But perhaps I should be more specific. Maybe specifics will allow you to overcome this current, potentially fatal, inertia—tied no doubt to the aforementioned shock—that stops you from leaving this office. Look—the last scrap of your manuscript has become a flake of ash floating above the fireplace. What a shame. Perhaps you would like an urn to collect the ashes of your dead newborn? Well, you can’t have one, because not only do we not have an urn, but even if we did, we would not allow you to use it for the transport of the ashes, if only from the fear that you might find some way to reconstruct the book from them—and yes, we do know it is likely you have a copy of the manuscript, but we will feel a certain warmth in our hearts if by burning this copy we can at least slow down your reckless and obstinate attempt to publish this cretinous piece of excrement. Returning to the specifics of our argument against this document: your insipid stupidity is evident from the first word of the first sentence of the first paragraph of your acknowledgments page, ‘The,’ and from there the sense of simple-minded, pitiable absence of thought pervades all of the first paragraph until, by the roaring crescendo of imbecility leading up to the last word of the first paragraph, ‘again,’ any possible authority the reader might have granted the author has been completely undermined by your inability to in any way convey even an unoriginal thought. And yet in comparison to the dull-witted pedantry of the second paragraph, the first paragraph positively shines with genius and degenerate brilliance. Perhaps at this point in our little chat, I should repeat that I don’t very much like this book.”

Gaudy then rose and shouted, “YOU HAVE BEEN MEDDLING IN THINGS YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT! DO YOU THINK YOU CAN POKE AROUND DOWN THERE TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT AND NOT SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES?! YOU ARE A COMPLETE AND UTTER MORON! IF YOU EVER COME BACK TO MORROW, I’LL HAVE YOU GUTTED AND YOUR ORGANS THROWN TO THE DOGS! DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME??!”

The past isn’t a slab of stone; it’s fragmented and porous.

Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.

I drifted and drifted, often so in trance that I did not have a single conscious thought for hours. I was a pair of eyes reporting to a brain that had ceased to police, to analyze, the incoming images. It all went through me and past, to some place other. In a way, it was a kind of release. Now, it makes me wonder if I had learned what it feels like to be a tree, or even, strike me dead, a gray cap. But, that cannot be so—the gray caps are always in motion, always thinking. You can see it in their eyes.

Once, as I stood in one of my motionless trances, a gray cap approached me. What did he do? Nothing. He sat in front of me and stared up at me for hours, for days. His eyes reflected the darkness. His eyes had a quality that held all of me entirely, held me against my will. Mary holds me, but not against my will—her eyes and my will are in accord. Her eyes: green, green, green. Greener than Ambergris. Greener than the greenest moss by a trickling stream.

After a time, I realized the gray cap had gone, but it took me weeks to return to the surface of my thoughts, and months to find the real surface, and with it the light. The light! A weak trickle of late afternoon gloom, presage of sunset, and yet it pierced my vision. I could not open my eyes until after dusk, fumbling my way along the Moth riverbank like some pathetic mole. The light burned into my closed eyelids. It seemed to crack my skin. It tried to kill me and birth me simultaneously. I lay gasping in the mud, writhing, afraid I would burn up.

I took a long sip from the canteen at this point, if only to assuage Duncan’s remembered heat. The starfish now served as an exotic, glowing ear, eclipsing flesh and blood. It hummed a little as it worked. A smell like fresh-cut orange surrounded it.

I offered Duncan the canteen. He used the opportunity to pour more water on his pet. I was about to prod him to continue when he pulled the starfish from his ear, sat up, and said, looking down at the compass as it sucked on his fingers, “Do you know the first sentences of the Truffidian Bible?”

“No,” I said. “Do you?” Our parents had treated religion like a door behind which stood an endless abyss: better not to believe at all, the abyss revealed, than have it be closed over, falsified, prettied up. (And yet, there is something in my skin now, after all these years, that hums of the world in a way that predicts the infinite.)

“Yes, I do know them. Would you like to hear them?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. Those words are ‘The world is broken. God is in exile.’ Followed shortly thereafter by ‘In the first part of creation, God made light and made vessels for thelight. The vessels were too fragile: they broke, and from the broken vessels of thesupernal lights, the material world was created.’”

Something very much like a void opened up inside me. A chill brought gooseflesh to my skin. Each word from my mouth sounded heavier than it should have: “And what does the creation of the world have to do with the gray caps?” He put a finger to his lips. His face in the sour light gave off a faint glow, pale relative to the illumination of the starfish. His skin winked from behind the mushroom dust. He looked so old. Why should he look so old? What did he know?

He said: “A machine. A glass. A mirror. A broken machine. A cracked glass. A shattered mirror.”

I remember now the way he used the phrases at his disposal. Clean, fine cuts. Great, slashing cuts. Fractures in the word and the world.

A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan’s journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully … But it doesn’t work right. It hasn’t worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance—something they don’t quite understand. How can I call it strictly a machine? It is as much organic as metallic, housed in a cavern larger than three Truffidian Cathedrals. You feel it and hear it before you see it: a throbbly hum, a grindful pulse, a sorrowful bellow. The passageways rumble and crackle with the force of it. A hot wind flares out before it. The only entrance leads, after much hard work, to the back of the machine, where you can see its inner workings. You are struck by the fact of its awful carnality, for they feed it lives as well as fuel. Flesh and metal bond, married by spores, joined by a latticework of polyps and filaments and lazy strands. Wisps and converted moonlight. Sparks and gears. The whole is at first obscured by its own detail, by those elements at eye level: a row of white sluglike bodies curled within the cogs and gears, eyes shut, apparently asleep. Wrinkled and luminous. Lacking all but the most rudimentary stubs of limbs. But with faces identical to those of the gray caps. You cannot help but look closer. You cannot help but notice two things: that they dream, twitching reflexively in their repose, eyelids flickering with subconscious thought, and that they are not truly curled within the machine—they are curled into the machine, meshed with it at a hundred points of contact. The blue-red veins in their arms flow into milk-white fingers, and at the border between skin and air, transformed from vein into silvery wire. Tendrils of wire meet tendrils of flesh, broken up by sections of sharp wheels, clotted with scraps of flesh, and whining almost soundlessly as they whir in the darkness.

As you stare at the nearest white wrinkled body, you begin to smell the thickness of oil and blood mixed together. As the taste bites into your mouth, you take a step back, and suddenly you feel as if you are falling, the sense of vertigo so intense your arms flail out though you stand on solid ground. Because you realize it isn’t one pale dreamer, or even a row of them, or even five rows of five hundred, but more than five thousand rows of five thousand milk-white dreamers, running on into the distance—as far as you care to see—millions of them, caught and transfixed in the back of the machine. And they are all dreaming and all their eyelids flicker in unison, and all their blood flows into all the wires while a hundred thousand sharpened wheels spin soundlessly.

The hum you hear, that low hum you hear, does not come from the machinery. It does not come from the wheels, the cogs, the wires. The hum emanates from the white bodies. They are humming in their sleep, a slow, even hum as peaceful as they are not—how can I write this, how? except to keep writing and when I’ve stopped never look at this again—while the machine itself is silent.

The rows blur as you tilt your head to look up, not because the rows are too far away, but because your eyes and your brain have decided that this is too much, this is too much to take in without going mad, that you do not want to comprehend this crushing immensity of vision, that if comprehended completely, it will haunt not just your nightmares for the rest of your life—it will form a permanent overlay upon your waking sight, and you will stumble through your days like a blind man, the ghost-vision in your head stronger than reality.

So you return to details—the details right in front of you. The latticework of wires and tubes, where you see a thrush has been placed, intertwined, its broken wings flapping painfully. There, a dragonfly, already dead, brittle and glassy. Bits and pieces of flesh still writhing with the memory of interconnection. Skulls. Yellowing bones. Glossy black vines. Pieces of earth. And holding it all together, like glue, dull red fungus.

But now the detail becomes too detailed, and again your eyes blur, and you decide maybe movement will save you—that perhaps if you move to the other side of the machine, you will find something different, something that does not call out remorselessly for your surrender. Because if you stand there for another minute, you will enmesh yourself in the machine. You will climb up into the flesh and metal. You will curl up to something pale and sticky and embrace it. You will relax your body into the space allowed it, your legs released from you in a spray of blood and wire, you smiling as it happens, your eyes already dulled, and dreaming some communal dream, your tongue the tongue of the machine, your mouth humming in another language, your arms weighed down with tendrils of metal, your torso split in half to let out the things that must be let out.

For a long time, you stand on the fissure between sweet acceptance of dissolution and the responsibility of movement, the enticing smell of decay, the ultimate inertia, reaching out to you … but, eventually, you move away, with an audible shudder that shakes your bones, almost pulls you apart.

As you hobble around to the side of the machine, you feel the million eyes of the crumpled, huddled white shapes snap open, for a single second drawn out of their dreams of you.

There is no history, no present. There are only the sides of the machine. Slick memory of metal, mad with its own brightness, mad with the memory of what it contains. You cling to those sides for support, but make your way past them as quickly as possible. The sides are like the middle of a book—necessary, but quickly read through to get to the end.

Already, you try in vain to forget the beginning.

The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention of their existence. Ever.

You slide into the calm of these scenes, although you cannot forget the white shapes behind the machine, the eyelids that flicker as these images flicker. Only the machine knows, and the machine is damaged. Its thoughts are damaged. Your thoughts are damaged: they run liquid-slow through your brain, even though you wish they would stop.

After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door at the very bottom of the mirror. The door is as big as the machine. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent—the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror, too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a nonexistent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth. The worms are singing to you through the rubble. The worms know your name. You cannot think. Your head is full of blood. You dare not breathe.

There is something behind the door.

There is something behind the door.

There is something behind the door.

The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You begin to run—to run as far from that place as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while the rest of you drowns in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hat doesnwor atdoeswor doeswor doewor dowordoor...

“You learned it wrong,” he told me. “That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve seen so many things, and I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve seen. They disappeared without a single drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment, a flaw in the machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children—they didn’t die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people—they were moved by mistake. The machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly—but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.”

He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his arms, where before the black dust had suppressed it.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. They’ve killed thousands of people. They’ve done terrible things. And you have the nerve to make apologies for them?!”

“Would it be easier to accept that they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other if we hadn’t massacred them to build this city? What I think is crazy is that we try to pretend they are just like us. If we had massacred most of the citizens of Morrow, we would expect them to seek revenge. That would be natural, understandable, even acceptable. But what about a people that, when you slaughter hundreds of them, doesn’t even really notice? That doesn’t acknowledge the event? We can’t accept that reaction. That would be incomprehensible. So we tack the idea of ‘revenge’ onto the Silence so we can sleep better at night—because we think, we actually have the nerve to think, that we understand these creatures that live beneath us. And if we think we understand them, if we believe they are like us in their motivations, then we don’t fear them quite as much. If we meet one in an alley, we believe we can talk to it, reason with it, communicate with it. Or if we see one dozing beneath a red flag on the street during the day, we overlook it, we make it part of the scenery, no less colorful or benign than a newly ordained Truffidian priest prancing down Albumuth Boulevard in full regalia.”

“I did bring a gray cap,” he said. “Several, in fact. Although not by choice. Take a good look through the doorway, out the front window, to the left. I doubt they would corroborate anything, though. I think they’d like to see me dead.” “Don’t joke.”

“I’m not. Take a look.”

Reluctantly, I raised myself, my left leg asleep—even less impressed by Duncan’s story, apparently, than I was. I peered around the doorway. Sheathed like swords by the fading light, more sharp shadow than dream, three gray caps stood staring in through the window. They stood so still the cobblestones of the street behind them seemed more alive. The whites of their eyes gleamed like wet paint. They stared at and through me. As if I meant nothing to them. The sight of them sent a convulsive shudder through me. I ducked back, beside Duncan.

Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together … When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain … every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each puppet in a different way, because we are all puppets on strings and we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to other puppets … After we are dead, gone to join the darkness between the lines of light, the strands we leave behind still quiver their lost messages into the hearts of those other puppets we met along the way, on our journey from light into not-light. These lost strands are the memories we leave behind … Magnify this effect by 25,000 souls and perhaps you can see why I cannot so lightly dismiss what you call a mistake. Each extinguished life leaves a hole in many other lives—a series of small extinguishments that can never be completely forgotten or survived. Each survivor carries a little of that void within them.

There never really is a finite beginning, is there? No real starting point to anything. Beginnings are continually beginning. Time is just a joke played by watchmakers to turn a profit.

No, my plan concerned additional research. With plucking the half-formed thoughts like plums. With growing another thirty or forty brains and limbs each semester, to become this multi-spined creature that might, in its flailing, lurching way, accomplish more than a single, if singular, scholar, ever could.

Even the flies have eyes, Janice. Eyes for them. There is no corner of this city they cannot see in some form. But it’s too much information. They cannot review it all at once. I imagine them down there, in the fungal light, reviewing intelligence gathered a decade ago—awash in information, none of it useful to them because it overwhelms them. And yet—why? Why attempt to gather it?

What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.

“Give back to this earth this good man, O Lord,” he said, much to the grumbling dismay of several Manziists present, who missed their traditional rat-festooned funeral ceremony. “Give back to this good man the earth, O Lord,” he said again, like a man who, having missed his memorized mark, has to start over in the correct order. “And let you, O Lord, serve as a light to him, for we are imperfect vessels and we platitude simile extended metaphor with barely any pauses followed by more repetition. Period. Comma. Stop. Start. Here I go again about God and the dirt and wait: another platitude, quote from the Truffidian Bible everyone’s heard a thousand times before, and even though I once actually knew Bonmot when I was a junior priest, not a single personal anecdote about the man because the scandal of his long-ago departure as Antechamber might somehow still cling to me like a fetid stench. Amen.”

What is it about distance—physical distance—that allows us to create such false portraits, such disguises, for those we love, that we can so easily discard them in memory, make for them a mask that allows us to keep them at a distance even when so close?

Before my “accident,” I had lived almost exclusively within the secret history of the city—a history of moments, not events, a history that vanished as it came and lived on only in the shudder of remembered ecstasy. This secret history descends (transcends) through the bedrooms of a hundred thousand houses, in the dark, through the tips of our fingers as we learn that our bodies have a thousand eyes to feel with, a thousand ways to learn the true meaning of touch. From foreplay to orgasm, from first touch to last, everything we know is in our skins—this secret history that so few people will be part of. We don’t talk about this history, although it made us and will make us and is the only way to get as close as we can to each other: an urgent coupling to close the space, to experience a pleasure that—excuse me as I stumble into this rapturous gutter (can we stop you?)—is on one level being filled or filling, but is also so much more.

Then, suddenly, I could feel the spores infiltrating my head, my limbs—they clambered over my sinuses, got between me and my own skin. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The spores began to seethe across my eyes, bringing a stinging green veil over my sight. I did the only thing I could do, the thing I have learned to do, still the hardest thing. I relaxed my arms, my legs, my neck, my head, so that I entrusted my balance to the fungi … and damned if I didn’t stay up. Damned if I didn’t continue to live, although I felt like I was drowning. I sweated from every pore. I felt nauseous, disoriented, dizzy. I felt as if the gray caps were searching for me across a vast distance—I could feel their gaze upon me, like a black cloud, a storm of eyes … and still the tendrils spread across my vision, blinding me … and then, as soon as they had finished their march from east and west, meeting somewhere around the bridge of my twitching nose, all of the discomfort faded and I could … breathe again. Not only could I breathe, but I was flying, soaring, my body as light as a single spore, and yet so powerful that I felt as if I could hold up the entire Academy with one hand. A fierce joy leaked into me, sped from my feet to my waist to my arms, my head. I could not have been happier had I been the sun, shining down on everyone from on high. And in that happiness, I did not even really exist, except as a connection, a bridge, an archway, linked with a hundred thousand other archways that extended up and down my body in a perfect crisscrossing pattern of completeness. And I cannot help feeling, even as the spores just as suddenly relinquished their hold and left me gasping and white, that what radiated into me was a thank-you from the thousands that comprise the invisible community that has become my body.

At the time, none of us thought much about these changes. Ambergris, for all its history, its secrets, its allure, had always been dirty, sickly, on the verge of crumbling back into itself—battered, babbling, incoherent in its design and intent. We all thought that, ultimately, the molt wouldn’t take, and the reptile that was the city would sink back into the mud a little, its skin ever more mottled from the experience.

Our dad loved historians, of course, but he had always hated journalists. He considered them the juvenile, larval stage of the historian, and as with certain reptilian or insect species that eat their own young, he believed they should be done away with for society’s greater good. I remember he used to call journalists “Historians without the wisdom of perspective.”

“At the heart of the city lies not a courtyard or a building or a statue, but an event: the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It is an overlay of this event that populates the city with an alternative history, one that, if we could only understand its ebb and flow, the necessity of violence to it, would also allow us to understand Ambergris.”

Something scratched at the outside of the door. A slow, tentative sound. It could have been anything. It could have been the wind. But the breath died in my throat. I realized every nerve in my skin had come alive in warning. I shut my eyes for a long time, as if willing the sound to go away. But it did not. It became louder, gained in confidence, precision. Scrabbling. At the door. At the window. I heard it sniffing the air. Reading our scent. I shivered, caught in the grip of nightmare. If we hadn’t boarded up the window, it would have been looking in at us at that very moment.

Sybel moaned, took me by the arm. “Janice, I think we have to leave.”

I held the gun tight, so tight my knuckles ached. “But where can we run to, Sybel? And how do we get out of here? I don’t think it’s possible now.”

“Do you think you could slide out of the bathroom window?” Sybel asked.

A knock at the door before I could reply—but not at the height I’d expected; lower, much lower.

I stifled a scream. “It’s too close. It can hear us right now. It can hear us talking. It knows what we’re going to do.” I held the gun like a club. I was no use to anyone. The fear had gotten too far into me. This wasn’t like trying to kill myself. I could face the fear of that now, but not this fear—this was too different, too unfamiliar.

Sybel grabbed me by the shoulders, whispered in my ear, “Either we go through the bathroom window or we’re dead. It’s going to come in here and kill us.” “Yes, but Sybel,” I whispered back, “what if there’s already one at the bathroom window, too? What if they’re already back there?”

Sybel shrugged. There was an odd, fatalistic light in his eyes. “Then it doesn’t matter. We’re dead. I’ll go first. If they get to me, go back into the apartment and lock yourself in the bedroom, and hope dawn comes soon.”

The thing at the door knocked again. Then it spoke.

In a horrible, moist parody of a human voice, it said, “I have something. For you. You will. Like it.”

Was this the first time in Ambergris’s history that a gray cap or a creature sent by the gray caps had spoken to a resident of the city? Most assuredly not—history is littered with the remains of those who have had such conversations; at least a dozen, two dozen. And yet, that night more than one hundred people reported having such contacts. What did it mean? At the time, no meaning would have penetrated my fear. (Mostly meant what a clever mimic, a parrot, means: nothing. A lure. Bait. A tripwire. A distraction. Delivered by their drones. Now I wonder if this was another harbinger of the Shift.)

We made our way to the back of the apartment, to the bathroom. I helped Sybel clamber up to the window. Behind us, the creature with the wet voice was banging on the door like a drunk and making a low gurgling laugh. “Let me in!” it said. “Let me in! I have something for you.”

The creature began to pound on the front door. It began to laugh—great, rippling waves of laughter. Perhaps it was calling to others of its kind. (It was gathering its strength—it had nothing but a collective consciousness; it was but the sum of its spores.)

I stood on the toilet seat and pulled myself up to the window ledge by pushing off against the wall with my left foot. A narrow ledge, a narrow window.

The banging behind me had become splintering.

Sybel offered his hand and pulled me through.

The splintering had become a rending. The door would be broken down within the minute.

Behind us, a muted roar. A shriek. Something I’d never heard before, something I never want to hear again. (No matter where you are now, I’m afraid you’ll be hearing it again. What we all heard in that moment of the war was the first groaning, rust-and-flesh-choked stirrings of the Machine. It fed off of that energy. It needed it. Forever after, my finely tuned senses could hear that hum, that vibration, in the ground. It terrified me.)

I was babbling by then. Praying to Truff, to Bonmot, to anyone I could think of. Even now, in this afterword, with the hole in the ground behind me, my typewriter slowly turning into fungal mush, I am babbling, thinking of that moment.

We waited. We almost waited too long. Its smell came closer, came closer. It jumped onto the roof—we could hear it leap to clear the gap with an effortless stride, heard its claws scrabble to find purchase on our side. It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.

“What do we do Sybel what do we do?” I kept saying, over and over again.

“Be calm and quiet, Janice,” he said. “Just be calm. When I say, stand up and fire at it.”

We almost waited too long. We thought it was farther away. But then it began to run at us. It had played its game of Stalk as long as it wanted to—now it meant to finish us. It was talking as it ran at us: “I have something for you something for you something for you you will like it you will like it you will like it,” like the chant of some senile priest counting beads cross-legged in the Religious Quarter.

That’s when we rose, in our fear. We rose up, and we emptied our pistols into it. It was dark as the night and yet transparent—you could see the stars through it when it got close. It was thick. It was thin. It had claws. It had fangs like polished steel. It had eyes so human and yet so various that the gaze paralyzed me. It was indescribable.

Even now, trying to visualize it, I want to vomit. I want to unthink it. Our shots went right through it. It veered to the left, misjudged the distance, and struck the wall in front of us, reared up again. We shot it again—tore great holes in its fungal skull, its impossible body. It roared, spit a stream of dark liquid, and tried to come up over the wall at us. Sybel stuck the muzzle of his pistol under its soft-rigid chin and pulled the trigger. The recoil sent the creature screaming and stumbling to the edge of the roof, and then over—falling. Still talking. Still telling us it had something for us that we’d like.

We stood there, numb, for a moment. Some things cannot be described. Some things can only be experienced.

I said that the world was silent. Do you understand what I mean by that? I mean that there was no sound anywhere in the city. The spores clotted the air, muffled noises, sucked the sound out of the world. We lived in silence. It was like a Presence, and it was watchful. As we sidled along a wall, keeping to the shadows for long moments, I felt that each spore was a tiny eye, and that each eye was reporting back to an unseen master. A heaviness grew in my lungs that I’ve never felt since. The air was trying to suck words as yet unspoken out of me, and snuff them, stillborn.

I met Duncan at the Spore again, in this room. As I approached the door, the flickering light within played a trick. I thought I saw his shadow, impossibly vast, curled around the edges, snap into a more human shape. A gurgle and whine that coalesced into a human voice.

The imprint shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown. If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she wound up hurting herself as well.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “no one knew your name. Someday no one will again.”

Lawless Ambergris, that oldest of cities named for the most valuable and secret part of the whale

Still dusty and alone in the swirl of the city — a voyeur among her skirts — Dradin set out, threading himself between street players and pimps, card sharks and candy sellers.

the clerk’s eyebrows rose like the startled silhouettes of twin seagulls upon finding that a fish within their grasp is actually a snark.

He had tried so very hard for conversions, despite their scarcity. Even confronted by savage beast, savage plant, and just plain savage he had persevered. Perhaps persevered for too long, in the face of too many obstacles, his hair proof of his tenacity—the stark black streaked with white or, in certain light, stark white shot through with black, each strand of white attributable to the jungle fever (so cold it burned, his skin glacial), each strand of black a testament to being alive afterward.

Dradin just stared, gap-jawed like a young jackdaw with naive fluff for wing feathers. For the dwarf had, tattooed from a point on the top of his head, and extending downward, a precise and detailed map of the River Moth, complete with the names of cities etched in black against the red dots that represented them. The river flowed a dark blue-green, thickening and thinning in places, dribbling up over the dwarf’s left eyelid, skirting the midnight black of the eye itself, and down past taut lines of nose and mouth, curving over the generous chin and, like an exotic snake act, disappearing into the dwarf’s vest and chest hair. A map of the lands beyond spread out from the River Moth. The northern cities of Dradin’s youth—Belezar, Stockton, and Morrow (the last where his father still lived) — were clustered upon the dwarf’s brow and there, upon the lower neck, almost the back, if one were to niggle, lay the jungles of Dradin’s last year: a solid wall of green drawn with a jeweler’s precision, the only hint of civilization a few smudges of red that denoted church enclaves. Dradin could have traced the line that marked his own dismal travels...

“Incredible,” Dradin said.

“Incredible,” echoed the dwarf, and smiled, revealing large yellowed teeth scattered between the gaping black of absent incisors and molars. “My father, Alberich, did it for me when I stopped growing. I was to be part of his show — he was a riverboat pilot for tourists — and thus he traced upon my skin the course he plotted for them. It hurt like a thousand devils curling hooks into my flesh, but now I am, indeed, incredible.

Do you wish to buy her? My name is Dvorak Nibelung.” From within this storm of information, the dwarf extended a blunt, whorled hand that, when Dradin took it, was cool to the touch, and very rough.

Dradin found the Religious Quarter on the map, traced over it with his index finger. It resembled a bird’s-eye view of a wheel with interconnecting spokes. No more a “quarter” than drawn. Cadimon Signal’s mission stood near the center of the spokes, snuggled into a corner between the Church of the Fisherman and the Church of the Seven-Pointed Star. Even looking at it on the map made Dradin nervous. To meet his religious instructor after such a time. How would Cadimon have aged after seven years? Perversely, as far afield as Dradin had gone, Cadimon Signal had, in that time, come closer to the center, his home, for he had been born in Ambergris. At the religious institute Cadimon had extolled the city’s virtues and, to be fair, its vices many times after lectures, in the common hall. His voice, hollow and echoing against the black marble archways, gave a raspy voice to the gossamer-thin cherubim carved into the swirl of white marble ceilings. The question that most intrigued Dradin, that guided his thoughts and bedeviled his nights, was this: Would Cadimon Signal take pity on a former student and find a job for him? He hoped, of course, for a missionary position, but failing that a position which would not break his back or tie him in knots of bureaucratic red tape.

As he neared the mission, Dradin tried to calm himself by breathing in the acrid scent of votive candles burning from alcoves and crevices and doorways. He tried to imagine the richness of his father’s conversations with Cadimon—the plethora of topics discussed, the righteous and pious denials and arguments. When his father mentioned those conversations, the man would shake off the weight of years, his voice light and his eyes moist with nostalgia. If only Cadimon remembered such encounters with similar enthusiasm.

The slap-slap of punished pilgrim feet against the stones of the street pulled him from his reverie. He stood to one side as twenty or thirty mendicants slapped on past, cleansing their sins through their calluses, on their way to one of a thousand shrines. In their calm but blank gaze, their slack mouths, Dradin saw the shadow of his mother’s face, and he wondered what she had done while his father and Cadimon talked. Gone to sleep? Finished up the dishes? Sat in bed and listened through the wall?

Silence. Then Cadimon said, “Don’t you still work for—”

“I quit.” Emphasis on quit, like the pressure on an egg to make it crack just so.

Dradin, taut muscles and clenched fists, would have obeyed Cadimon out of respect for the memory of authority, but now a vision rose into his mind like the moon rising over the valley the night before. A vision of the jungle, the dark green leaves with their veins like spines, like long, delicate bones. The jungle and the woman and all of the dead...

The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in all the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris — or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry, stamping one, two, three hundred thousand strong; no matter this savagery in the midst of apparent civilization—still the woman in the window seemed to him more ruly, more disciplined and in control and thus, perversely, malleable to his desire, than anyone Dradin had yet met in Ambergris: this priceless part of the whale, this overbrimming stew of the sublime and the ridiculous.

As Dvorak murmured goodbye, Dradin heard him with but one ear, cocooned as he was in a world where the sun always shone bright and uncovered all hidden corners, allowing no shadows or dark and glimmering truths.

The gangrenous moon began to seep across the sky in dark green hues. The drone of conversations grew more urgent and the cries of the people on the street below, befouled by food, drink, and revelry, became discordant: a fragmented roar of fragmenting desires.

“I cannot let you go. You no longer belong to me. You are a priest, are you not?

They pay well for the blood of priests.”

“My friends will come for me.”

“You have no friends in this city.”

“Where is the woman from the window?”

Dvorak smiled with a smugness that turned Dradin’s stomach. A spark of anger spread all up and down his back and made his teeth grind together. The graveyard gate was open. He had run through graveyards once, with Anthony — graveyards redolent with the stink of old metal and ancient technologies—but was that not where they wished him to go?

“In the name of God, what have you done with her?”

“You are too clever by half,” Dvorak said. “She is still in Hoegbotton & Sons.”

“At this hour?”

“Yes.”

“W-w-why is she there?” His fear for her, deeper into him than his own anger, made his voice quiver.

Dvorak’s mask cracked. He giggled and cackled and stomped his foot. “Because, because, sir, sir, I have taken her to pieces. I have dismembered her!” And from behind and in front and all around, the horrible, galumphing, harrumphing laughter of the mushroom dwellers.

Dismembered her. The laughter, mocking and cruel, set him free from his inertia. Clear and cold he was now, made of ice, always keeping the face of his beloved before him. He could not die until he had seen her body.

Dradin yanked on the rope and, as Dvorak fell forward, wrenched free the noose. He kicked the dwarf in the head and heard a satisfying howl of pain, but did not wait, did not watch—he was already running through the gate before the mushroom dwellers could stop him. His legs felt like cold metal, like the churning pistons of the old coal-chewing trains. He ran as he had never run in all his life, even with Tony. He ran like a man possessed, recklessly dodging tombstones and high grass, while behind came the angry screams of Dvorak, the slithery swiftness of the mushroom dwellers. And still Dradin laughed as he went—bellowing as he jumped atop a catacomb of mausoleums and leapt between monuments, trapped for an instant by abutting tombstones, and then up and running again, across the top of yet another broad sepulcher. He found his voice and shouted to his pursuers, “Catch me! Catch me!”, and cackled his own mad cackle, for he was as naked as the day he had entered the world and his beloved was dead and he had nothing left in the world to lose. Lost as he might be, lost as he might always be, yet the feeling of freedom was heady. It made him giddy and drunk with his own power. He crowed to his pursuers, he needled them, only to pop up elsewhere, thrilling to the hardness of his muscles, the toughness gained in the jungle where all else had been lost.

Dradin felt the dwarf’s body go taut and then lose its rigidity, while the mouth came loose of his fist and a thick, viscous liquid dribbled down his knife arm. Dradin turned to catch the body as it fell, so that as he held it and lowered it to the ground, his hand throbbing and bloody, he could see Dvorak’s eyes as the life left them. The tattoo, in that light, became all undone, the red dots of cities like wounds, sliding off to become merely a crisscross of lines. Dark blood coated the front of his shirt.

Dradin embraced the pieces of his lover, luxuriating in the smooth and shiny feel of her, the precision of her skin. He rose to a knee, cradling his beloved’s head in his shaking arms. Was he moaning now? Was he screaming now? Who could tell? With careful deliberateness, Dradin took his lover’s head and walked into the antechamber, and then out the door. The third-floor landing was dark and quiet. He began to walk down the stairs, descending slowly at first, taking pains to slap his feet against each step. But when he reached the second-floor landing, he became more frantic, as if to escape what lay behind him, until by the time he reached the first floor and burst out from the shattered front door, he was running hard, knapsack bobbing against his back. Down the boulevard, seen through the folds of the squid float, a mob approached, holding candles and torches and lanterns. Stores flared and burned behind them. Dradin spared them not a glance, but continued to run—past the girl and her phonograph, still playing Voss Bender, and past Borges Bookstore, in the shadow of which prowled the black panther from the parade, and then beyond, into the unknown. Sidestepping mushroom dwellers at their dark harvest, their hands full of mushrooms from which spores broke off like dandelion tufts, and the last of the revelers of the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, their trajectories those of pendulums and their tongues blue if not black, arms slack at their sides. Through viscera and the limbs of babies stacked in neat piles. Among the heehaws and gimgobs, the drunken dead and the lolly lashers with their dark whips. Weeping now, tears without end. Mumbling and whispering endearments to his beloved, running strong under the mad, mad light of the moon—headed forever and always for the docks and the muscular waters of the River Moth, which would take him and his lover as far as he might wish, though perhaps not far enough.

“I boarded my vessel and left the city that I had thought to be so rich and prosperous but is actually a starveling, a city full of lies, tricks, perjury, and greed, a city rapacious, avaricious, and vainglorious.

Three centuries later, city mayors all along the Moth would cast off the yoke of cappans and kings and create a league of city-states based on trade alliances — eventually plunging Ambergris into its current state of “functional anarchy.”

The Truffidian priest Michael Nysman came to the city as part of a humanitarian mission the year after the Silence and was shocked by what he found there. In a letter to his diocese back in Nicea, he wrote: The buildings are gray and their windows often like sad, empty eyes. The only sound in the street is that of weeping. Truly, there is a great emptiness to the city, as if its heart had stopped beating, and its people are a grim, suspicious folk. Can such a city ever now lose a certain touch of cruelty, of melancholy, a lingering hint of the macabre? Is this, then, the grief of the gray caps 70 years later given palpable form?

To head librarian Michael Abrasis fell the task of examining the journal, and luckily he kept notes. 'Leather-bound, 6 x 9, with at least 300 pages, of which almost all have been used. The leather has been contaminated by a green fungus that, ironically, has helped to preserve the book; indeed, were the lichen to be removed, the covers would disintegrate, so ingrained and so uniform are these green “shingles.” Of the ink, it would appear that the first 75 pages are of a black ink easily recognizable as distilled from whale’s oil. However, the sections thereafter are written using a purple ink that, after careful study, appears to have been distilled from some sort of fungus. These sections exude a distinctly sweet odor.'

Dark and darker for three days. We are lost and cannot find our way to the light. The Cappan still pursues the gray caps, but they remain flitting shadows against the pale, dead glow of the fungus, the mushrooms that stink and writhe and even seem to speak a little. We have run out of food and are reduced to eating from the mushrooms that rise so tall in these caverns we must seek sustenance from the stem alone—maddeningly aware of succulent leathery lobes too high to reach. We know we are being watched, and this has unnerved all but the strongest men. We can no longer afford to sleep except in shifts, for too often we have woken to find another of our party missing. Early yesterday I woke to find a stealthy gray cap about to murder the Cappan himself, and when I gave the alarm, this creature smiled most chillingly, made a chirping sound, and ran down the passageway. We gave chase, the Cappan and I and some 20 others. The gray cap escaped, and when we returned our supplies were gone, as were the 15 men who had remained behind. The gray caps’ behavior here is as different as night is to day—here they are fast and crafty and we hardly catch sight of them before they strike. I do not believe we will make it to the surface alive.

Another entry, dated just a few “days” later, is more disjointed and, one feels, soaked through with terror:

Three more gone—taken. In the night. Morning now. What do we find arranged around us like puppet actors? We find arranged around us the heads of those who have been taken from us. Ramkin, Starkin, Weatherby, and all the rest. Staring. But they cannot stare. They have no eyes. I wish I had no eyes. Cappan long ago gave up on all but the idea of escape. And it eludes us. We can taste it—the air sometimes fresher, so we know we are near the surface, and yet we might as well be a hundred miles underground! We must escape these blind staring heads. We eat the fungus, but I feel it eats us instead. Cappan near despair. Never seen him this way. Seven of us. Trapped. Cappan just stares at the heads. Talks to them, calls them by name. He’s not mad. He’s not mad. He has it easier in these tunnels than I. And still they watch us...

Tonsure then describes the deaths of the men still with the Cappan and Tonsure— two by poisoned mushrooms, two by blow dart, and one by a trap set into the ground that cut the man’s legs off and left him to bleed to death. Now it is just the Cappan and Tonsure, and, somehow, Tonsure has recovered his nerve:

We wonder now if there ever were such a dream as aboveground, or if this place has always been the reality and we simply deluding ourselves. We shamble through this darkness, through the foul emanations of the fungus, like lost souls in the Nether World. Today, we beseeched them to end it, for we could hear their laughter all around us, could glimpse the shadows of their passage, and we are past fear. End it, do not toy with us. It is clear enough now that here, on their territory, they are our Masters. I looked over my notes last night and giggled at my innocence. “Degenerate traces of a once-great civilization” indeed. We have passed through so many queer and ominous chambers, filled with otherworldly buildings, otherworldly sights—the wonders I have seen! Luminous purple mushrooms pulsing in the darkness. Creatures that can only be seen when they smile, for their skin reflects their surroundings. Eyeless, pulsating, blind salamanders that slowly ponder the dead darkness through other senses. Winged animals that speak in voices. Headless things that whisper our names. And ever and always, the gray caps. We have even spied upon them at play, although only because they disdain us so, and seen the monuments carved from solid rock that beggar the buildings aboveground. What I would give for a single breath of fresh air. Manzikert resists even these fancies; he has become sullen, responding to my words with grunts and clicks and whistles. More disturbing still, we have yet to retrace our steps; thus, this underground land must be several times larger than the aboveground city, much as the submerged portion of an iceberg is larger than the part visible to a sailor.

We are old. We have no teeth. We swallow what we chew. We chew up all the swallows. Then we excrete the swallows. Poor swallows—they do not fly once they are out of us.

Then follow the last 10 pages of the journal, filled with so concrete and frenzied a description of Truffidian religious practices that we can only conclude that he wrote these passages as a bulwark against insanity and that, ultimately, when he ran out of paper, he ran out of hope—either writing on the walls121 or succumbing to the despair that must have been a tangible part of every one of his days below ground. Indeed, the last line of the journal reads: “An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.” Thus passes into silence one of the most influential and mysterious characters in the history of Ambergris.

It would seem that two separate and very different societies shall continue to evolve side by side, separated by a few vertical feet of cement. In our world, we see their red flags and how thoroughly they clean the city, but we are allowed no similar impact on their world except through the refuse that goes down our sewer pipes.

The hall contained the following items, some of which were later cataloged on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with a hint of mildew:

• 24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop one box stood

• 1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing cotton (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the

• 5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors—lit with what he could only describe as a black light: it illuminated but did not lift the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of tattered jellyfish floating in amber bottles, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in brittle poses. The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and

• 1 Manzikert-brand phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and

• 8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles. Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by some wild delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower left corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop

• 1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood

• 8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice

• 1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again—and beneath the clock

• 1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal

• 1 bookcase, lacquered, stacked with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase

• 1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to

• 1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her left nub held by

• 1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pocket watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-gray trousers. He stared at

• 1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald-green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of

• 1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab gray suit he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set halfway up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge.

“But I don’t really need the collection. It’s a fine collection, very fine”—and he meant it; he admired a man who could so single-mindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of things—“but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?” Hoegbotton shrugged his famous shrug, perfected over several years of haggling.

“Tell me about the cage,” Hoegbotton said suddenly, surprising himself. “The cage up there”—he pointed—“is it for sale, too?”

The boy stiffened, stared at the floor.

To Hoegbotton’s surprise, the woman turned to look at him. Her eyes were black as an abyss; they did not blink and reflected nothing. He felt for a moment as if he stood balanced precariously between the son’s alarm and the mother’s regard.

“The cage was always open,” the woman said, her voice gravelly, something stuck in her throat. “We had a bird. We always let it fly around. It was a pretty bird. It flew high through the rooms. It—No one could find the bird. After.” The terrible pressure of the word after appeared to be too much for her and she fell back into her silence.

“We’ve never had a cage,” the boy said, the dark green suitcase swaying. “We’ve never had a bird. They left it here. They left it.”

The light glinted softly off the windows. The silence became more absolute. All around, dead things watched one another, from wall to wall—a cacophony of gazes that saw everything but remembered nothing. Outside, the rain fell relentlessly.

An unintelligible answer floated up. As his sight adjusted to the scene below, the distant solicitor in his chair, the other two still standing, he thought for a horrible second that they were melting. The boy seemed melded to his suitcase, the green of it inseparable from the white of the attached arm. The woman’s nubs were impossibly white, as if she had grown new bones. The solicitor was just a splash of green.

When he stood on solid ground again, he could not control his shaking.

“I’ll have the papers to you tomorrow, after I’ve cataloged all of the items,” he said.

All around, on the arms of the chairs, on the table, atop the bookcase, white mushrooms had risen on slender stalks, their gills tinged red.

The solicitor sat in his chair and giggled uncontrollably.

“It was nice to meet you,” Hoegbotton said as he walked to the door that led to the room that led to the next room and the room after that and then, hopefully, the outside, by which time he would be running. The woman’s stubs had sprouted white tendrils of fungus that lazily wound their way around the dried blood and obscured it.

Her eyes were slowly filling with white.

Hoegbotton backed into the damaged table and almost fell. “As I say, a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” the solicitor said, and giggled again, his skin as green and wrinkly as a lizard’s.

“Then I will see you again, soon,” Hoegbotton said, edging toward the door, groping behind him for the knob, “and under … under better…” But he could not finish his sentence.

The boy’s arms were dark green, fuzzy and indistinct, as if he were a still life made of points of paint on a canvas. His suitcase, once blue, had turned a blackish green, for the fungi had engulfed it much as ivy had engulfed the eastern wall of the mansion.

All the terrible knowledge of his condition shone through the boy’s eyes and yet still he held his mother’s arm as the white tendrils wound round both their limbs in an ever more permanent embrace.

Hoegbotton later believed he would have stood at the door forever, hand on the knob, the solicitor’s giggle a low whine in the background, if not for what happened next.

The broken clock groaned and struck midnight. The shuddering stroke reverberated through the room, through the thousands of jars of preserved animals. The solicitor looked up in sudden terror and, with a soft popping sound, exploded into a lightly falling rain of emerald spores that drifted to the floor with as slow and tranquil a grace as the seeds of a dandelion. As if the sound had torn him apart.

He had never come this close before. Either they had died long before he arrived or long after he left. The solicitor’s liquid giggle trickled through his ears, along with the soft pop of the spores. He shuddered, relaxed, shuddered again.

The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.

When he finally stood in front of the apartment—on the ground level of a three- story building—he wondered if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. Weeds had drowned the grass and other signs of a lawn. A smell like dull vinegar permeated the air. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away. Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, attenuated, automatic. The sound was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.

Hoegbotton pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and left of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was oddly ordinary, nothing out of place. In the even more dimly lit living room, Hoegbotton could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshift tent, broadsheets strewn across the floor for a bed. Dog droppings were more recent, as were the bones of small animals piled in a corner. A rabbit carcass, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before.

The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings that had hung on the wall lay in tumbled flight against the floor, their hooks having long since given out. A faint, bitter smell rose from the room—a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi, the natural results of decay.

Hoegbotton relaxed. The gray caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand. Hoegbotton entered the dining room. Brittle fragments of newsprint lay scattered across the dining room table, held in place by a bottle of port with glass beside it.

Colonized by cobwebs, by dust, by mottled fragments of wood that had drifted down from the ceiling, the table also held three plates and place settings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out. Samuel Hoegbotton. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.

Hoegbotton stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last hundred years? Had freak winds blowing through the gaps in the boarded-up windows caused them to move? How could anyone know? And yet, their current positioning teased his imagination. It did not look as if Samuel Hoegbotton’s family had gotten up in alarm—unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third—that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper—had not been used, nor had the silverware for that setting. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate? The knife was missing entirely. On the left side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it. It appeared to Hoegbotton as if the family had been eating and simply... disappeared... in mid-meal. A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbotton’s skin.

The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half eaten. The bottle of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing in the scenarios his sister and he had drawn up in their youth could account for it.

Hoegbotton took out his pocketknife and leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbotton must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where his daughter and wife would have been sitting. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall of squid meat due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from the Truffidian Antechamber; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shift, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see … what? To see the gray caps or a vision much worse? Had Samuel Hoegbotton known surprise?

Terror? Wonder? Or was he taken away so swiftly that he, his daughter, and his wife, had no time for any reaction at all. Hoegbotton stared across the table again, focused on the bottle of port. The glass was half full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bottle. A further mystery. Had the port been poured long after the Silence?

Beyond the bottle, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate. He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the fork itself. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbotton’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle attached to a line and two “U” shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, Hoegbotton felt the questions multiply, until he was not just sitting in Samuel Hoegbotton’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.

That night, he made love to Rebecca. Her scar gleamed by the light from her eyes, which, at the height of her rapture, blazed so brightly that the bedroom seemed transported from night to day. As he came inside of her, he felt a part of her scar enter him. It registered as an ecstatic shudder that penetrated his muscles, his bones, his heart. She called out his name and ran her hands down his back, across his face, her eyes sparking with pleasure. At such moments, when the strangeness of her seeped through into him, he would suffer a sudden panic, as if he was losing himself, as if he no longer knew his own name. He would sit up, as now, all the muscles in his back rigid.

She knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong, but, sleep besotted, the light from her eyes dimming to a satisfied glow, said, simply, “I love you.” “I love you, too,” he said. “Your eyes are full of fireflies.” She laughed, but he meant it: entire cities, entire worlds, pulsed inside those eyes, hinting at an existence beyond the mundane.

Something in her gaze reminded him suddenly of the woman with the missing hands and he looked away, toward the window that, though closed, let in the persistent sound of rain. Beside the window, his grandmother’s possessions still lay in shadows on the mantel.

A man was throwing up into the gutter. A woman was yelling at her husband. The sky was a uniform gray. The rain was unending, as common as the very air. He couldn’t even feel it anymore. Everywhere, in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the minute spaces between bricks in shop fronts, new fungi were growing. He wondered if anything he did mattered.

The apartment door was ajar. He tried to catch his breath, bending over as he slowly pushed the door open. A line of white mushrooms ran through the hallway, low to the ground, their gills stained red. Where his hand held the door, fungus touched his fingers. He recoiled, straightened up.

“Rebecca?” he said, staring into the kitchen. No one. The inside of the kitchen window was covered in purple fungi. A cane lay next to the coat rack, a gift from his father. He took it and walked into the apartment, picking his way between the white mushrooms as he pulled the edge of his raincoat up over his mouth. The doorway to the living room was directly to his left. He could hear nothing, as if his head were stuffed with cloth. Slowly, he peered around the doorway.

The living room was aglow with fungi, white and purple, green and yellow. Shelves of fungi jutted from the walls. Bottle-shaped mushrooms, a deep burgundy, wavering like balloons, were anchored to the floor. Hoegbotton’s palm burned fiercely. Now he was in the dream, not before.

Looking like the exoskeleton shed by some tropical beetle, the cage stood on the coffee table, the cover drawn aside, the door open. Beside the cage lay another alabaster hand. This did not surprise him. It did not even register. For, beyond the table, the doors to the balcony had been thrown wide open. Rebecca stood on the balcony, in the rain, her hair slick and bright, her eyes dim. Strewn around her, as if in tribute, the strange growths that had long ago claimed the balcony: orange strands whipping in the winds, transparent bulbs that stood rigid, mosaic patterns of gold - green mold imprinted on the balcony’s corroded railing. Beyond: the dark gray shadows of the city, dotted with smudges of light.

Rebecca was looking down at … nothing … her hands held out before her as if in supplication. “Rebecca!” he shouted. Or thought he shouted. His mouth was tight and dry. He began to walk across the living room, the mushrooms pulling against his shoes, his pants, the air alive with spores. He blinked, sneezed, stopped just short of the balcony.

Rebecca had still not looked up. Rain splattered against his boots.

“Rebecca—it isn’t safe. Come away from the balcony.” His words were dull, unconvincing. A lethargy had begun to envelop his body.

“I wish I knew what it was,” she said. “Can you see it? It’s right here—in front of me.”

He started to say no, he couldn’t see it, but then he realized he could see it. He was gasping from the sight of it. He was choking from the sight of it. Blood trickled down his chin where he had bitten into his lip. All the courage he had built up for Rebecca’s sake melted away.

The thing had not moved from the balcony. It was not truly invisible but camouflaged itself by perfectly matching its background. The bars of a cage. The spaces between the bars. A perch. He could only glimpse it now because it could not mimic the rain that fell upon it fast enough.

The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer mattered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca’s eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosphorescent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin shimmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could get, he knew now, staring into that single, beautiful eye. This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond.

Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience that. The thing held out its clawed hand and, after a time, Hoegbotton took it in his own.

Lake also took several anatomy classes when young; even in his most surreal paintings the figures often seem hyperreal—as if there are layers of paint unseen, beneath which exist veins, arteries, muscles, nerves, tendons. This hyperreality creates tension by playing against Lake’s assertion that the “great artist swallows up the world that surrounds him until his whole environment has been absorbed in his own self.”

We may think of the Lake who arrived in Ambergris from Stockton as a contradictory creature: steeped in the technical world of anatomy and yet well versed in the miraculous and ur-rational by his mother—a contradiction further enriched by his guilt over not following his father into the family trade. These are the elements Lake brought to Ambergris. In return, Ambergris gave Lake the freedom to be an artist while also opening his eyes to the possibilities of color.

The renaming alone made Lake’s teeth grind together. It seemed, to his absurdly envious eye—he knew how absurd he was, but could not control his feelings—that every third building of any importance had had the composer’s name rudely slapped over old assignations, with no sense of decorum or perspective. Was it not enough that while alive Bender had been a virtual tyrant of the arts, squashing all opera, all theater, that did not fit his outdated melodramatic sensibilities? Was it not enough that he had come to be the de facto ruler of a city that simultaneously abhorred and embraced the cult of personality? Did he now have to usurp the entire city—every last stone of it—forever and always as his mausoleum? Apparently so. Apparently everyone soon would be permanently lost, for every avenue, alley, boulevard, dead end, and cul-de-sac would be renamed “Bender.” “Bender” would be the name given to all newborns; or, for variety’s sake, “Voss.” And a whole generation of Benders or Vosses would trip and tangle their way through a city which from every street corner threw back their name at them like an impersonal insult.

Lake stared at the fingers holding the broadsheet and wondered if there would be a place for the man’s sour features in his latest commission—if he could immortalize the unhelpfulness that was as blunt as the man’s knuckles. After the long, grueling walk through hostile territory, this was really too much.

The four sitting with Lake he counted as his closest friends: Raffe, Sonter, Kinsky, and Merrimount. The rest had become as interchangeable as the bricks of Hoegbotton & Sons’ many trading outposts, and about as interesting. At the moment, X, Y, and Z claimed the outer tables like petty island tyrants, their faces peering pale and glinty-eyed in at Lake’s group, one ear to the inner conversation while at the same timetrying to maintain an uneasy autonomy.

“O fecund grand mother matron, Ambergris, bathed in the blood of versions under the gangrenous moon.” Merrimount’s melodramatic lilt was unmistakable, and Lake roused himself.

“Did I hear right?” Lake rubbed his ears. “Is this poetry? Verse? But what is this gristle: bathed in the blood of versions? Surely, my merry mount, you mean virgins. We all were one once—or had one once.”

A roar of approval from the gallery.

But Merrimount countered: “No, no, my dear Lake, I meant versions—I protest. I meant versions: Bathed in the blood of the city’s many versions of itself.”

“A nice recovery”—Sonter again—“but I still think you’re drunk.”

“You’re not Merrimount,” he said to the man.

The man’s eyes were closed.

Lake stood facing the moon. The man stood facing Lake.

The man opened his eyes and the ferruginous light of the moon shot through them and formed two rusty spots on Lake’s neck, as if the man’s eyes were just holes that pierced his skull from back to front.

The moon blinked out. The light still streamed from the man’s eyes. The man smiled a half-moon smile and the light trickled out from between his teeth. The man held Lake’s left hand, palm up.

The knife sliced into the middle of Lake’s palm. He felt the knife tear through the skin, and into the palmar fascia muscle, and beneath that, into the tendons, vessels, and nerves. The skin peeled back until his entire hand was flayed and open. He saw the knife sever the muscle from the lower margin of the annular ligament, then felt, almost heard, the lesser muscles snap back from the bones as they were cut—six for the middle finger, three for the ring finger—the knife now grinding up against the os magnum as the man guided it into the area near Lake’s wrist—slicing through extensor tendons, through the nerves, through the farthest outposts of the radial and ulnar arteries. He could see it all—the yellow of the thin fat layer, the white of bone obscured by the dull red of muscle, the gray of tendons, as surely as if his hand had been labeled and diagrammed for his own benefit. The blood came thick and heavy, draining from all of his extremities until he only had feeling in his chest. The pain was infinite, so infinite that he did not try to escape it, but tried only to escape the red gaze of the man who was butchering him while he just stood there and let him do it.

The thought went through his head like a dirge, like an epitaph, I will never paint again.

He could not get away. He could not get away.

Lake’s hand began to mutter, to mumble …

In response, the man sang to Lake’s hand, the words incomprehensible, strange, sad.

Lake’s hand began to scream—a long, drawn out scream, ever higher in pitch, the wound become a mouth into which the man continued to plunge the knife.

Lake woke up shrieking. He was drowning in sweat, his right hand clenched around his left wrist. He tried to control his breathing—he sucked in great gulps of air—but found it was impossible. Panicked, he looked toward the window. There was no moon. No one stood there. He forced his gaze down to his left hand (he had done nothing, nothing, nothing while the man cut him apart) and found it whole. He was still shrieking.

“But I’m wondering if maybe it is too big…”

“It’s smaller than it looks,” Shriek offered, somewhat pathetically, Lake thought.

“Perhaps I could have it altered, cut down to size,” Lake said, glaring at Shriek.

Bibble nodded, putting a hand to his chin in rapt contemplation of the possibilities.

“Or maybe I should just saw it in fourths and you can take the fourth you like best,” Lake said. “Or maybe eighths would be more to your liking?”

Bibble stared blankly at him for a moment, before Shriek stepped in with, “Artists! Always joking! You know, I really don’t think it will be too large. You could always buy it and if it doesn’t fit, return it—not that I could refund your money, but you could pick something else...

After Bibble had left, Shriek turned to him and said, “That was wonderful!”

“What was wonderful?”

Shriek’s eyes became colder than usual. “That smug, arrogant, better-than-thou artist’s demeanor. They like that, you know—it makes them feel they’ve bought the work of a budding genius.”

Shriek patted him on the back. “Whatever it is, keep it up. Now, let’s take a look at the new paintings.”

Lake bit his lip to stop himself from committing career suicide, walked over to the table, and retrieved the two canvases. He spread them out with an awkward flourish.

Shriek stared at them, a quizzical look on her face.

“Well?” Lake finally said, Raffe’s words from the night before buzzing in his ears. “Do you like them?” “Hmm?” Shriek said, looking up from the paintings as if her thoughts had been far away.

Lake experienced a truth viscerally in that moment which he had only ever realized intellectually before: he was the least of Shriek’s many prospects, and he was boring her.

Nonetheless, he pressed on, braced for further humiliation: “Do you like them?”

“Oh! The paintings?”

“No—the…” The earwax on your walls? he thought. The beets? “Yes, the paintings.”

Shriek’s brows furrowed and she put a hand to her chin in unconscious mimicry of the departed Bibble. “They’re very … interesting.”

Interesting.

“They’re of my father’s hands,” Lake said, aware that he was about to launch into a confession both unseemly and useless, as if he could help make the paintings more appealing to her by saying this happened, this is a person I know, it is real therefore it is good. But he had no choice—he plunged forward: “He is a startlingly nonverbal man, my father, as most insect catchers are, but there was one way he felt comfortable communicating with me, Janice—by coming home with his hands closed—and when he’d open them, there would be some living jewel, some rare wonder of the insect world—sparkling black, red, or green—and his eyes would sparkle too. He’d name them all for me in his soft, stumbling voice—lovingly so; how they were all so very different from one another, how although he killed them and we often ate them in hard times, how it must be with respect and out of knowledge.” Lake looked at the floor. “He wanted me to be an insect catcher too, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to become an artist.” He remembered the way the joy had shriveled up inside his father when he realized his son would not be following in his footsteps. It had hurt Lake to see his father so alone, trapped by his reticence and his solitary profession, but he knew it hurt his father more. He missed his father; it was an ache in his chest.

“That’s a lovely story, Martin. A lovely story.”

“So you’ll take them?”

“No. But it is a lovely story.”

“But see how perfectly I’ve rendered the insects,” Lake said, pointing to them.

“It’s a slow season and I don’t have the space. Maybe when your other work sells.”

Her tone as much as said not to press her too far.

A frenzied rapping and smashing erupted from the table. Lake sucked in his breath and pulled his fist back abruptly. A frisson of dread traveled up his spine. It had just occurred to him that the playful game might not be a playful game after all. The black table, on which he had laid his invitation, was not actually a table but an unadorned coffin from which someone desperately wanted to get out!

Lake rose with an “Uh!” of horror—and at that moment, the Stork returned, accompanied by two other men. The Stork’s companions were both of considerable weight and height, and from a certain weakness underlying the ponderous nature of their movements, which he remembered from his days of sketching models, Lake realized both were of advancing years. Both wore dark suits identical to that worn by the Stork, but the resemblance ended there. The larger of the two men—not fat but merely broad—wore a resplendent raven’s head over his own, the glossy black feathers plucked from a real raven (there was no mistaking the distinctive sheen). The eyes shone sharp and hard and heavy. The beak, made of a silvery metal, caught the subdued light and glimmered like a distant reflection in a pool of still water.

The third man wore a mask that replicated both the doorknocker and the seal on Lake’s invitation: the owl, brown-gold feathers once again genuine, the curved beak a dull gray, the human eyes peering out from the shadow of the fabricated orbits. Unfortunately, the Owl’s extreme girth extended to his neck and the owl mask was a tight fit, covering his chins, but constricting the flesh around the neck into a jowly collar. This last detail made him hideous beyond belief, for it looked as if he had been denuded of feathers, revealing the plucked skin beneath.

The three stood opposite Lake across the coffin—the top of which had begun to shudder upward as whatever was inside smashed itself against the lid. “What … what is in there?” Lake asked. “Is this part of the masquerade? Is this a joke? Did Merrimount send you?”

The Owl said, “A very nice disguise,” and still staring at Lake, rapped his fist so hard against the coffin lid that black paint rubbed off on his white glove. The thrashing inside the coffin subsided. “A good disguise for this masquerade. The frog, who is equally at home on land as in the water.” The Owl’s voice, like that of the Stork, came out distorted, as if the man had stuffed cotton or pebbles in his mouth.

“Why? Why have you done this to him?”

The Stork sneered, said, “He did it to himself. He brought everything on himself.”

“He’s no good,” the Raven said.

“He is,” the Owl added, “the very epitome of Evil.”

Voss Bender moved a little. The eyes under the imperious gray eyebrows opened wide. Bender wasn’t deaf or stupid—Lake had never thought him stupid—and the man followed their conversation with an intense if weary interest. Those eyes demanded that Lake save him. Lake looked away.

“The Raven here will give you his knife,” the Owl said, “but do not think that just because you have a weapon you can escape.” As if to prove this, the Owl produced a gun, one of those sleek, dangerous-looking models newly invented by the Kalif’s scientists.

The Raven held out his knife.

Lake glanced at Voss Bender, then at the knife. A thin line of light played over the metal and the grainy whorls of the hilt. He could read the words etched into the blade, the name of the knife’s maker: Hoegbotton & Sons. That the knife should have a history, a pedigree, that he should know more about the knife than about the three men struck him as absurd, as horrible. As he stared at the blade, at the words engraved there, the full, terrible weight of the deed struck him. To take a life. To snuff out a life, and with it a vast network of love and admiration. To create a hole in the world. It was no small thing to take a life, no small thing at all. He saw his father smiling at him, palms opened up to reveal the shiny, sleek bodies of dead insects.

“For God’s sake, don’t make me kill him!”

The burst of laughter from the Owl, the Raven, the Stork, surprised him so much that he laughed with them. He shook with laughter, his jaw, his shoulders, relaxed in anticipation of the revelation that it was all a joke … before he understood that their laughter was throaty, fey, cruel. Slowly, his laughter turned to sobs.

The Raven’s hilarity subsided before that of the Owl and the Stork. He said to Lake, “He is already dead. The whole city knows he’s dead. You cannot kill someone who is already dead.”

What did the genius composer see in those final moments? Lake wondered later. Did he see the knife, the arm that held it, descending, or did he see himself back in Morrow, by the river, walking through a green field and humming to himself? Did he see a lover’s face contorted with passion? Did he see a moment from before the creation of the fame that had devoured him? Perhaps he saw nothing, awash in the crescendo of his most powerful symphony, still thundering across his brain in a wave of blood.

As Lake bent over Voss Bender, he saw reflected in the man's eyes the black mask of the Raven, who had stepped nearer to watch the killing.

“Through His Eyes” has an attitude toward perspective unique among Lake’s works, for it is painted from the vantage point of the dead Voss Bender in an open coffin (an apocryphal event—Bender was cremated), looking up at the people who are looking down, while perspective gradually becomes meaningless, so that beyond the people looking down, we see the River Moth superimposed against the sky and mourners lining its banks. Of the people who stare down at Bender, one is Lake, one is a hooded insect catcher, and three are wearing masks—in fact, a reprisal of the owl, raven, and stork from “The Burning House.” Four other figures stare as well, but they are faceless. The scenes in the background of this monstrously huge canvas exist in a world which has curved back on itself, and the details conspire to convince us that we see the sky, green fields, a city of wood, and the river banks simultaneously. As Venturi writes, “The colors deepen the mystery: evening is about to fall and the river is growing dim; reds are intense or sullen, yellows and greens are deep-dyed; the sinister greenish sky is a cosmetic reflection of earthly death.” The entirety of the painting is ringed by a thin line of red that bleeds about a quarter of an inch inward. This unique frame suggests a freshness out of keeping with the coffin, while the background scenes are thought to depict Lake’s ideal of Bender’s youth, when he roamed the natural world of field and river. Why did Lake choose to show Bender in a coffin? Why did he choose to use montage? Why the red line? Some experts suggest that we ignore the coffin and focus on the red line and the swirl of images, but even then can offer no coherent explanation.

Even more daring, and certainly unique, “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” creates an equivalence between sounds and colors: a musical scale based on the pictorial intensity of colors in which “color is taken to speak a mute language.” The “hero” rides through a crumbling graveyard to a frozen lake. The sky is dark, but the reflection of the moon, which is also a reflection of Voss Bender’s face, glides across the lake’s surface. The reeds which line the lake’s shore are composed of musical notes, so cleverly interwoven that their identity as notes is not at first evident. Snow is falling, and the flakes are also musical notes—fading notes against the blue-black sky, almost as if Bender’s aria is disintegrating even as it is being performed.

In this most ambitious of all his paintings, Lake uses subtle gradations of white, gray, and blue to mimic the progression of the aria itself—indeed, his brushstrokes, short or long, rough or smooth, duplicate the aria’s movement as if we were reading a sheet of music.

All of this motion in the midst of apparent motionlessness flows in the direction of the rider, who rides against the destiny of the aria as a counterpoint, a dissenting voice. The light of the moon shines upon the face of the rider, but, again, this is the light of the reflection so that the rider’s features are illuminated from below, not above.

The rider, haggard and sagging in the saddle, is unmistakably Lake. (Venturi describes the rider as “a rhythmic throb of inarticulate grief.”) The rider’s expression is abstract, fluid, especially in relation to the starkly realistic mode of the rest of the painting. Thus, he appears ambivalent, undecided, almost unfinished—and, certainly, at the time of the painting, and in relation to Voss Bender, Lake was unfinished.

As the sun’s wan light infiltrated the city, exposing Red and Green alike, Lake found himself in a place he no longer understood, the streets crowded with faces he did not want to see, for surely they all stared at him: from the sidewalk sandwich vendors in their pointy orange hats and orange-striped aprons, to the bankers with their dark tortoiseshell portfolios, their maroon suits; from the white-faced, well-fed nannies of the rich to the bravura youths encrusted in crimson makeup that had outgrown them.

The week after Raffe had found him, Lake forced himself to attend Bender’s funeral, Raffe and Merrimount insistent on attending with him even though he wanted to go alone.

The funeral was a splendid affair that traveled down to the docks via Albumuth Boulevard, confetti raining all the way. The bulk of the procession formed a virtual advertisement for Hoegbotton & Sons, the import-export business that had, in recent years, grabbed the major share of Ambergris trade. Ostensibly held in honor of Bender’s operas, the display centered around a springtime motif, and in addition to the twigs, stuffed birds, and oversized bumblebees attached to the participants like odd extra appendages, the music was being played by a ridiculous full orchestra pulled along on a platform drawn by draft horses.

This display was followed by the senior Hoegbotton, his eyes two shiny black tears in an immense pale face, waving from the back of a topless Manzikert and looking for all the world as if he were running for political office. Which he was: Hoegbotton, of all the city’s inhabitants, stood the best chance of replacing Bender as unofficial ruler of the city.

In the back seat of Hoegbotton’s Manzikert sat two rather reptilian-looking men, with slitted eyes and cruel, sensual mouths. Between them stood the urn with Bender’s ashes: a pompous, gold-plated monstrosity. It was their number—three—and Hoegbotton’s mannerisms that first roused Lake’s suspicions, but suspicions they remained, for he had no proof. No telltale feathers ensnarled for a week to now slowly spin and drift down from the guilty parties to Lake’s feet.

The rest of the ceremony was a blur for Lake. At the docks, community leaders including Kinsky, Hoegbotton conspicuously absent, mouthed comforting platitudes to memorialize the man, then took the urn from its platform, pried open the lid, and cast the ashes of the world’s greatest composer into the blue-brown waters of the Moth.

Voss Bender was dead.

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet to rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born? And thus, he was trapped, condemned by his nature, those gifts and talents he had honed and perfected in pursuit of his craft. Was he a good writer. The answer meant nothing: even the worst writer sometimes sees the world in this light.

The man sat in the room and wrote on a legal sheet. The room was small, with insufficient light, but the man had good pens so he did not care. The man was a writer. This is why he wrote. Because he was a writer. He sat alone in the room which had no windows and he wrote a story. Sometimes he listened to music while he wrote because music inspired him to write. The story he wrote was called “Sarah and the Land of Sighs” and it was his attempt to befriend the daughter of his wife, who was not his own daughter. His children were his stories, and they were not always particularly well- behaved. “Sarah and the Land of Sighs” was not particularly well-behaved. It had nothing at all to do with the world of Ambergris, which was the world he wrote about for adults (all writers have separate worlds they write about, even those writers who think they do not have separate worlds they write about). And yet, when he had finished writing for the day and reread what he had written, he found that bits and pieces of Ambergris were in his story. He did not know how they had gotten into his story but because he was a writer and therefore a god—a tiny god, a tiny, insignificant god, but a god nonetheless—he took his pen and he slew the bits and pieces of Ambergris he found in his children’s story. By this time, it was dusk. He knew it was dusk because he could feel the dusk inside of him, choking his lungs, moving across that part of him which housed his imagination. He coughed up a little darkness, but thought nothing of it. There is a little darkness in every writer. And so he sat down to dinner with his wife and her daughter and they asked him how the writing had gone that day and he said, “Rotten!

Horrible! I am not a writer. I am a baker. A carpenter. A truck driver. I am not a writer.” And they laughed because they knew he was a writer, and writers lie. And when he coughed up a little more darkness, they ignored it because they knew that there is a little more darkness in a writer than in other souls.

All night the writer coughed up bits of darkness—shiny darkness, rough darkness, slick darkness, dull darkness—so that by dawn all of the darkness had left him. He awoke refreshed. He smiled. He yawned. He ate breakfast and brushed his teeth. He kissed his wife and his wife’s daughter as they left for work and for school. He had forgotten the darkness. Only when he entered his work room did he remember the darkness, and how much of it had left him. For his darkness had taken shape and taken wing, and had flown up to a corner of the wall where it met the ceiling and flattened itself against the stone, the tips of its wings fluttering slightly. The writer considered the creature for a moment before he sat down to write. It was dark. It was beautiful. It looked like a sleek, black manta ray with catlike amber-red eyes. It looked like a stealth bomber given flesh. It looked like the most elegant, the wisest creature in the world. And it had come out of him, out of his darkness. The writer had been fearful, but now he decided to be flattered, to be glad, that he had helped to create such a gorgeous apparition. Besides, he no longer coughed. His lungs were free of darkness. He was a writer. He would write. And so he did—all day.

My work on this book began in 1944 when my fahter was sent to El Paso, Texas, to stamp out VD among servicemen and their 'contacts' with a new wonder drug called penicillin... As a toddler, I am sure I did not anticipate the most amazing and long-lasting result of the Jewish family Sokolov's sojourn in El Paso. Our cuisine changed.

My mother, the assimilated American-born daughter of immigrants, began to cook Tex-Mex. To her repertory of East European and Midwestern dishes she added a very hot chili con carne. My father, who had spent part of his early youth on a Yiddish-speaking Zionist commune near Gunnison, Utah, acquired a taste for jalapeno peppers. Back home in Michigan after the war we kept on eating chili, and there was always a bottle of hot peppers in the refrigerator. As I grew up I learned to like the chili and eventually began to eat those peppers too.

When we took these foods into our diet, it was as if we had incorporated some Spanish into our speech. I make this comparison to casual bilingualism because it is such a familiar phenomenon, something that happens to those on both sides of the United States-Mexican border. These individual speech patterns are what linguists call idiolects. Everybody speaks an idiolect -- his own personal language that functions within the larger speech community. A full blown dialect is a set of idiolects so similar they form a recognizable minilanguage: the Spanglish of United States Chicanos, the nasal twang of the Great Lakes, Valley Girl talk in California.

The same thing happesn in the kitchen. Every family has it's own set of recipes and eating habits, its idiocuisine formed by foods being passed down from the previous generation and through contacts with new foods, flavors, and tastes. And if the similar experiences of many neighboring families evolve into a new 'dialect' of eating and cooking... then the world has a new regional cuisine. In the United States this happened over and over again as European colonists and their descendants moved westward and met indigeneous peoples, learned to eat indigeneous plants and animals, and mixed their Old World heritage with what they found in the New World.

Make no mistake about it: The great preponderance of the evidence argues against permanence in anybody's food heritage. We have all grown up believing in the principle of culinary authenticity and tradition as an axiom of human civilization, but the norm around the world has been change, innovation. Mexican cuisine bears only a faint resemblence to the verminous, milkless, almost meatless food of the Aztecs. China has absorbed foreign foods for most of it's long recorded history, starting eons ago. To the chefs who pioneered the nouvelle cuisine in France, the ancienne cuisine they were rebelling against looked timeless, primordial, old as the hills. But the cookbook record proves that the haute cuisine codified early in this century by Escoffier barely goes back to Napoleon's time. Before that, French food is not recognizable as French to modern eyes. Europe's menu before 1700 was completely different from its menu after 1800, when national cuisines arose along with modern nations and national cuisines.

The exchange of foodstuffs began as a deliberate policy of the Spanish crown. Old World crops and livestock were introduced to Mexico and Peru to support a civilized (that is, Spanish) way of life for the colonists, and New World exotica were sent to Spain as novelties and for agricultural exploitation. But once tomatoes had taken root in Italy, once cattle provided beef and gave milk in Mexico, then local cooks put these wonderful new foods to new uses. And the world changed.

In order to understand how overwhelming all this was, it is crucial to have a clear picture of the immensely different gastronomic status quo before 1492. From one end of Europe to the other people ate much the same food. This medieval menu bore almost no resemblance to the national cuisines that evolved in the various nation states of the continent in the eighteenth century. The French, Italian, and Spanish food 'traditions' we now think of as primeval all sprang up relatively recently and would be unrecognizable without the American foods sent across the water, mostly in Spanish boats.

Today the world feeds itself on a post-Columbian cuisine. Italians eat post-columbian pizza; Irish have post-Columbian shepherd's pie; the French wax chauvinistic about post-Columbian haricots verts. Meanwhile, West Africa survives in no small part on American manioc naturalized long ago . Sichuan food would not be Sichuanese without the hot chilies that arrived before 1700 from South America.

During this time, I walked among the trees, which are the most beautiful I have ever seen. I saw as much greenery, in such density, as I would have seen in Andalusia in May. And all of the trees are as different from ours as day is from night, and so are the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and everything.

On his last day before sailing home, Columbus "discovers" the chili pepper, referring to it as aji, the indigeneous name still used in South America. "There is also much aji, which is their pepper and is worth more than our pepper; no one eats without it because it is very healthy. Fifty caravels can be loaded each year with it on this Isla Espanola.

Greedy Columbus, not yet having found the lucrative black pepper he was supposed to bring back from the Indies, hopes to compensate with chilies, so he calls them peppers and starts a worldwide nomenclatural confusion that complicated culinary communication in dozens of languages even today. Of course, chilies did not sweep Europe (except in Hungary); instead, they conquered Asia and Africa and countined to flourish in the warm parts of the Americas.

These glowing reports were meant to drum up support for new expeditions. One of them, hyping sweet potatoes as it were, inadvertently describes the real beginning of transatlantic culinary cross-fertilization: "When eaten raw as in salads, they taste like parsnips; when roasted, like chestnuts; when cooked with pork you would think you were eating squash. You will never eat anything more delishes than asses (sweet potatoes) soaked in the milk of almonds." There it is: New World meets Old in this typically medieval Spanish use of almold milk. The voyages must have brought indispensable almonds with them. Soon they would return home and usher in the modern era in the Spanish kitchen. New World spices would supplant the antique, Oriental mixture called salsa fina. Similarly, the tomato would join the onion in that most typical of SPanish culinary preparations, the sofrito, a prefried flavoring combination added to countless dishes in Spain... If only Columbus could see what he started.

Where the native population was large, ate a varied diet, and shared its traditions successfully with the Iberian newcomers (Mexico), a truly mixed, integrated cuisine came to be. An informed observer can detect major components of the indigeneous and the immigrant cuisines in the modern hybrid. Indeed, the essence of Mexican cuisine, as of Mexican culture, is the palpable mixture, the pervasive equipoise of Spanish and Indian traditions.

On the other hand, where the native population was small and perished almost completely from persecution and imported disease (Puerto Rico), the exotic foodstuffs brought in by the commerce of the Spanish empire produced an original cuisine in a tropical laboratory, with a Spanish gastronomic syntax inspiring new dishes made with ingredients never found all together in one place before.

Where, however, a sparse community of Spaniards - many of them serving only a hitch and not putting down roots - ruled a large and self-sustaining native population (the Philippines), the native cuisine survived largely intact, with Spanish names applied to its best known dishes and local food ideas imposed on ingredients brought in by the galleons from Mexico.

Where natives and conquerors lived side by side (Peru), indigeneous and imported foods both flourished and influenced each other without fundamentally altering the nature of either inherited culture.

In societies heavily repopulated with African slaves brought in to run plantations (the Carribean coast of Colombia, northeast Brazil), tribal West African dishes were either transplanted almost completely or acquired an Iberian flavor.

In other words, history, politics and demography determines the culinary outcome of colonialism.

Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn’t give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.

Now, though, that meadow scene is the first thing that comes back to me. The smell of the grass, the faint chill of the wind, the line of the hills, the barking of a dog: these are the first things, and they come with absolute clarity. I feel as if I can reach out and trace them with a fingertip. And yet, as clear as the scene may be, no one is in it. No one. Naoko is not there, and neither am I. Where could we have disappeared to? How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then—Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It’s true, I can’t even bring —Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It’s true, I can’t even bring back Naoko’s face—not right away, at least. All I’m left holding is a background, sheer scenery, with no people up front.

Now we were walking through the frightful silence of a pine wood. The desiccated corpses of cicadas that had died at the end of the summer littered the surface of the path, crunching beneath our shoes. As if searching for something we’d lost, Naoko and I continued slowly down the path in the woods.

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”

“Always,” I said. “I’ll always remember.”

“Even so, my memory has grown increasingly distant, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?”

Once, long ago, when I was still young, when the memories were far more vivid than they are now, I often tried to write about Naoko. But I was never able to produce a line. I knew that if that first line would come, the rest would pour itself onto the page, but I could never make it happen. Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start—the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now, though, I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts. The more the memories of Naoko inside me fade, the more deeply I am able to understand her. I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed.

He was up at six each morning with the strains of “May Our Lord’s Reign.” Which is to say that that ostentatious flag-raising ritual was not entirely useless. He’d get dressed, go to the bathroom, and wash his face—forever. I sometimes got the feeling he must be taking out each tooth and washing it, one at a time.

I can never say what I want to say,” continued Naoko. “It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words—the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.

It had been a nice afternoon in May. After lunch, Kizuki suggested we cut classes and go play pool or something. I had no special interest in my afternoon classes, so together we left school, ambled down the hill to a billiards parlor on the harbor, and shot four games. When I won the first, easygoing game, he got serious and won the other three. This meant that I paid, according to our custom. Kizuki made not a single wisecrack as we played, which was most unusual. We had a smoke afterward.

“Why so serious?” I asked.

“I didn’t want to lose today,” said Kizuki with a satisfied smile.

He died that night in his garage. He led a rubber hose from the exhaust pipe of his N-360 to a window, taped over the gap in the window, and revved the engine.

There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green-felt pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium smokestacks, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.

I lived through the following spring, at eighteen, with that knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

“This man says he has read The Great Gatsby three times,” he said as if to himself. “Well, any friend of Gatsby is a friend of mine.”

To think that these idiots had been the ones screaming for the dismantling of the university! What a joke. Let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.

“It is a game. I don’t give a damn about power and money per se. Really, I don’t. I may be a selfish bastard, but I’m incredibly cool about shit like that. I could be a Zen saint. The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world.”

“And you have no use for ‘ideals,’ I suppose.”

“None. Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.”

“Hey, tell me, what d’you think the best thing is about being rich?”

“Beats me.”

“Being able to say you don’t have any money. Like, if I suggested to a classmate we do something, she could say, ‘Sorry, I don’t have any money.’ Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If I said ‘I don’t have any money,’ it would really mean ‘I don’t have any money.’ It’s sad. Like if a pretty girl says ‘I look terrible today, I don’t want to go out,’ that’s O.K., but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her. That’s what the world was like for me. For six years, until last year.”

“Each scene felt unreal and strangely distanced, as if I were viewing it through two or three layers of glass, but the events had undoubtedly happened to me. The beer glasses were still sitting on the table, and a used toothbrush lay by the sink.”

This may be an overanalytical way of looking at things. Don’t you agree? The therapy they perform here is certainly not overanalytical, but when you are under treatment for several months the way I am here, like it or not, you become more or less analytical. “This was caused by that, and that means this, because of which thus-and-such.” Like that. I can’t tell whether this kind of analysis is trying to simplify the world or subdivide it.

Sleeping soundly in this apartment of hers, I wrung the fatigue from every cell of my body, drop by drop. I dreamed of a butterfly dancing in the half-light.

When the record ended, Reiko brought a guitar out from under her bed, and after tuning it with a look of fondness for the instrument, she began to play a slow Bach fugue. She missed her fingering every now and then, but it was real Bach, with real feeling—warm, intimate, and filled with the joy of performance.

“And you call that ‘stoic’?”

“For him it is.”

Naoko thought about my words for a minute. “I think he’s a lot sicker in the head that I am,” she said.

“So do I,” I said. “But he can put all his warped qualities into a logical system.”

“I’m sorry,” said Naoko. “I don’t mean to hurt you, but this much you have to understand: Kizuki and I had a truly special relationship. We had been together from the time we were three. It’s how we grew up: always together, always talking, understanding each other perfectly. The first time we kissed—it was in the sixth grade—was just wonderful. The first time I had my period, I ran to him and cried like a baby. We were that close. So after he died, I didn’t know how to relate to other people. I didn’t know what it means to love another person.”

“That’s why I loved being with the two of you. His best side was all that I could see then, too. I could relax and stop worrying when the three of us were together. Those were my favorite times. I don’t know how you felt about it.”

“I used to worry about what you were thinking,” I said, giving my head a shake.

“The problem was that that kind of thing couldn’t go on forever,” said Naoko. “Such perfect little circles are impossible to maintain. Kizuki knew it, and I knew it, and so did you. Am I right?”

“Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it,” she said, raising her eyes to mine. “The pain of growing up. We didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I’m in here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island”. If we got hungry, we’d just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we’d go to sleep in each other’s arms. But that kind of thing doesn’t last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside world. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn’t work, of course.”

“I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I’m much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.”

“Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?” “Nothing special. I just called.” “I see.” “You see what?” “Nothing. Just ‘I see,’” I said. “Any fires lately?” “That was fun, wasn’t it? It didn’t do much damage, but all that smoke made it kind of like reality. Great stuff.” Midori chugged down another glass of water, took a breath, and studied my face for a while. “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” she asked. “You’ve got this spaced-out look. Your eyes aren’t focused.” “I’m O.K.,” I said. “I just got back from a trip and I’m kinda tired.” “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” “I see.”

“My intuition’s not as good as yours, so I have to learn systematic thinking to some extent. Like the way a crow collects chunks of glass in a hollow tree.” “Does it serve some purpose?” “I wonder. It probably makes it easier to do some kinds of things.” “What kinds of things? Give me an example.” “Metaphysical thought, say. Mastering several languages.” “What good does that do?” “It depends on the person who does it. It serves a purpose for some, and not for others. But mainly it’s training. Whether it serves a purpose or not is another question. Like I said.”

He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition. Around the dry lips sprouted clumps of whiskers like so many weeds. So, I thought, even after so much of his life force had been lost, a man’s beard continued to grow.

‘Oh, Midori, you’ve got such a healthy appetite.’ What do they think I am, a donkey pulling a cart? They’re old enough to know how the world really works, so why are they so stupid? It’s easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit. I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too. I mean, you try watching a gang of doctors get together and cut open somebody’s head when there’s no hope of saving them, and stirring things up in there, and doing it again and again, and every time they do it it makes the person worse and a little bit crazier, and see how you like it!

“After I do my laundry tomorrow morning and hang it out to dry, I’ll go to my ten o’clock class. It’s the one I’m in with Midori, History of Drama. I’m working on Euripides. Are you familiar with Euripides? He was an ancient Greek—one of the ‘Big Three’ of Greek tragedy along with Aeschylus and Sophocles. He supposedly died when a dog bit him in Macedonia, but not everybody buys this. Anyhow, that’s Euripides. I like Sophocles better, but I suppose it’s a matter of taste. I really can’t say which is better. “What marks his plays is the way things get so mixed up the characters are trapped. Do you see what I mean? A bunch of different people appear, and they’ve all got their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own brand of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple—a god appears in the end and starts directing traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for a while.’ Like that. He’s kind of a fixer, and in the end everything works out perfectly. They call this ‘deus ex machina.’ There’s almost always a deus ex machina in Euripides, and that’s the point where critical opinion divides over him. “But think about it—what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up there and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that? Anyhow, that’s History of Drama. This is more or less the kind of stuff we study at the university.”

“This was excellent sea bass,” I offered, but no one took me up on it. I might as well have thrown a rock down a deep shaft.”

“It was Nagasawa, of course, who told me what had happened. His letter from Bonn said this: “Hatsumi’s death has extinguished something. This is unbearably sad and painful, even to me.” I ripped his letter to shreds and threw it away. I never wrote to him again.”

“Nah, a funeral’s a piece of cake. We’ve had plenty of practice. You put on a black kimono and sit there like a lady and everybody else takes care of business—an uncle, a neighbor, like that. They bring the sake, order the sushi, say comforting things, cry, carry on, divide up the keepsakes. It’s a piece of cake. A picnic. Compared to nursing somebody day after day, it’s an absolute picnic. We were drained, my sister and me. We couldn’t even cry. We didn’t have any tears left. Really. Except, when you do that, they start whispering about you: ‘Those girls are cold as ice.’ So then, we’re never going to cry, that’s just how the two of us are. I know we could have faked it, but we would never do anything like that. The sons of bitches! The more they wanted to see us cry, the more determined we were not to give them that satisfaction. My sister and I are totally different types, but when it comes to something like that, we’re in absolute sync.”

“That was fun,” said Midori. “Let’s try it again sometime.” “They just keep doing the same things,” I said. “Well, what else can they do? We all just keep doing the same things.” She had a point there.”

Time itself slogged along in rhythm with my faltering steps. The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. The world around me was on the verge of great transformations. Death had already taken John Coltrane, who was joined now by so many others. People screamed there’d be revolutionary changes—which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the “changes” that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning. I trudged along through each day in its turn, looking up only rarely, eyes locked on the endless swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time.

“Anyhow, be happy. I get the feeling a lot of shit is going to come your way, but you’re a stubborn son of a bitch, I’m sure you’ll handle it. Mind if I give you one piece of advice?” “Sure, go ahead.” “Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only assholes do that.” “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. We shook hands and went our separate ways, he to his new world, and I back to my swamp.”

Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger. I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult. Because that’s what I have to do. I always used to think I’d like to stay seventeen or eighteen if I could. But not anymore. I’m not a teenager anymore. I’ve got a sense of responsibility now. I’m not the same guy I was when we used to hang out together. I’m twenty now. And I have to pay the price to go on living.

“‘Why?’!” she screamed. “Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don’t know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl say something like this? I like you more than I like him, that’s all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn’t. I fell in love with you!”

“After saying good-bye to Midori, I bought a newspaper at the station, but when I opened it on the train, I realized I had absolutely no desire to read a paper and in fact couldn’t understand what it said. All I could do was glare at the incomprehensible page of print and wonder what was going to happen to me from now on, and how the things around me would be changing. I felt as if the world was pulsating every now and then. I released a deep sigh and closed my eyes. With regard to what I had done that day, I felt not the slightest regret; I knew for certain that if I had it to do all over again, I would live this day in exactly the same way again. I would hold Midori tight on the roof in the rain; I would get soaking wet with her; and I would let her fingers bring me to climax in her bed. I had no doubts about those things. I loved Midori, and I was happy that she had come back to me. The two of us could make it, that was certain. “As Midori herself had said, she was a real, live girl with blood in her veins, and she was putting her warm body in my arms. It had been all I could do to suppress the intense desire I had to strip her naked, throw open her body, and sink myself in her warmth. There was no way I could have made myself stop her once she was holding my penis and moving her hand. I wanted her to do it, she wanted to do it, and we were in love. Who could have stopped such a thing? It was true: I loved Midori. And I had probably known as much for a while. I had just been avoiding the conclusion for a very long time. The problem was that I could never explain these developments to Naoko. It would have been hard enough at any point, but with Naoko in her present condition, there was no way I could tell her I had fallen in love with another girl. And besides, I still loved Naoko. Bent and twisted as that love might be, I did love her. Somewhere inside me, there was still preserved a broad, open space, untouched, for Naoko and no one else.”

“I have always loved Naoko, and I still love her. But there is a decisive finality to what exists between Midori and me. It has an irresistible power that is bound to sweep me into the future. What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I feel for Midori is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being. I don’t know what to do. I’m confused. I’m not trying to make excuses for myself, but I do believe that I have lived as sincerely as I knew how. I have never lied to anyone, and I have taken care over the years not to hurt other people. And yet I find myself having been tossed into this labyrinth.

Reiko wrote to me several times after Naoko's death. It was not my fault, she said. It was nobody’s fault, any more than you could blame someone for the rain. But I never answered her. What could I have said? What good would it have done? Naoko no longer existed in this world; she had become a fistful of ash.

The memories would slam against me like the waves of an incoming tide, sweeping my body along to some strange new place—a place where I lived with the dead. There Naoko lived, and I could speak with her and hold her in my arms. Death in that place was not a decisive element that brought life to an end. There, death was but one of many elements comprising life. There Naoko lived with death inside her. And to me she said, “Don’t worry, it’s only death. Don’t let it bother you.

I felt no sadness in that strange place. Death was death, and Naoko was Naoko. “What’s the problem?” she asked me with a bashful smile, “I’m here, aren’t I?” Her familiar little gestures soothed my heart and gave me healing. “If this is death,” I thought to myself, “then death is not so bad.” “It’s true,” said Naoko, “death is nothing much. It’s just death. Things are so easy for me here.” Naoko spoke to me in the spaces between the crashing of the dark waves.

Eventually, though, the tide would pull back, and I would be left on the beach alone. Powerless, I could go nowhere; sorrow itself would envelop me in deep darkness until the tears came. I felt less that I was crying than that the tears were simply oozing out of me like perspiration.

I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.

By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whiskey, bread, and water.

The month of traveling neither lifted my spirits nor softened the blow of Naoko’s death. I arrived back in Tokyo in pretty much the same state in which I had left. I couldn’t even bring myself to phone Midori. What could I say to her? How could I begin? “It’s all over now; you and I can be happy together”? No, that was out of the question. However I might phrase it, though, the facts were the same: Naoko was dead, and Midori was still here. Naoko was a pile of white ash, and Midori was a living, breathing human.

Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum—a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.

I’m all through as a human being,” she said. “All you’re looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I’m just functioning by rote memory.

“If you feel some kind of pain with regard to Naoko’s death, I would advise you to keep on feeling that pain for the rest of your life. And if there’s something you can learn from it, you should do that, too. But quite aside from that, you should be happy with Midori. Your pain has nothing to do with your relationship with her. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix. So, hard as it may be, you have to be strong. You have to grow up more, be more of an adult. I left the sanatorium and came all the way up here to Tokyo to tell you that—all the way on that coffin of a train.” “I understand what you’re telling me,” I said to Reiko, “but I’m still not prepared to follow through on it. I mean, that was such a sad little funeral! No one should have to die like that.” Reiko stretched her hand out and stroked my head. “We all have to die like that sometime. I will, and so will you.”

Next she played a guitar transcription of Ravel’s “Pavanne for a Dying Queen” and a beautifully clean rendition of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune.” “I mastered both of these after Naoko died,” said Reiko. “To the end, her taste in music never rose above the horizon of sentimentalism.”

“I telephone Midori. “I have to talk to you,” I said. “I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”

Midori responded with a long, long silence—the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. Forehead pressed against the glass, I shut my eyes and waited. At last, Midori’s quiet voice broke the silence: “Where are you now?”

Where was I now?

Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.”