"You know what I mean."

He said this surprisingly gently.

"You don't know that," I told him.

"Think about it."

"You can't be sure."

"Remember Chance? Remember Sammy Klein?"

"Shut up."

"We didn't listen. We went back on our deal."

"Shut up."

"They even gave us a last chance. She didn't--"

"Shut the f.u.c.k up."

"She didn't see it."

I went for him. All I felt was rage. I wanted to tear him to pieces--stupid f.u.c.king know-it-all. He grabbed my arms and twisted me around. He overpowered me and forced me down.

"Jeremy, stop. Stop. This isn't going to help anything."

"We have to go get her."

"We can't."

"We have to. We have to save her."

"How? How, Jeremy? How could we save her?"

"We go after her."

We both looked at the hole in the middle of that flickering room. The hole was impossibly dark. Inestimably deep. I tried to imagine what was at the bottom. Given the deviousness, the ghoulishness of what we'd seen so far, the possibilities seemed limitless. Would we fall at breakneck speed into a pit of random spikes, where a dozen skeletons were already impaled? Or maybe we'd land in a pit of half-starved dogs, creeping toward us, snarling, mangy fur glowing faintly with moonlight. Would they throw in a sword and shield to reflect the stars and add some excitement?

We looked at that hole for a long time. It occurred to me that if we wanted to save Sarah's life--if we wanted to even have a chance--we had to go now.

Miles spoke softly behind me.

"Jeremy, if you were going to jump, you would've done it already."

He walked back across the blade room to the door we'd entered a hundred years ago. He tried the k.n.o.b, and it opened. He waited for me at the door.

I turned back to the hole.

If this were a movie, I would've jumped. I would've said something heroic, or at least clever: I'll be back! Hasta la vista, baby! All in a day's work!

But it wasn't a movie.

And I didn't jump.

G.o.d help us, we left her there.

I felt a strange buzzing in my head. It was a giddy feeling. My body was pumping me full of joy, excuses, illusions, distractions. We sat in Miles's apartment on the red futon, flipping channels and trying not to look at each other. We ordered Chinese food and waited for it to come. There was nothing on TV. We pa.s.sed Hogan's Heroes, an infomercial for a gym machine, a Steven Seagal movie dubbed in Spanish, reruns of cla.s.sic game shows. The badness made it almost impossible to pretend we were actually watching. Miles lit a joint and took a long drag. He offered it to me. I'd never smoked pot before. Never even wanted to. But right now, all I wanted was to stop the feeling of pointlessness that was creeping around the edges of my awareness, looking for a way in. I took the joint. It was wet on the tip. I sucked in and let the raw smoke go into my mouth. I held it there for a second. I knew what to do next. I'd tried cigarettes once in high school and mastered the art of letting the smoke go down my trachea and bloom into my lungs. I wanted that peaceful look I'd seen on potheads' faces. I wanted to find truth in Pink Floyd. I wanted to find my own hand hilarious. But I didn't inhale. I just held the smoke long enough to fake it and let it out a moment later. I pa.s.sed the joint back to Miles.

I couldn't stand the silence. I asked Miles a question I'd been saving for a late-night chat. I asked it now, just to break the tension.

"Hey Miles."

"Yeah?"

He didn't look at me.

"Why'd you quit law?"

He took another hit. He didn't say anything.

"You had an offer from the best firm in the country," I said. "People would kill for that. And you turned it down. Why?"

Miles closed his eyes.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe it was a mistake, in retrospect."

"You must've had a reason. Do you remember?"

Finally he sighed.

"It's gonna sound stupid now." He shook his head. "Something I heard on the first day of cla.s.s, in Torts. It always bothered me. A man sees a baby on some train tracks. He's just walking by. No one else is around. There's a train coming. It's way off in the distance. All he has to do is move the baby, right? Just pick it up and move it off the tracks. But he doesn't. For whatever reason, he keeps walking. And Professor Long told us: the law has nothing to say about that. Remember? Because there's no duty between him and the baby. Not in the legal sense."

"That's it? That's why you quit?"

"No. I started thinking. Say we all get mad. We pa.s.s a law that says you have to move the baby or you go to jail. Next time, the guy moves the baby."

"That's good. The law worked."

"Sure it worked. But the guy hasn't changed. See? He didn't want to move the baby. He just didn't want to go to jail."

"So?"

"So? So it's not free will. He's just a slave. The law didn't make him good."

"The law's not supposed to make him good. It's supposed to stop him from being evil."

"So where does morality come from, then?"

"I don't know. Religion."

"Fine. He moves the baby because G.o.d wants him to. Isn't that just a different kind of law? Maybe he's scared of going to h.e.l.l. Isn't that just another kind of prison?"

"Parents, then. Culture."

"More rules. More law. When does it come from inside, Jeremy, absent anything else . . ." Miles shook his head. "I turned to philosophy. I studied Aristotle and virtue ethics. I studied Kant and Mill and Rawls and Nozick. I mastered communitarianism, egalitarianism, utilitarianism, structuralism, deontology, Straussianism, postmodernism, objectivism, contractarianism . . ."

I started laughing. I didn't mean to. I couldn't control myself. It was an unhappy sound--the worst laughter I'd ever heard. I felt like the last hinges in my brain had sprung open. I just laughed. At first Miles thought I was laughing with him, and he smiled uncertainly, but then he heard the edge in it and stopped. He looked at me, his mouth half-open. I just laughed until I thought I'd go insane.

"You're talking about goodness," I said. "You're talking about goodness, and she's down there."

Miles looked startled.

"You asked about my career."

"We left her down there." I was shouting. I couldn't stop. "Miles, you're talking about goodness and WE LEFT HER DOWN THERE."

"It's just philosophy."

"It's nothing--if you don't get off this couch. I want you to shut your big f.u.c.king mouth because it's all bulls.h.i.t." My head was going to explode, the blood was rushing so hard. "Get up. Get off your fat a.s.s and get off this couch because we are going to save her. We are going to get her out of that dark place and make her okay. Do you hear me, Miles? Do you?"

He didn't say anything. He blinked a couple of times. His eyes were red from the pot. He scratched at his beard.

"I'm going to take a shower," he said.

He left the room. I wanted to move. I wanted to go after her. But my legs wouldn't budge. And suddenly I realized what my legs already seemed to know: if I went down there after her, I might die. If I went alone, without Miles, it was virtually guaranteed. Let him take his shower. Ten minutes under the hot water and he'd come around.

This was Miles, I kept thinking over and over. My mentor. My protector in high school. I remembered the time we walked down the hall together, and this guy who used to pick on me pa.s.sed us and said something ugly. In one motion, Miles had him up in the air, and he held him there with one arm for a long time. No words, no threats, no violence even--just the gentle lifting, like a father lifting a child. Miles was valedictorian of his cla.s.s, and he could lift a bully with one arm. For me. Miles was my hero.

When the water stopped, he stepped out of the bathroom. He was wrapped in a towel. His ma.s.sive frame, somewhere between fat and muscle, was pink from the hot water. But the thing that shocked me had nothing to do with his colossal size or his bareness. He'd shaved off his beard. His face looked naked, almost babylike. I barely recognized him at first, and then suddenly he looked just like the Miles from high school, like he'd traveled back in time seven years. As if you could reach inside yourself and produce the person you used to be, just like that.

But when I saw his face, I knew.

"I understand what you're saying," Miles said. "But I can't help you."

He walked into his bedroom and shut the door.

I heard it in his voice. There wouldn't be any discussion. Not this time.

I walked to the entryway and picked up his satchel. I strung it over my shoulder.

As I left his apartment, for some reason I thought of Miles proposing to Isabella--one giant kneeling before another.

I walked the campus one last time. I pa.s.sed the music school with the statue of Beethoven outside--larger than life and cast in black metal, his eyes and hair blazing. I pa.s.sed the bridges over the river and saw the line of bell towers, one red, one blue, one green. The campus was quiet. The crew teams still had an hour before first light, when they'd practice on the river, rowing as a unit like an eagle pumping its wings. I pa.s.sed the library with its ma.s.sive columns and the statue of our founder with his three lies, and there I flashed back to that first day, pa.s.sing the tourists on my way to Bernini's cla.s.s. I wondered what had gone through Sarah's mind, down in that hole, if she wondered why I hadn't tumbled down after her. Then I found myself past the yard, facing Centennial Church.

The bell tower was shingled with chalky shades of blue, red, and brown, striped like snakeskin. Spotlights went up the sides of the tower and ended in the clouds. I felt an unbearable sense of need rattle me, and I fell to my knees and looked up. When I saw the cross, for the first time in my life it meant something new--no longer did I see a symbol of membership, of fraternity or conversion. Now it was something internal: the intersection of my spine and shoulders. It was a cross inside me, a steel frame, holding me up against the unstoppable urge to crumble. I wanted a religious experience. I wanted a voice and I was instead consumed by an almost infinite silence. The harder I begged that building to speak, the more quiet, the more alone I felt, kneeling in an empty lawn and looking up at a silent building. And yet, in that moment, I had the truest religious experience I believe there is: for I was suddenly filled with the desire to be good, even if no one was watching.

I did one last thing. I wrote a letter to my dad and put it in the mail. It's hard to even call it a letter--it was just one line. It said: You are not small to me.

I retraced my steps from Bernini's office to the steam tunnel door with eyes above it. I pa.s.sed through the three rooms. The doors were all open now. The mechanisms were silent. It felt like an abandoned movie set. Or, even better, it felt like something I remembered from my childhood, an amazing, unexplainable feeling that was new to my generation, since we were the first generation to grow up with computers. It felt like a computer game, after you'd solved all the puzzles and done everything you were supposed to do for that level. All that was left was to move on. But if you postponed that--if you walked around that world just a little bit longer--it took on an uncanny feeling. The characters were still there, little animated men running through their programmed routines, tending bar, sweeping porches, working the docks of the pirate shipyard. But it no longer felt like a real world, because your tasks were done and the characters had nothing left to say to you, and you saw through the illusion of their activity.

I found myself past the last room and standing above the hole where the trapdoor still hung open. I let my feet stick out over the edge.

I took a deep breath, and I jumped.

37.

I fell, and the walls of the hole arced and I went into a slide that sent me hurtling. Miles's satchel was across my waist; I had one hand over it and one protecting my head. I was rolling over myself now, smacking different parts on the packed dirt of the walls. And yet there was something thrilling about it. I felt free. I felt hope. I was going to rescue Sarah. This was an adventure, and nothing was going to stop me!

The walls leveled out as I fell until they became ground below me and a ceiling above, depositing me in a wild roll until I skidded in a mounting pile of dirt. I plowed to a stop. My eyes were closed. I froze for a moment and listened. Nothing. No explosions, no snarls, no voices, not even crickets chirping. Just the light sound of air moving through cracks.

Did my fingers and toes still move? Check. Vision intact? Check. Wooden spikes through my torso? Negative.

Things were looking up.

It smelled pungent down here, thick and muddy. The rocky walls were covered with writing, more mathematical than pictorial. They still looked primitive. Maybe this was once the home of the Einstein of cavemen.

My body was sore, but I was okay.

I saw a hallway chiseled through the rock. I moved too quickly and was almost seen by three people at the end of the hall, but they were absorbed in conversation and I pressed myself against the wall faster than I realized I could move.

At the distant end of the hall were three women. Their lips were moving, but I couldn't hear them speak. They were young. They reminded me of pretty mothers at a playground. Their skin was almost luminous, lit by a shaft of pale light from slats above them. They seemed lighthearted. One of them laughed. The women moved away together, so gracefully that it wasn't at all clear they were walking. They disappeared around a corner.

I went down the hall after them. I stepped slowly and hoped no one would come around the bend ahead and see me. But it was completely silent. Every step I took, gravel crackled under my shoes. I clutched Miles's bag and felt the metal inside. It was comforting.

I got to the spot where the women had turned and was. .h.i.t with a blast of cool, fresh air. The dirt path I'd followed forked and continued also in the other direction, around another turn. For a moment, I started to follow the women, but something told me not to. I turned and went left instead of right. I can't tell you why. But I was glad I did. Because the path brought me to a stone stairway within a tight, ascending pa.s.sage lined with columns on either side. The steps were wide but the stairway was steep, the end high above me. As I neared the top, I saw I was heading toward a slanted opening, like the entrances of a.s.syrian temples I'd seen in history books. No sound, no movement from that opening as I climbed. But when I reached the top, I looked through the door and saw a room I'd seen before. An altar in the center. A pole that loomed from the floor to the high stone ceiling. And beyond all that, a machine, quietly thrumming and moving in the shadows.

38.

The machine reminded me of a spider, the way its long spindles bent in unnatural places, producing movements that were alive but definitely not human. Not even mammalian, for that matter. It creeped me out. It was machinelike in an ancient way, like the Gutenberg press. It could have been hundreds of years old. How long had these people been replicating themselves? How many centuries had they lived?

The machine was also larger than I ever imagined, seeing it through the slots of that vent, looking down. The thin spindle arms spread out from the central mechanism; they filled the room and towered over me. The arms bent and gyrated at joints, like bones. They traced out the points in s.p.a.ce of the ritual dance without really capturing what was alive about the dancers--the way stars could be connected into bears and scorpions without blood or brains.