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Bob Garfield's 'Chaos Scenario'
A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disaster
By: Bob Garfield Bio
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RSS feed Published: April 13, 2005
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Meet George Jetson, circa 2020.
He doesn't have a personal hovercraft or a food computer, but the rest of the future is more futuristic than he thought. Spacely Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs are out of business. Digits are the new widgets.

What happens if the traditional marketing model collapses before a better alternative is established? Bob Garfield dares to confront the question.

Others Articles in This Series:

YouTube Grows Up -- But What Does It Mean?
Bob Garfield Explores The Implications of the Video Sharing Revolution
Inside the New World of Listenomics
How the Open Source Revolution Impacts Your Brands

TV is gone
Over-the-air network TV is gone, along with program schedules, affiliate stations and hotel demand in Cannes in the third week of June. George, Jane, Judy and Elroy get their entertainment, and their news, any way they wish: TV, phone, camera, laptop, game console, MP3 player. They get to choose from what the Hollywood big boys have funded and distributed, or what the greater vlogosphere has percolated to their attention.

ABC, NBC and CBS are still major brands, but they surely aren't generating radio waves. Three initials never uttered, however, are CPM. They've long since been supplanted not just by ROI, but VOD, video on demand; P2P, the peer-to-peer Napsterization of content; DRM, the allocation of royalties for digital distribution of content; VOIP, Internet telephony; and RSS, the software that aggregates Web content for easy access by the user.

Branded Entertainment has long since been exposed as a false idol, because consumers got quickly fed up with their shows being contaminated by product placements. Satellite radio is a $4 billion 8-track tape player, stored on a high shelf in the garage, pushed aside by podcasting, which is free. The Upfront Market is an exhibit at the Smithsonian. The Super Bowl survived as the No. 1 pay-per-view event. Survivor didn't.

The space-age family of the future can still watch CSI, any episode they want, whenever they want, but not on any advertiser's dime -- unless they choose for their viewing costs to be subsidized. Yet advertisers know everything about them and understand virtually every move they make.

Marketers aren't adversaries
And the Jetsons don't fight it. In 2020, consumers understand that marketers aren't adversaries; they're intimates, sharing info for everybody's mutual benefit.

Yesiree, by George, it's a brave and exciting new world that the near future holds, a democratized, consumer-empowered, bottom-up, pull-not-push, lean forward and lean back universe that will improve the quantity and quality of entertainment options, create hitherto unimaginable marketing opportunities and efficiencies and, not incidentally, generate wealth that will make the current $250 billion domestic ad market seem like pin money.

Alas, the future -- near or not -- doesn't happen till later.

So let's return to contemporary business reality in the digital revolution, already in progress. Because in the intervening 15 years -- or 20 years, or five -- there are three more initials to consider: SOS.

Because revolutions by their nature are neither seamless nor smooth.

Collapse of old model
Because there is no reason to believe the collapse of the old media model will yield a plug-and-play new one.

On the contrary, there is nothing especially orderly about media's New World Order. At the moment it is a collection of technologies and ideas and vacant-lot bandwidth, a digital playground for visionaries and nerds.

So what happens when 30 Rock and Black Rock and the other towering edifices of network TV are rubble, and the vacant lot has yet to be developed?

Undeveloped and unprepared. Unprepared to lawfully deliver CSI. Unprepared to absorb $4 billion ad dollars, much less broadcast's $42 billion. Unprepared legally, technologically and even socially to pick up the pieces of the old world order.

Hold on. Let's change metaphors. Forget the construction site. Make it a space-age treadmill, cycling too fast for George Jetson to keep his footing. "Jane!" he pleads. "Stop this crazy thing!" But Jane can't stop it. Nobody can stop it, and nobody can quite hang on.

Ah, yes. The Chaos Scenario.

Downward spiral
The statistics are already getting tiresome, but let's review a few of the more salient ones, shall we?

According to Nielsen, network TV audience has eroded an average of 2% a year for a decade, although in the same period the U.S. population increased by 30 million.

In the last sweeps period, for the first time, cable commanded a larger audience than broadcast.

The cost of reaching 1,000 households in prime time has jumped from $7.64 in 1994 to $19.85 in 2004.

A 2000 Veronis Suhler Stevenson survey showed that Americans devoted an average of 866 hours to broadcast TV annually and 107 to the Internet, a ratio of 8:1. The projection for 2005 had the TV/Internet ratio at 785 hours to 200, or just under 4:1.

U.S. household broadband penetration has gone from 8% in March 2000 to an estimated 56% in March of this year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

70% of DVR users skip commercials
Five percent of U.S. homes are equipped with TiVo or other digital video recorders, and not only does time-shifting of favorite programs render network schedules irrelevant, 70% of DVR users skip past TV commercials.

Complicating problems, consolidation in the telecom industry and potential re-regulation of DTC drug advertising threaten billions in network ad revenue, jeopardizing the supply-demand quotient that has propped up network prices for five years. Meanwhile, there is the sword of Damocles called "cost." The reality-TV fad has enabled networks to fill their ever-more-irrelevant schedules and cast for hits with cheap programming. But how much longer will they last? Westerns and spy shows, superheroes and hospital dramas all once burned bright. Then they burned out.

What's ominous about that is not the inevitable end of the latest hot genre; it's the inevitable end of the profitability that has gone with it. And the downward spiral could begin at any moment. In fact, to switch metaphors once again, Shawn Burns, managing director of Wunderman, Paris, looks at the 2005 upfront and sees "the last strand of the rope bridge."

Mr. Burns, of course, makes a living preaching the wonders of segmentation and the bankruptcy of mass marketing. No wonder he observes with barely camouflaged glee that the efficiency pendulum has swung. "There's been research," he says, "that real cost of obtaining 30 seconds of the consumer's attention is the same in 2005 as it was before the invention of television."

Fraying rope
Emphasis his. Yes, he has a vested interest in being a doomsayer. He is by no means, however, the only one who sees the rope fraying.

"I still love and enjoy TV and believe it is very effective for advertisers," says Association of National Advertisers President Bob Liodice. "But we're killing it. We're gradually killing it with cost increases, the level of clutter, the quality of the creative that is out there."

"How can they continue to ask for more and more for fewer and fewer faces?" asks Geoffrey Frost, chief marketing officer of Motorola. "I don't believe that is sustainable. I believe there will be disruption. There's already disruption."

"It's an inevitable kind of slow collapse of the entire mass media advertising market," says J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet: Remixing the Future of Entertainment and president of the Social Media Group consultancy. "What we're seeing is that not only does television have to reinvent itself from the content point of view, it has to reinvent itself as an advertising medium."

Primitive standards
No mystery as to how, either. As technology increasingly enables fine targeting and interaction between marketer and consumer, the old measurement and deployment standards are primitive almost to the point of absurdity.

"The industry's key currency is basically reach, frequency, exposure and cost per thousand," says Rishad Tobaccowala, president of Internet media shop Starcom IP. "I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong but that's currently the currency. And where the currency ought to be is about outcomes, engagement and effectiveness. Because right now all I'm doing is I'm measuring how cheaply or how expensively I'm buying the pig. I'm not figuring out whether the hot dog tastes good."

None of this is lost on any sentient being in the media and marketing business. Any lingering denial most likely evaporated when Procter & Gamble Global Marketing Officer Jim Stengel -- he of the $5.5 billion marketing budget -- faced agency heads a year ago at the American Association of Advertising Agencies' Media Conference and declared the existing model "broken." But it's not just the ad model; it's the content model, as well. Writer and former venture capitalist Om Malik looks at TiVo and the video-on-demand horizon and is prepared to call in the backhoes for the institution of the prime-time schedule.

"Hasn't it collapsed already?" asks the author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. "Look at their viewership. Isn't it going down every day? I mean, we can pick and choose what foods we eat, what car we drive, what clothes we wear and what colognes we use. And some guy sitting in New York decides how I should watch?"

Consumer control
Point taken. As more control has been placed in the hands of the consumer, the consumer has shown every intention of exercising it. Especially in the coveted 18-34 cohort, viewers are fleeing TV and going online, where nobody need have their content dictated to them. But as to Mr. Malik's rhetorical question -- hasn't the old model collapsed already --the answer happens to be:

No, it hasn't.

Network TV spending went up in 2004, by 10.7%. According to Jack Myers Report, last year's upfront market yielded a 15.4% increase across the four majors, and Mr. Myers projects a 4% increase for the top four in 2005. Yes: increase. There are many possible explanations for the phenomenon. One is habit; gigantic institutions tend not to rapidly adapt. Another is greed: the self-interest of the comfortably situated old guard to preserve the status quo. The third is supply and demand, upward pricing pressure from Viagra, et al, which engorged the marketplace with billions in new spending. The main factor, though, is that network TV audiences remain coveted, because -- shrinking though they are -- they represent the last vestige of mass media and marketing, or, as Motorola's Mr. Frost calls it, "the last surviving conglomeration of human beings in the living room."

Precisely, says David Poltrack, executive vice president of research at CBS, who sees incremental revenue opportunities in video-on-demand, but no end to the dominance of broadcast TV in the foreseeable future. "Unless the advertising community finds something to replace television advertising, I think the relative value of the top-quality inventory is always going to be appreciating relative to all the other options," he says. "Unless someone can come up with a more effective way of introducing a new product than broad-based advertising exposure, I think that business is always going to be there."

Which is why Motorola, whose nifty palm-sized Razr device represents the Jetsons' media future today, mainly used TV to introduce the gizmo to the world. Because there are still a few programs that catch the imagination of enough human beings in enough living rooms to represent a mass-marketing opportunity.

"I still believe in TV," Mr. Frost says. "People still watch it, and I love being associated with the right kind of programming that is different, that is appealing, that embodies the kind of innovation we want to stand for as a company."

'Teetering ecosystem'
On the other hand, he acknowledges that the financing of the "right kind of programming" -- not to mention the overwhelming majority of flops --depends on network revenue streams that could dry up quickly. "The teetering ecosystem behind all this stuff that allows people like us to sort of cherry-pick" for exceptional programs, he says, "may begin to find itself in serious trouble."

So while the old model hasn't necessarily collapsed, new-media gurus could be forgiven for seeing the beginning -- or middle -- of the end. Steven Rosenbaum, pioneer of citizen-produced TV and founder of MagnifyMedia, envisions a world of content created by and for individuals over broadband. He snorts at Mr. Poltrack's defense of the status quo.

"These guys," he says, "their job is to postpone the future."

Viacom split
Another skeptic apparently is Sumner Redstone, chairman of CBS parent Viacom. One week after Mr. Poltrack spoke to Ad Age, Mr. Redstone announced his plan to split the company in two, presumably to reduce the drain of CBS and its other broadcast properties on the stock value of the company's faster-growing media assets.

So for the moment, let's assume that there is indeed major trouble ahead, that the law of diminishing returns will eventually kick in, that advertisers who've paid more and more for less and less will not pay indefinitely for nothing. Marketers will begin to abandon network TV. Ad prices will fall. Profitability will disappear. Program development will suffer, leading to more advertiser defection, and so on in a consuming vortex of ruin. But wait. The network refugees will not flee empty handed. They'll draw carts bearing steamer trunks stuffed with a quarter trillion dollars.

Then what? In the short run, obviously, more boom times for cable, and then:

Payday for the New World Order.

"A bit of it will go to this new emerging network which will be on the mobile phones," says Mr. Malik. "The next thing, you will see is the emergence of more Internet-based video advertising. ... There's going to be a lot of hit-and-miss in this but I think that's another area you'll see a lot of progress made. A third channel is ... Internet-enabled cable services. They're not home runs by any means but they're definite solid singles and doubles."

Economics of scale
No dingers? So what? The whole point of new media is small ball. Quit playing for the three-run homer and amass the singles and doubles. Because, says Starcom's Mr. Tobaccowala, "the key thing is economics of scale is going to disappear. That's really what the issue is. Our business has been built on the economics of scale. And instead we're going to go into the economics of re-aggregation. Which is how do you get 10, 20, 30, 40 thousand people instead of taking in 250 million and making them into 12 and 30 million dollar segments. How do you re-aggregate one at a time into the tens of thousands?"

Fragmentation, the bane of network TV and mass marketers everywhere, will become the Holy Grail, the opportunity to reach -- and have a conversation with -- small clusters of consumers who are consuming not what is force-fed them, but exactly what they want. Producers and broadcasters capitalized with billions of dollars will be on approximately equal footing with podcasters and video bloggers capitalized with $399.99 12-months same-as-cash from Best Buy. And just as DailyKos, Instapundit, Wonkette and Wil Wheaton have coalesced large followings in the cacophony of the blogosphere, some of the citizen-video programmers will find not just a voice but an audience.

Wait. Did I say "will find?" Make that "are finding."

"All of that is happening," says Drazen Pantic, founding member of videologging Web site unmediated.org, "In the last two or three years, we've had a silent revolution of consumer electronics. And broadband is coming. It's a huge proliferation in the last two years. And so people are going to start broadcasting from home and so on. You will have zillions of people, broadcasting for the audience of 10."

Except when it's much bigger than 10. A month ago, a little girl named Dylan Verdi posted a home movie on her father's Web site. PressThink.org's Jay Rosen dubbed her the world's youngest vlogger. The link went viral and, as her father Michael reports on his own videolog, "24 hours later 2,000 people had downloaded her video." It would have been much more, but he had to shut his site down so he wouldn't wind up penniless from bandwidth charges.

Web proves it can outdraw TV
The Internet has also demonstrated its ability to outdraw TV. JibJab satirical animations have been downloaded by the millions, for instance. And even TV programming has drawn better online than in its native habitat -- such as when comedian Jon Stewart went on CNN's Crossfire to assassinate Tucker Carlson live on cable.

"That episode got, what, 400,000 viewers maybe on big old powerful CNN?" says Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications, and author of the media blog BuzzMachine.com. "Well that same segment was copied onto the Internet, where it got at least 5 million views. So what's more powerful, the network CNN owns or the network no one owns? So now suddenly the distribution is exploded. Now on the Internet we can all swim in the same pool as content created by, you know, Universal or Disney. The tools are cheap and easy."

It is a beautiful thing: the total democratization of media, combined with the total addressability of marketing communications. We, the people, cease to be demographics. We become individuals again.

"Choice is a good thing," Mr. Jarvis says. "Choice is a proxy for power. The more choice we have the more power we have. The most important invention in the history of media was not the Guttenberg Press, it was the remote control. It gave us control over the consumption of media. Then came the cable box and the VCR and the TiVo and now come the means of creating content. Now I can create a radio show and put it on the Internet. Nyah, nyah, nyah."

Maybe it's "nyah, nyah, nyah -- take that Big Media." Or maybe it's "tra la, tra la -- what an empowering new world." Either way, it's underway.

Straight-to-Internet campaigns
On the advertising side, Google last year generated $3 billion in revenue, about the same as The New York Times Co. No surprise that Vonage, the Internet telephony carrier, is using the Internet to find subscribers, but Procter & Gamble put its money where Jim Stengel's mouth is by launching Prilosec OTC with 75% of its budget allocated off TV. American Express allocates 80% of its budget off the airwaves. The new Pepsi One campaign will use no TV whatsoever. (Not Capital One. Not Purina One. Pepsi One.) In the new-media laboratory called South Korea, where universal broadband is social policy and its penetration exceeds 80%, the Internet's share of ad spending is twice that of the U.S. TV, meanwhile, accounts for only 34.4%.

In the wake of BMW films, such diverse U.S. marketers as Amex, Burger King, Lincoln-Mercury and Motorola have created an ever-expanding universe of content/advertising hybrids, Webisodic short films to reach younger prospects online. Mercury's "The Lucky Ones" is so barren of product and brand messages it is scarcely advertising at all.

Netcasting, of course, also delivers pure programming, too. From the top down was the streaming, on Yahoo, of Kirstie Allie's new show, Fat Actress. From the bottom up, video logs -- or vlogs -- like Dylan Verdi's are being generated every day. At Rocketboom.com, chirpy, irreverent host Amanda Congdon delivers oddball news and snarky observations in a primitive studio (or maybe a one-bedroom). At J.D. Lasica's alpha Web site Ourmedia.com, citizen journalists and producers post their own news reports, animations, music videos and whatever else amuses them free of charge.

So that should be the answer: the seamless transition from TV to online, from mass media to micro media, from mass marketing to permission marketing. But not so fast. George Jetson does his vlogging in 2020. Om Malik says he believes the scenario could just as easily take place by 2010. But this is 2005. What if the rope bridge finally snaps, say, next year? Or the next?

It better hadn't. Because the future isn't quite ready.

Think: Yugoslavia.

Perhaps you are familiar with it. It used to be a country, ruled by an authoritarian criminal. Then it began to fragment. There went Slovenia, and Croatia next. Then Bosnia. Kosovo made its move, and in the ensuing madness, the regime collapsed. The unshakeable Slobodan Milosevic, who had fomented four wars in the name of Greater Serbia, was overthrown. Democracy! Empowered individuals! A new model!

And, five years later, unemployment is 32%. The average monthly income is $336. The prime minister was assassinated by organized criminals and the country's most notorious war-crimes suspect is at large. Unmediated.org's Mr. Pantic, formerly of Belgrade's freedom-fighting radio station B92, is only too familiar with the problem.

"There is no way," he says, "to make the transition into anything that is different or new or whatever without chaos. Because as with democracies you need five or six newly elected parliaments, you need to replace people who have ties with the old regime."

Change doesn't happen overnight
Likewise, he says, in the transition from old media to new: "The new paradigm is not going to be established overnight." There are too many obstacles.

BROADBAND PENETRATION It has catapulted to nearly 60%, but that is still a long way from 100%. In South Korea, where penetration exceeds 80%, online advertising does indeed have twice the share of the U.S. online industry, but it is still less than 5%.

CAPACITY "I don't think the interactive community has sufficient capacity to handle a seismic change in a transition from network to online," says the ANA's Mr. Liodice. "I don't think that's gonna happen." Online-marketing consultant Joseph Jaffe agrees. The author of the forthcoming Life After the 30-Second Spot doesn't believe there will ever be a dollar-for-dollar transfer of TV money to the Internet. But even 10% of all money now allocated to TV would more than double the total online spending. "You've got a handful of publisher properties that may be able to kind of cope initially," Mr. Jaffe says, "and then be able to at least kind of sustain that increased demand. But for the most part, when the tsunami hits, all hell's gonna break loose."

QUALITY Dylan Verdi is a cute little girl, but once the novelty of world's-youngest-vloggerdom wears off, there is no reason for anyone outside of her immediate family to watch her iMovies. "I mean you can put a lot of bad video clips that you shoot with your camera phone on the Web," says Mr. Malik, "but how many people want to watch that? If you're going to create a product for passive consumption it has to be good. I mean look at all the shows that fail. There is very low tolerance for bad television."

FINANCING "Where," Mr. Malik asks, "does the money come from to produce the programming of high enough quality to reach the audiences that are obviously going to be smaller than the status quo?" In a video-on-demand universe, networks may send along free samples of new shows to paying customers of existing ones, but absent vast reservoirs of ad revenue, the risk of program development may well be prohibitive. A collapse of the old model could create a Hollywood dustbowl.

LEGISLATION. Peer-to-peer software such as BitTorrent, which permits affordable transfer of large video files, also enables video piracy, and could be legislated or litigated into oblivion by a beleaguered Hollywood desperate to preserve the value of its backlist. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, last year introduced an anti-p2p bill called the Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act of 2004 (Induce Act).

COST. As pricing in the search business has amply demonstrated, any influx of spending into the online space will drive prices upwards, potentially erasing the efficiencies promised by even the most ultra-targeted media buy. The metrics of reach may change radically, but not necessarily those of frequency. As Mr. Tobaccowala puts it, "Millions of people arrive at the Yahoo Homepage. What people don't realize is that they arrive one at a time."

SUITABILITY Content will be enormously diverse, agrees Forrest Research research director Chris Charron, but will it constitute a legitimate advertising medium? "A lot of people talk about these social networks and blogs and the blogosphere as being great ways to attract consumers and attract eyeballs and potentially good advertising opportunities, but history shows that is not the case, even recent history. Remember GeoCities? I think they were bought by Yahoo for $3 or $4 billion. Well, it never became a very viable advertising outlet and that's because it wasn't a great context for people to place ads. Advertisers weren't interested in putting it on a personal homepage for Chris Charron for my friends and relatives to see."

CONTENT DIVIDE Convergence means not only technological and economic disruption; it means social disruption. Cost of broadband and VOD programming will surely exceed $100 per month for each household, and most likely twice that, disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans and changing the dynamics of a shared popular culture. The idea of a vast digital underclass mocks the Internet's promise of the democratization of media.

Then, of course, there is the biggest monkey wrench in the works: the absurd lack of preparedness for anything other than the most deliberate evolution into a Jetsonian future.

"Even if all the technology were in place and scaled up to size," says Mr. Tobaccowala, "what isn't ready really is either clients, agencies, or the media companies. Because in effect what we have to change is the way we do business."

Oh, preparations are underway. Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. retained McKinsey & Co. to figure out how to transition to this Internet thing -- which is something like nailing plywood to the windows when the hurricane makes landfall. News Corp. no doubt feels safe enough, because Fox network customers are still lining up to buy, partly because they know how to do that. GRPs are buggywhips that just feel so familiar and reassuring in their hands. No wonder Mr. Stengel is showing up at the 4A's revival tent preaching salvation: "If we believe that there's life beyond the 30-second spot," he demanded, "why are we still dependant on reach, frequency and advertising pre-market scores?"

Yahoo's gambit
So don't storm the Bastille just yet. Even the revolutionaries aren't quite organized for the revolution. Among those not quite ready for the end of prime time is Yahoo, which hired ABC programming chief Lloyd Braun to develop whatever content will be when content will come from the likes of Yahoo.

"The key for us," he told an iMedia Brand Summit in February, "is to be able to come up with that unique, signature, compelling content for the Internet, the way television has been able to do over the years."

Duh. As to what that might look like, he was a little bit fuzzy.

"What I'm not saying is that we're just going to be doing television shows on Yahoo, and we're going to be streaming them, so we're going to do our version of Lost, or our version of Alias. There's going to be a big place for video streaming and all of that, don't get me wrong, but I don't believe ultimately that the future of Internet content is by doing on the PC, or on mobile devices, what you can already get on your living room television set. We have to really get our arms around what those expectations are. What is the audience looking for when they go on the Internet?"

Yes, that would seem to be the question. But nobody has definitively answered it. That's why there are hand-wringing Cassandras like Jim Stengel and giddy opportunists like Wunderman's Shawn Burns.

But what if you are a direct marketer in what promises to be the Golden Age for direct marketing and a historic opportunity knocks and you lack the manpower to answer the door? Under the current circumstances, Mr. Burns says he'd first advise clients to scale up their Web capabilities by a factor of 10. But he concedes that in a Gold Rush economy, he doesn't know where all the Web designers would come from to do the work. That, of course, is the essence of the Chaos Scenario -- a critical shortage of resources and infrastructure.

It's almost comical to hear Starcom's Mr. Tobaccowala talk about the marketing landscape of the very near future.

"Expect to see a lot of event and store-based marketing," he says. "Expect people to actually go completely away from electronic media to experiential media, if you can call it that. So expect for instance Starbucks, bars, all kinds of things -- bathrooms, OK?"

Bathrooms? Jim Stengel has $5.5 billion burning a hole in his pocket, and he's supposed to invest it in bathrooms?

"That's exactly the point," says John Hayes, chief marketing officer for American Express. "There isn't the off-the-shelf capacity today. You have to create it. You have to build them. You have to come up with the ideas. To access the talent, you have to basically construct solutions."

Hence Amex's Jerry Seinfeld/Superman Webisodes and sponsored concerts Webcast to prospects. If the old model is broken, Mr. Hayes can't just sit around waiting for somebody else to fix it.

"As in any industry," he says, "those who are unprepared for change will obviously suffer the consequences."

That warning has to be pried from Mr. Hayes' lips, but it is a warning nonetheless -- sort of a reciprocal to another sort of warning. David Poltack, of CBS, may or may not be the spokesman for the status quo, but you can't miss the "You'll be sorry" quality to his caution about his notion of the chaos scenario should marketers abandon network TV.

An economic downfall?
"If they do," he says, "then the entire marketing system that perpetuates this economy will be weakened. And this is not a problem for just the broadcast television networks. This is a major problem for everyone who markets a product to the consumers in this country. Because there has been and there is not currently on the horizon anywhere near as effective a way to market products to the mass consumer marketplace. And if in fact that current system deteriorates to the point that advertisers and marketers abandon it, I don't see anything that's going to replace it and the entire marketing infrastructure and the economy is going to be diminished. And that's a lot bigger problem than just a network television program."

In other words, what's good for CBS is good for America.

The other possibility is the opposite: that what's bad for CBS, and for ABC and NBC and Fox and Conde Nast and the Gannett Co. is very good for America, because what emerges from the ruins will be superior in every way to what it replaced. Better for marketers, better for the economy and especially better for Mr. Jetson, who won't have a robot maid but very likely will have a million-channel universe.

As Rishad Tobaccowala elegantly concludes, "Those who come to destroy TV are those who are eventually going to save it."

And the world will rejoice, happily awash in electrons. But before the liberte, fraternite and egalite, beware. This is revolution, and first we will be awash in the blood of the old guard.

Lost in the Meritocracy
How I traded an education for a ticket to the ruling class

By Walter Kirn
On the bus ride down to St. Paul to take the test that will help determine who will get ahead in life, who will stay put, and who will fall behind, two of my closest buddies seal their fates by opening pint bottles of cherry schnapps the moment we leave the high school parking lot. They hide the liquor under their varsity jackets and monitor the driver's rearview mirror for opportune moments to duck their heads and swig. A girl sees what they're up to, mutters, "Morons," and goes back to shading in the tiny ovals in her Scholastic Aptitude Test review book. She dated one of the guys a few months back, but lately she's grown serious, ambitious; I've heard that she hopes to practice law someday and prosecute companies that pollute the air. When she notices one of the bottles coming my way, she shoots me a look of horror.

"No, thanks," I say.

My friends seem wounded by this-aren't we teammates? We play baseball and football together. We go way back. In our high school class there are only fifteen boys, and every summer some of us camp out by the river and cannonball from the cliffs into the current. We talk as though we'll be together forever, though I've always known better: Someday we'll be ranked. Someday we'll be screened and then separated. I've known this since my first day of kindergarten, when I raised my hand slightly faster than the other kids-and waved it around to make sure the teacher saw it.

My buddies give me another chance to drink.

"Put that away, guys. Today is a big deal for us."

But they know this already-they just don't like the fact.

"Come on," one says. "A sip."

"I'm sorry. No."

And so I go on to college, and they don't.

Percentile is destiny in America. Four years after that bus ride I'm slumped on an old sofa in the library of my Princeton eating club, waiting to feel the effects of a black capsule that someone said would help me finish writing my overdue application for a Rhodes scholarship. At the other end of the sofa sits my good friend Adam (all names in this piece have been changed)-a Jewish science whiz from the New York suburbs who ate magic mushrooms one evening, had a vision, and switched from pre-med to English literature. Adam should be reading Dubliners, which he'll be tested on early tomorrow morning, but he's preoccupied with an experiment. He's smashing Percocet tablets with a hammer and trying to smoke the powder through a water pipe.

I have other companions in estrangement, way out here on the bell curve's leading edge, where our talent for multiple-choice tests has landed us without even the sketchiest survival instructions. Our club isn't one of the rich, exclusive outfits, where the pedigreed children of the establishment eat chocolate-dipped strawberries off silver trays carried by black waiters in starched white uniforms, but one that anyone can join, where geeks and misfits line up with plastic plates for veggie burgers and canned fruit salad. At the moment the club is struggling financially and has fewer than twenty paid-up members, including two religious fanatics who came to Princeton as normal young men, I'm told, but failed somehow to mix and grew withdrawn. Not long from now, one will take a Bible passage too literally and pluck out one of his eyes in penance for some failing he won't disclose; the other will style himself a campus messiah and persuade a number of "disciples"-most of them black and here on scholarships-to renounce their degrees just before graduation as a protest against Princeton's fallenness.

The rest of us in the club feel almost as lost. One kid, a token North Dakotan (Princeton likes to boast that it has students from all fifty states), wears the same greaser haircut he brought from Fargo and has poured all his energy for the past few years into fronting a lackadaisical rock band that specializes in heartland heavy metal. His soul never made the leap from Main Street to the Ivy League. Another young man is nearly catatonic from dropping LSD and playing pinball in marathon sessions that sometimes last twelve hours. Strike a match an inch from his face and he won't flinch-his pupils won't even contract from the flame.

If my buddies from Minnesota could see me now, they wouldn't have a clue whom they were seeing, and I-also bewildered-wouldn't be able to help them. Four years ago my SAT scores set me on a trajectory. One day I looked down at a booklet filled with questions concerning synonyms and antonyms and the meeting times of trains on opposite tracks, and the next thing I knew I was opening thick envelopes from half the colleges in the country. One, from Macalester College, in St. Paul, contained an especially tempting offer: immediate admission as a freshman. I didn't even have to finish senior year in high school.

I enrolled the next fall, but with no intention of staying. I'd read my Fitzgerald, and I wanted to go east; I wanted to ride the train to the last station. As a natural-born child of the meritocracy, I'd been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations meetings and model state governments and student congresses, and I knew only one direction: forward, onward. I lived for prizes, praise, distinctions, and I gave no thought to any goal higher or broader than my next report card. Learning was secondary; promotion was primary. No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient. What else was there?

Before I'd been at Macalester a month, I applied to transfer to Princeton as a sophomore. I was warned that only twenty students a year got into the university this way, but I was used to being the exception; it was the only condition I'd ever known. Like a novice gambler on a winning streak, I wasn't even sure that failure existed, except for others. To bolster my application, I looked around Macalester for a contest, any contest, that I might place first in, and I hit at last on a poetry competition that seemed to be attracting few entries. I'd never written serious poetry, but this didn't faze me. My desire to get ahead was all the inspiration I'd ever needed. Appetite can be a kind of genius.

I won the poetry contest. A few months later I found myself sitting in a Princeton lecture hall that was older than my home town, writing down a new word: "post-structuralism." I couldn't define it exactly, but I knew more or less what it meant: I was making progress of sorts. The student next to me bore a famous last name that I recognized from a high school history text (not Rockefeller, but close). Discovering that it was still in circulation among living people-individuals whom I was expected to befriend now and make a career among, if possible-renewed in me a sense of dislocation that I'd been fighting, and courting, since entering grade school.

Tonight, on speed and applying for the Rhodes in a room full of red-eyed former valedictorians, I'm more disoriented than ever. Only a few months short of graduation I've run out of thoughts, out of the stuff that thoughts are made from. I'm mute, aphasic. I can't write a word. A doctor I saw when I went home last summer pronounced me severely malnourished and put me on a regimen of vitamins, but this is depletion of another kind. I've been fleeing upward since age five, learning just enough at every level to make it, barely, to the next one. I'm the system's pure product, clever and adaptable, not so much educated as wised-up; but now I've hit a wall.

I put my pen down as my friend holds out the water pipe stoked with pulverized pain pills. "You should try this," he says.

I flash back to that bus, to that bottle of cherry schnapps. Back then I knew where I was going, and that to get there I'd have to keep a clear head. But now I'm here, and my head doesn't function the way it used to. All thanks to a test that measured ... what, exactly? Nothing important, I've discovered. Nothing sustaining. Just "aptitude."

That's why we're here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That's what they wanted, so that's what we delivered. A talent for nothing, but a knack for everything.

Nobody told us it wouldn't be enough.

My first semester at Princeton, I had four roommates, who resembled no one I'd ever known: A foppish piano prodigy with a moustache, who dreamed of writing Broadway musical comedies and spent his free hours in robe and slippers, smoking Benson & Hedges Menthol 100s and hunching, vulturelike, over his piano, plinking out show tunes about doe-eyed ingénues who'd been seduced and ruined by caddish millionaires. The budding composer's pudgy heiress girlfriend, whose father owned a five-star Manhattan hotel and regularly sent a limousine on weekends so that his daughter could drink cocktails with celebrities, who-as I gathered from a snapshot she showed me-included the Bee Gees. The son of a New York City TV newscaster, who kept his cheeks fresh with Oil of Olay and treated the composer and the heiress as his surrogate parents, addressing them in baby talk and asking them to tuck him in at night, which they did, complete with fairy tales. And an earnest Long Island Quaker kid with a short red beard, who played guitar and protested apartheid, which I pretended to be concerned about too, although I wasn't certain what it was. The SATs hadn't required such trivial knowledge.

One night a report came over the radio that John Lennon, my Quaker friend's hero, had been assassinated, which plunged the Quaker into fits of violent weeping in which I felt compelled to join. Lennon's death meant very little to me (my tastes ran to midwestern stadium rock), but I needed a good cry that night for other reasons.

It had all started one Sunday when the heiress, Jennifer, returned from one of her weekend jaunts lugging a case of champagne her father had given her. She saw me watching her from my bedroom doorway and invited me into the common living room, where we popped the cork on a bottle and drank the bubbly without glasses, licking the foam when it ran down the neck. This struck me as the height of decadence, and reason enough for betraying my high school buddies, whom I'd promised to keep in touch with but hadn't.

When the bottle of champagne was gone, Jennifer said, "You owe me twenty." I looked at her uncomprehendingly. "It's a good bottle," she said. "You owe me twenty."

I didn't have the money, and I said so. My parents sent checks now and then, but not for much; they lacked any sense of the cost of living at Princeton. My phone bills alone consumed most of their remittances, freezing me out of any real social life and limiting my wardrobe to a pair of Levi's; a blue T-shirt; two white dress shirts, which I seldom found occasion to wear; and one red, lumberjacky flannel number, which filled me with shame about my regional origins.

"Welsher," Jennifer said, putting me in my place. In Minnesota, I hadn't had a place, but here I did: several levels down from heiresses who charged their roommates to drink free champagne. It seemed unfair that I had come so far in life only to find new ways to fall short.

The humiliations mounted. One afternoon a van from Bloomingdale's pulled up in front of our dormitory, and a crew of men began unloading furniture that appeared to belong on the set of a TV show about single young socialites. The men placed armchairs, lamps, tables, and a sofa in one corner of the living room and then unrolled an Oriental rug so vast that its edges curled up against the walls, blocking the electrical sockets. After directing the placement of each piece, Jennifer and her boyfriend sought me out in my tiny bedroom, whose only furnishings were a desk, a bed, and a bookcase fashioned from plastic milk crates. Owing to my budget, many of the books inside it were stolen from the university bookstore; I'd never bought books before, and couldn't believe how expensive the damned things were.

"We figured out everyone's share of the new living room," the boyfriend said. "Yours is five hundred and ten."

I laughed out loud. "But I didn't order any of it."

"Well, you'll benefit from it, won't you?" Jennifer said. This was my first encounter with a line of reasoning that would echo through my years at Princeton: even unbidden privileges must be paid for. Tuition, the university liked to tell us, covered only a fraction of the cost of our education. What's more, the benefits of a Princeton degree were so far-reaching and long-lasting, supposedly, that for the duration of our lives we would be expected to give money to various university funds and causes. I'd assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was wrong. The price of getting in-to the university itself, and to the great world it promised to open up-was an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the initial quote.

After I told my roommates to stop bothering me, they convened a meeting in the common room and voted to ban me from touching any item, including the rug, that I had not bought stock in. This put the entire suite-except for the bathroom, my bedroom, and the hallway leading to the front door-off limits to me. I raged inside. The common room had evolved into a concentrated version of what the whole campus had come to represent for me: a private association of the powerful that I'd been permitted to visit on a day pass, which, I sensed, could be revoked as suddenly as it had been issued.

I avoided my roommates and focused on my classwork. I chose to concentrate on English, since it sounded like something I might already know. I assumed that my classmates and I would study the classics and analyze their major themes, but instead we were buffeted, almost from day one, with talk of "theory," whatever that was. The basic meanings of the poems, short stories, and plays drawn from the hefty Norton anthologies that anchored our entry-level reading lists were treated as trivial, almost beneath discussion; what mattered, we learned, were our "critical assumptions."

I, for one, wasn't aware of having any. Until I was sixteen or so, my only reading had consisted of Hardy Boys mysteries, books on UFOs, world almanacs, a Time-Life history of World War II, and a handful of pulpy best sellers linked to movies (The Day of the Jackal and The Exorcist stand out), which I'd read for their sex scenes. I knew a few great authors' names from scanning dust jackets in the town library and watching the better TV quiz shows, but the only serious novels I'd ever cracked were Moby-Dick and Frankenstein-both sold to me by a crafty high school teacher as gripping tales of adventure, which they weren't.

With no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas disguised as conclusions that I'd reached myself. The deployment of key words was crucial, as the recognition of them had been on the SATs. With one professor the charm was "ambiguity." With another "heuristic" usually did the trick. Even when a poem or a story fundamentally puzzled me, I found that I could save face through terminology, as when I referred to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as "semiotically unstable."

The need to finesse my ignorance through such stunts left me feeling hollow and vaguely hunted. I sought solace in the company of other frauds (we seemed to recognize one another instantly), and together we refined our acts. We toted around books by Jacques Derrida, and spoke of "playfulness" and "textuality." We laughed at the notion of "authorial intention" and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate, an expression of powerful group interests that it was our sacred duty to transcend-or, failing that, to systematically subvert. In this rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors-the ones who drank with us in the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up pants and skirts-we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we'd never constructed in the first place.

I came to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were actors. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedimentary study habits were ill adapted, I concluded, to the new world of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was a con, and I-a born con man who hadn't read any great literature and was looking for any excuse not to-was eager to agree with them.

This lucky convergence of intellectual fashion and my illiteracy restored my pride and emboldened me socially. Maybe I belonged at Princeton after all. I took up with a moody crowd of avant-gardists, who hung around one of the campus theaters tripping on acid and staging absurdist plays by Sartre, Albee, and Ionesco. One production, which I assisted with, required the audience to contemplate a stage filled with unoccupied metal folding chairs. My friends and I stood snickering in the wings, making bets on how long it would take for people to leave.

Who knew that serious drama could be like this? Who knew that the essence of high culture would turn out to be teasing the poor fools who still believed in it? Certainly no one back in Minnesota. Well, the joke was on them, and I was in on it. I could never go back there now, not with a straight face. It embarrassed me that I'd ever even lived there, knowing that people here on the East Coast (people like me-the new me) had been laughing at us all along.

It frightened me that had I not reached Princeton, I might never have discovered this; I might have remained a rube forever. This realization altered my basic loyalties. I decided that it was time to leave behind the folks who'd raised me and stand with the people who'd clued me in.

My closest friend as a junior was V, a Pakistani boy who'd disappointed his family-and even, as he told it, his nation's leaders-by leaving his intended major, electrical engineering, for philosophy. He claimed that his decision was purely intellectual, but I suspected a social motive. Among the artsy eastern prep-school graduates who composed the campus's tastemaking elite, philosophy was in vogue just then, especially the arcane linguistic variety that allowed one to brandish Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whereas engineering was deemed unsuitable for anyone other than indentured Third Worlders whose governments were paying their tuition in return for future work designing missiles and irrigation projects.

This had been V's deal. Once he broke it, whether out of conviction or in deference to fashion, he couldn't go home again. That made two of us.

One cold winter night we set out down Prospect Avenue toward one of the eating clubs that wouldn't have us. On the way we talked Wittgenstein, loudly, so that others would hear us. Drunk on a mixture of beer, resentment, and longing, we were determined to crash a party we'd heard about. Girls went by, but not a lot of them, and few that were available to our kind. Twelve years after Princeton had gone coed, the campus sex ratio still favored males by a considerable margin, placing a premium on pretty women that only rich boys and quarterbacks could pay. Our shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking brains may have entitled us to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with them.

This was the system's great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to supplant with a cast of brainy up-and-comers. But we still needed to impress them: the wasp New Englanders with weekend coke habits, well-worn deck shoes, and vaguely leftish politics devised in reaction to their parents' conservatism, to which they'd slowly return as they aged. They didn't have our test scores, but they had style, a charismatic aura of entitlement, and V and I were desperate for a piece of it.

Somehow we slipped past the door into a room jammed with handsome, arrhythmic dancers in pastel polo shirts with turned-up collars. When we tried to join the fun, the crowd contracted and squeezed us out in a kind of reflexive mass immune response. We retreated to the professionally staffed bar, and in no time I was drunk and plotting revenge.

I targeted a girl with pearl earrings whose solid, columnar figure, husky voice, and rubber-banded sheaf of wheaty hair held no physical attraction for me but aroused my inner revolutionary. Like a frustrated stableboy in an old novel, I wanted to seduce and ruin her. Amazingly, we ended up alone on the bare wood floor of an empty upstairs room. The girl lay under me, kissing with a suction that actually drew blood from my chapped lips. She tugged at my zipper and muttered hearty obscenities. Her passion was frank, elemental, and intimidating, permitting me no illusion of domination. I was servicing a fair-haired warrior goddess, bred to lead and to give birth to leaders.

But she was drunker than I knew; as the act began in earnest, she fell asleep-a total power outage. Should I press on? Here was my chance to vent a primitive fury on a symbol of everything that tortured me.

I couldn't do it. I fled downstairs, found V, and made him leave with me. On the walk back to his room he said, "What assholes."

"We're just as bad," I said. I didn't explain.

We sobered up in V's room by drinking coffee. As he tended to do when pressured by strong emotion, he launched into one of his disquisitions on language, and I chimed in with my own thoughts now and then, though my mind was on the girl back at the club. V's point, I gathered, was his usual one: words referred to other words, not to the world, and the noblest, grandest words, such as "truth" and "God," referred to nothing. Or maybe I misunderstood. It hardly mattered. It had been years since I'd known what I was talking about, and I no longer expected such conversations to educate or enlighten me; I just expected them to sound good. They were catechisms, incantations. They reminded me of the short-lived high school class in which we'd tried to learn German phonetically, by repeating sentences from tapes.

Tonight, though, I couldn't bear the posing, and I understood why V's government was mad at him. I excused myself to use the bathroom, filled a glass with water from the tap, looked in the mirror, and beheld an absence-nothing but the reflected door behind me and a bathrobe hanging on a hook. Where was my face? I knew it still existed, because I could feel it with my fingertips, but I couldn't find it with my eyes-a hallucination in reverse.

"I need a doctor," I told V when I came back. "How late is the clinic open?"

He ignored me. He'd been holding a thought about Hegel all this time and was writing it down so that he wouldn't forget it later. I left him and walked back down Prospect Avenue toward the elitist eating club, thinking that if I could find the girl I'd left there and have a normal human word with her, it would help me see my face again. But the party was over and the door was locked.

I didn't have to wait long for my crack-up.

During a Chaucer lecture the next semester I lost the ability to discern the boundaries between spoken words. Professor F. opened his mouth and out flowed slushy streams of sonic nonsense with no meter, no structure, no definition. I closed my notebook and managed to isolate a few short phrases from the garbled flow, but l couldn't link them into sentences.

I decided I was tired, and I must have been, because once I lay down, I slept for twenty hours. When I finally got up, the floor felt like a waterbed, and I had to brace myself against a chair. A moment later I heard rats inside the walls. I knew that the noises came from warming water pipes, but I couldn't stop picturing hungry rodents nibbling through the plaster into my room.

I started skipping classes, which wasn't like me, since the heart of my personal program for winning distinction, despite my baseline bafflement, was the diligent daily maintenance of friendly relations with my professors. I'd learned that by showing up early to say hello and chat with them, staying late to ask them extra questions, and dropping in during office hours to drink their stale coffee and let them bum my cigarettes (they had always just quit smoking, it seemed, but without conviction), I could pull down Bs, at least. If I also showed signs of having read their books (particularly if the course did not require me to), I could manage As.

But I'd grown too blurred to keep up this trickery. I embraced dissociation instead.

There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene. Kids can't just get high; they have to know why they're doing it. They have to back up their mischief with manifestos. The most popular one among the students I knew held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, helped to break down the rigid mental structures that restricted one's full humanity. This belief in creative derangement came down to us from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the Beat poets, but in my case it didn't quite apply, because my mind had little structure to begin with.

Our LSD sessions were the opposite of parties; they brought on bouts of crushing introspection and spirals of anxious cerebration. One evening at dinner Adam, my ex-pre-med friend, slipped me a square of perforated blotter paper and invited me to walk with him to the Institute for Advanced Study, a lofty think tank secluded in the woods. The place was best known as a haven for world-class physicists, including Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, and through its golden windows we glimpsed the silhouettes of Nobel Prize winners, their heads surrounded by pulsing pink coronas that persisted even when we blinked. Now and then someone would pass us in the darkness, absorbed, we suspected, in algebraic reveries related to fusion reactors and plasma beams. Toward midnight we sat down under a tree-a benevolent presence that seemed to offer shelter from the sinister brilliance all around us-and reached the conclusion that Princeton was a portal for arrogant, Luciferian energies bent on the overthrow of God and Nature. We vowed to fight back. Scooping up clods of mud, we smeared it on our faces and then danced like druids, at last attracting attention from a guard whose flashlight beam swarmed with photons the size of snowflakes. He asked us what we were doing. "Repenting," we said.

Every month or so one of my acid-head friends would crack, and the mood of our demimonde would darken. One night at an off-campus communal house a buddy of mine who studied architecture mixed peyote with amphetamines and decided that the key to time travel was to stand in the basement and repeat the mantra "I am willing, sir." After he'd chanted for three hours, we tried to rescue him, but he punched and kicked until we backed away. Toward morning we found him praying on his knees wearing only his boxer shorts and socks. He was holding a lighted white candle, and in its radiance we could see teardrops dripping off his chin.

Then there was the girl who climbed onto the rail of her dormitory's interior staircase and hurled herself onto a landing four floors down, clutching a copy of Anna Karenina. She survived, but she had to wear a back brace for the rest of the semester. She told me she'd jumped to prove her love for Adam and would do it again unless he married her. Her voice was rough and lumpy (from tranquilizers?), and her hands slowly opened and closed like gasping fish.

My aphasia worsened by the day. I could feel words disappearing from my memory like defective bulbs in a strand of Christmas lights. My right eyelid twitched when I read. Straight lines of print rippled and broke apart. My education was running in reverse as my mind shed its outermost layer of signs and symbols and shrank back to its mute, preliterate core.

My breakdown climaxed with a strange prank that could have been taken straight from a bad novel about collegiate social Darwinism. I was flying on acid in the Terrace Club library, along with a couple of visual-arts majors who were trying their hands at Pollock-style "action painting," when in walked Leslie, a handsome blond campus prince-the descendant of a legendary industrialist-whom I knew from our vicious little theater scene but had never felt worthy of engaging in conversation.

"Walter, may I talk to you?" he said. I was astonished that he knew my name.

I followed him outside to his car, a new European sports coupe with leather seats, where he asked me to help him with a "trust experiment" related to his sociology thesis. He couldn't describe the experiment, he said, because it might prejudice the results, and I didn't press him. I was glad to help. This was the social break I'd waited years for.

Leslie started the car as I buckled in next to him. His instructions were simple: don't speak and don't resist. Then he blindfolded me with a strip of fuzzy dark cloth. He turned on a Laurie Anderson tape full blast-a gale of futuristic electronica that made me ashamed of my Top 40 tastes-and drove without stopping for what seemed like an hour, ending up on a bumpy stretch of road that I took to be rural and remote. At some point my blindfold loosened and slipped down, and I resecured it without being asked.

The car stopped moving. Leslie got out, walked around to my side, opened the door, set his hands on my shoulders, and marched me forward across an expanse of spongy, uneven earth. He halted and commanded me to kneel, urging me down by pressing on my skull. I suspected by then that I'd been lured into a sadistic hazing ritual, but instead of lashing out or fleeing, I fantasized about the sort of club that I'd been deemed worthy of auditioning for.

"Remove the blindfold," Leslie said.

When I raised my dazzled eyes, I saw, about fifty yards in front of me, surrounded by stately trees, an actual castle, with countless tall windows and pediments and columns. In the center of its crescent driveway stood an enormous dry fountain of leaping cupids.

"My family's estate," Leslie said. "Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!"

With that he ran back to his car and drove away.

It took me three hours, walking and hitchhiking, to make it back to the campus. The LSD turned the trip into an odyssey of spectral laughing faces in the sky and dark, miasmic whirlpools underfoot. When I finally lay down in my room, I asked myself why I'd been chosen for this elaborate humiliation, and concluded that the answer lay in the success of a play on, of all subjects, 1960s pop art that I'd written and staged. I burned with shame for obeying Leslie's orders and blamed the drugs for my craven passivity, though I knew deep down that the problem was ambition. The drugs I could give up, but not the ambition.

W hen summer vacation arrived, a few weeks later, I chose to stay in Princeton and find a job rather than go home and shock my family with my listlessness and dissipation. I also set out to rebuild my brain.

I bought a dictionary and a thesaurus and instituted a daily regimen of linguistic calisthenics. My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I'd lie in bed, with my reference books propped up against my knees, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. I found the ritual humbling but soothing, and for the first time in my academic career I could feel myself making measurable strides, however tiny. "Militate." "Militia." "Milk." I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones-an act of contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise.

My job, at Firestone Library, helped advance this program of self-styled mental reconstruction. Working under a young crew boss who belonged to a self-improvement cult led by Werner Erhard, the founder of est, I emptied quarter-mile-long shelves of books, loaded them onto rolling metal carts, and transferred them to new shelves, one floor down, in perfect Dewey decimal order. When breaks were called, I opened whichever volume I happened to be holding at the moment and read until it was time to go to work again, picking up reams of miscellaneous knowledge about such topics as Zoroastrianism and the history of animal husbandry. And unlike the material from my classes and lectures, these fragments stuck with me-maybe because I'd collected them for their own sake, not as cards to be played at final-exam time and then forgotten when a new hand was dealt.

One day, during lunch, my boss sat down beside me while I was reading up on Zarathustra, whom I'd known before then only as a word in the title of a book by Nietzsche that I'd often argued with V about, despite never having gotten through the preface.

"Perpetual self-betterment," my boss said. "That's man's purpose on earth, you know."

I nodded.

"Can you come to a meeting of people who share your drive?" he said. "It's absolutely free of charge."

"I'm sorry. I have to do this thing alone."

"What thing?"

"Reconnecting certain wires."

By August, I felt human again. The hollow feeling behind my forehead was replaced by a reassuring fullness. The tics and twitches subsided. By all appearances, I'd saved myself-at least for the time being. With graduation just a year away and no firm career plans or even any career desires (my vague interest in writing poetry didn't qualify), the only game I knew how to play-scaling the American meritocratic mountain, not to gain wisdom but just because it was there-was, I feared, about to end.

Making money didn't interest me. While my classmates streamed into on-campus interviews with Wall Street brokerage firms (becoming an "arbitrageur" was all the rage then, even among students who as juniors had vowed to spend their lives painting or composing), I cast about for another test to take, another contest to compete in. I needed medals, acceptance letters, status. To me, wealth and influence were trivial by-products of improving one's statistical scores in the great generational tournament of worthiness. The score itself was the essential prize.

I applied for two scholarships to Oxford, an institution I regarded much as I'd once regarded Princeton-as a sociocultural VIP room that happened to hold classes in the back. The first was the Rhodes, created to fashion leaders for some future utopian global order. Why I imagined that I was "Rhodes material"-which at Princeton meant someone resembling Bill Bradley, our most widely known recipient of the honor-I had no idea. The other students I knew of who had applied were conspicuous campus presences, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was a nervous loner in an old raincoat whose most notable accomplishment was writing and staging a blank-verse play loosely based on Andy Warhol. Still, I sensed I had a chance. I'd learned by then that the Masters of Advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddballs.

When a letter arrived informing me that I'd been chosen as a state finalist, I bought a blue suit on credit and flew back to Minnesota for my interviews. A doorman at the Minneapolis Club directed me to a gloomy paneled room, where my nametagged fellow candidates were enjoying a get-acquainted cocktail party with the members of the committee that would formally screen us the next morning.

I armed myself with a cheese cube on a napkin and a glass of red wine and strode into the fray, looking for someone important to impress, but my rivals had gotten a jump on me and wouldn't make space in the tight perimeters around the professors and business people tasked with assessing our leadership potential. I noticed that none of the other candidates were drinking their wine; they were using their glasses as props. I looked down at my empty goblet. Caught out again.

Seeing my rivals up close unsettled me. Back when I took the SATs, the contest had been impersonal, statistical, waged against an anonymous national peer group. This time the competition was all too personal-about a dozen of us remained. One short-haired young woman in a dark suit was holding forth on national health-care policy to a man who kept looking past her at a prettier girl whose panty lines were discernible through her skirt. A handsome young brute whose tag identified him as a West Point cadet was discussing his fitness regimen with a lady on the committee who seemed to be sleeping standing up. Every few minutes everyone changed partners, like dancers in a Jane Austen ballroom scene. What expert mixers they were! I hated them.

By the time I managed to corner a few committee members, I was feeling drunk and squirrelly. To give the irresistible impression of humble origins transcended, I affected a lazy backwoods drawl and combined it with a Sunday-best vocabulary straight out of my thesaurus exercises. I got off the word "heuristic" once, a magical bit of scholastic legerdemain, but I pronounced it in the manner of Johnny Cash. I knew I sounded demented, but I couldn't stop myself. Even worse, I'd lit a cigarette, making me the party's only smoker aside from a bearded old fellow with a pipe whom I knew to be an English professor at a local college. I approached him, seeking cover for my vice, and babbled away about my love of Whitman, a name I'd picked out of a hat. He seemed to sense this.

At the end of the party we drew times for our morning interviews. I drew the first slot: seven sharp. I showed up pale and trembling and dehydrated, speckled with crumbs from a cinnamon bun I'd wolfed. My rivals were already seated in the waiting room, some of them reading The New York Times. This was a masterly touch-one I wished I'd thought of.

My name was called, and I sat down in a conference room at a long table of poker-faced interrogators equipped with pencils, clipboards, and questionnaires. "What, in your opinion, is the primary problem facing our world today?" one woman asked, not even giving me time to sip my coffee.

The moisture inside my mouth evaporated; I'd expected a little small talk first. I knew in my gut that to answer the question creatively would be a mistake; these were sober, high-minded people, dedicated to serving humanity by preselecting future American presidents and United Nations ambassadors. The only issues worthy of their seriousness, I strongly suspected, were the obvious two: poverty and nuclear proliferation. My chance to exhibit originality would come with the inevitable follow-up: "And how would you deal with this problem?" That's where the challenge lay. I wanted to bring in poetry-but how? By calling for a new, transformative literature pledged to the empowerment of the voiceless through a concern with the basic global values of justice and mutual respect?

That might be a winner, if I could just remember it.

But I couldn't. Instead I said, "Miscommunication. I think that's the biggest problem we face these days."

"Expand on that," a quiet female voice said. "Miscommunication between whom?"

I offered a list of miscommunicators that included governments and their subjects, men and women, and even-absurdly-animals and human beings. Sometime during my speech I realized I'd lost. I'd never lost at anything before, not even a spelling bee, and the feeling was like waking on the Moon after going to bed on Earth. No sounds, no light, no air, no gravity.

I returned to the waiting room ten minutes later. My rivals scanned my face for clues: how had my interview changed the odds for them? I gave them more information than they deserved, hoping to win their favor for the future. Someday one of them might run the country, and I wanted to be remembered as a good sport.

"You're safe," I told them all. "I screwed it up."

They couldn't help smiling. Then one girl hugged me. "You really shouldn't consider it a loss," she said. "You should feel honored you reached the final group." I returned the hug and left the building, unwilling to wait for the winners to be named. Later I found out that one of them was the girl who'd tried to boost my spirits, which made her gesture seem patronizing in retrospect. She knew she was bound for the sharp end of the pyramid, and was merely practicing her royal manners.

I was two weeks away from an interview for another scholarship, sponsored by the Keasbey Foundation, less coveted than the Rhodes but more exclusive (only a handful were given out each year). Yet my broken momentum had sapped my confidence, and I did nothing to prepare myself. I drifted through classes and lectures, astonished anew by how little four years of college had affected me. The great poems and novels mystified me still, even the few I'd managed to read, and my math skills, once adequate for the SATs, had shriveled to nothing through lack of use. The lone science class I'd been required to take, an introductory geology course, was graded pass/fail, and though I'd passed it (barely), I still wasn't sure what "igneous" meant.

All around me friends were securing places in grad schools and signing contracts with worldwide corporations, but I found myself without prospects, in a vacuum. I'd never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end and the game of trading on them would begin. Once, I'd had nowhere to go but up. Now, it seemed, I had nowhere to go at all.

For my interview I drove down to Philadelphia with Princeton's other Keasbey nominee, the football team's starting quarterback. I'd never expected to meet him in this life. He was smaller than I thought he'd be, and a faster, more impressive talker. Under his short haircut he seemed sad, though, as if he, too, feared his life had already run its course. His car was old, not a quarterback's car at all, and I realized that he wasn't one anymore, except in memory. The season was over.

In the elegant conference room of a downtown law firm the Keasbey Foundation's trustees explained the peculiar history of their fellowship to me. Its founder, now deceased, was a wealthy daughter of industry who'd never married. One spring, however, as a blushing society girl, she'd attended an Oxford college ball with an English boy whose demeanor had so charmed her that she later devised a way to re-create him by funding the education of young Americans who, with the proper training, it was hoped, might wear his cummerbund. Pure Henry James, this story. The trustees went on to tell us that Miss Keasbey had intended the fellowship for young men only, but a court challenge had made young women eligible.

The trustees interviewed the ex-quarterback first, which gave me an hour to work on my persona as a young aristocrat in the rough. If my schooling had taught me anything, it was how to mold myself-my words, my range of references, my body language-into whatever shape the day required, and by the time I sat down in the conference room, I'd hit on a pose of dreamy provincial yearning à la the youthful Tennessee Williams, but marginally more virile. When asked who my favorite author was, I answered Lord Byron-for the life he'd lived as much as for his writings. (I might not have understood Romantic poetry, but I knew what the names of the poets signified.) When someone brought up my D in Spanish-that glaring stain on my academic record, which the Rhodes committee had also noted, provoking in me much defensive stuttering-I confessed that I'd stayed up late drinking before the final and let it go at that. This elicited broad smiles. The next question touched on my athletic interests-or, rather, my apparent lack thereof. I replied that I liked to exert myself in solitude, by taking long walks. "Very British," one man said.

I could feel in the trustees' handshakes, as we parted, a distinct congratulatory warmth. I'd won again, and by doing what I did best: exploiting my meticulously indexed collection of lofty buzzwords, charming gestures, and apt allusions. Just days before, I'd felt a reckoning looming, but now I was off to Oxford. I'd been spared.

"I flubbed it," the ex-quarterback told me on the drive back. "How did you do, you think?"

I didn't dare tell him.

The summer before I left for Oxford, I found myself back home, drinking beer with a high school friend in a pickup truck parked next to the river. His name was Karl, and he'd stuck around to lend a hand on his family's dairy farm. Most everyone else from our crowd had moved away, part of the ongoing small-town diaspora that will someday completely depopulate rural America. Our old buddies worked on salmon boats in Alaska. They dealt cards in Las Vegas. They sold Fords in Denver. Some, having grown fed up with low-wage jobs, were studying computer programming or starting small businesses with borrowed money. I had a hard time imagining their lives, especially if they'd married and had kids, but I didn't have to: they were gone. I was gone too, up a ladder into the clouds. Up a ladder made of clouds.

"So, what are your views on Emerson?" Karl asked me.

We'd been discussing books, at his request. He'd looked me up that night for this very purpose. While I'd been off at Princeton, polishing my act, he'd become a real reader and also a devoted Buddhist. He said he had no one to talk to, no one who shared his interest in art and literature, so when he'd heard I was home, he'd driven right over. We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn't, in fact, and I didn't know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn't quote the Transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn't quote anyone. I'd honed more-marketable skills: for flattering those in authority without appearing to, for ranking artistic reputations according to the latest academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the background of my listener, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some "classic" work of "literature," for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if the consensus changed.

Flexibility, irony, class consciousness, contrarianism. I'd gone to Princeton, and soon I'd go to Oxford, and these, I was about to tell Karl, are the ways one gets ahead now-not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I'd learned a lot since I'd aced the SATs, about the system, about myself, and about the new class the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things. The class that makes the headlines-that writes the headlines, and the stories under them.

But I kept all this to myself; I didn't tell Karl. He was a reader, a Buddhist, and an old friend, and there were some things he might not want to know. I wasn't so sure I wanted to know them either.

My cynicism had peaked, but later that summer something happened that changed me-not instantly but decisively. A month before I was scheduled to fly to England and resume my career as a facile ignoramus, I came down with a mild summer cold that lingered, festered, and turned into pneumonia, forcing me to spend two weeks in bed. One feverish night I found myself standing in front of a bookcase in the living room that held a row of fancy leather-bound volumes my mother had bought through the mail when I was little. Assuming that the books were chiefly decorative, I'd never even bothered to read their titles, but that night, bored and sick, I picked one up: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it back to my bedroom and actually read it-every chapter, every page. A few days later I repeated the feat with Great Expectations, another canonical stalwart that I'd somehow made it through Princeton without opening.

And so, belatedly, haltingly, and almost accidentally, it began: the education I'd put off while learning to pass as someone in the know. I wasn't sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete, but for once those weren't my first concerns. Alone in my room, exhausted and apprehensive, I no longer cared about self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. I wanted to find out what others thought.

Walter Kirn is a novelist and critic who lives in Montana. His essay "American Everyman," about Warren Buffett, appeared in the November Atlantic.
Sportsmen Of The Year
The 2004 Boston Red Sox staged the most improbable comeback in baseball history and liberated their long-suffering nation of fans
TOM VERDUCCI

The cancer would have killed most men long ago, but not George Sumner. The Waltham, Mass., native had served three years aboard the USS Arkansas in World War II, raised six kids with a hell of a lot more love than the money that came from fixing oil burners, and watched from his favorite leather chair in front of the television--except for the handful of times he had the money to buy bleacher seats at Fenway--his Boston Red Sox, who had found a way not to win the World Series in every one of the 79 years of his life. George Sumner knew something about persistence. ? The doctors and his family thought they had lost George last Christmas Day, more than two years after the diagnosis. Somehow George pulled through. And soon, though still sick and racked by the chemo, the radiation and the trips in and out of hospitals for weeks at a time, George was saying, "You know what? With Pedro and Schilling we've got a pretty good staff this year. Please let this be the year." ? On the night of Oct. 13, 2004, George Sumner knew he was running out of persistence. The TV in his room at Newton-Wellesley Hospital was showing Pedro Martinez and the Red Sox losing to the New York Yankees in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series--this after Boston had lost Game 1 behind Curt Schilling. During commercial breaks Sumner talked with his daughter Leah about what to do with his personal possessions. Only a few days earlier his wife, Jeanne, had told him, "If the pain is too much, George, it's O.K. if you want to go."

But Leah knew how much George loved the Red Sox, saw how closely he still watched their games and understood that her father, ever quick with a smile or a joke, was up to something.

"Dad, you're waiting around to see if they go to the World Series, aren't you?" she said. "You really want to see them win it, right?"

A sparkle flickered in the sick man's eyes and a smile creased his lips.

"Don't tell your mother," he whispered.

At that moment, 30 miles away in Weymouth, Mass., Jaime Andrews stewed about the Red Sox' losing again but found some relief in knowing that he might be spared the conflict he had feared for almost nine months. His wife, Alice, was due to give birth on Oct. 27. Game 4 of the World Series was scheduled for that night. Jamie was the kind of tortured fan who could not watch when the Red Sox were protecting a lead late in the game, because of a chronic, aching certainty that his team would blow it again.

Alice was not happy that Jaime worried at all about the possible conflict between the birth and the Sox. She threatened to bar him from the delivery room if Boston was playing that night. "Pathetic," she called his obsession with his team.

"It's not my fault," Jaime would plead, and then fall on the DNA defense. "It was passed down through generations, from my grandfather to my mother to me."

Oh, well, James thought as he watched the Red Sox lose Game 2, at least now I won't have to worry about my team in the World Series when my baby is born.

Dear Red Sox:

My boyfriend is a lifelong Red Sox fan. He told me we'll get married when the Red Sox win the World Series.... I watched every pitch of the playoffs.

--signed by a bride-to-be

The most emotionally powerful words in the English language are monosyllabic: love, hate, born, live, die, sex, kill, laugh, cry, want, need, give, take, Sawx.

The Boston Red Sox are, of course, a civic religion in New England. As grounds crew workers tended to the Fenway Park field last summer after a night game, one of them found a white plastic bottle of holy water in the outfield grass. There was a handwritten message on the side: GO?SOX. The team's 2003 highlight film, punctuated by the crescendo of the walk-off home run by the Yankees' Aaron Boone in ALCS Game 7, was christened, Still, We Believe.

"We took the wording straight out of the Catholic canon," club president Larry Lucchino says. "It's not We Still Believe. Our working slogan for next year is It's More than Baseball. It's the Red Sox."

Rooting for the Red Sox is, as evident daily in the obituary pages, a life's definitive calling. Every day all over New England, and sometimes beyond, death notices include age, occupation, parish and allegiance to the Sox. Charles F. Brazeau, born in North Adams, Mass., and an Army vet who was awarded a Purple Heart in World War II, lived his entire 85 years without seeing the Red Sox win a world championship, though barely so. When he passed on in Amarillo, Texas, just two days before Boston won the 2004 World Series, the Amarillo Globe News eulogized him as a man who "loved the Red Sox and cheap beer."

Rest in peace.

What the Red Sox mean to their faithful--and larger still, what sport at its best means to American culture--never was more evident than at precisely 11:40 EDT on the night of Oct. 27. At that moment in St. Louis, Red Sox closer Keith Foulke, upon fielding a ground ball, threw to first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz for the final out of the World Series--and the first Red Sox world championship since 1918. And then all hell didn't just break loose. It pretty much froze over.

All over New England, church bells clanged. Grown men wept. Poets whooped. Convicts cheered. Children rushed into the streets. Horns honked. Champagne corks popped. Strangers hugged.

Virginia Muise, 111, and Fred Hale, 113, smiled. Both Virginia, who kept a Red Sox cap beside her nightstand in New Hampshire, and Fred, who lived in Maine until moving to Syracuse, N.Y., at 109, were Red Sox fans who, curse be damned, were born before Babe Ruth himself. Virginia was the oldest person in New England. Fred was the oldest man in the world. Within three weeks after they had watched the Sox win the Series, both of them passed away.

They died happy.

Dear Red Sox:

Can you get married on the mound in, say, November at Fenway?

On its most basic level, sport satisfies man's urge to challenge his physical being. And sometimes, if performed well enough, it inspires others in their own pursuits. And then, very rarely, it changes the social and cultural history of America; it changes lives. The 2004 Boston Red Sox are such a perfect storm.

The Red Sox are SI's Sportsmen of the Year, an honor they may have won even if the magnitude of their unprecedented athletic achievement was all that had been considered. Three outs from being swept in the ALCS, they won eight consecutive games, the last six without ever trailing. Their place in the sporting pantheon is fixed; the St. Jude of sports, patron saint of lost athletic causes, their spirit will be summoned at the bleakest of moments.

"It is the story of hope and faith rewarded," says Red Sox executive vice president Charles Steinberg. "You really believe that this is the story they're going to teach seven-year-olds 50 years from now. When they say, 'Naw, I can't do this,' you can say, 'Ah, yes you can. The obstacle was much greater for these 25 men, and they overcame. So can you.'"

What makes them undeniably, unforgettably Sportsmen, however, is that their achievement transcended the ballpark like that of no other professional sports team. The 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers were the coda to a sweet, special time and place in Americana. The 1968 Detroit Tigers gave needed joy to a city teeming with anger and strife. The 2001 Yankees provided a gathering place, even as a diversion, for a grieving, wounded city. The 2004 Red Sox made an even deeper impact because this championship was lifetimes in the making.

This Boston team connected generations, for the first time, with joy instead of disappointment as the emotional mortar. This team changed the way a people, raised to expect the worst, would think of themselves and the future. And the impact, like all things in that great, wide community called Red Sox Nation, resounded from cradle to grave.

On the morning after the Red Sox won the World Series, Sgt. Paul Barnicle, a detective with the Boston police and brother of Boston Herald columnist Mike Barnicle, left his shift at six, purchased a single red rose at the city's flower market, drove 42 miles to a cemetery in Fitchburg, Mass., and placed the rose on the headstone of his mother and father, among the many who had not lived long enough to see it.

Five days later, Roger Altman, former deputy treasury secretary in the Clinton Administration, who was born and raised in Brookline, Mass., flew from New York City to Boston carrying a laminated front page of the Oct. 28 New York Times (headline: Red Sox Erase 86 Years of Futility in Four Games). He drove to the gravesite of his mother, who had died in November 2003 at age 95, dug a shallow trench and buried the front page there.

Such pilgrimages to the deceased, common after the Red Sox conquered the Yankees in the ALCS, were repeated throughout the graveyards of New England. The totems changed, but the sentiments remained the same. At Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, for instance, gravestones were decorated with Red Sox pennants, hats, jerseys, baseballs, license plates and a hand-painted pumpkin.

So widespread was the remembrance of the deceased that several people, including Neil Van Zile Jr. of Westmoreland, N.H., beseeched the ball club to issue a permanent, weatherproof official Red Sox grave marker for dearly departed fans, similar to the metal markers the federal government provides for veterans. (Team president Lucchino says he's going to look into it, though Major League Baseball Properties would have to license it.) Van Zile's mother, Helen, a Sox fan who kept score during games and took her son to Game 2 of the 1967 World Series, died in 1995 at 72.

"There are thousands of people who would want it," Van Zile says. "My mom didn't get to see it. There isn't anything else I can do for her."

One day last year Van Zile was walking through a cemetery in Chesterfield, N.H., when the inscription on a grave stopped him.Blouin was the family name chiseled into the marble. Beneath that it said Napoleon A. 1926-1986. At the bottom, nearest to the ground, was the kicker of a lifetime.

Darn those Red Sox.

Dear Red Sox:

Thanks for the motivation.

--Josue Rodas, marine, 6th Motor Transport Company, Iraq

Like snowflakes in a blizzard came the e-mails. More than 10,000 of them flew into the Red Sox' server in the first 10 days after Boston won the World Series. No two exactly alike. They came from New England, but they also came from Japan, Italy, Pakistan and at least 11 other countries. The New England town hall of the 21st century was electronic.

There were thank-you letters. There were love letters. The letters were worded as if they were written to family members, and indeed the Red Sox were, in their own unkempt, scruffy, irreverent way, a likable, familial bunch. How could the faithful not love a band of characters self-deprecatingly self-dubbed the "idiots"?

DH David Ortiz, who slammed three walk-off postseason hits, was the Big Papi of the lineup and the clubhouse, with his outsized grin as much a signature of this team as his bat. Leftfielder Manny Ramirez hit like a machine but played the game with a sandlot smile plastered on his mug, even when taking pratfalls in the outfield. Long-locked centerfielder Johnny Damon made women swoon and men cheer and, with his Nazarene look, prompted a Tshirt and bumper sticker bonanza (WWJDD: What Would Johnny Damon Do? and Honk If You Love Johnny).

First baseman Kevin Millar, with his Honest Abe beard and goofball personality, had the discipline to draw the walk off Yankees closer Mariano Rivera that began Boston's comeback in the ninth inning of ALCS Game 4. Righthander Derek Lowe, another shaggy eccentric, became the first pitcher to win the clinching game of three postseason series in one October. Foulke, third baseman Bill Mueller, catcher Jason Varitek and rightfielder Trot Nixon--the club's longest-tenured player, known for his pine-tar-encrusted batting helmet--provided gritty ballast.

The love came in e-mails that brought word from soldiers in Iraq with Red Sox patches on their uniforms or Red Sox camouflage hats, the symbols of a nation within a nation. The cannon cockers of the 3rd Battalion 11th Marine Regiment built a mini Fenway Park at Camp Ramadi. Soldiers awoke at 3 a.m. to watch the Sox on a conference-room TV at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, the games ending just in time for the troops to fall in and receive their daily battle briefing.

A woman wrote of visiting an ancient temple in Tokyo and finding this message inscribed on a prayer block: May the Red Sox play always at fenway park, and may they win the World Series in my lifetime.

Besides the e-mails there were boxes upon boxes of letters, photographs, postcards, school projects and drawings that continue to cover what little floor space is left in the Red Sox' offices. Mostly the missives convey profound gratitude.

"Thank you," wrote Maryam Farzeneh, a Boston University graduate student from Iran, "for being another reason for me and my boyfriend to connect and love each other. He is a Red Sox fan and moved to Ohio two years ago. There were countless nights that I kept the phone next to the radio so that we could listen to the game together."

Maryam had never seen a baseball game before 1998. She knew how obsessed people back home were about soccer teams. "Although I should admit," she wrote, "that is nothing like the relationship between the Red Sox and the fans in New England."

Dear Red Sox:

Your first round of drinks is free.

--the Loose Moose Saloon, Gray, Maine

Nightfall, and the little girl lies on her back in the rear seat of a sedan as it chugs homeward to Hartford. She watches the stars twinkle in between the wooden telephone poles that rhythmically interrupt her view of the summer sky. And there is the familiar company of a gravelly voice on the car radio providing play-by-play of Red Sox baseball. The great Ted Williams, her mother's favorite, is batting.

Roberta Rogers closes her eyes, and she is that little girl again, and the world is just as perfect and as full of wonder and possibilities as it was on those warm summer nights growing up in postwar New England.

"I laugh when I think about it," she says. "There is nothing wrong with the memory. Nothing."

Once every summer her parents took her and her brother, Nathaniel, to Boston to stay at the Kenmore Hotel and watch the Red Sox at Fenway. Nathaniel liked to operate the safety gates of the hotel elevator, often letting on and off the visiting ballplayers who stayed at the Kenmore.

"Look," Kathryn Stoddard, their mother, said quietly one day as a well-dressed gentleman stepped off the lift. "That's Joe DiMaggio."

Kathryn, of course, so despised the Yankees that she never called them just the Yankees. They were always the Damnyankees, as if it were one word.

"We didn't have much money," Roberta says. "We didn't take vacations, didn't go to the beach. That was it. We went to the Kenmore, and we watched the Red Sox at Fenway. I still have the images ... the crowds, the stadium, the sounds, the feel of the cement under my feet, passing hot dogs down the row, the big green wall, the Citgo sign--it was green back then--coming into view as we drove into Boston, telling us we were almost there.... "

Roberta lives in New Market, Va., now, her mother nearby in a retirement facility. Kathryn is 95 years old and still takes the measure of people by their rooting interest in baseball.

"Acceptable if they root for the Sox, suspect if they don't, and if a Damnyankee fan, hardly worth mentioning," Roberta says.

On Oct. 27, two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Boston winning 3-0, Roberta paced in her living room, her eyes turned away from the TV.

"Oh, Bill," she said to her husband, "they can still be the Red Sox! They can still lose this game!"

It was not without good reason that her mother had called them the Red Flops all these years.

"And then I heard the roar," Roberta says.

This time they really did it. They really won. She called her children and called "everybody I could think of." It was too late to ring Kathryn, she figured. Kathryn's eyesight and hearing are failing, and she was surely sleeping at such a late hour.

So Roberta went to see Kathryn first thing the next morning.

"Mom, guess what? I've got the best news!" Roberta said. "They won! The Red Sox won!"

Kathryn's face lit up with a big smile, and she lifted both fists in triumph. And then the mother and daughter laughed and laughed. Just like little girls.

Dear Red Sox:

I really want to surprise my whole school and the principal.

-- Maine high school student, asking that the entire team visit his school

"Is that what I think it is?"

The conductor on the 11:15 a.m. Acela out of Boston to New York, Larry Solomon, had recognized Charles Steinberg and noted the size of the case he was carrying.

"Yes," the Red Sox VP replied. "Would you like to see it?"

Steinberg opened the case and revealed the gleaming gold Commissioner's Trophy, the Red Sox' world championship trophy. Solomon, who had survived leukemia and rooting for the Sox, fought back tears.

The Red Sox are taking the trophy on tour to their fans. On this day it was off to New York City and a convocation of the Benevolent Loyal Order of the Honorable Ancient Redsox Diehard Sufferers, a.k.a. the BLOHARDS.

"I've only cried twice in my life," Richard Welch, 64 and a BLOHARD, said that night. "Once when the Vietnam War ended. And two weeks ago when the Red Sox won the World Series."

Everywhere the trophy goes someone weeps at the sight of it. Everyone wants to touch it, like Thomas probing the wounds of the risen Jesus. Touching is encouraged.

"Their emotional buckets have filled all these years," Steinberg says, "and the trophy overflows them. It's an intense, cathartic experience."

Why? Why should the bond between a people and their baseball team be so intense? Fenway Park is a part of it, offering a physical continuum to the bond, not only because Papi can stand in the same batter's box as Teddy Ballgame, but also because a son might sit in the same wooden-slat seat as his father.

"We do have our tragic history," says the poet Donald Hall, a Vermonter who lives in the house where his great-grandfather once lived.

The Sox specialized not, like the Chicago Cubs, in woebegone, hopeless baseball, but in an agonizing, painful kind. Indeed, hope was at the very breakable heart of their cruelty. From the 1967 Impossible Dream team until last season, the Red Sox had fielded 31 winning teams in 37 years, nine of which reached the postseason. They were good enough to make it hurt.

"It's probably the desperately cruel winters we endure in New England," Mike Barnicle offers as an explanation. "When the Red Sox reappear, that's the season when the sun is back and warmth returns and we associate them with that.

"Also, a lot has to do with how the area is more stable in terms of demographics than most places. People don't move from New England. They stay here. And others come to college here and get infected with Red Sox fever. They get it at the age of 18 and carry it with them when they go out into the world."

If you are born north of Hartford, there is no other big league baseball team for which to root, just as it has been since the Braves left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953. It is a birthright to which you quickly learn the oral history. The Babe, Denny Galehouse, Johnny Pesky, Bucky Dent, Bill Buckner and Aaron Boone are beads on a string, an antirosary committed to memory by every son and daughter of the Nation.

"I've known nothing different in my life," says David Nathan, 34, who, like his brother Marc, 37, learned at the hand of his father, Leslie, 68, who learned at the hand of his father, Morris, 96. "It's so hard to put into words. I was 16 in 1986 sitting in the living room when the ball went through Buckner's legs. We all had champagne ready, and you just sit back and watch it in disbelief.

"I was at Game 7 last year and brought my wife. I said, 'You need to experience it.' The Sox were up 5-2, and my wife said to me, 'They've got this in the bag.' I said, 'No, they don't. I'm telling you, they don't until the last out.'

"I used to look at my dad and not understand why he cried when they lost or cried when they won. Now I understand."

At 11:40 on the night of Oct. 27, David Nathan held a bottle of champagne in one hand and a telephone in the other, his father on the other end of the line. David screamed so loud that he woke up his four-year-old son, Jack, the fourth generation Nathan who, along with Marc's four-year-old daughter, Jessica, will know a whole new world of Sox fandom. The string of beads is broken.

David's wife recorded the moment with a video camera. Two weeks later David would sit and write it all down in a long email, expressing his thanks to Red Sox owner John Henry.

"As my father said to me the next day," David wrote, "he felt like a burden was finally lifted off of his shoulders after all these years."

He read the e-mail to his father over the telephone. It ended, "Thanks again and long live Red Sox Nation." David could hear his father sobbing on the other end.

"It's nice to know after all these years," Leslie said, "something of mine has rubbed off on you."

Dear Red Sox:

I obviously didn't know what I was talking about.

--fan apologizing for his many previous e-mails, especially the one after game 3 of the ALCS, in which he very color- fully expressed his disgust for the team and the people running it

It was one minute after midnight on Oct. 20, and Jared Dolphin, 30, had just assumed his guard post on the overnight shift at the Corrigan-Radgowski correctional facility in Montville, Conn., a Level IV security prison, one level below the maximum. The inmate in the cell nearest him was 10 years into a 180-year sentence for killing his girlfriend's entire family, including the dog.

Some of the inmates wore makeshift Red Sox "caps"--a commissary bandanna or handkerchief festooned with a hand-drawn iconic "B." Technically they were considered contraband, but the rules were bent when it came to rooting for the Red Sox in October. A few inmates watched ALCS Game 7 on 12-inch portable televisions they had purchased in the prison for $200. Most leaned their faces against the little window of their cell door to catch the game on the cell block television. Others saw only the reflection of the TV on the window of another cell door.

A Sox fan himself, Dolphin watched as Alan Embree retired the Yankees' Ruben Sierra on a ground ball to end the greatest comeback in sports history. Dolphin started to cry.

"Suddenly the block erupted," Dolphin wrote in an e-mail. "I bristled immediately and instinctively my hand reached for my flashlight. It was pandemonium--whistling, shouting, pounding on sinks, doors, bunks, anything cons could find. This was against every housing rule in the book, so I jumped up, ready to lay down the law.

"But as I stood there looking around the block I felt something else. I felt hope. Here I was, less than 10 feet away from guys that will never see the outside of prison ever again in their lives. The guy in the cell to my immediate left had 180 years. He wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. But as I watched him scream, holler and pound on the door I realized he and I had something in common. That night hope beamed into his life as well. As Red Sox fans we had watched the impossible happen, and if that dream could come true why couldn't others.

"Instead of marching around the block trying to restore order I put my flashlight down and clapped. My applause joined the ruckus they were making and for five minutes it didn't stop. I applauded until my hands hurt. I was applauding the possibilities for the future."

Dear Red Sox:

Any player who speaks Latin.

--request for a Red Sox player to visit the Latin class at a middle school in Newton, Mass.

On the day after Christmas 2003, Gregory Miller, 38, of Foxboro, Mass., an enthusiastic sports fan, especially when it came to the Sox, dropped dead of an aneurysm. He left behind a wife, Sharon, six-year-old twin boys and an 18-month-old daughter. Sharon fell into unspeakable sadness and loneliness.

And then came October and the Red Sox.

Sharon, not much more than a casual fan before then, grew enthralled with the team's playoff run. She called her mother, Carolyn Bailey, in Walpole, as many as 15 times during the course of a game to complain, exult, worry, commiserate and celebrate. She even made jokes.

"My eyes need toothpicks to stay open," Sharon would say during the run of late games. "More Visine. I need more Visine."

Carolyn laughed, and her heart leaped to see her daughter joyful again. She had not seen or heard her like this since Gregory died.

"It was the first time she started to smile and laugh again," Carolyn says. "The Red Sox gave her something to look forward to every day. They became like part of the family."

The day after the Red Sox won the World Series, Carolyn wrote a letter to the team. In it she said of her daughter, "The Red Sox became her medicine on the road back from this tragedy. On behalf of my entire family--thank you from the bottom of our hearts."

Leah Storey of Tilton, N.H., composed her own letter of thanks to the Red Sox. Her father had died exactly one year before the Red Sox won the World Series. Then her 26-year-old brother, Ethan, died of an accidental drug overdose only hours after enthusiastically watching the Red Sox win ALCS Game 5. When the Red Sox won the World Series, Ethan's friends and family rushed outside the Storey house, yelled for joy, popped open a bottle of Dom Perignon and gazed up in wonder at a lunar eclipse, and beyond.

"To us, with the memory of Ethan's happy night fresh in our minds, those games took on new meaning," Leah wrote of Boston's run to the championship. "Almost as if they were being played in his honor. Thank you for not letting him down. I can't express enough the comfort we derived from watching you play night after night. It didn't erase the pain, but it helped."

Dear Red Sox:

I would even volunteer my time to clean up, do the dishes, whatever.

--fan asking that the Sox host an event where players greet fans 80 and older

On oct. 25 the Sox were two victories away from winning the World Series when doctors sent George Sumner home to his Waltham house to die. There was nothing more they could do for him. At home, though, George's stomach began to fill with fluid, and he was rushed back to the hospital. The doctors did what they could. They said he was in such bad shape that they were uncertain if he could survive the ride back home.

Suddenly, his eyes still closed, George pointed to a corner of the room, as if someone was there, and said, "Nope, not yet."

And then George went back home to Waltham. Leah knew that every day and every game were precious. She prayed hard for a sweep.

On the morning of Game 4, which stood to be the highlight of Jaime Andrews's life as a "pathetic," obsessed Red Sox fan, his wife, Alice, went into labor. Here it was: the conflict Jaime had feared all summer. At 2:30 p.m. he took her into South Shore Hospital, where they were greeted by nurses wearing Red Sox jerseys over their scrubs.

At 8:25 p.m., Alice was in the delivery room. There was a TV in the room. The game in St. Louis was about to begin.

"Turn on the game."

It was Alice who wanted the TV on. Damon, the leadoff hitter, stepped into the batter's box.

" Johnny Damon!" Alice exclaimed. "He'll hit a home run."

And Damon, his long brown locks flowing out the back of his batting helmet, did just that.

The Red Sox led, 3-0, in the bottom of the fifth inning when the Cardinals put a runner on third base with one out. Jaime could not stand the anxiety. His head hurt. He was having difficulty breathing. He broke out in hives. It was too much to take. He asked Alice to turn off the television. Alice insisted they watch until the end of the inning. They saw Lowe pitch out of the jam. Jaime nervously clicked off the TV.

At home in Waltham, George Sumner slipped in and out of sleep. His eyes were alert when the game was on, but when an inning ended he would say in a whisper, which was all he could muster, "Wake me up when the game comes back on." Each time no one could be certain if he would open his eyes again.

The Red Sox held their 3-0 lead, and the TV remained off in the delivery room of South Shore Hospital. At 11:27 p.m. Alice gave birth to a beautiful boy. Jaime noticed that the baby had unusually long hair down the back of his neck. The nurses cleaned and measured the boy. Jaime was still nervous.

"Can I check the TV for the final score?" he asked Alice.

"Sure," she said.

It was 11:40 p.m. The Red Sox were jumping upon one another in the middle of the diamond. They were world champions.

George Sumner had waited a lifetime to see this--79 years, to be exact, the last three while fighting cancer. He drew upon whatever strength was left in his body and in the loudest whisper that was possible he said, "Yippee!"

And then he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

"It was probably the last real conscious moment he ever had," Leah says.

George opened his eyes one last time the next day. When he did he saw that he was surrounded by his extended family. He said, "Hi," and went back to sleep for the final time.

George Sumner, avid Red Sox fan, passed away at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 29. He was laid to rest with full military honors on Nov. 2.

On the day that George Sumner died, Alice and Jaime Andrews took home a healthy baby boy. They named him Damon.

Dear Red Sox:

Thank you, 2004 World Series Champs, Boston Red Sox. It was worth the wait.

--closing lines of the obituary for Cynthia Marie Riley-Rubino in a Hamden, Conn., newspaper, sent to the team by another fan

Ballplayers are not social scientists or cultural historians. Quite to the contrary, they create an insular fortress in which all considerations beyond the game itself are feared to carry the poison of what are known generically as "distractions."

The Red Sox are not from Boston; they come from all corners of the U.S. and Latin America, and flew to their real homes immediately after a huge, cathartic parade on Oct. 30, during which normal life in New England was basically TiVoed for three hours. ("Three and a half million people there and a 33 rating on TV!" marveled Steinberg.)

There is an awful imbalance to our relationship with athletes, as if we are looking through a one-way mirror. We know them, love them, dress like them and somehow believe our actions, however trivial, alter the outcome of theirs, all while they know only that we are there but cannot really see us.

Howard Frank Mosher of Vermont was in northern Maine in the summer of '03 for a book-signing, during which he discussed his upcoming novel, Waiting for Teddy Williams, a fanciful tale in which the Red Sox (can you imagine?) win the Series; he heard a small group of people singing in the back of the bookstore. It sounded like, Johnny Angel, how I love him....

As Mosher drew closer he realized they were singing, Johnny Damon, how I love him.... What was going on? he wondered.

"We're performing an incantation," one of the men said. " Damon has been in a slump. We think it's working. He was 4 for 5 last night."

Crazy. How could Damon know this? How could any Boston player know that the Reverend William Bourke, an avid Sox fan who died in his native Rhode Island before Game 2 of the World Series, was buried the day after Boston won it all, with a commemorative Sox baseball and that morning's paper tucked into his casket?

How could Pedro Martinez know that on the morning of World Series Game 2, Dianne Connolly, her three-year-old son, Patrick, and the rest of the congregation of St. Francis of Assisi parish in Litchfield, N.H., heard the choir sing a prayer for the Red Sox after the recessional? "Our Father, who art in Fenway," the singers began. They continued, "Give us this day our perfect Pedro; and forgive those, like Bill Buckner; and lead us not into depression...."

How could Curt Schilling know that Laura Deforge, 84, of Winooski, Vt., who watched every Red Sox game on TV--many of them twice--turned the ALCS around when she found a lucky, 30-year-old Red Sox hat in her closet after Game 3? Laura wore it everywhere for the next 11 days, including to bingo. (And she's still wearing it.)

"I've only been here a year," Schilling says, "and it's humbling to be a part of the relationship between Red Sox Nation and this team. I can't understand it all. I can't. All I can do is thank God that He blessed me with the skills that can have an impact on people's lives in some positive way."

The lives of these players are forever changed as professionals. Backup catcher Doug Mirabelli, for instance, will be a celebrity 30 years from now if he shows up anywhere from Woonsocket to Winooski. The '04 Red Sox have a sheen that will never fade or be surpassed.

The real resonance to this championship, however, is that it changed so many of the people on the other side of the one-way glass, poets and convicts, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the dying and the newborn.

The dawn that broke over New England on Oct. 28, the first in the life of little Damon Andrews, was unlike any other seen in three generations. Here began the birth of a new Red Sox Nation, sons no longer bearing the scars and dread of their fathers and grandfathers. It felt as clean and fresh as New Year's Day.

Damon's first dawn also was the last in the fully lived life of George Sumner.

"I walked into work that day," Leah Sumner says, "and I had tears in my eyes. People were saying, 'Did he see it? Did he see it? Please tell me your dad saw it.' You don't understand how much comfort it gave my brothers and sisters. It would have been that much sadder if he didn't get to see it.

"It was like a blessing. One lady told me he lived and died by the hand of God. I'm not religious, but he was blessed. If he was sitting here, he would agree there was something stronger there.

"It was the best year, and it was the worst year. It was an unbelievable year. I will tell my children and make sure they tell their children."

The story they will tell is not just the story of George Sumner. It is not just the story of the 2004 Boston Red Sox. It is the story of the bond between a nation of fans and its beloved team.

"It's not even relief," Leah says. "No, it's like we were a part of it. It's not like they did it for themselves or for money or for fame, but like they did it for us.

"It's bigger than money. It's bigger than fame. It's who we are. It's like I tell people. There are three things you must know about me. I love my family. I love blues music. And I love baseball."
GQ at 50: The Wronged Man
Twenty-two years after being sent to prison for an unspeakable crime he did not commit, Calvin Willis walked out a free man, the 138th American exonerated by DNA evidence. He has won his freedom, yes, but how does a falsely accused man reclaim his life?
By Andrew CorselloPhotograph by Mary Ellen MarkNovember 2007
Janet Gregory and Calvin Willis in 2004, outside the house where the rape occurred twenty-three years earlier.
As we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, we look back at some of the most powerful journalism the magazine has published. In 2004, Andrew Corsello gave us this story of Calvin Willis, a man who spent twenty-two years in prison for a rape he did not commit. DNA evidence cleared him, but it was the work of a crusading stranger, Janet Gregory, that set him free.

Three little girls sleep in a house. They're alone. It's a strange house, long like a shoebox and only one room wide, tin-roofed, set on cinder blocks, removed from the street by a long steep rise. The house has no toys, no television, so the girls have spent the night playing dress-up-they've all gone to sleep wearing comically large women's nightgowns. Katina is 7. She lies in her mama's bed. Her 9-year-old sister, Latanya, curls on the living room couch with their friend, Lucretia.* It's a dim, grimy room, littered with beer cans and lit by a single red bulb propped in the front window.

Where are their parents? The fathers-vanished. The mothers come and go at weird hours. Often they're gone all night, sometimes for days at a time. When they go, Lucretia babysits Katina and Latanya, though Lucretia herself is just a child. She's two weeks from her eleventh birthday. She's large for her age, and vaguely sad, a special-ed kid who understands others only when they stand in front of her and speak loudly and slowly. An odd drowsiness envelops her. She often sleeps from nine in the evening until three the next afternoon.

A man enters. Gently, he lifts Latanya off the couch, takes her to the bedroom, sets her down next to her younger sister, then returns to the living room.

He's not gentle with Lucretia. He puts both hands around her neck, wrenches her into the air, hurls her against the thin wall separating the living room from the bedroom. A noise flutters out of her. Katina and Latanya come half awake. They listen from their mother's bed less than a foot away. They're scared but too young to understand. Even if they did, there'd be no call to 911. The house has no phone.

The man mashes a thumb into Lucretia's throat. Then, palming her forehead with both hands, he wallops the living room wall with her skull once, twice, three times.

He says, "Shut up, or I'll kill you."

Lucretia can see him in the red light of the room. Black man. Big. A beard. Cowboy hat and cowboy boots.

Has she seen him before? Maybe.

Lucretia twists. Twists free. Bursts through the door. The block is dark except for a single streetlamp between her house and the next. She flees into its yellow cone of light. The beige nightgown she's wearing, sized for a woman and trailing behind her on the lawn, trips her. He catches up. She gets another look at him, the hulking cowboy with his hat and his boots.

He says nothing. Just takes Lucretia by both hands, the way a father might take a daughter to swing her around in circles, and boots her in the stomach. She goes limp. He carries her back into the house. Now that she's had the fight kicked out of her, he can take his time. He removes the boots, the pants. He keeps the hat on. After, he decides to leave a memento on the living room couch. A pair of boxer shorts, bunched and wet, size 40.

***

Eleventh of June, 1981. Dawn. Calvin Willis wakes with a start. He feels odd. Not himself. He feels larger than himself, as if his spirit has grown beyond the boundaries of his body. He nudges his pregnant wife.

"Debbie, something going on with me."

"Oh, Calvin," she says, smiling, eyes closed.

"Serious. I feel good."

He wants to explain it to her, but how? So much change lately. In the five years he's known her, she's been singing the same song. Come home, Calvin. Until recently, he's scattered himself around town. How could he not? At 22, Calvin Willis has a gift, an ease-the guileless, guileful appeal of a man with a blessed body that he is unafraid to fully inhabit. Big Hands, they call him. Not just for the physical fact of the hands, which would look enormous on a seven-foot man, much less one standing five feet eight, but because he is, simply, a handler. A man who knows how to dance fast and dance slow, how to tell a story, how to make his friends feel they're at the center of things, afloat with him in his bubble of youth even as they're stuck in Shreveport, Louisiana, an industrial smear near the Texas border.

Yes, Calvin has always enjoyed being Calvin. Some months ago, though, the thrill began steadily growing. At first he thought he was simply being given more mojo. But soon it became clear that the voice in his head was proffering not license but conviction. It's time to step up. Be a man. Be a father to the 2-year-old daughter he and Debbie already had, and to the son she was carrying.

So Calvin decided to take the enormous energy of his youth and his manhood, his spirit, and pour it into their life together. Step by step, he began changing things. Two months ago, he married Debbie. He started talking to God, too, like when he was a kid, giving the Old Man the play-by-play on his inner workings, in part to humble himself and in part to show he finally had something worth saying. Now they converse when Calvin is in his car, or walking down the street, or in the shower, and after they hang up, Calvin often finds himself singing.

You know, my Jesus is on the main line / Call him up sometime!

Just yesterday Calvin quit his job as a sanitation worker. He doesn't want his kids having to say their daddy rides the back of a garbage truck. He's going to become a longhaul truck driver instead. He's due to take his written test this very day.

Now, as he sits in bed next to his sleeping wife...a giddy feeling. The optimism he's been feeling is there, but something else is, too, a touch of the queer dark energy that's come over the neighborhood in the last few days. That business with the girl. Calvin was shocked to hear of it but not surprised; he'd believed for some time that the girl's mother, Barbara, and her next-door neighbor, Maxine, were turning tricks, that their homes were parades of junkies and strange men. He'd gotten into it with Maxine a month before. She'd wanted to know why he thought he was too good for her. He'd told her he didn't truck with no hookers.

Then, yesterday, after his last shift hauling trash, Calvin stopped by his grandmother's.

"You been on Perrin Street?" she said sternly.

One block over, where Lucretia lived.

"Nah. Why?"

"Two detectives been by looking for you."

Calvin waited all day, but the detectives never followed up.

Twenty-four hours later he's all but forgotten about that. As he sizes himself up in the mirror-the sheen of his Jheri curl; the ivory shirt cuffs that show off, by contrast, those giant languorous hands of his; the thick black belt with the nickel-plated buckle, tightly cinched around the taper of his twenty-nine-inch waist-he chats casually with his Jesus. "Don't know what you got planned for me today, Lord, but it feels big!" Yet once he's done with Jesus, he finds he can't stop talking. To Debbie. To himself. To the air.

"Somethin' different today!" he says, walking out the door. "I can feel it!"

He fires up the Dodge Colt, pulls out of the driveway. After one block he begins to feel physically uncomfortable, his whole body queasily overloaded like a sleeping limb roused to feeling. Two blocks from home he slams on the brakes. Now he knows.

"Goddamn!"

He whips the car around. Pulls into the driveway. With one hand he throws the car door open. With the other he undoes his collar. He scurries up the walk, throws the door open. Shucks his boots.

"That you, Calvin?"

Calvin snaps the belt off his waist. "Goddamn! Unzips his pants as he strides past the room where his daughter still sleeps.

"Calvin, what you doin'?"

He doesn't answer. Just takes off his boxer shorts, climbs into bed and says simply, "I love you." Then slowly, serenely, with eyes wide open, ever careful of her curved belly, he makes love to his wife.

The written exam takes two hours. He schedules his road test for the following Monday, then emerges from the driving academy brimming with the calm, clean feeling that comes from taking care of business. A small voice in his head then.

One more thing to set right.

Calvin crosses the street to City Hall, where the police are headquartered, and steps up to the front desk.

"My name is Calvin Willis," he says, "and I hear y'all lookin' for me."

***

Ninth of June, 1981. Two days prior.

Maxine gets home first. The sun is up. Her daughters, Latanya and Katina, play in the yard. She heads for the bedroom. Lucretia's hunched in a chair with her face buried in a pillow.

Lucretia?

The girl's face is a shell, lumpy and discolored. Dried blood sheathes her neck. Maxine goes next door for a phone.

A detective named Betty Brookins arrives. What happened? Who did this to you? But Lucretia is incoherent. She keeps grabbing her stomach and breaking into hysterics.

Maxine gets Lucretia's mom, Barbara, on the phone. She's at somebody's house watching The Price Is Right.

"Mama," Lucretia says, when Barbara appears. "That man ugly."

At the hospital, Barbara remains with her daughter for a while. But only for a while. After a few hours she goes back to Perrin Street, where she and Maxine and a few of their neighbors start to hash things out. Fueled by grief and spite and a feral hazy sense that somebody needs to pay, they make a decision.

You'll find him one block over, they soon tell the detectives. At his grandmother's.

***

"This is about Perrin Street," the detective says, "and what you did there Monday night."

"Monday night?" Calvin says. "Let me lay it out for you."

He provides the details. How Debbie told him as he walked out the door that she wanted him home by midnight. How he laughed-what did it matter whether he was in by midnight or sunrise, since her big old pregnant self was going to be in bed the whole time anyway? How he hung out with his friends Gerald and Jerome until eight o'clock. How Calvin and Jerome went off and visited a couple of friends, then hit the Glass Hat Lounge around ten-forty-five. How, when he stripped to his underwear, threw his pants and shirt over the dresser, and got into bed, Debbie roused, looked at the clock, saw that it was exactly five minutes to midnight, and said, You made it home, Calvin.

"Do you remember what shoes you were wearing, Calvin?"

Calvin laughs. Nothing he wears is ever an afterthought.

"Dress shoes. Beige. Leather."

"Not cowboy boots?"

"Nope."

"What about a cowboy hat? You have a hat on, Calvin?"

"Haven't worn a hat since last winter."

"You sure about that?"

"Look at me," Calvin says, pointing to his hair. "This cost me sixty-five dollars. You think I want to hide my curl? You think I want to muss it up with a hat?"

"That little girl knows who you are, Calvin. She knows your face."

There's an edge of fear now. This is 1981, not 1960, but it's still Louisiana, and Calvin is still a black man answering to a white detective. To help keep cool, he begins a separate and simultaneous conversation. To the detective he says aloud, evenly, "Sir, my wife is pregnant. I have a daughter. Till lately I been keeping three women on the side. I don't got to rape nobody." To his constant companion he says silently, ardently, Sweet Jesus, I been trying to get good with you. You know that, right?

"Would you be willing to take a test, Calvin?"

"I take any test you got."

Calvin surrenders his saliva, his pubic hair, his blood. The tests show him to be a type O secretor. Like 41 percent of black people. And like the cowboy man, whose semen has been found spangled over the size 40 boxer shorts and Lucretia's nightgown, and inside her.

Forty-one percent. Thousands, millions, of other men standing between him and the horror on Perrin Street. It can't touch him, can it?

Of course it can, for the oldest, tritest reason of all: He's black and poor.

Calvin is charged with the aggravated rape of a child and jailed pending trial.

Seven months pass.

***

When Calvin was 2 years old, his mother took him to his grandparents' house. He was so malnourished he was covered with sores-he looked gnawed-and drifted from room to room like a wraith, whispering nonsense to himself.

"Give me that little boy," Calvin's grandfather demanded.

"Take him," Calvin's mother said. "I can't take care of him."

So Calvin grew up calling his grandparents, Samuel and Narlvil Newton, Poppa and Momma. The Newtons, they were as filled with God, exuberantly and tremulously, as people can be on this earth, and they taught their boy how to open his heart to God, how to talk to Him and praise Him with song.

Twenty years later, the Newtons once again stand between Calvin and the abyss.

The lawyer they hire, a man named Stacey Freeman, believes the state had no cause even to suspect, much less arrest, Calvin, and waives his client's right to a jury trial. This is an incendiary charge, after all; why bring human uncertainty and prejudice into the equation when the case-as a matter of law, of fact-is so feeble? Let the judge rule from the bench.

From the get-go, however, the trial is bizarre. The district attorney announces that a day after the rape, Lucretia picked Calvin's face out of a photo lineup (the police having had his mug on file from a couple of misdemeanor arrests dating to '79). Neither Calvin nor his lawyer has heard of this lineup. The DA says he himself has just learned of it. He also announces that the photo lineup has been lost. And that the police have kept no record of how it was assembled.

After the judge denies Freeman's motion to exclude, the lineup and the issue underlying it-did Lucretia actually name Calvin as her attacker and, if so, when-becomes the trial's central question. Problem is, nearly all the prosecution witnesses contradict statements they made to police the day of the crime-and even statements they've already made on the stand. The testimony of Lucretia's mother, Barbara, is typical: She starts by saying she'd never heard the name Willis before talking to the detectives. Then she admits she had. Then she says a detective suggested the name to her. Finally, she says that Lucretia named "Calvin" to her just before they arrived at the police station on the morning of the tenth.

Then there is Lucretia. She is, simply, a terrified child, saying "yes" both literally and effectively to whatever is being asked, no matter who's asking, and casting a veil of confusion. Even her swearing-in raises questions.

"Do you know what an oath means, when you raise your hand to tell the truth?" Judge Paul Lynch asks.

"Like when your mama tells you not to do something and then you go and do it?" she offers.

Unsatisfied, or perhaps unnerved, Lynch persists.

"What did that mean when you said that you would tell the truth?"

No response.

"You are unable to answer?"

Lucretia shakes her head.

"You are crying. Are you that upset?"

Despite this beginning, Lucretia possesses some recall about the photo array.

"[Detective Betty Brookins] showed me some pictures, and then she told me to pick the ones that didn't have a full beard," she says, later adding, ominously, "[Brookins] said pick the one who did it to you, and I said neither one of them."

In other words, the police did not ask if her attacker's face was among the photos, as they should have, but told her it was-and instructed her to find it. (Detective Brookins corroborates Lucretia's account, testifying that she told the girl, "I need you to pick out the one that raped you.")

Lucretia's testimony gets stranger still. Under cross-examination, she says that she was unable to pick a face from the lineup, that the name Calvin was then suggested to her, and that she still didn't pick out a face.

When Calvin takes the stand, his sense that the trial has become a joke mixes with his fear to produce a taut, edgy witness, ready to fight. After the DA launches a series of oddball questions about daylight savings time, Calvin snaps.

"Do I look like I got a hole in the top of my head?"

"I don't know what you understand," the DA says.

"Are you trying to take me for a fool?"

Calvin's account-everything from where he was, and when, to the beige shoes he was wearing-squares perfectly with the testimony of his friends, Jerome and Gerald, with whom he spent the night of June 8, and with that of his wife. But in the end, Calvin's testimony does not matter. Nor does it matter that if the testimony of Calvin's alibi witnesses is taken at face value, the scenario of Calvin as rapist necessarily means that he returned home at five to midnight, changed out of his beige shoes, played possum for a while next to his sleeping wife, snuck out of bed, dressed up as a cowboy, left the house, savagely raped and beat a child, returned home, hung up his cowboy paraphernalia, and crept back into bed without rousing his wife. It does not even matter that the rapist's waistline, as evidenced by his boxer shorts, is eleven inches larger than Calvin's.

None of this matters because the trustworthiest witness of all-science-has calmly pointed its finger at Calvin: "Shorts were found at the scene," Lynch rules, "and...semen stains matched that of the defendant. The nightgown that was worn by the victim had semen stains that matched that of the defendant."

On February 2, 1982, Judge Lynch finds Calvin Willis guilty of raping a child. On May 17, 1982, Lynch sentences him to a term no shorter than "natural life" without the possibility of parole.

"Do you have anything to say?" Lynch asks.

Calvin turns from the judge to face Mrs. Newton. He speaks in a quiet, bewildered voice.

"I didn't do it, Momma."

Narlvil Newton feels her face tightening into a mask, openmouthed and silent, as her boy is taken away.

"Momma?" Calvin whispers, looking back, waiting for her face to move. "Momma?"

***

In all of Shreveport, young Lucretia notwithstanding, is there a human being as cursed as Calvin Willis?

There is.

Her name is Janet Gregory. She's a white woman a few years older than Calvin who walks with a limp and talks with a drawl. By her own admission she was raised among racists, though she herself has never bought into that. Prissy, as she is known, has an unusual disposition. She has an uncanny ability to sniff out liars and phonies and a corresponding inability, just as uncanny, to refrain from telling those liars and phonies exactly what she thinks of them. In other respects Prissy is strangely guarded. She doesn't like being looked at or touched by men, because men have brought almost incomprehensible pain to her life. Three months after marrying her high school sweetheart, Ralph, Prissy accidentally shot herself through the knee with his .357. Doctors told her she would never walk again. Four months later, before it became clear that Janet was tougher than anyone knew and would indeed walk again, Ralph was killed in a car wreck.

When a proper period of time had passed, Prissy agreed, at the prodding of friends, to date a man named Daryl. He picked her up in his truck and took her not to the concert he'd told her they'd be attending but to his rented trailer home. He asked her to take a seat, walked into another room, returned with a shotgun, and announced that she would be performing oral sex on him.

"I think you should just shoot me," Prissy said.

Daryl shrugged, laid the shotgun in one corner, raped her, then drove her home.

On some level, Prissy suspected that Daryl might somehow be the price she needed to pay for living and breathing when her husband had died, so for many years she told no one about what had happened in the trailer.

She did find love again, though. His name was Ferris. They married. Ferris and his dog were hit by a seventy-five-car freight train. He'd been fiddling with the radio in his truck.

Prissy is now married to her third husband. She refers to this man not as "my husband" but as "my son's father." This is because he beats and forces himself upon her.

In years to come, after she secures a protective order and a divorce, people will ask about her ex, and Janet will say, "The one constant anger in my life is my son's father. I can handle no child support. But for my boy's whole life he hasn't had a father. And for that, I could literally rip his head off and shit down his neck. Given all that has befallen Janet Gregory, such statements carry a certain weight.

Because Janet's third husband-whom she characterizes drily, ominously, as "the one who lives"-makes no financial contribution, she works as a paralegal. In this capacity, she strikes up some remarkable relationships. One is with a death-row inmate named Wayne Felde, whom her boss represents on appeal. Janet knows Felde killed a policeman in a drunken rage, and he doesn't pretend that he didn't. But throughout his unsuccessful appeals-even after she stops working for his lawyer-she talks to Wayne Felde, writes him, visits him, lays her hands upon him during court proceedings, functions as a vessel for him, assuring him when he feels his humanity departing him that it is safe and intact with her. This is the thing about Janet. For some reason, her sufferings, rather than withering her soul, have greatly expanded it. They have given her sight into the inner lives of others and, yes, an abiding and forceful anger. Yet what she sees she tends not to judge, the energy of her rage instead being transmuted into wondering: What is my role here? On the day of his electrocution, Wayne and Janet speak on the phone until his time comes. "I have to go, they're here for me, I love you, I'll miss you, good-bye," he says. Janet takes out a loan to pay for his burial.

After working for Felde's lawyer, Janet finds employment with an attorney named Graves Thomas-whom Momma and Poppa Newton have hired to appeal Calvin's conviction. In May 1987, while weighing Calvin's options, Graves-one of Janet's dearest friends-goes waterskiing. After cleaning moss from the engine's propeller, he steps up to the deck, says, "Let's go!" and is struck dead by lightning.

A few months after this, Samuel Newton, Calvin's de facto father and the man whose meager salary has been keeping Calvin's legal strategies-his hope-alive, dies of cancer. Calvin is given leave from prison to attend the funeral. In a way, it feels like his own.

In the two years preceding Graves Thomas's death, Calvin has heard the name Janet Gregory once or twice, though he's never met her. He actually thinks she's a secretary. He does not know that there is little in this world Janet Gregory has not withstood, or how this has generated a matter-of-fact willingness-utterly bold, utterly without vanity-to think Yes, I'll take it to everything life shovels at her, no matter how daunting or malign. He does not know that Janet Gregory, a white woman raised to be racist and violated by two men, has been going through her dead boss's files, reading the trial transcript of a black man convicted of rape and alternately exclaiming "This is bullshit!" and "I cannot live with this!" and, more important, wondering, What is my role here?

All Calvin knows is that there are two people out of place at his grandfather's wake, and that Calvin is one of them. There are the scores of mourners in their Sunday best, silent and elegant, all black. There is Calvin, hands and ankles tautly chained to a black steel box affixed to his beltline, shuffling, clanking, eyes lowered-no longer Big Hands, no longer the man who once used his gaze to seize ownership of whatever came before him. And there is that woman, the sole white face, kneeling before his children and speaking softly. Now she's moving toward Calvin, limping, crying, backing his guards off with a ferocious glare, then hugging his neck and saying Calvin, oh Calvin. It's been five years since any woman-including his wife, whom he sees only at family gatherings in prison- has touched him with such intensity.

"Lady," he says, "who are you?"

***

From 1982 to 1986 the state of Louisiana houses Calvin at the Caddo Correctional Institute thirty miles outside Shreveport. Debbie brings the family every Saturday-Momma and Poppa Newton, while he's still alive; Calvin's little girl, Kesha, 3 years old at the time of his conviction; and Calvin Jr., the baby, born while Calvin was jailed awaiting trial-and this gives his life a semblance of reality, even as the reunions, in a noisy visitor's room full of strangers, feel formal and sterile and weird.

The visits are never enough, of course. Not even close. His need for Debbie is complex. At first he tethers his longing to his memories: of dancing with her for an hour straight the night they met; of their holiday celebrations; of Kesha's birth; of instances when the might of their physical love verged on the preposterous. But as the years pass, he comes to see that there is a difference between what he can remember about their relationship and the relationship itself-that the great moments of their life, though marvelous, are unconnected dots, and that what actually holds a man and a woman together are millions of tiny, unremarkable moments that cannot be individually seen or collectively explained. The moments one simply must be there for. So he finds himself pining for what he cannot quite remember, the nonevents, the sweet quiet nothings of being with her. There's a thing she used to do as she nuzzled his chest in bed, a peaceful rolling coo. Did she know she did it? Did she know he could feel the low little hum in his sternum? What did she mean by it? Something plain and good, he thinks now. You're here with me. I'm here with you.

His longing for his babies, on the other hand, is not complex. Where missing Debbie is an act, something he engages in, his need for his babies seizes and terrorizes him. There is no controlling it. He will try to numb himself, dip his mind in a gray vagueness for days at a time, but then something sharp-the ammoniac sting of industrial solvent in the mess, the cold shock of his cell's stainless-steel shitter against his haunches-will jerk him to a state of full awareness and he will freeze, clasp his son's first bib, which he keeps with him, over his eyes and say aloud, "My babies." He discovers that his desperate hunger to touch them, compounded a hundredfold by the fact that he's innocent-he is innocent!-is sometimes ameliorated by physical pain. One day he goes so far as to sneak into a room he's not supposed to be in. When, inevitably, a guard approaches saying, "Hey, you," Calvin calmly wraps a hand around the man's forearm, lowers himself into the man's chest, and flips him on his back. The storm comes within seconds, half a dozen guards with billy clubs, calling him nigger and bludgeoning his kidneys and shins until he no longer feels the agony of his lost children.

In 1986, shortly before being transferred 260 miles across the state to Angola prison, Calvin addresses the unspoken question hanging over the Saturday reunions. He asks the Newtons and his children for some time with Debbie. Once they're alone, he tells his wife that he aches for her, aches the way he did in his last hours as a free man, when a spirit came upon him and sent him home to make love to her for the last time. Debbie begins to cry.

"Don't say this thing, Calvin."

But he must, and she knows it. He tells her that he knows it's been hard for her. That he knows she's been working six days a week at Dillard's with double shifts on Saturdays. That he knows Kesha and Calvin Jr. now spend most of their time at their great-grandparents'. That this is no way to live. And he tells her that even though the thought of her with another man feels to him like a form of death, he knows that it must happen.

"I hate it," Debbie sobs. "I hate it!"

Calvin just shakes his head, folds his big hands around hers, and looks her in the eye.

"The only thing in this world that could separate us," he tells her, "is if you had a child by another man."

***

The most despised and marked man in the world is the man imprisoned for raping a child, so Calvin tells no one on the inside why he is there. To avoid anyone asking, he seeks no company and strives to keep others from seeking it in him. To hide himself in plain sight, he kills everything within him that is engaging-his ability to tell a story, to offer counsel, to make everyone around him laugh and forget. He even strips the confidence and sex from his stride, tightening it up and keeping his eyes downcast when he moves from here to there so that his body in motion suggests nothing except Nothing to see here.

Calvin's way of being, showing his heart to God through constant conversation while showing the world the face of a zombie, takes enormous effort. It requires psychic sustenance: the faith and love of family and of the extended community back in Shreveport. Yet after the first few months, nobody besides Calvin's family visits. Nobody writes. Why? Why don't all those people who once adored Big Hands stick by him?

It's not that anyone back home thinks he's guilty. Nor does their belief in his innocence lack conviction. They are thoroughly convicted people. Yet theirs is not a conscientious, do-the-right-thing kind of conviction. It's subtler, deeper, beyond righteous anger: It's conviction-as-resignation. The people Calvin grew up with presume that innocent black men will go to jail and that there's nothing anybody can do about it. Most are Baptists or born-again evangelicals, a handful of generations removed from slave theology, who believe that the reward for people such as them lies in the next plane and that there is little if any human agency in this world. When a right man like Calvin is shut away, their response is less That is an outrage! than Ain't that a shame.

Debbie, though, does not believe God has willed Calvin to be in prison or his community to abandon him, and she is outraged. Her anger thickens and curdles her heart until she begins to carry a conviction of her own, secret and terrible. One day when she can no longer abide herself, she tells her grandmother-in-law that as hard as it is working all those shifts at Dillard's, she's starting not to mind, because almost everyone she works with is white.

"They the only ones that been offering me kindness."

"You need to look to God, child," Mrs. Newton says.

"We got a black church on every corner in this neighborhood-where they been?" Debbie fires back. "It's a white church that's been bringing my kids gifts at Christmastime. My pastor hasn't even talked to me about it. I got no one of my own people I can talk to. Black people don't stick together, Momma! Now that we finally got something-'cause we free and we can work and make something of ourselves-it's like we afraid they'll take it away again, so we don't share anything with each other."

Debbie knows how a bigoted mind works, the way it assigns the characteristics of individuals to whole groups of people. All black people eat watermelon.... All black people are shiftless.... But as her community forsakes her family, she finds her mind and heart similarly debased-black people don't stick together-and the indignity of it makes her all the more enraged at what the state of Louisiana has done to their lives.

***

When Calvin sees that white woman whispering to his 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son at Poppa Newton's wake, he assumes she's talking cute to them, distracting them from the enveloping sadness. He's wrong. She is making a furious and tender vow.

"Two things," she tells Kesha and Calvin Jr. "First, if you hear people saying bad things about your daddy today, don't you believe a word of it." The children nod. They don't know what to make of this woman. "Second, if I have to, I will go to my grave trying to prove he is innocent."

Indeed. After cookie and a few other nouns, Calvin is one of the first words Janet Gregory's child utters. Sometimes when his mother can't get to the phone, he'll pick up and squeal "Calvin! Calvin! Calvin!" into the receiver. In a way, "Calvin" becomes the man of Janet's fatherless house, a palpable presence by way of the legal briefs carpeting the living room floor and the Post-it-note brainstorms spackling the walls.

Just as some nurses become as expert in medicine as the doctors they work with, Janet has built an encyclopedic knowledge of criminal law. While holding down a job, attending classes in pursuit of a college degree, and singly raising her child, she researches and writes Calvin's petitions herself, picking apart the bungled photo array and the contradictory testimony at his trial. Then she shows up at the doorsteps of various Shreveport lawyers, announcing that "I've prepared this marvelous writ and I need a warm body with a law degree to sign it." Since everyone knows she's no sucker or bleeding heart, and since she's just a little bit scary, they sign.

In 1988, by way of Janet, Calvin files a postconviction application. It is denied without explanation. This kind of per curiam judgment, as it is called, is very difficult to challenge. By essentially declaring, "Because we said so," it offers a convict no legal traction, no argument to parse on appeal.

In 1989 he files a writ of habeas corpus. Denied per curiam.

In 1990 he files a second postconviction application. Denied per curiam.

The same year, he files his second writ of habeas corpus. Denied per curiam.

Again in 1990 he files for postconviction relief with the Louisiana Supreme Court. Denied per curiam.

In early 1991 he files another writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Denied per curiam.

During these years, as Janet fails to prove Calvin's innocence-fails, even, to get a court to explain his "guilt"-the two of them never lay eyes upon one another. In fact, after their first face-to-face at his grandfather's wake, Calvin and Janet don't meet in person for seven years. Janet simply hasn't the time or the money for the 520-mile round-trip from Shreveport to Angola prison. She does not travel. She does not eat out. She does not shop. She does not have a love life. She works at her job and her schoolwork, raises her boy, and files briefs.

Despite the physical distance-or perhaps because of it-Janet's relationship with Calvin takes on a teetering intensity. At first their letters and calls concern only legal matters. After a time, though, what once became clear to Wayne Felde becomes clear to Calvin Willis: that Janet knows no bounds, that she is capable of acting as a preserving vessel for another person's humanity- humanity that would otherwise stagnate or deform. Tentatively at first, then flowingly, then in a roaring geyser, Calvin reveals to Janet...everything. Everything he must keep hidden in Angola for fear of being killed, or worse, and everything he must keep hidden from the members of his family, who are already fragile. Only with Janet is he able to flex the humor and intelligence and libido and wrath that together form his manhood. He tells Janet about Angola, a hard-labor camp redolent of the slave plantation it once was, where Louisiana's lifers are sent to wither and die-how the place is designed not to rehabilitate or even hold men but to turn them into something less than men. He tells her how every day hurts and threatens to remove him from his self. He tells her what it's like not to see his wife and children and mother, and how the ghost of things not done haunts his conscience. He tells her about his ongoing lover's quarrel, belligerent and ecstatic, with his God. He tells her about his fevered and tearful masturbation, usually conducted without privacy. He tells her about scouring the dictionary in the prison library for new, long, strong, clean words: phenomenon, fastidious, punctilious, omnipotent. He tells her about performing biceps curls with law books-the only way they prove useful. He tells her about the dead-eyed cellmate who, when arrested in a nightclub, had a beer in one hand and a sack stuffed with a woman's head in the other. He tells her about seeing human beings hang themselves, puncture their wrists, overdose, anything to escape, and about human flesh getting shivved and cudgeled and fucked. He tells her about the petty and arbitrary humiliations the guards mete out: the way they give Calvin thirty days in extended lockdown for "reckless eyeballing" (failing to turn and face the wall in the presence of a female guard) and another thirty for the "aggravated sex offense" of accidentally grazing a female security guard's shoulder in passing, the way they fire rifle shots a foot above his head when he crosses an imaginary "guard line" out in the fields on work detail, and the way they cuff him to the bars of his cell for six hours just for fun and Mace his eyes if he doesn't offer up his wrists the instant he's told. He tells her about being paid four cents an hour to pick cotton in the fields surrounding the prison, and how much worse this is than being paid nothing at all. He tells her what it's like watching the children of the guards, who live on the plantation grounds, grow up, and how strange it is to see young boys who once called "Hey, nigger!" to him as he worked the fields become guards themselves-yes, that much time is passing-with rifles in their hands and toothpicks in their mouths and absolute power over where he rests his eyeballs. He tells her he is losing his grasp on time, losing his ability to count, in a way; how during his first four years of imprisonment, at Caddo Correctional, time was still solid, still the bedrock of his reality, each day marked by a beginning and an end linked by a continuous line of being, but how at Angola, a place that cannot possibly be real (can it?), he has learned that a man's grasp on time is like his good health- something taken for granted until it dissolves. He tells her about the way a cell becomes a kiln in the summer, the air void of motion, 110 degrees at two in the morning, the way he will take a tin cup and splash the brown water from the tap onto the concrete floor, then lie in it face down, spread-eagled and naked, his nose and mouth filled with the ever present shit-stink bubbling up from the drain, his ears filled with the baboon shrieks of men whose consciousness has been reduced to the purely physical, saying to himself over and over, for hours on end, I will not die in Angola.... I will not die in Angola.... I will not die in Angola....

More than anything, though, it is his anger that Calvin tells Janet about, and that he needs her to absorb and carry for him. It is his anger that debases and emasculates him most, even more than all his unspent love. It is his anger that shuts down his imagination (he does not dream when he sleeps at Angola-ever) and stills time, that turns a day into a month. And it is his anger, eating him inside-out like lupus, that threatens to alienate him from his God. This is the thing that cannot happen. For only in prayer does Calvin travel beyond the cast of his own umbra to perceive something other than his own suffering self. Prayer is not to Calvin what drugs or suicide are to other men in Angola-a means of escape. It is how he tunes in to the fact that he is a real person, here on this earth, living in real time, and that he is not alone. And it is only in prayer that the voice comes to him, full of mystery and hope.

You have a testimony. You must bear witness to yourself. And you will.

***

In January 1993, after a change in Louisiana law allows him to do so, Calvin obtains the initial police report on his case. It is an astonishment. In it, two detectives write that on the morning of June 9-hours after the crime-Latanya told them that a "big" man named "HARRY" [sic] who "had on a cowboy hat, cowboy shoes" had visited the house and left after finding only children there.

Harry. A big man. A man Latanya knew by name. Ugly. Not Calvin Willis.

Eleven years into his sentence, Calvin secures a certificate of probable cause and reappeals.

A month later, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dismisses the grant-not on the merits of its argument but because of the "untimely filing by petitioner."

Untimely.

As if Calvin has had the original police report in hand for ten years and has been omitting it from his previous appeals out of...caprice?

He has one more shot. In October 1993 he files another application for postconviction relief; in March 1994 the First Judicial District Court of Caddo Parish denies Calvin's application. This denial is not per curiam. Reasoning is offered.

"The police report does make mention of...'HARRY,' but it does not state that 'HARRY' visited the home where the incident occurred earlier that day."

This is inane: Though the detectives did not quote Latanya on when "HARRY" visited, it is patently clear she meant the day of the incident-and that this is what the detectives thought she meant.

"Because...'HARRY' was not necessarily a suspect," the ruling continues, "there is no need for the court to consider [this claim]."

Catch-22: "HARRY" was never a suspect because the police report in which his name appeared never saw the light of day throughout the investigation, during the trial, and for the next eleven years.

It is over now. In legal terms, Calvin's case has been "exhausted." Janet, too, is exhausted, and stooped under the weight of anger, both her own and Calvin's. All of her heart and soul and rightness have been poured into Calvin's legal briefs over the better part of a decade. Countless thousands of words, all met with the same slap to the face: DENIED.

Until now there has been a distinct difference between what Janet did for Wayne Felde and what she has been doing for Calvin. What she did for Wayne was a form of palliative care; she was never going to save him. Calvin has always been different. Like Wayne, he has demanded her love but also-because the object has been to free him-every ounce of her intellectual fortitude. And she has failed. Now it is merely her job, as it was with Wayne, to ensure Calvin goes to his grave knowing he has been understood.

But then one day not long after his final denial, Calvin calls. "People around here been talking about something," he says. "It's called DNA."

For a time the only sound on the line is the recorded voice that interjects every few minutes to remind her that she is taking a collect call from a prisoner. Janet knows about DNA evidence, how it has broken men out of death row. Still, something within her resists its promise of sword-through-the-knot magic. To Janet, believing in DNA-in the possibility of a force cooler and stronger than the human minds that conduct and corrupt the business of justice-is like believing in happy endings, something to which she has long been allergic.

"I need to see your face," she says at last.

Janet brings the kids and Mrs. Newton. Debbie remains in Shreveport; in the wake of Calvin's final failed appeal, she has written a series of letters explaining that she finally has the means to purchase a home. But creditors won't lend to a single mother with an incarcerated husband. She has assured him the divorce will be nothing but a piece of paper to mollify the bank. But signing it has left Calvin with a sick feeling. Maybe it's better she's not here.

Janet, for her part, now knows Calvin more intimately than anyone save God. Yet having met Calvin in person only once, seven years before, she barely knows his face. He in turn barely knows hers. Their faces-hers reveals its weathering; his, strangely, appears as fresh as the day he turned himself in-render them unrecognizable to one another. For the first fifteen minutes they do something they've never done before: small talk. Finally, Calvin addresses the subject.

"People gettin' relief from this DNA," he says.

"Let me give you a reality check," Janet says.

This is one of the reasons she has come in person; she's not sure he can survive another dashed hope. She explains that exoneration by DNA evidence is a long shot. Eleven years have passed. Even if the DNA in the rape kit and on the boxer shorts has been preserved, the DA's office might refuse to release the file.

"We need to do this," he says.

Another reason Janet has traveled 260 miles is to look Calvin in the eye, and she does so now.

"I will do what needs to be done. You know that. I will write the letters. I will talk to the police. I will raise the money. But the thing about DNA evidence is, it's...irrefutable."

"I know."

So she will start again, from scratch.

***

It takes nine years.

For the first four, Janet's on her own. After determining that the Caddo Parish clerk's office has preserved Lucretia's rape kit and the boxer shorts, she does what she did during the appellate phase of Calvin's case: letter-writing, calling, fund-raising. In 1998 she discovers the Innocence Project, cofounded by Barry Scheck and run out of the Cardozo law school in New York City, and submits an application on Calvin's behalf. Scheck accepts. This is big. Scheck is the country's most credible legal advocate when it comes to DNA evidence, with access to the most vaunted laboratories. He tells Janet she'll need to raise $2,500, though by the time all is said and done the bill will top $14,000.

Janet redoubles her fund-raising efforts, showing up in the offices and homes of friends and enemies alike armed with Calvin's story and a letter printed on Innocence Project stationery. She hits up clerks at the grocery store, the woman at the dry cleaner's, strangers on the street. The donations rarely top $50. She mails copies of the checks-including one for $3 from her mother's housekeeper, the most the woman can afford-to Calvin, who pens each contributor a thank-you note. (The four cents an hour he earns slinging a blade in the fields of Angola nets him about a stamp's worth of postage a day.)

She even hits up a retired prosecutor named Carey Schimpf.

"Hey, Carey, do you remember a guy you prosecuted about twenty years ago named Calvin Willis?"

Not in great detail, Schimpf says.

"Well, he was innocent. But guess what? You have the chance to redeem yourself."

Schimpf declines to contribute.

In 1999 the district attorney agrees to release the evidence to Scheck's DNA specialist, Edward Blake of Richmond, California.

Four more years pass.

Janet is adept at rage; she's known for years how to channel the two lives' worth that she carries into her legal questing. But these four more years of waiting threaten to transport her to a place where her anger consumes her. One thing keeps her on an even keel: a burly, bearded, ex-junkie, ex-alcoholic country-music guitarist and songwriter named Randy Arthur. He is, like Janet, intimately familiar with pain. Years ago, in an alcoholic stupor, he killed a jogger with his pickup truck. Now, Janet stays awake at night and listens as Randy pleads with the man's widow in his sleep, telling her how he's bettered his life and asking for her forgiveness. Randy, in short, is a person who gets Janet. They marry in November of 1999.

***

A change comes over Calvin in these years as he waits for his blood to speak for him. During his first fifteen years or so behind bars he often felt that every filament of his being was aligned in the service of pain, as if pain itself had designed and realized in him the perfect instrument for its expression. Over time, though-as with Janet, and perhaps because of her-the perfection of his pain has cleaned him out, concentrated and clarified him, pushed him deeper into God. Not just his own God, either. Calvin's prayer life has imbued him with a peaceful intellectual hunger; by the late '90s he has become the kind of Christian who reads the Koran and attends Muslim prayer services so as to behold the manifold nature of holiness, and who sees God in every face he encounters-even those of his guards.

On his way to the dungeon known as Camp J for yet another "reckless eyeballing" offense, Calvin turns to the guard hustling him along and asks, "Why you hate me?" Something in Calvin's tone commands the man to confront the question head-on rather than sarcastically.

"I hate you because you are the shit of the earth."

"No," Calvin says. "Why you hate me?"

"I hate you because of what you did."

"No. Why you hate me."

The guard gives Calvin a long look.

"Boy, I was raised to hate you," he says, walking off.

"I'm not the one you hate," Calvin calls after him. "I'm not the one."

This is Calvin Willis now. Even as he continues to suffer one of the greatest offenses a man in this world can endure, his consciousness has been multiplied. He sees through. It is even possible that he forgives. There is power in that. And knowledge. He knows now that he can never be repressed, only murdered.

By the time Calvin's blood reaches Blake, his life can no longer be measured in terms of time, which he's lost track of anyway-only in terms of its crescendoing radiance. Because he finally can, he begins to take back the anger Janet has been carrying for him.

"The work you have done is good," he tells her over the phone and in letters, time and again. "You are good. Concentrate on that. Let your anger go."

She says she doesn't know how.

"Just give it to me," Calvin says.

It is by way of this grace that when the cruelest blow comes, Calvin can sustain it.

Late in 1999, a man on Calvin's cellblock, also from Shreveport, receives a family visit.

"I got news for you," he says when he returns. "Your wife got remarried, man! She got a daughter. That girl already 5 or 6 years old!"

Debbie, it turns out, did not need his signature on the divorce decree just to buy the house. Back in 1994, while Janet, Momma Newton, and the children were visiting Calvin in Angola, she was in the hospital giving birth to her daughter, Briana; Janet and Mrs. Newton hadn't thought it their place to break the news.

The one line I drew. The only thing that could separate us.

He thinks, too, about the little art-class trinkets he's sent her over the years, the toothpick houses and construction-paper Valentine's Day cards, and how childish and pathetic they've surely seemed to her, an adult getting on with her life, going on without him, a new family.

"What you gonna do, Calvin?"

It's a rhetorical question, but Calvin answers.

"Nothing, man. When you in prison you can't do nothing about nothing."

And by the time the cruelest blow comes to Janet, Calvin has already taken back the principal on his anger, assuring her by way of his manifest serenity that she is free to fully concentrate on her own burden.

Randy's years of substance abuse have caught up with him; his liver is dying. In September 2001 a donor organ matching Randy's tissue type is located. Prissy kisses her husband before he goes under and tells him she'll be there when he gets back. But when the doctors open him up they discover his hepatic veins have turned to jelly. He bleeds out on the operating table. At the age of 46, Janet becomes a widow for the third time.

A group of local musicians throws a benefit; Janet has been sending her own money, along with the donations she's drummed up, to the Innocence Project to pay for Calvin's testing, and doesn't have enough to bury her husband.

***

In March 2003, Janet gets Calvin on the phone.

"Hey, Calvin," she says, "you need to start studying for your driver's test."

"What you talking about?"

"There's male DNA in Lucretia's fingernail scrapings. It matches the male DNA on the boxer shorts."

"Okay."

"It's not your DNA."

Calvin doesn't say anything.

"You're coming home, Calvin."

There's something blindingly, even painfully, bright about the words, and for a moment they crush him. How could it be? How could something in the blood, a million times smaller than anything the eye can see, rout the brutality of mind and heart, as old as the species, that took his life away?

Word spreads quickly around the cellblock.

Calvin is innocent! Calvin gettin' out!

Over the next few days, the guards overseeing Calvin approach him to have a word. They do not congratulate. They do not apologize. They grin. Grin and say, each of them, the same three words.

You'll be back.

Six months pass.

No one at Angola bothers explaining to Calvin or Janet why a proven-innocent man continues to serve time. Nor do they offer any guesses as to when he might be released.

But on the evening of September 18, 2003, a journalist tells Janet that Calvin is being put on a bus at five the next morning to the Caddo Correctional Center, where he will be released. Janet has a terrible vision: Calvin greeting freedom in a neon orange jumpsuit. She runs out to buy a selection of jeans, khakis, and dress shirts, as well as socks, tennis shoes, and a belt.

The guards keep Calvin's hands and feet manacled throughout the 260-mile drive. They take a long McDonald's stop. They give Calvin nothing to eat or drink. They offer him no acknowledgement whatsoever. Inside the correctional center they unshackle his limbs, then leave without saying another word.

An officer approaches Calvin with the clothes Janet has purchased.

"Your lady friend brought these for you," she says.

Calvin stares at the shirts and pants for a while. Spiritual matters aside, he has not made a choice since 1981. He no longer knows how.

"Miss," he finally says, "I haven't worn clothes in twenty-two years. Could you pick something out for me?"

The corrections officer takes each article of clothing from the box and places it up against Calvin's frame. She picks the khakis and a plaid button-down shirt. The cling of the new socks on his ankles startles him.

"You look nice," she tells him after he's dressed. Then: "It's time."

"What do I do?"

"Leave," she says, pointing to the exit.

As he approaches the door, Calvin prays. Prays for a renewing of his mind and heart, prays to be free of whatever anger he retains, the self-inflicted wound of it. And at the instant he lays his hand upon the door and steps into the light, he receives this final piece of his deliverance; he experiences it as a hand, searing and baptismal, passing over him.

You must bear witness to yourself. And you will.

They are out there with the media, waiting. Momma Newton and Kesha and Calvin Jr., whom he hasn't seen in almost ten years. And Janet. All his loves except Debbie.

Debbie had a terrible night last night. Lying in bed next to her husband, Edward, with eyes wide open, she prayed for the trembling to stop.

Lord, keep my body still. If my husband sees my distress he'll think I want Calvin back.

Later, in the hours before sunrise, her mind went elsewhere.

I was 23 years old. I had the best marriage anybody could have. And then you were gone. And I couldn't talk about you. Not even with black people. My own people. And my mind went blank. For years my mind went blank. I couldn't remember you the same. I had to let you go. And I hated you. Hated you for making me need to be with other men. Hated you for not being at home. You should have been home, Calvin.

At the instant Calvin Willis, age 44, steps into freedom-as the 138th convict in this country to be exonerated by DNA evidence-Debbie and Edward are at Home Depot purchasing supplies for a home renovation.

Debbie sees the replay on the evening news, however: There are her children. There is Janet, God bless her. There is Mrs. Newton, 85 years old, unable to form words, howling as she grabs her boy. And there is Calvin, serene, poised, fielding questions.

"You know," he says, "I lost my wife."

Then he bursts into tears.

***

It is not over. It will never be over. Hugo Holland, chief of the sex-crimes unit at the district attorney's office, makes a concerted effort to ensure that Calvin Willis retains the stigma of child rape, unleashing a series of acid sound bites:

"Calvin Willis is not innocent. He's just not guilty."

"There is no reason whatsoever for us to ever say that the legal system made a mistake."

"[Just] because we didn't find Calvin Willis's DNA on the underwear doesn't mean that he didn't leave them there."

Hugo Holland is the least of Calvin's problems. In practical terms, as an exonerated man in the state of Louisiana, he gets nothing. Not a dime for having two of the best-earning decades of his life stolen from him, and for the loss of his family. Without Momma Newton's spare bedroom, he'd be homeless.

Yet there are myriad odder ways in which Calvin in burdened. There are, for instance, his dual aversions to making eye contact and to being touched. His old friends, who remember him as the most physically assertive and expressive of men, never know what to say when Calvin goes stiff and silent in their embraces. There is his inability to stop cleaning (he scrubs Mrs. Newton's floors, sinks, and toilets at least once a day), as if the literal and figurative upwelling of shit he battled every day in Angola has permanently imprinted his olfactory nerves. There is the way life behind bars has damaged his understanding of time. He can tell you in vivid detail, for instance, about an episode in Angola in which he brandished a coffeepot during a fight and ended up burning a layer of skin off his face, but he can't remember what year this happened, or even whether it happened in the late '80s or early '90s or mid-'90s.

So much he has unlearned. Shortly after his release, Momma Newton prepares an enormous repast. When the spread is ready, she hands him a plate and says, "You start!" But Calvin just stands there, puzzled. A minute passes before Mrs. Newton makes the realization-the boy doesn't know how to serve his own plate-and turns away so he doesn't see her tears.

This is Calvin Willis after twenty-two years in a box: a man of rare spiritual elevation; a child who doesn't know how to spoon food onto his own plate.

At Thanksgiving, Momma Newton gathers her kin-Calvin; Kesha and her husband; Calvin Jr. and his boy (Calvin's first grandson, Elijah, born two days after Calvin gained his freedom)-as well as Debbie, her husband, Edward, and their 9-year-old daughter, Briana. The minute she lays eyes on Calvin, Debbie becomes acutely self-conscious; where she's put on the pounds, Calvin, having been stopped in time, is as beautiful as the day he vanished.

"I know," she says, casting her eyes down. "I was a size 5 when you left. Now look at me."

Calvin just smiles.

"Still look good to me."

She hugs him, then asks if he's ready. When he says he is, Edward comes forward.

"I got to say something to you," Calvin says.

Edward braces himself. This has been a long time coming.

"I want to thank you," Calvin continues. "It takes a strong man to raise another man's kids right, allowing them to become who they need to become. My children are beautiful. I know you've had a hand in that. I thank you."

"Who's that man?" Briana asks her mother. "Why he make Daddy cry?"

Debbie takes her daughter aside.

"He's father to Kesha and Calvin Jr.," she explains, "but no one to you."

Briana does a lovely thing then. She runs across the living room and grabs hold of Calvin's waist. He takes her up, and the two of them talk for a while. He says the things one says to a child. Hello, missy. What's your name? How are you? But after a few minutes Briana sees something in this man, something cavernous and vast, and it amazes her. Calvin, a man who has been forced to spend half his life letting other souls carry and act upon his most fathomless passions, then watches as Briana turns to face her mother.

"Mama, this man!" she cries. "He love you!"

*The victim's name has been changed.

A Reporter at LargeThe Lost City of ZA quest to uncover the secrets of the Amazon.by David Grann
September 19, 2005 .PrintE-MailSingle PageKeywords
The Amazon;Amazonian Rain Forests (Rainforests);Search Expeditions;Fawcett, Percy Harrison (Col.);Lost City of Z;Explorers;DisappearancesIn the summer of 1996, rains flooded the Amazon, rendering it virtually impenetrable. Bridges were swept away, and, amid vast stretches of mud, small holes appeared where cobras and armadillos had buried themselves. Then the sun came out and scorched the region. Rivers sank by thirty feet; bogs became meadows; islands turned into hills. Finally, after months of waiting, a team of Brazilian adventurers and scientists headed into the jungle, determined to solve what has been described as "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century." The group was searching for signs of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British explorer who, in 1925, had disappeared in the forest, along with his son and another companion.

The expedition expected to find little more than bones-yet even discovering those would have been a revelation. When he vanished, Fawcett and his party had been trying to uncover a lost civilization hidden in the Amazon, which Fawcett had named, simply, the City of Z. In the next seven decades, scores of explorers had tried and failed to retrace Fawcett's path. Some nearly died of starvation, while others retreated in the face of tribes that attacked with poisoned arrows. Then there were those adventurers who had gone to find Fawcett and, instead, disappeared along with him, swallowed by the same forests in the Mato Grosso region which travellers had long ago christened the "green hell."

The latest attempt was led by James Lynch, a Brazilian financier who had trekked through the most unforgiving terrains of South America. A man in his early forties, with blue eyes and pale skin that burned in the sun, he had competed in many gruelling adventure contests: once, he had hiked for seventy-two hours without sleep, and traversed a wide canyon by shimmying across a rope. For all their physical challenges, Lynch's voyages were also intellectual endeavors, and he spent months in the library, researching and planning them. On one trip, he located the long-disputed source of the Amazon, and pinpointed where, in 1937, a pioneering German aviator had crashed in the Andes. He had never, however, encountered a case like that of Colonel Fawcett.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Fawcett had been acclaimed as one of the last of the great amateur archeologists and cartographers-men who ventured into uncharted territories with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. Fawcett survived in the jungle for years at a time, without contact with the outside world, often subsisting for days on a handful of nuts; he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never seen a white man before; he emerged with maps of regions from which no expedition had returned.

Yet it was his "quest," as Fawcett called it, to find Z that most captivated Lynch. For centuries after the discovery of the New World, many Europeans believed that a fantastical kingdom of untold wealth was concealed in the ethereal landscape of the Amazon. In 1541, Friar Gaspar Carvajal, a member of the first European expedition to descend from the Andes into the Amazon, reported glimpses of white Indians and women warriors who resembled the mythical Greek Amazons. One early map of South America was adorned with minotaurs and headless beings with eyes in their chests, and well into the twentieth century the Amazon remained, as Fawcett put it, "the last great blank space in the world."

from the issuecartoon banke-mail this.Lynch's research made him feel certain that Fawcett, unlike so many of his predecessors, was not a soldier of fortune or a crackpot. Fawcett was a recipient of the Gold Medal, the highest honor bestowed on an explorer by the Royal Geographical Society; a skilled mapmaker; and a decorated hero of the First World War. He knew the Amazon as well as anyone. His younger son, Brian, said of him, "True, he dreamed; but his dreams were built upon reason, and he was not the man to shirk the effort to turn theory into fact."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lynch learned, had reportedly drawn on Fawcett's explorations of the Amazon for his 1912 novel "The Lost World," in which explorers in South America "disappear into the unknown" and find, on a remote plateau, a land where dinosaurs still roam. By the time Fawcett had begun his final expedition, with his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimell, newspapers around the globe regularly chronicled his adventures. The Los Angeles Times declared of the 1925 voyage, "It is perhaps the most hazardous and certainly the most spectacular adventure of the kind ever undertaken by a scientist with the backing of conservative scientific bodies."

In 1927, Fawcett was officially declared missing, prompting a wave of expeditions in search of him; but, unlike other famed lost explorers, such as Amelia Earhart, he had kept his planned route a secret, making it almost impossible for anyone to retrace his steps. In part, he feared that other explorers might discover Z first; he also believed that any attempt to rescue him would result only in more deaths. As Fawcett confided to his younger son upon his departure, "If with all my experience we can't make it, there's not much hope for others."

Lynch was undeterred by Fawcett's warning. "I have to go," he told his wife. He secured a partner, Rene Delmotte, whom he had met during an adventure competition. For months, the two men studied satellite images of Brazil, honing their trajectory. Lynch obtained the best equipment: turbocharged jeeps with puncture-resistant tires; twenty-five-foot aluminum boats with outboard motors; Global Positioning Systems; walkie-talkies; and shortwave radios. He chose the members of his group with equal care. He recruited a mechanical engineer who could repair all the equipment, and he enlisted Dr. Daniel Muñoz, a forensic anthropologist, who, in 1985, had helped to identify the remains of Josef Mengele, the Nazi fugitive, and who could help confirm the origins of any object that might be from Fawcett's party: a belt buckle, a bone fragment, a bullet.

Although Fawcett had often warned that large parties inevitably would "come to grief" in the Amazon, Lynch's team gradually grew to seventeen men, including his sixteen-year-old son, James, Jr. For days, the party drove through the Amazon basin, a region nearly the size of the continental United States, traversing unpaved roads scarred with ruts and brambles. After stopping several times to camp, the expedition followed the road to a clearing along the Xingu River, one of the Amazon's major tributaries. It was not far from where Fawcett had reportedly last been seen.

A net of vines and branches covered the trails extending from the clearing, and Lynch decided that the expedition would have to proceed by boat. He instructed several team members to turn back with some of the heaviest gear. Once he found a place where a plane could land, he would radio in the coördinates, so that the equipment could be delivered by air.

The Xingu's churning currents quickly carried Lynch and the remaining team members, including his son, downriver, past submerged palm trees and purple orchids. Near the end of the day, the expedition reached a settlement of huts. It was a village of Kuikuros, one of the few tribes that still lived in the Amazon much as they had before the arrival of Europeans. A powerfully built chief, whose forehead and chest were covered with red paint, greeted Lynch and granted him permission to camp by the village and to land a propeller plane in a nearby clearing.

The next day, Lynch and his son went with some Kuikuros to a lagoon, where they bathed alongside turtles. Lynch could hear the sound of a plane landing not far away. Moments later, a Kuikuro came running down the path, hollering in his native language, which Lynch couldn't understand. The Kuikuros rushed out of the water. "What is it?" Lynch asked in Portuguese.

"Trouble," a Kuikuro replied.

Everyone ran to the village, including Lynch and his son. When they arrived, another member of their expedition approached them. "What's happening?" Lynch asked.

"They're surrounding our camp."

"Who?" Lynch cried. But he could already see dozens of Indian men, presumably from neighboring tribes, encircling them. They, too, had heard the sound of the arriving plane. Many wore black and red streaks of paint across their naked bodies. They carried bows with six-foot arrows, antique rifles, spears, and clubs.

As the expedition was being surrounded, five team members ran toward the plane. The pilot was still in the cockpit, and the five men jumped in the cabin and told him to take off, though the plane was designed for only four passengers. As the pilot started the propeller, several Indians hurried toward the plane, aiming their bows and arrows. They grabbed onto the wings, trying to keep the plane grounded. The pilot, concerned that the plane was dangerously heavy, started to throw supplies out the doors. The plane began easing down the runway; just before the wheels lifted off, the last of the Indians let go.

Lynch watched the plane disappear, red dust from its wake swirling around him. The Indians herded the remaining team members into small boats. "Where are you taking us?" Lynch asked.

"You are our prisoners for life," one man responded in Portuguese.

Lynch's son looked ashen. As they floated upriver, Lynch surveyed the surroundings-the clear river filled with colorful fish, the increasingly dense thicket of vegetation. It was, he thought, the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

Last February, I decided to see if I could retrace Fawcett's route and unravel a mystery that had only deepened with each ill-fated attempt to solve it. It was not easy to find a guide willing to make the journey, and it was even harder to find someone who had ties to the indigenous communities in Brazil, which function almost as autonomous countries, with their own laws and governing councils.

In Brazil, the history of the interaction between brancos and indios-whites and Indians-often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated. As late as 1920, an English missionary reported that many Indians had told him, "It is better to fall into the power of our spirits than into the hands of the Christians." On one occasion, a tribe buried its children alive to spare them the shame of subjugation.

The interior of Brazil was so forbidding, however, that some tribes managed to insulate themselves, for a time, from the age of airplanes and telephones. The Brazilian government didn't officially approach many Amazon tribes until the nineteen-forties, and there are still some forty tribes that have had no recorded contact with outsiders. In recent decades, the Brazilian government has stopped trying to "modernize" indigenous peoples, and has worked to protect them. As a result, many Amazon tribes, particularly those in the Mato Grosso ("Thick Forest") region, where Fawcett disappeared, have flourished. Their populations, after being decimated, are growing again; their languages and customs have endured.

The guide whom I eventually persuaded to accompany me was Paolo Pinage, a fifty-two-year-old former professional samba dancer. We met in Cuiabá, the capital of the Mato Grosso region, along the southern edge of the Amazon basin. Though Pinage was not of Indian descent, he had worked for the government agency set up to protect the rights of Indians. Its motto is "Die if you must, but never kill." During our initial phone conversation, I had asked Pinage if we could penetrate the same region that Fawcett had, including part of what is now Xingu National Park, Brazil's first Indian reservation, which was created in 1961. (The park, along with an adjoining reservation, is the size of Belgium and is one of the largest swaths of jungle under Indian control on the planet.) Pinage said, "I can take you there, but it's not easy." Entering Indian territories, he explained, required elaborate negotiations with tribal leaders. He asked me to send him medical records, attesting that I carried no contagious diseases. Then he began approaching various chiefs on my behalf. Many of the tribes in the jungle now had shortwave radios, and, for weeks, our messages were relayed back and forth, as Pinage assured them that I was a reporter and not a garimpero, or "prospector." Last year, twenty-nine diamond miners trespassed onto a reservation in western Brazil, where members of the Cinta Larga tribe, which in the past had endured massacres by brancos, shot or beat the prospectors to death with wooden clubs.

On my way to Cuiabá, I had stopped briefly in São Paulo to chat with the man I thought would understand better than anyone the obstacles that Pinage and I might encounter: James Lynch. When I found him at his financialconsulting firm, I asked him what had happened in the Xingu. "The Indians held us hostage for three days," he said. "Several threatened to tie us over the river and let piranhas eat us." As he spoke, James, Jr., who works for the company as well, entered the room. Lynch glanced at his son and said, "I was afraid what might happen to him."

He advised me that tribes had traditionally expected small tokens from visitors-a sign of good intentions. Today, they often demanded thousands of dollars from outsiders. "If we didn't give them something, they threatened to kill us one by one," Lynch said. "The only way we could get out was to give them our boats and offer to buy them a truck." In the end, Lynch's team paid a ransom that amounted to thirty thousand dollars. "Just remember: once you go into their territory, you are on your own," he said. "No one from the government can come in and get you."

When I arrived in Cuiabá, two days later, none of the tribes had agreed to my visit. Still, Pinage seemed optimistic when he greeted me at the airport. He was carrying several large plastic containers, instead of a suitcase or a backpack, and had a cigarette dangling from his lip. He wore a camouflage vest with myriad pockets, filled with supplies: a Swiss Army knife; a Japanese anti-itch medicine; a flashlight; more cigarettes. He resembled someone returning from an expedition, not embarking on one. His vest was ragged, his face was bone thin and covered with a gray-tinged beard, and his bald head had been seared by the sun. Although his English pronunciation was shaky, he spoke as fast as he smoked. "Come, come, we go now," he said.

We took a taxi into Cuiabá, which was founded during a gold rush in the early seventeen-hundreds. In 1920, Fawcett described it as an "impoverished and backward" place that had degenerated into "little better than a ghost town." Today, the city, which has undulating paved roads and a few modest skyscrapers, serves primarily as a staging ground for the latest pioneers-farmers and ranchers-hoping to find riches in the surrounding countryside.

We checked into a hotel named El Dorado ("A funny coincidence, isn't it?" Pinage said) and began making preparations. Our first challenge was to divine, as closely as possible, Fawcett's secret route. Pinage asked me what I knew, and I told him that Brian Fawcett, who was nineteen when his father disappeared, had tightly guarded Fawcett's private papers; in 1953, he published some of them in a book, "Exploration Fawcett," which contained one of the few clues to his father's final course. The book quotes Fawcett saying, "Our route will be from Dead Horse Camp, 11° 43' south and 54° 35'west, where my horse died in 1921." Many subsequent explorers had started off from these coördinates. Fawcett's family, however, recently acknowledged what others had learned to their despair: Fawcett had provided false coördinates, in order to throw off would-be seekers of the City of Z.

Before coming to Brazil, I explained to Pinage, I had visited the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, in London, and sifted through stacks of letters that Fawcett had sent to the institution through the years. The letters, old and brittle, released yellowish flakes when I opened them. Fawcett had scribbled in a hasty, feverish manner, the words run together like code. After a few days in the archives, I noticed, in the corner of a frayed packet of papers, a single word: "confidential." The document was dated April 13, 1924, and, unlike most of the other letters, it was typed, though Fawcett's small, slanting signature was visible at the bottom. It was entitled "Case for an expedition in the Amazon basin."

In earlier letters, Fawcett had raised his usual objections to providing specifics about his final trip. "These things leak out," he wrote. Recalling how the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott had been beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen by only weeks, Fawcett added, "There can be nothing so bitter to the pioneer as to find the crown of his work anticipated." Fawcett, however, was desperate for funding, and in the document he seemed to relent to a demand by the society that he be more forthcoming. Fawcett contended that in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajós and the Xingu tributaries, lay what he called "the most remarkable relics of ancient civilization." A few adventurers had traversed the major tributaries of the Amazon, including Theodore Roosevelt, but Fawcett claimed that no explorer had dared to enter the forests between them, for fear of starvation, disease, and hostile natives. To bolster his case that the ruins of Z would be found in the region, he cited carvings that he had seen on rocks in the area, and documents that he had uncovered from Portuguese conquistadores in Brazilian archives. He quoted a Brazilian scholar, who declared, "My studies have convinced me that . . . there may yet be found in our forests, as yet penetrated in few places, ruins of ancient cities."

In the same materials were several brown parchments on which Fawcett had sketched maps of the region, based on previous expeditions. And there was one more document-seemingly, a detailed account of his intended route to the City of Z.

After copying these materials, I told Pinage, I made one last stop, in Cardiff, at the house of Fawcett's granddaughter, Rolette de Montet-Guerin. All of Fawcett's immediate family is dead, and Montet-Guerin, who is the daughter of the youngest of Fawcett's three children, Joan, acts as the guardian of the family estate. A petite, energetic woman in her fifties, with short black hair and glasses, she took me into a back room and opened a trunk. Inside were Fawcett's diaries and logbooks. Montet-Guerin allowed me to examine each one for details that might help in my search. In the log from 1921, I spotted coördinates for Dead Horse Camp that were conspicuously different from those which had appeared in "Exploration Fawcett." On another page, I noticed jottings about a place that members of the Botocudo tribe had described to Fawcett as "enormously rich in gold-so much so as to blaze like fire." Fawcett wrote, "It is just conceivable this may be Z."

I went through the books, carefully making notations. I thought that I now had enough information to retrace his route. Montet-Guerin said that she wanted to show me one more thing. It was a photograph of Fawcett's gold signet ring, which was engraved with the family motto, "Nec Aspera Terrent"-essentially, "Difficulties Be Damned." In 1979, an Englishman named Brian Ridout, who was making a wildlife film in Brazil, heard rumors that the ring had turned up at a store in Cuiabá. By the time Ridout tracked down the shop, the proprietor had died. His wife, however, searched through her possessions and emerged with Colonel Fawcett's ring. Montet-Guerin, who had since put the ring in safekeeping, said, "It's the last concrete item we have from the expedition."

Montet-Guerin had been desperate to learn more, she said, and had once showed the ring to a psychic. I asked her if she had learned anything. She looked down at the picture, then up at me. "It had been bathed in blood," she said.

In the hotel room in Cuiabá, as Pinage leaned over my shoulder, I spread the copies of Fawcett's papers on a table. Fawcett had been an accomplished artist-his pen-and-ink drawings were exhibited at the Royal Academy-and many of his original maps were meticulous, recalling pointillist paintings. He had printed "unexplored" in bold letters atop one image, which depicted the forests between the Xingu River and two other major tributaries of the Amazon. On another map, he added several notations: "small tribes . . . believed to be friendly"; "very bad Indian tribes-names unknown"; "Indians probably dangerous."

Pinage and I agreed that the documents confirmed that Fawcett and his team, after leaving Cuiabá, had proceeded north, to the territory of the Bakairí Indians. From there, they had gone to Dead Horse Camp, and then, presumably, deep into what is today Xingu National Park. In the route that Fawcett had supplied in confidence to the Royal Geographical Society, he wrote that his party would turn due east around the eleventh parallel south of the equator, and cross the Xingu River. He noted that it was preferable to maintain an eastward trajectory, toward Brazil's coastal regions, since it "would preserve a higher level of enthusiasm than one proceeding farther & farther into the wilds."

Pinage, who had become as curious about Fawcett as I had, excitedly drew a black pen across a clean map, ticking off each of our intended destinations. Finally, he took his cigarette out of his mouth and said, "On to Z, no?"

Percy Harrison Fawcett was always searching for something beyond his Victorian world. The son of a British aristocrat who had squandered two family fortunes, he recalled his childhood as "devoid of parental affection." In 1886, at the age of nineteen, he received his commission in the Royal Artillery, and was stationed in the British colony of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). He often took long walks through the forests, entranced by the strange local customs. Though he married Nina Paterson, the daughter of a colonial judge, he remained, as he put it, a "lone wolf," and continued to wander the island, investigating archeological ruins and even hunting for buried treasure. It was the peak of the British Empire, a time when the English were constantly confronting and colonizing new, exotic civilizations; when imperial explorers such as David Livingstone were trying to map the so-called "dark continent" of Africa; and when the Allan Quatermain novels by Fawcett's friend H. Rider Haggard, which chronicle the intrepid adventurer's discovery of ancient civilizations in Africa, were wildly popular.

In 1901, Fawcett, hoping to become an explorer himself, enrolled at the Royal Geographical Society to study surveying and mapmaking. The British government often tried to recruit mapmakers as spies, their vocation being an ideal cover, and, that year, Fawcett went to Morocco, where, while surveying, he also served as a secret agent.

Five years later, the president of the Royal Geographical Society approached him for a different kind of mission. According to "Exploration Fawcett," the president showed Fawcett an atlas of South America and exclaimed, "Look at this area! It's full of blank spaces." He explained that the boundaries between Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil were ill-defined, and that the three countries had asked a disinterested party to survey the area. "What it really amounts to is exploration," the president said. "It may be difficult and even dangerous." Fawcett didn't hesitate. "Here was the chance I had been waiting for," he later wrote, adding, "Destiny intended me to go!"

Leaving behind his wife and three-year-old son, Jack, he headed off with little more than a sixty-pound pack, a handful of recruits, and a copy of Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Explorer." ("Something hidden. Go and find it. . . . Go!") As he trekked with a small group for hundreds of miles, across mountains, swamps, and jungles, he detected signs-arrowheads buried in trees, smoke from fires-that they were being watched by Indians. The indigenous people in the area, having been enslaved or massacred by rubber tappers in the past, were known to kill trespassers, and a few were believed to practice cannibalism. Fawcett, convinced that the only way to survive was to establish friendly contact, ordered his men never to open fire. Once, when his expedition was ambushed, Fawcett had his men stand and play musical instruments, singing "Soldiers of the Queen" and "Suwannee River" as arrows rained upon them. At other times, Fawcett would hold his hands in the air and march directly toward the Indians, in order to demonstrate his peaceful intentions. His tactics succeeded, and, with maps in hand, he returned triumphantly to England.

He soon grew restless. "Deep down inside me a tiny voice was calling," he wrote. "At first scarcely audible, it persisted until I could no longer ignore it. It was the voice of the wild places, and I knew that it was now part of me for ever." He added, "Inexplicably-amazingly-I knew I loved that hell. Its fiendish grasp had captured me, and I wanted to see it again."

In 1908, Fawcett went on an even more dangerous expedition: tracing the source of the Rio Verde, in Brazil. During the trip, his team ran out of food. One of the men lay down and begged Fawcett to leave him, but Fawcett insisted, "If we've got to die, we'll die walking." Though the team eventually made it out, on other trips more than half of Fawcett's men died from sickness. The Royal Geographical Society noted in its journal that Fawcett was prepared to "fare harder than most people would consider either possible or proper."

As Fawcett completed his maps of the Amazon, he became fascinated by the tribes populating the region. Like many Victorians, he held views of indigenous Americans that were often blinded by racism. "There are three kinds of Indians," he wrote. "The first are docile and miserable people. . . . The second, dangerous, repulsive cannibals very rarely seen; the third a robust and fair people who must have a civilized origin." He shared the widely held notion that any advanced civilization in South America, if it had ever existed, must have had a European origin-in Phoenicia, say, or even Atlantis. John Hemming, a distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians, has called Fawcett a "Nietzschean explorer" who spouted "eugenic gibberish."

Yet some anthropologists have also found in Fawcett's writings a sensibility that was more enlightened than that of many of his contemporaries. He was an outspoken opponent of the destruction of Indian culture through colonization. "My experience is that few of these savages are naturally 'bad,' unless contact with 'savages' from the outside world has made them so," Fawcett wrote. He studied many Amazonian dialects, and immersed himself in the rich legends and artistic traditions of the local tribes. He was amazed by shards of delicate ancient pottery that he had seen along the mouth of the Amazon, and by mysterious raised mounds of earth that were scattered through the rain forest. And he read early histories of South America, which revealed that the first Spaniards who visited the Amazon had described "numerous and very large settlements" and "many roads and fine highways inland." All this suggested to Fawcett that there had once been a large, complex civilization in the Amazon which had been decimated over the centuries. Moreover, he theorized, remnants of that civilization might have survived in areas that had remained isolated from Westerners.

One day, during a visit to a colonial archive in Rio de Janeiro, Fawcett discovered a document, partly eaten by worms, that was titled "Historical account of a large, hidden, and very ancient city, without inhabitants, discovered in the year 1753." A Portuguese bandeirante, or "soldier of fortune," described how, "after a long and troublesome peregrination, incited by the insatiable greed of gold," he and his men had ascended a mountain path and seen a spellbinding vista: below them were the ruins of an ancient city. The men climbed down, and discovered stone arches, a statue, wide roads, and a temple with hieroglyphics. "The ruins well showed the size and grandeur which must have been there, and how populous and opulent it had been in the age when it flourished," the bandeirante wrote.

Fawcett was certain that he had found proof that the interior contained an ancient civilization, which he christened the City of Z. He was mapping out a route to find it when the First World War erupted. Though he was approaching fifty, he volunteered for the front, in Flanders, and led a brigade in the Artillery. The savagery of the fighting repelled him, and he became even more entranced by the idea of a lost civilization. After the war, he tried to raise funds for an expedition to find Z, but he met resistance from the new professionals of archeology, who were supplanting the role of explorers, and who considered Fawcett an anachronism. Moreover, many of these academic experts believed that the Amazon-with its oppressive heat and nutrient-poor soil, which resisted modern attempts at farming-could simply not sustain large settled populations. As the archeologist Betty Meggers later put it, the Amazon was a "counterfeit paradise." The colonial records that Fawcett had cited were seen as akin to the old stories of towering Amazons: tall tales invented to impress royal patrons. "To get the elderly gentlemen of the archaeologists and museum experts in London to credit a fraction of what I knew to be true was a task altogether beyond my powers," he wrote.

In 1920, hoping to find the City of Z on his own, Fawcett embarked on the expedition that ended at Dead Horse Camp, where, delirious with fever, he shot his ailing pack animal and retreated in defeat. He was determined to return, but he could not get anyone in England to back him. In a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, he wrote bitterly, "It is of course bound to come out eventually that a modern Columbus was turned down in England."

Four years later, nearly destitute, he looked to the United States, where he began to tap into enthusiasm for what he referred to as his "romantic quest." He received backing from various scientific bodies, including the American Geographical Society and the Museum of the American Indian. He also made agreements with news organizations in India, South Africa, Australia, Britain, and the United States, promising to file dispatches in exchange for funding. Even the Royal Geographical Society lent some support.

According to Fawcett's letters, his final expedition departed from Cuiabá on April 20, 1925, assisted by two Brazilian laborers, eight mules, two horses, and a pair of dogs. As the team moved quickly northward across the cerrado, or dry forest, Fawcett forged a path with a specially designed, eighteen-inch machete, and often walked far ahead of his group, inspecting rock formations for possible inscriptions, while Jack, his son, and Raleigh, Jack's friend, struggled to keep up with him.

Fawcett was fifty-seven years old, nearly three times as old as Jack and Raleigh, and his hair was gray and thinning, yet he was strikingly fit. He was over six feet tall, and his long, lean legs were unusually strong. His blue eyes burned like a preacher's. He wore baggy, lightweight, tear-resistant pants, riding boots, and a broad-rimmed Stetson hat; in photographs taken soon after the trip began, he eerily matches the descriptions of Lord John Roxton, a protagonist of "The Lost World." At one point, Conan Doyle writes of Roxton, "Something there was of Napoleon III, something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman."

The first days of the expedition were relatively easy-the terrain consisting mostly of short, twisting trees and savanna-like grass, where a few ranchers and prospectors had established settlements. Yet, as Fawcett told his wife in a letter, it was "an excellent initiation" for the inexperienced Jack and Raleigh. (Fawcett once wrote proudly of his son, "He is big, very powerful physically, and absolutely virgin in mind and body.") In a black-and-white photograph taken before the 1925 trip, Jack, with his luminescent skin, oiled hair, and crisp mustache, resembles a movie star-which is what he planned to become after the mission. Raleigh, who was the son of a British naval surgeon, was equally tall and robust, but with a more playful nature.

On the first day, the three explorers and their two Brazilian helpers travelled seven miles from Cuiabá; the next day, another ten. Even in the shade of the buriti palms, it was hot-so hot, as Fawcett wrote in a particularly fervid dispatch, that in the Cuiabá River "fish were literally cooked alive." After they marched from sunup to sundown, they set up camp, wrapping themselves in nets to prevent mosquito-borne infections, drinking cups of tea, and eating biscuits. Fawcett would try to compose letters to his wife or dispatches to the newspapers, which, editors' notes explained, were "relayed to civilization by Indian runners over a long and perilous route." An article introducing the installments, which were published with such headlines as "three men face cannibals in relic quest," said of the explorers, "If they enter the grim region . . . and come out again, they will achieve something which no other man has done."

One day, as the explorers approached the Manso River, some forty miles north of Cuiabá, the two younger men became separated from Fawcett. As Jack later wrote in a letter to his mother, "Daddy had gone ahead at such a pace that we lost sight of him altogether." The boys spent the night alone, listening to the screeching forest; the next morning, Fawcett appeared on his horse, as if returning from a leisurely jaunt.

The area was infested with ticks, and Raleigh was bitten by one on his foot, which swelled so much that he had to ride with his shoe off. To help him recuperate, Fawcett stopped for five days at a cattle-breeding ranch on the edge of the frontier-a place where Brazilian laws were considered irrelevant. The ranch was owned by Hermenegildo Galvão, one of the most powerful and ruthless farmers in the Mato Grosso. According to Hermes Leal's biography "Colonel Fawcett: The Real-Life Indiana Jones," which was published in Portuguese in 1996, Galvão had a posse of hired gunmen who were charged with killing any Indian who threatened his vast feudal empire.

Fawcett's team stayed in Galvão's red brick manor for several days, eating and resting. At one point, Galvão later told a reporter, Fawcett removed from his belongings a strange object covered in cloth. He carefully unwrapped it, revealing a ten-inch stone idol with almond-shaped eyes and hieroglyphics carved on its chest. Rider Haggard, Fawcett's friend, had obtained it from someone in Brazil and given it to Fawcett, who believed that it was a relic of Z.

Then the three Englishmen were on their way again, heading east, toward Bakairí Post, where in 1920 the Brazilian government had set up a garrison-"the last point of civilization," as the settlers referred to it. Occasionally, the dense forest opened up, revealing the blinding sun and blue-tinged mountains in the distance. The trail became harder, and the men descended steep, mud-slicked gorges and crossed rock-strewn rapids, where they had to check their skin for traces of blood, which might attract piranhas. They also had to remain alert for a pernicious eel-like fish called a candiru, which, as Fawcett once wrote, "seeks to enter the natural orifices of the body, whether human or animal, and once inside cannot be extracted." Fawcett had seen one specimen that had been removed from a man's penis. "Many deaths result from this fish, and the agony it can cause is excruciating," he wrote.

A month after they left Cuiabá, and after what Fawcett described as a "shockingly difficult passage," they arrived at Bakairí Post, a small settlement of about twenty huts. The Bakairí tribe was one of the first in the region which the government had tried to "acculturate," and Fawcett was appalled by what he called "the Brazilian methods of civilizing the Indian tribes." In a letter to one of his sponsors in the United States, he noted, "The Bakairís have been dying out ever since they became civilized. There are only about 150 of them." He went on, "They have in part been brought here to plant rice, manioc . . . which is sent to Cuiabá, where it fetches, at present, high prices. The Bakairís are not paid, are raggedly clothed, mainly in khaki govt. uniforms, and there is a general squalor and lack of hygiene which is making the whole of them sick."

Members of other remote tribes occasionally visited Bakairí Post, and Jack and Raleigh soon saw something that astonished them: "about eight wild Indians, absolutely stark naked," as Jack wrote to his mother. The Indians carried seven-foot-long bows with six-foot arrows. "To Jack's great delight we have seen the first of the wild Indians here-naked savages from the Xingu," Fawcett wrote to his wife.

Jack and Raleigh hurried out with the camera and took photographs of the men. In one, Jack stood beside them, to demonstrate "the comparative sizes"; the Indians came up to his shoulders. Later, the three explorers went to the hut where the Indians were staying. Fawcett carried a ukulele and Jack carried a piccolo, and they performed a concert around a fire.

On May 19th, a fresh, cool day, Jack woke up even more excited-it was his twenty-second birthday. "I have never felt so well," he wrote to his mother. The three explorers made their final preparations. To the north of the post, they could see several imposing mountains, and just beyond them, as Jack wrote with a hint of awe, was "absolutely unexplored country."

They headed straight for terra incognita. Before them there were no clear paths, and almost no light filtering through the hundred-and-fifty-foot trees. Branches snapped back at them; creepers entangled their legs. The heat was oppressive, and they were encircled by swarms of piums-stinging insects that left splotches of blood on their skin. There were vampire bats and scorpions and anacondas. Even Fawcett, at times, felt his age. As he wrote to his wife, "Years tell, in spite of the spirit of enthusiasm."

After nine days, Fawcett wrote, they hacked their way to Dead Horse Camp, where they could still see the "white bones" from his old pack animal and where they were attacked by "the wickedest fly on earth, almost invisible, biting like a mosquito, and very active." They covered themselves in nets, but the bugs slipped through them.

Fawcett sent his Brazilian helpers back to Cuiabá, along with many of the animals. The jungle would soon be so thick that the explorers could proceed only by carrying equipment on their backs. Raleigh's foot remained swollen and ulcerous-the skin was now peeling off-and Fawcett urged him to return with the guides. Raleigh, unwilling to leave his best friend, said that he was fine, and Fawcett relented.

Fawcett folded up various letters and a dispatch and gave them to the Brazilian guides. He said that he would try to get out other communiqués in the coming year or so, but added that it was unlikely. As he noted in one of his final articles, "By the time this dispatch is printed, we shall have long since disappeared into the unknown."

The explorers said their farewells to the Brazilians, then headed deeper into the jungle. In his last words to his wife, Fawcett wrote, "You need have no fear of any failure."

"Can you get the G.P.S. to work?" Pinage asked.

I was sitting in the back seat of a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi truck, fiddling with a Global Positioning System, in an attempt to obtain readings of our coördinates. We were heading north-that much I knew-with a driver whom we had hired when we rented the pickup. Pinage had told me that we would need a powerful truck and a professional driver if we were to have any chance of completing our journey, especially in the rainy season. "This is the worst time of year," he said. "The roads are-how do you say in English?-shit."

When I first explained my mission to our driver, he asked me when the British colonel had disappeared.

"Nineteen twenty-five," I said.

"And you want to find him in the jungle?"

"Not exactly."

"Are you one of his descendants?"

"No."

He seemed to think about this for a long moment, then said, "Very well," and began cheerfully to load our gear, which included hammocks, rope, mosquito netting, water-purifying tablets, a satellite phone, antibiotics, and malarial pills. On our way out of Cuiabá, we also picked up a friend of Pinage's, a descendant of a Bakairí chief named Taukane Bakairí. (In Brazil, the last names of Indians are typically the same as that of their tribe.) Taukane, who was in his mid-forties, and had a handsome, round face, wore Levi's and a baseball cap. Though he now lived mostly in Cuiabá, he continued to represent his tribe's political interests. "I am what you might call an ambassador," he told me. And, in exchange for a "gift" of two tires for a communal tractor, he had agreed to take us to his village, the last place Fawcett had incontrovertibly been seen. ("If it were up to me, I would take you for free," Taukane said. "But all Indians must now be capitalists. We have no choice.")

Upon leaving the city, we entered the central plains of Brazil, which mark the transition from dry forest to rain forest. After a while, a plateau came into view; Martian red in color, it spanned more than two thousand square miles, an endless tabletop that reached into the clouds. We stopped at its base, and Pinage said, "Come, I show you something."

We left the truck and climbed a steep, rocky slope. The ground was moist from a recent rainstorm, and we used our hands and knees to ascend.

"Where are we going?" I asked Pinage, who had another cigarette clamped between his teeth.

"You see," he said.

Lightning streaked the sky and a thin mist descended, making the ground more slippery. Rocks gave way under our feet, clapping as they hit the ground, fifty yards below.

"Almost there," Pinage said.

He helped to pull me up a ledge, and as I got to my feet, covered in mud, he pointed at another ridge, a few yards away, and said, "Now you see!"

Jutting into the sky was a cracked stone column. I blinked in the rain-in fact, there was not just one but several columns in a row, as in a Greek ruin. There was also a large archway, both sides of it still intact, and behind it was a dazzlingly large tower. They looked like what the bandeirante had described in 1753.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Stone city."

"Who built it?"

"It is-how do you say?-an illusion."

"That?" I said, pointing to one of the columns.

"It was made by nature, by erosion. But many people who see it think it is a lost city, like Z."

Ever since the first Europeans arrived in the New World, explorers had been seduced by their own visions of Z. As John Hemming, the historian, recounts in "The Search for El Dorado" (1978), these visions were based on an astounding precedent: In 1519, Hernán Cortés and his band of soldiers found a causeway that led into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán-a city laden with gold, with advanced architecture and engineering. Twelve years later, Francisco Pizarro discovered and conquered the equally wealthy Incan empire, and the search for golden cities became a European obsession. In 1541, a Spanish traveller wrote of el indio dorado, or "the golden Indian," in reference to tales he'd heard of a chieftain who was so wealthy that he sprinkled his entire body in gold dust. Explorers had hunted fruitlessly for this leader's kingdom, which became known as El Dorado, and many became convinced that the city was hidden in the last unpenetrated region: the Amazon.

Fawcett himself was embarrassed by the story of El Dorado, which he called an "exaggerated romance." In a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, he acknowledged that his vision of Z "must invariably suggest the tradition of the Golden City," but insisted that his quest was a serious one. His theory that the Amazon had once contained a prosperous city was not irrational, he maintained. It was grounded in science.

"We will find out the truth soon enough," Pinage said, as we returned to the car and headed north, toward the jungle.

We eventually turned onto BR-163, one of the most treacherous roads in South America. Extending more than a thousand miles, from Cuiabá to the Amazon River, it was designated on our map as a major highway. Yet almost all the asphalt from its two lanes had been washed away during the rainy season, leaving behind a combination of ditches and puddle-filled gullies. Our driver sometimes chose to ignore the road altogether and steer along the rocky banks and fields, where herds of cattle occasionally appeared, parting in our midst.

As we passed the Manso River, where Fawcett had got lost and where Raleigh was bitten by the tick, I kept looking out the window, expecting to see the first signs of a fearsome jungle. Instead, the terrain looked like Nebraska-perpetual plains that faded into the horizon. When I asked Taukane where the forest was, he said, simply, "Gone."

A moment later, he pointed to a truck heading in the opposite direction, carrying sixty-foot logs.

"Only the Indians respect the forest," Pinage said. "The white people cut it all down." The Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. Between August, 2003, and August, 2004, ten thousand square miles of the Amazon, an area the size of Massachusetts, were cleared away-and, in the past year, at least another five thousand square miles were lost. The state governor, Blairo Maggi, who is one of the largest soybean producers in the world, told the Times, "I don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here. We're talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about."

From BR-163, we veered onto a smaller dirt road, which went east, toward Bakairí Post. We passed close to where Fawcett had stayed with Galvão, and we decided to see if we could find the infamous ranch. In letters, Fawcett had said that the ranch was known as Rio Novo, and that name was marked on several current maps. After nearly four hours of bone-jarring bumps, we came upon a rusty sign at a fork in the road-"Rio Novo"-with an arrow pointing left.

"Look at that," Pinage said.

We crossed a wobbly, wooden-slatted bridge over a river. The bridge creaked under the weight of the truck, and we looked down fifty feet at the torrent of water.

"How many mules and horses did the coronel have?" Pinage asked, trying to picture Fawcett's crossing.

"A dozen or so," I said. "According to his letters, Galvão replaced some of the weakest animals and gave him a dog-Tupi, I think its name was-which supposedly returned to the farm, several months after Fawcett vanished."

"It wandered back on its own?" Pinage asked.

"That's what Galvão said. He also said something about some swallows he saw rise from the forest in the east, which he thought had to be some kind of sign from Fawcett."

For the first time, we entered a swath of dense forest. Though there was no farm in sight, we came across a mud hut with a thatched roof. Inside was an old Indian sitting on a tree stump with a wooden cane in his hand. He was barefoot, and wore dusty slacks without a shirt. Behind him, hanging on the wall, was the skin of a jaguar and a picture of the Virgin Mary. Taukane asked him, in the Bakairí language, if there was a cattle-breeding ranch known as Rio Novo. He spat at the name and waved his cane toward the door. "That way," he said.

Another Indian, who was younger, appeared and said that he would show us the way. We got back in the car and drove down an overgrown path, the branches clapping against the windshield. When we couldn't drive any farther, our guide hopped out, and we followed him through the forest, as he slashed at the creepers and vines with a machete. Several times, he paused, studied the tops of the trees, and took a few paces east or west. Finally, he stopped.

We looked around-there was nothing but a cocoon of trees. "Where's Rio Novo?" Pinage asked.

Our guide lifted his machete over his head and slammed it into the ground. It hit something hard. "Right here," he said.

We looked down and, to our disbelief, saw a row of cracked bricks.

"This is where the entrance to the manor used to be," the guide said, adding, "It was very big."

We began to fan out in the forest, as rain started to fall again, looking for signs of the great Galvão farm.

"Over here!" Pinage cried excitedly. He was a hundred feet away, standing by a crumbling brick wall nestled in vines. The farm had been consumed by jungle in just a few decades, and I wondered how actual ancient ruins could possibly survive in such a hostile environment. For the first time, I had some sense of how it might be possible for the remnants of a civilization simply to disappear.

When we returned to the road, the sun had begun to set. We had lost track of the time in our excitement. We hadn't eaten since five-thirty in the morning and had nothing in the truck except a warm bottle of water and some crackers. As we drove through the night, lightning flashed in the distance, illuminating the emptiness around us. Taukane eventually nodded off, and Pinage and I became engaged in what had become our favorite diversion-trying to imagine what had happened to Fawcett and his party after they left Dead Horse Camp.

"I can see them starving to death," Pinage, who seemed focussed on his own hunger, said. "What I can't imagine is this: What made them want to go?"

At the time, many Brazilians had assumed that Fawcett was searching for gold. The Victorian era, however, while still often consumed with exploiting distant lands, had also ushered in the age of scientific exploration-the pursuit not of gold but of knowledge. And though Fawcett no doubt wanted to achieve a certain acclaim, he also seemed to be after something more intangible. As he noted in "Exploration Fawcett," "Who will ever understand that I want no . . . money for myself-that I am doing it unpaid in the hope that its ultimate benefit to mankind will justify the years spent in the quest?"

We both slept for a time in the car. The next morning, we drove up a small mountainside to reach Bakairí Post. It had taken Fawcett a month to get here from Cuiabá. It took us two days.

Bakairí Post had grown, and more than eight hundred Indians now lived in the area. We went to the largest village, where several dozen one-story houses were organized in rows around a square, dusty plaza. Most of the houses were made of clay and bamboo and had thatched roofs, though some of the newer ones had concrete walls and tin roofs that clinked in the rain. The village, while still unmistakably poor, now had a well, a tractor, satellite dishes, and electricity.

When we arrived, nearly all the men, young and old, were away hunting, in preparation for a ritual to celebrate the corn harvest. But Taukane said that there was someone we had to meet. He took us to a house abutting the plaza, near a row of fragrant mango trees. We entered a small room with a single electric light bulb hanging overhead and several wooden benches along the walls.

Before long, a tiny, stooped woman appeared through a back door. She held a child's hand for support and moved slowly toward us, as if confronting a strong wind. She wore a floral cotton dress and had long gray hair, which framed a face so wizened that her eyes were almost invisible. She had a wide smile, which revealed a majestic set of white teeth. Taukane explained that the woman was the oldest member of the village and had seen Fawcett and his expedition come through. "She is probably the last living person to have encountered them," he said.

She sat down on a chair, her bare feet hardly reaching the floor. Using Taukane and Pinage to translate from English into Portuguese and then into Bakairí, I asked her how old she was. "I don't know my exact age," she said. "But I was born around 1910." She continued, "I was just a little girl when the three outsiders came to stay in our village. I remember them because I had never seen people so white and with such long beards. My mother said, 'Look, the Christians are here!' "

She said that the three explorers had set up camp inside the village's new school, which no longer exists. "It was the nicest building," she said. "We didn't know who they were, but we knew they must be important because they slept in the school." In a letter, I recalled, Jack Fawcett had mentioned sleeping in a school. She added, "I remember that they were tall, so tall. And one of them carried a funny pack. He looked like a tapir."

I asked her what the village was like then. She said that by the time Fawcett and his men had arrived everything was changing. Brazilian military officials, she recalled, "told us we had to wear clothes, and they gave us each a new name." She added, "My real name was Comaeda Bakairí, but they told me I was now Laurinda. So I became Laurinda." She recalled the widespread sickness that Fawcett had described in his letters. "Bakairí people would wake up with coughs and go to the river to clean themselves, but it didn't help," she said.

After a while, Laurinda got up and stepped outside. Accompanying her, we could see, in the distance, the mountains that Jack had stared at with such wonder. "The three went in that direction," she said. "Over those peaks. People said there were no white people over those mountains, but that is where they said they were going. We waited for them to come back, but they never did."

I asked her if she had heard of any cities on the other side of the mountains which the Indians may have built centuries ago. She said she didn't know of any, but she pointed to the walls of her house and said that her ancestors had spoken of Bakairí houses that had been much bigger and more spectacular. "They were made of palm leaves from the buriti trees and were twice as high and so beautiful," she said.

Some of the hunters returned, carrying the carcasses of deer and anteaters and boar. In the plaza, a government official was setting up a large outdoor movie screen. I was told that a documentary would be shown teaching the Bakairís the meaning of the corn-harvest ritual that they were about to celebrate, which was part of their creation myth. Whereas the government had once tried to strip the Bakairís of their traditions, it was now attempting to preserve them. The old woman watched the proceedings from her doorstep. "The new generation still performs some of the old ceremonies, but they are not as rich or as beautiful," she said. "They do not care about the crafts or the dances. I try to tell them the old stories, but they are not interested. They do not understand that this is who we are."

Before we said goodbye, she remembered something else about Fawcett. For years, she said, other people came from far away to ask about the missing explorers. She stared at me, her narrow eyes widening. "What is it that these white people did?" she asked. "Why is it so important for their tribe to find them?"

On January 25, 1927, after nearly two years without word from Fawcett or his men, the Royal Geographical Society declared, "We hold ourselves in readiness to help any competent, well accredited [search] party." Though the society warned that if Fawcett "could not penetrate and push through, much less can anyone else," it was deluged with hundreds of letters from volunteers. One wrote, "I am thirty-six years of age. Practically Malaria-proof. Stand 5'11" in my socks and am as hard as nails." Another said, "I am prepared to sacrifice all, including my life."

Many were drawn to the heroic nature of the quest-a chance to see, as one later volunteer put it, "whether there is the making of a man in me, or just clay"-and by the prospect of becoming the next Henry Stanley, who had located Livingstone in East Africa five decades earlier. Many, including Fawcett's wife, Nina, believed that Indians had taken the party hostage-a relatively common practice. (Several decades later, when Brazilian authorities approached the Txukahamei tribe for the first time, they found half a dozen white captives.)

In February, 1928, the first major rescue effort was launched, by George M. Dyott, a forty-five-year-old former British Naval Air Force commander and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Dyott, who had once met Fawcett, referred to him as "the gallant British explorer." He claimed that, in order to succeed, he would need "the intuition of a detective" and "the skill of a big-game hunter." Though he did not quite fit the image of an explorer-he was five feet seven and weighed only a hundred and forty pounds-he had previously ventured through parts of the Amazon, and had once been taken hostage by a tribe in the Andes. "In my own mind, I am convinced that Colonel Fawcett is alive, but he must be in a very serious predicament by now," Dyott declared upon announcing his search effort. "Some years ago I was caught in the claws of the jungle, and the feeling of desperation that overcame me as I waited for assistance that never materialized was nigh incredible."

Dyott posted an advertisement in a London newspaper seeking a volunteer who resembled himself: "small, spare, of wiry build," with "habits of discipline." He heard from twenty thousand applicants-among them Roger Rimell, the thirty-year-old brother of Raleigh. Roger's mother, Elsie, told a reporter at the time, "I know of no greater help I can give them than to offer the services of my one remaining son."

Dyott, however, feared taking someone with so little experience and chose only hardened outdoorsmen, technical experts, and Indian guides. (Several adventurous ladies applied, but Dyott insisted, "I can't take a woman.") His party came to include twenty-six members, and required seventy oxen and mules to carry more than three tons of food and gear, including inflatable rafts and movie cameras. One observer later described the party as a "Cecil B. De Mille safari." Brazilians began to refer to the expedition as the "suicide club."

Dyott, who had recently been married, left his bride in Rio de Janeiro. He departed wearing a khaki uniform and a helmet that shielded his long, bearded face. Like Fawcett, Dyott filed dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance, which published his accounts of "savages," "disease," "snakes," "fire ants," "heat," "a million mosquitoes," "man-eating fish," and "that green monster, the all powerful jungle." Arriving at Bakairí Post, which he described as "the dregs of civilization mixing with the scum of the wilds," Dyott made what he considered his first breakthrough: he met an Indian named Bernardino, who said that he had served as Fawcett's guide down the Kurisevo River, one of the headwaters of the Xingu. In exchange for gifts, Bernardino agreed to lead Dyott as far as he had taken Fawcett's party, and, shortly after they departed, Dyott spotted Y-shaped marks carved into the trunks of trees-a possible sign of Fawcett's former presence. "Fawcett's trail loomed largely before us and, like a pack of hounds on the scent, we were in full cry," Dyott wrote.

One night, his men set up a strange-looking device that released a sharp, staticky sound. Suddenly, a voice could be heard in the darkness, talking about Eskimos. The team had turned on a wireless radio, picking up an operator from an expedition in the Arctic. Dyott used the radio to transmit his newspaper dispatches, and to relay messages to his wife.

After nearly a week, the party reached the settlement of the Nahukwá, one of many tribes that had sought sanctuary in the jungles around the Xingu. Dyott wrote of the Nahukwá, "These new denizens of the forest were as primitive as Adam and Eve." Some in the tribe greeted Dyott and his party warmly, but the chief, Aloique, seemed hostile. "He regarded us impassively with his small eyes," Dyott wrote. "Cunning and cruelty lurked behind their lids."

Dyott was surrounded by Aloique's children, and he noticed something tied to a piece of string around the neck of one boy-a small brass plate engraved with the words "W. S. Silver and Company." It was the name of the British firm that had supplied Fawcett with gear. Later, in Aloique's dimly lit home, Dyott spied a military-style metal trunk. Without the benefit of translators, he tried to interrogate Aloique, using elaborate sign language. Aloique, also gesturing, seemed to suggest that the trunk was a gift. He then indicated that he had guided three white men to a neighboring territory. Dyott was skeptical and urged Aloique and some of his men to take him along the same route. Aloique warned that a murderous tribe, the Suyás, lived in that direction. Still, Dyott persisted, and, in exchange for knives, Aloique agreed to guide them.

As they marched through the forest, Dyott continued to question Aloique, and, before long, the chief seemed to add a new element to his story. Fawcett and his men, he now intimated, had been killed by the Suyás. "Suyás! Bung-bung-bung!" the chief yelled, falling to the ground as if he were dead. Aloique's shifting explanations aroused Dyott's suspicions. As he later wrote, "The finger of guilt seemed to point to Aloique."

Dyott's expedition was already short of food and water, and some of the men were so ill that they could barely walk. The radio had also been damaged, causing Dyott's last communication with the outside world to be abruptly disconnected. ("jungle cry strangled," the Los Angeles Times had declared. "dyott radio cut off in crisis.") He therefore decided to press on with only two of his men, in the hope of finding Fawcett's remains. The night before the small contingent left, however, one of the men in Dyott's expedition party, an Indian, reported that he had overheard Aloique plotting with tribesmen to murder Dyott and steal his equipment. By then, Dyott had no doubt that he had found Fawcett's killer. That evening, Dyott told Aloique that he now intended to take his entire party with him. The next morning, Aloique and his men had vanished.

Soon afterward, dozens of Indians from the Xingu region emerged from the forest, carrying bows and arrows, and demanding gifts. Dyott, terrified, told the Indians that the next morning he would give each of them an axe and knives. Then he gathered his men, and that night they fled down the river in canoes. One of the technicians was able to get the wireless radio to work long enough to relay a message that said, "Am sorry to report that the Fawcett expedition perished at the hands of hostile Indians." The message went on, "Our position is critical. . . . We can't even afford time to send full details by wireless. Must descend Xingu without delay or we ourselves will be caught." The expedition then dumped the radio, along with other heavy gear, to hasten its exit. Newspapers debated the team's odds: "dyott's chance to escape even," one headline ran. When Dyott and his men finally emerged from the jungle, months later-sick, skinny, bearded, mosquito-pocked-they were greeted as heroes. Dyott later published a book, "Man Hunting in the Jungle," and starred in a 1933 Hollywood movie, "Savage Gold," based on his adventure.

But by then Dyott's story had begun to dissolve. As Brian Fawcett pointed out, it is hard to believe that his father, who was so wary of anyone knowing his path, would have left Y marks on trees. The gear that Dyott found in Aloique's house may well have been a gift from Fawcett, as Aloique insisted. Indeed, Dyott's case rested on his assessment of Aloique's "treacherous" disposition-a judgment based largely on interactions conducted in sign language and on Dyott's purported expertise in "Indian psychology." Years later, when missionaries and other explorers entered the region, they described Aloique and the Nahukwá as generally peaceful and friendly. Dyott had ignored the likelihood that Aloique's evasiveness, including his decision to flee, stemmed from his own fears of a white stranger who was leading an armed brigade. Finally, there was Bernardino. "Dyott . . . must have swallowed hook, line and sinker what he was told," Brian Fawcett wrote. "I say this because there was no Bernardino with my father's party in 1925." According to Fawcett's last letters, he had brought with him from Bakairí Post only two Brazilian helpers: Gardenia and Simão. Not long after Dyott returned to England, Nina Fawcett released a statement declaring, "There is consequently still no proof that the three explorers are dead."

In 1932, a hunter wearing riding boots and a sports jacket arrived at the British Embassy in São Paulo, insisting that he had important information concerning Fawcett. The hunter spoke with the British consul-general, Arthur Abbott, who had known Fawcett personally. In a sworn statement, the man said, "My name is Stefan Rattin. I am a Swiss subject. I came to South America twenty-one years ago." He explained that on October 16, 1931, he and two companions had been hunting near the Tapajós River, in the northwest corner of the Mato Grosso, when he encountered a tribe holding an elderly white man with long yellowish hair. Later, after many of the tribesmen had got drunk, Rattin said, the white man, who was clad in animal skins, quietly approached him.

"Are you a friend?" he asked.

"Yes," Rattin replied.

"I am an English colonel," he said, and he implored Rattin to go to the British consulate and tell "Major Paget" that he was being held captive.

Abbott knew that a former British Ambassador to Brazil, Sir Ralph Paget, had been a confidant of Fawcett's. This fact, Abbott noted in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, "was only known to me and a few personal friends." Paget himself, when he was reached in England, was skeptical. The white man had been discovered far from where Fawcett had last been seen. More important, why would Rattin have been allowed to leave the tribe while Fawcett was forced to remain a prisoner? Abbott, however, was convinced of the Swiss man's sincerity, especially since Rattin vowed to rescue Fawcett without seeking a reward. Rattin soon set out with two men, one of them a Brazilian reporter, who filed articles for the United Press syndicate. After walking through the jungle for weeks, the three men arrived at the Arinos River, where they built canoes out of bark. In a dispatch dated May 24, 1932, as the expedition was about to enter hostile Indian territory, the reporter wrote, "Rattin is anxious to get away. He calls, 'All aboard!' Here we go." The men were never heard from again.

In 1933, a fifty-three-year-old Englishman named Albert de Winton arrived in Cuiabá, vowing to find Fawcett dead or alive. Winton had recently had minor roles in several Hollywood films, including "The King of the Wild." According to the Washington Post, he had "given up on the imitation thrills of the movies for the real ones of the jungle." Wearing a crisp safari uniform, a gun strapped to his waist, and smoking a pipe, he headed into the jungle; he emerged nine months later with his clothes in tatters, his face emaciated. On February 4, 1934, a photograph of him appeared in newspapers with the caption "Albert Winton, Los Angeles actor, is not made up for a role in a film drama. This is what nine months in a South American wilderness did for him." Within days, he had returned to the Xingu region. Months elapsed without any word from him. Then, in September, an Indian runner came out of the forest with a crumpled note. It said that Winton had been taken prisoner by a tribe and pleaded, "Please send help." He, too, was never seen again. Only years later did Brazilian officials learn from Indians in the region that a member of the Kamayura tribe had smashed Winton's head in with a club, then taken his rifle.

Dozens of explorers continued to try to find Fawcett or the City of Z. (Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, went on one failed expedition.) By 1934, the Brazilian government had issued a decree banning Fawcett search parties unless they received special permission. Because so many seekers went without fanfare, there are no reliable statistics on the numbers who disappeared. One recent estimate, however, put the total as high as a hundred. According to "Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of South America," by David H. Childress, among them was a thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher from New Zealand, who, before he vanished, released a carrier pigeon with a note saying, "I die happily, knowing that my belief in Fawcett and his lost City of Gold was not in vain." Meanwhile, missionaries began to explore the Xingu, and returned with tales of a white child. In 1937, the American missionary Martha L. Moennich, who vowed to convert what she called "the most primitive and unenlightened of all South American Indians," reported that the child was living among the Kuikuro tribe and that the chief had told her that he was the son of Jack Fawcett, who had fathered him with an Indian woman before his expedition headed east. In 1943, a Brazilian tabloid dispatched a reporter to find the grandson. The reporter returned with a seventeen-year-old boy with milky-white skin named Dulipé, who was paraded around Brazil and hailed in the newspaper as the "White God of the Xingu." But when Nina Fawcett examined photographs of the boy she was taken aback. "That child looks to me like an albino," she said. Tests later confirmed her assessment.

Nina, meanwhile, maintained an almost blind conviction that her husband and son would reappear. As late as 1950, she told a reporter that it would not surprise her if they walked through the door at any moment-her husband now eighty-two, her son forty-seven. But in April, 1951, Orlando Villas Boas, a government official revered for his defense of the Amazonian tribes, announced that the Kalapalo Indians had confessed to him that they had murdered the three explorers. What's more, Villas Boas claimed that he had proof: the bones of Colonel Fawcett.

"The chief of the Kalapalos will meet with us," Pinage told me, relaying a message that had been radioed in from the jungle. The negotiations, he said, would take place not far from Bakairí Post, in Canarana, a small frontier town on the southern border of Xingu National Park. When we arrived that evening, the city was in the midst of a dengue-fever epidemic, and many of the phone lines were down. It was also Canarana's twenty-fifth anniversary, and the city was celebrating with fireworks, which sounded like sporadic, melancholy gunshots. In the early nineteen-eighties, the Brazilian government, as part of its continuing colonization of Indian territories, had sent in planes filled with cowboys-many of German descent-to settle the remote area. Though the town was desolate, the main roads were bafflingly wide, as if they were superhighways. Only when I saw a photograph of a guest parking his airplane in front of a local hotel did I understand the reason: for years, the city had been so inaccessible that the streets doubled as runways. Even today, I was told, it was possible for a plane to land in the middle of the road, and in the main square sat a passenger airplane, the town's only apparent monument.

The Kalapalo chief, Vajuvi, showed up at our hotel accompanied by two men. He had a tanned, deeply lined face, and appeared to be in his late forties. Like his two companions, he was about five feet six, with muscular arms. His hair was trimmed in a traditional bowl cut high above the ears. In the Xingu region, tribesmen often dispensed with clothes, but, for this visit to the city, Vajuvi wore a cotton V-neck shirt and sun-bleached jeans that hung loosely around his hips.

After we introduced ourselves and I explained why I wanted to visit the Xingu, Vajuvi asked, "Are you a member of the Colonel's family?"

By now, I was accustomed to the question, though this time it seemed more loaded: the Kalapalos had been accused of killing Fawcett, an act that could require his family to avenge his death. When I explained that I was a reporter, Vajuvi seemed accommodating. "I will tell you the truth about the bones," he said. He then added that the village wanted the sum of five thousand dollars.

I explained that I didn't have that kind of money and tried to extoll the virtues of cultural exchange. One of the Kalapalos stepped toward me and said, "The spirits told me that you were coming and that you are rich." Another Kalapalo added, "I've seen pictures of your cities. You have too many cars. You should give us a car."

One of the Indians left the hotel and returned moments later with three more Kalapalos. Every few minutes, another Kalapalo appeared; the room was soon crowded with more than a dozen men, some old, some young, all of them surrounding Pinage and me. "Where are they coming from?" I asked Pinage.

"I don't know," he said.

Vajuvi let the other men argue and haggle. As the negotiations continued, many of the Kalapalos grew hostile. They pressed against me and called me a liar. Finally, Vajuvi stood and said, "You talk to your chief in the United States, and then we'll talk again in a few hours."

He walked out of the room, the members of his tribe following him.

"Do not worry," Pinage said. "They are pushing and we are pushing back. This is the way it happens."

Dispirited, I went up to my room. Two hours later, Pinage called on the hotel phone. "Please come downstairs," he said. "I think I reach an agreement for us."

Vajuvi and the other Kalapalos were standing at the entryway of the hotel. Pinage told me that Vajuvi had agreed to take us into Xingu National Park if we paid for transportation and for several hundred dollars' worth of supplies. I shook the chief's hand, and, before I knew it, his men were patting me on the shoulders, asking about my family, as if we were meeting for the first time. "Now we talk and eat," Vajuvi said. "All is good."

The next day, we prepared to leave. To reach one of the largest headwaters of the Xingu, the Kuluene River, we needed an even more powerful truck, and so, after lunch, we said farewell to our driver, who seemed relieved to be going home. "I hope you find this Y you are looking for," he said.

After he departed, we rented a flatbed truck with tractor-size wheels. As word spread that a truck was heading into the Xingu, Indians emerged from all quarters, carrying children and bundles of goods, hurrying to climb on board. Every time the truck seemed full, another person squeezed on, and as the afternoon rains poured down we began our journey.

According to the map, the Kuluene was only sixty miles away. But the road was worse than any that Pinage and I had travelled: pools of water reached as high as the floorboards, and at times the truck, with all its weight, tipped perilously to one side. We drove no faster than fifteen miles an hour, sometimes coming to a halt, reversing, then pressing forward again. The forests had been denuded here as well. Some areas had been burned recently, and I could see the remnants of trees scattered for miles, their blackened limbs reaching into the open sky.

Finally, as we neared the river, the forest began to reveal itself. Trees gradually closed around us, their branches forming a net that covered the windshield. After five hours, we reached a wire fence: the boundary of Xingu National Park. Vajuvi said that it was only half a mile to the river, and then we would travel by boat to the Kalapalo village. Yet the truck soon got stuck in the mud, forcing us to remove our equipment temporarily to lighten the weight, and by the time we reached the river it was pitch black under the canopy of trees. Vajuvi said that we would have to wait to cross. "It's too dangerous," he said. "The river is filled with logs and branches. We must not disrespect it."

Mosquitoes pricked my skin, and macaws and cicadas chanted. Above our heads, some creatures howled. "Do not worry," Pinage said. "They are only monkeys."

We walked a bit farther and arrived at a shack; Vajuvi pushed the door, which creaked as it opened. He led us inside and fumbled around until he lit a candle, which revealed a small room with a corrugated-tin roof and a mud floor. There was a wooden pole in the middle of the room, and Vajuvi helped Pinage and me string our hammocks. Though my clothes were still damp with sweat and mud from the journey, I lay down, trying to shield my face from the mosquitoes. After a while, the candle went out, and I swung gently in the darkness, listening to the murmurings of cicadas and the cawcawing of monkeys.

I fell into a light sleep, but woke suddenly when I felt something by my ear. I opened my eyes with a start: five naked boys, carrying bows and arrows, were staring at me. When they saw me move, they laughed and ran off.

I sat up. Pinage and Vajuvi were standing around a wood fire, boiling water.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Five-thirty," Pinage said. He handed me some crackers and a tin cup filled with coffee. "It's still a long way," he said. "You must eat something."

After a quick breakfast, we walked outside; in the light of day, I could see that we were at a small encampment overlooking the Kuluene River. On the shore were two flat-bottom aluminum boats, into which we loaded our gear. Both boats were about twelve feet long and had outboard motors-an invention that had been introduced into the Xingu only in recent years.

Pinage and I climbed into one boat with a Kalapalo guide, while Vajuvi and his family travelled in another. The boats sped upriver, side by side. Farther north were rapids and waterfalls, but here the water was a calm, olive-green expanse. Trees lined the banks, their boughs bent like old men, their leaves skimming the surface of the water. After several hours, we docked our boats along the shore. Vajuvi told us to gather our gear, and we followed him up a short path. He paused and waved his hand proudly in front of him. "Kalapalo," he said.

We stood at the edge of a circular plaza that was more than a hundred yards in circumference and dotted with houses much like those described by the old woman at Bakairí Post. Resembling the overturned hulls of ships, they appeared to be woven, rather than constructed, out of thatch and wood. Their exteriors were covered with thatch, except for a door in the back and the front-both low enough, I was told, to keep out evil spirits.

Several dozen people were walking across the plaza. Many of them were unclothed, and some had adorned their bodies with exquisite ornamentations: monkey-tooth necklaces; swirls of black pigment from the genipap fruit; swaths of red pigment from the uruku berry. Women between the ages of thirteen and fifty tended to wear loose cotton dresses, the upper half dangling around their waists. The men who weren't naked typically wore spandex bathing suits, as if they were Olympic swimmers. Physical fitness was clearly a prized trait. Some of the babies, I noticed, had strips of cloth pulled tightly around their calves and biceps, like tourniquets, to accentuate their muscles. "For us, it is a sign of beauty," Vajuvi said. The tribe continued to commit infanticide against those who seemed unnatural or bewitched, although the practice had become less common.

Vajuvi led me into his house, a cavernous space filled with smoke from a wood-burning fire. He introduced me to two handsome women. Both had jet-black hair, with bangs in the front, that fanned down over their bare backs. The older one had a tattoo of three vertical stripes on her upper arms; the other had a necklace with glittering white shells. "My wives," Vajuvi said.

Before long, other people stepped out of the shadows: children and grandchildren, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. Vajuvi said that nearly twenty people lived in the house. It seemed less like a home than like a self-contained village. In the center of the room, near a pole supporting the roof, from which corn had been hung to dry, one of Vajuvi's daughters knelt in front of a large wooden loom, weaving a hammock. Next to her was a boy wearing a blue-beaded belt, holding fish in an elaborately detailed, brightly painted ceramic pot. Beside him, an elderly hunter sat on a large hardwood bench carved in the shape of a jaguar, sharpening a five-foot-long arrow. Fawcett wrote of the southern basin of the Amazon, "The whole of this region is saturated with Indian traditions of a most interesting kind," which "cannot be founded upon nothing" and which suggest the prior presence of "a once-great civilization."

The village, which had about a hundred and fifty residents, was highly stratified. These people were not wandering hunter-gatherers. Chiefs were anointed by bloodlines, as with European kings. There were strict taboos on diet which forbid them to eat most red meats, including tapir, deer, and boar. At puberty, boys and girls were held in extended seclusion, during which a designated elder taught them the rituals and the responsibilities of adulthood. (The son in line to become chief was sequestered for up to four years.) George Dyott, during his journey in the Xingu with Aloique, passed through the Kalapalo village and was so impressed by the scene that he wrote, "There is reason to believe that Fawcett's stories of a forgotten civilization are based on fact."

I asked Vajuvi whether he knew if the people of this region, who were known as Xinguanos, had once descended from a larger civilization, or if there were any significant ruins in the surrounding jungle. He shook his head. According to legend, however, the spirit Fitsi-fitsi built giant moats in the area. ("Everywhere he went that seemed like a nice place to stay, Fitsi-fitsi would make long, deep ditches and leave part of his people there, and he himself would continue travelling.")

While Vajuvi, Pinage, and I were talking, a man named Vanite Kalapalo entered the house and sat down beside us. He seemed despondent. It was his job, he said, to guard one of the posts to the reservation. The other day, another Indian had come to him and said, "Listen, Vanite. You must come with me down the river. The white people are building something in Afasukugu." The word "Afasukugu" meant "the place of the big cats"; at this site, the Xinguanos believe, the first humans were created. Vanite picked up a stick and drew a map on the mud floor. "Here is Afasukugu," he said. "It is by a waterfall."

"It is outside the park," Vajuvi, the chief, added. "But it is sacred."

Vanite continued with his story. "So I said, 'I will go with you to Afasukugu, but you are crazy. Nobody would build anything at the place of the jaguars.' But when I get there the waterfall is destroyed. They blew it up with thirty kilos of dynamite. The place was so beautiful, and now it is gone. And I ask a man working there, 'What are you doing?' He says, 'We are building a hydroelectric dam.' "

"It is in the middle of the Kuluene River," Vajuvi said. "All the water from there flows right into our park and into our territory."

Vanite, who was becoming agitated, didn't seem to hear the chief. He said, "A man from the Mato Grosso government comes to the Xingu and tells us, 'Do not worry. This dam will not hurt you.' And he offers each us of money. One of the chiefs from another tribe took the money, and the tribes are now fighting with each other. For me, the money means nothing. The river has been here for thousands of years. We don't live forever, but the river does. The god Taugi created the river. It gives us our food, our medicines. You see, we don't have a well. We drink water right from the river. How will we live without it?"

Vajuvi said, "If they succeed, the river will disappear and, with it, all our people."

Our search for Fawcett and the City of Z suddenly felt trivial-another tribe appeared to be on the verge of extinction. But, later that night, after we bathed in the river, Vajuvi said that there was something he had to tell Pinage and me about the Englishmen. The next day, he promised, he would take us by boat to where the bones had been discovered. Before going to bed, he added, "There are many things about the Englishmen that only Kalapalo people know."

The next morning, as we got ready to depart, one of the girls in our house removed a piece of cloth from a large object in the corner of the room, near an array of masks. Underneath was a television set, which was powered by the village's sole generator.

The girl, who was naked, turned a knob, sat down on the mud floor, and began watching a cartoon featuring a raucous Woody Woodpecker-like bird. Within minutes, at least twenty other children and several adults from the village had gathered around the set.

As Vajuvi came to retrieve us, I asked him how long he had owned a television. "Only a few years," he said. "At first, all everyone did is stare at it in a trance. But now I control the generator, and it is on only a few hours a week."

Several of the men watching the television got their bows and arrows and went out to hunt. Meanwhile, Pinage and I followed Vajuvi and one of his sons, who was five years old, down to the river. "I thought we would catch our lunch, the way Kalapalo do," Vajuvi said.

We climbed into one of the motorboats and headed upriver. A mist that covered the forest slowly dissipated as the sun rose. The river, dark and muddy, occasionally narrowed into a chute so tight that tree branches hung over our heads like bridges. Eventually, we entered an inlet covered by a tangle of floating leaves. "The green lagoon," Vajuvi said.

He cut the engine, and the boat slid quietly through the water. Terns with yellow beaks fluttered amid the rosewood and cedar trees, and swallows zigzagged above the lagoon, shimmering white specks on the blanket of green. A pair of macaws cackled and screamed, and, on the shore, deer stood as still as the water. A small caiman scurried up the banks.

"You must always be careful in the jungle," Vajuvi said. "I listen to my dreams. If I have a dream of danger, then I stay in the village. Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams."

The Xinguanos were famous for fishing with bows and arrows, their bodies perched silently on the front of canoes-a pose that early-twentieth-century explorers had caught on camera. Vajuvi and his son, however, took out some fishing lines and baited the hooks. Then they spun the lines over their heads like lassos and sent the hooks sailing into the center of the lagoon.

As Vajuvi pulled in his line, he pointed to the shore and said, "Up that way is where the bones were dug up. But they were not Fawcett's bones-they were my grandfather's."

"Your grandfather's?" I asked.

"Yes. Mugika-that was his name. He was dead when Orlando Villas Boas began to ask about Fawcett. Orlando wanted to protect us from all the white people coming in, and he told the Kalapalo people, 'If you find a tall skeleton, I will give each of you a rifle.' My grandfather was one of the tallest men in the village. So several people in the village decide to dig up his bones and bury them out here by the lagoon and say they are Fawcett's."

As he spoke, his son's line went taut. He helped the boy pull it in, and a silvery-white fish burst out of the water, flapping wildly on the hook. I leaned in to inspect it, but Vajuvi jerked me out of the way and began to club it with a stick.

"Piranha," he said.

I looked down at the dead fish, with its low-hung jaw, lying on the aluminum floor of the boat. Vajuvi opened its mouth with a knife, revealing a set of sharp interlocking teeth-teeth that the Indians sometimes used to scrape their flesh in purification rituals. After he removed the hook, he continued, "My father, Tadjui, was away at the time, and he was furious when he found out what the people did. But the bones had already been taken away."

Other evidence seemed to corroborate his story. As Brian Fawcett had noted at the time, many of the Kalapalos told contradictory versions of how the Colonel had actually been killed. The Kalapalo insisted that Fawcett had been murdered because he had not brought any gifts and had slapped a young Kalapalo boy, yet Fawcett was known for his gentle behavior in the jungle. More significant, I later found a document from the Royal Anthropological Institute, in London, which had examined the bones. It stated:

The upper jaw provides the clearest possible evidence that these human remains were not those of Colonel Fawcett, whose spare upper denture is fortunately available for comparison. . . . Colonel Fawcett is stated to have been six feet, one and a half inches tall. The height of the man whose remains have been brought to England is estimated at about five feet, seven inches.

"I would like to get the bones back and bury them where they belong," Vajuvi said.

After catching half a dozen piranhas, we glided to shore. Vajuvi gathered several sticks and built a fire. Without skinning the piranhas, he laid them on the wood, grilling one side, then the other. He put the blackened fish on a bed of leaves and tore several pieces off the bone. He wrapped the fish in beiju, a kind of pancake bread made from manioc flour, handing each of us a sandwich. As we ate, he said, "I will tell you what my parents told me really happened to the Englishmen. It is true that they were here. There were three of them, and no one knew who they were or why they had come. They had no animals and carried packs on their backs. One, who was the chief, was old, and the two others were young. They were hungry and tired from marching for so long, and the people in the village gave them fish and beiju. In return for their help, the Englishmen offered them fish hooks, which no one had seen before. And knives. Finally, the old man said, 'We must be going now.' The people asked them, 'Where are you going?' And they said, 'That way. To the east.' We said, 'Nobody goes that way. That's where the hostile Indians are. They will kill you.' But the old man insisted. And so they went." Vajuvi pointed eastward and shook his head. "In those days, nobody went that way," he said. For several days, he continued, the Kalapalos could see smoke above the trees-Fawcett's campfire-but on the fifth day it disappeared. Vajuvi said that a group of Kalapalos, fearing that something bad had happened to them, tried to find their camp. But there was no trace of the Englishmen.

Later, I learned that what his parents had shared with him was an oral history, which had been passed down for generations with remarkable precision. In 1931, Vincenzo Petrullo, an anthropologist who worked for the Pennsylvania University Museum, in Philadelphia, and who was one of the first whites to enter the Xingu, reported hearing a similar account. (Amid all the sensationalist tales, few had paid much attention to it.) Some fifty years later, Ellen Basso, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, recorded a more detailed version from a Kalapalo named Kambe, who was a boy when Fawcett and his party arrived in the village. She translated his account directly from the Kalapalo language, maintaining the epic rhythms of the tribe's oral histories:

One of them remained by himself.

While he sang, he played a musical instrument.

His musical instrument worked like this, like this. . . .

He sang and sang.

He put his arm around me this way.

While he was playing we watched the Christians.

While he was playing.

Father and the others.

Then, " I'll have to be going," he said.

Kambe also recounted how they could see their fire:

"There's the Christians' fire," we said to one another.

That was going on as the sun set.

The next day as the sun set, again their fire rose up.

The following day again, just a little smoke, spread out in the sky.

On this day, mbouk, their fire had gone out. . . .

It looked as if the Englishmen's fire was no longer alive, as if it had been put out.

"What a shame! Why did he keep insisting they go away?"

When Vajuvi finished his version of the oral history, he said, "People always say the Kalapalos killed the Englishmen. But we did not. We tried to save them."

One day in 1955, four years after the bones were dug up, Brian Fawcett conducted his own search for Z. He rented a propeller plane and dropped thousands of leaflets over the jungle. The leaflets asked, "Are you Jack Fawcett? If your answer is yes, then make this sign holding arms above your head. . . . Can you control the Indians if we land? . . . Is P. H. Fawcett still alive?"

When Brian received no positive responses, he continued to canvass the wilderness from above for signs of Z. He crisscrossed the Amazon, peering through binoculars, and, as the days wore on, he began to fear what he had never allowed himself to consider-that there had never been a Z. As he later wrote, "The whole romantic structure of fallacious beliefs, already rocking dangerously, collapsed about me, leaving me dazed."

Before long, the search for Fawcett began to attract a new kind of explorer: spiritualists and occultists. Hundreds of people came to believe that Fawcett, who had developed a lifelong interest in mysticism during his days in Ceylon, had discovered that Z was, in fact, a portal to an alternate reality. They cited many of Fawcett's cryptic and largely impenetrable writings for magazines such as Occult Review, which he published shortly before he departed on his last adventure. In one essay, he spoke of his search for "the treasure of the invisible World."

Fawcett's disappearance, and the failure of later explorers to find his remains, fuelled the notion that the Colonel, in his quest, had somehow transcended the laws of physics. In the nineteen-sixties, several religious cults began worshipping Fawcett as a kind of god. According to Leal's biography of Fawcett, one such group was founded, in 1968, by a man named Udo Luckner, who wore a long white gown and a hat resembling an archbishop's mitre. Luckner claimed that Fawcett had uncovered a gateway to a new dimension inside a cave in the Roncador Mountains, in the northeast corner of the Mato Grosso. Recently, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society announced plans for an expedition to find "the same portal or the doorway to a Kingdom that was entered by Colonel Fawcett in 1925." The trek, which will include psychic guides, is billed as an "Expedition of No Return in the Ethereal Place of the Unbelief."

In many ways, these seekers represent the end point of exploration. Just as the search for gold gave way to a search for scientific knowledge, now the search for scientific knowledge has given way to the search for transcendence. Fawcett himself anticipated this turn. Not long before he vanished, he wrote to his wife, "But for the Occult side-everything else is peripheral (!), I scarcely see how anyone could do these expeditions." At one point, Pinage and I met a mystic near the Roncador Mountains, who told us, "You will never find Z as long as you look for it in this world."

Still, I pressed on with my attempt to find Z in the Xingu, even though Brian Fawcett had warned others about "throwing away their lives for a mirage." According to Fawcett's blueprints, Z would have been situated farther north than the Kalapalo settlement. Vajuvi, Pinage, and I decided to follow the Kuluene River in the direction of the Kuikuro village-the settlement where, in 1996, James Lynch had been taken hostage.

We loaded our equipment in the aluminum canoe and set out. It had rained most of the night before, and the river spilled into the surrounding forest. After three hours, the boat approached an embankment where a young Indian boy was fishing. Vajuvi steered the boat toward him and turned off the engine as the bow slid onto the shore.

"Are we here?" I asked Vajuvi.

"The village is inland," he said. "You'll have to walk from here."

Pinage and I unloaded our bags and our boxes of food, and said goodbye to Vajuvi. We watched as his boat disappeared behind a bend in the river. There was too much baggage for us to carry, and Pinage asked the boy if he could borrow his bicycle, which was propped against a tree. The boy agreed, and Pinage told me to wait while he went to find help. As he rode away, I sat under a buriti tree and watched the boy casting his line and pulling it in.

An hour passed without anyone from the village appearing. I stood and stared down the path-there was only a trail of mud surrounded by wild grass and bushes. It was past noon when four boys showed up on bicycles. They strapped the cargo on the back of their bicycles, but they had no room for a large cardboard box, which weighed about forty pounds, or for my computer bag, and so I carried them myself. In a mixture of Portuguese, Kuikuro, and pantomime, the boys explained that they would meet me in the village, waved goodbye, and vanished down the path on their rickety bikes.

With the box resting on one shoulder and the bag in my hand, I followed on foot, alone. The path wound through a partially submerged mangrove forest. I wondered whether I should remove my shoes, but I had no place to carry them, so I left them on, my ankles sinking in the mud. The vestiges of the path soon disappeared underwater. I was unsure which way to go, and I veered to the right, where I thought I saw some trampled grass. I walked for an hour-still, there was no sight of anyone. The box on my shoulder had grown heavier, as had the bag for my laptop, which, among the mangroves, seemed like an absurdity of modern travel. I thought about leaving them behind, but there was no dry spot to be found.

Occasionally, I slipped in the mud, falling in the water. I yelled out Pinage's name, but there was no response. Exhausted, I found a grassy knoll that was only a few inches below the waterline, and sat down. My pants filled with water as I listened to the frogs. The sun burned my face and hands, and I wiped muddy water on myself in a vain attempt to cool down.

After half an hour, I stood again and tried to find the correct path. I walked and walked; in one spot, the water rose to my waist, and I lifted the bags above my head. Each time I thought that I had reached the end of the mangrove forest, a new swath opened up before me-large patches of tall, damp reeds clouded with mosquitoes, which ate into me.

I was slapping a mosquito on my neck when I heard a noise in the distance. I stopped but didn't see anything. As I took another step, the noise grew louder. I called out again for Pinage.

I could hear the sound again-a strange cackle, almost like laughter. A dark object darted in the tall grass, then another one, and another. "Who's there?" I asked, in Portuguese.

I walked faster, but the water deepened and widened until it resembled a lake. I was looking dumbfounded at the shore, some two hundred yards ahead, when I noticed, tucked in a bush, an aluminum canoe. Though there was no paddle, I rested the box and my bag in it and climbed in, short of breath. Then I heard the noise again and bolted upright. Out of the tall reeds burst dozens of naked children. They seized the edges of the canoe and began to swim me across the lake, screaming with laughter the entire way. When we reached the shore again, I stumbled out of the canoe, and the children followed me up a path. We had reached the Kuikuro village.

Pinage was sitting in the shade of the nearest hut. "I'm sorry I didn't go back for you," he said. "I didn't think I could make it." His vest was draped around his neck, and he was sipping water from a bowl. He handed the bowl to me, and, though the water hadn't been boiled, I drank it greedily, letting it spill around my neck.

"Now you have some kind of real picture in your mind of what it was like for Fawcett," he said. "Now we go home, no?"

Before I could reply, a Kuikuro man came and told us to follow him. Recalling Lynch's experience, I paused for a moment, then walked with him across the dusty central plaza, which was some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter-the largest one, I was told, in the Xingu. Two fires had recently swept through the huts along the plaza's perimeter, the flames leaping from one thatched roof to the next, leaving much of the settlement in ashes. He paused outside one of the surviving homes and told us to enter. Near the door, I could see two magnificent clay sculptures-one of a frog, the other of a jaguar. I was admiring them when an enormous man stepped out of the shadows. He was built like Tamakafi, a mythical Xinguano fighter, who, according to legend, had a colossal body, his arms as thick as thighs, his legs as big as a chest. The man wore only a thin bathing suit, and he had a bowl haircut that somehow made his stern face seem even more imposing.

"I am Afukaká," he said, in a surprisingly soft, measured voice. It was clear that he was the chief. He offered Pinage and me lunch-a bowl of fish and rice-which his two wives, who were sisters, served us. He seemed interested in the outside world and asked me many questions about New York, about the skyscrapers and restaurants.

As we spoke, a sweet serenading sound filtered into the hut. I turned to the door as a group of women dancers and men with bamboo flutes entered. The men, who were naked, had covered their bodies with elaborate images of fish and tortoises and anacondas, the shapes weaving along their arms and legs, the orange and yellow and red colors gleaming with sweat. Around the eyes of most of them were black circles of paint, which resembled masks at a costume party. Their heads were topped with large, colorful feathers.

Afukaká and Pinage and I stood as the group crowded into the hut. The men stepped forward twice, then back, then forward again, all the time blowing their flutes, some of which were ten feet long-beautiful pieces of bamboo that released humming tones, like wind catching an open bottle top. Several young girls with long black hair danced alongside the men, their arms slung over the shoulders of the person in front of them, forming a chain; they, too, were naked, except for strings of snail shells around their necks and a bark-cloth triangle, or uluri, that covered their pubic area. Some of the pubescent girls had recently been held in seclusion, so that their bodies were paler than those of the men. Their necklaces rattled as they stamped their feet, adding to the insistent rhythm of the music. The group circled us for several minutes, then ducked under the doorway and disappeared into the plaza, the sound of the flutes fading as the musicians and the dancers entered the next hut.

I asked Afukaká about the ritual, and he said that it was a festival for fish spirits. "It is a way to commune with the spirits," he said. "We have hundreds of ceremonies-all beautiful."

After a while, I mentioned Fawcett. Afukaká echoed what the Kalapalo chief had told me. "The fierce Indians must have killed them," he said. Indeed, it seemed likely that at least one of the more warlike tribes in the region-most likely the Suyás, as Aloique had suggested-had slaughtered the party; it was improbable that all three Englishmen would have starved to death, given Fawcett's talent for surviving in the jungle for long periods. But that was as far as the evidence led me. For example, I could not account for how Fawcett's ring had wound up in a shop outside Cuiabá. Perhaps Fawcett had traded it for goods in Cuiabá, or perhaps he had given it to someone at Bakairí Post. "Only the forest knows all," Pinage said.

An archeologist named Michael Heckenberger was doing field work in the Kuikuro village. Earlier, we had spoken on the phone and arranged a meeting. A highly regarded professor at the University of Florida, he had spent more than a decade doing research in the Amazon. During that time, he had battled everything from malaria to snakes to virulent bacteria that made his skin peel off and forced him to boil his garments twice a day. Because of the prevailing notion that the Amazon was a counterfeit paradise-and because no stone city had ever been found-most established archeologists had long ago abandoned the remote Xingu. "They assumed it was an archeological black hole," Heckenberger told me. "Fawcett was probably the last person who came in here looking for lost cities."

Heckenberger, who, with baggy shorts and shaggy blond hair, looks a little like a surfer, knew the story of Fawcett well and had tried to conduct his own inquiry into his fate. "I'm fascinated by him and what he did in that time period," Heckenberger said. "He was one of these larger-than-life figures. Anyone who would jump in a canoe or march in here at a time when you know some of the Indians are going to try to-" He stopped in midsentence, as if contemplating the consequences.

He said that Fawcett was easy to dismiss as "a crank"; he lacked the tools and the discipline of a modern archeologist, and he never questioned the shibboleth that any lost city in the Amazon had to have European origins. "But if you look back you'll find that a lot of people believed that then," Heckenberger said. Fawcett, he went on, may have been an amateur, but, in some ways, he was able to see things more clearly than many professional scholars.

"I want to show you something," Heckenberger said at one point.

Grabbing a two-foot-long machete, he led Pinage, Afukaká, and me into the forest, cutting away tendrils from trees, which shot upward, fighting for the glow of the sun. After walking for a mile or so, we reached an area where the forest thinned. Heckenberger pointed to the ground with his machete. "See how the land dips?" he asked.

Indeed, the ground seemed to slope downward for a long stretch, then tilt upward again, as if someone had carved out an enormous ditch.

"It's a moat," Heckenberger said.

"What do you mean, a moat?"

"A moat. A defensive ditch." He added, "From nearly nine hundred years ago."

Pinage and I tried to follow the moat's contours, which curved in a nearly perfect circle through the woods. Heckenberger said that the moat had originally been between a dozen and sixteen feet deep, and about fifty feet wide. It was nearly a mile in diameter. I thought of "the long, deep ditches" that the spirit Fitsi-fitsi was said to have built around settlements. "The Kuikuros knew they existed, but they didn't realize that their own ancestors had built them," Heckenberger said.

Afukaká, who had helped with the excavation, said, "We thought they were made by the spirits."

Heckenberger walked over to a rectangular hole in the ground, where he had excavated part of the moat. Pinage and I peered over the edge with the chief. The exposed earth, in contrast to other parts of the forest, was dark, almost black. Using radiocarbon dating, Heckenberger had dated the trench to about 1200 A.D. He pointed the tip of his machete to the bottom of the hole, where there seemed to be a ditch within the ditch. "That's where they put the palisade wall," he said.

"A wall?" I asked.

Heckenberger smiled and went on, "All around the moat, you can see these funnel shapes, equally spread apart. There are only two explanations. Either they had traps at the bottom or they had something sticking into them, like tree trunks."

He said that the concept of traps made little sense, since the people the moat was supposed to be protecting would have been in peril themselves. What's more, he said, when he examined the moats with Afukaká, the chief told him a legend about a Kuikuro who had escaped from another village by leaping over "a great palisade wall and ditch."

Still, none of it seemed to make sense. Why would anyone build a moat and a stockade wall in the middle of the wilderness? "There's nothing here," I said.

Heckenberger didn't respond; instead, he bent down and rooted through the dirt, picking up a piece of hardened clay with grooves along the edges. He held it up to the light. "Broken pottery," he said. "It's everywhere."

As I looked at other shards on the ground, I thought of how Fawcett had once asserted in a letter that on certain high grounds in the Amazon "very little scratching will produce an abundance" of ancient pottery.

Heckenberger said that we were standing in the middle of a vast ancient settlement.

"Poor Fawcett-he was so close," Pinage said.

It was understandable why Fawcett wouldn't have been able to see it, Heckenberger went on. "There isn't a lot of stone in the jungle, and most of the settlement was built with organic materials-wood and palms and earth mounds-which decompose," he said. "But once you begin to map out the area and excavate it you are blown away by what you see."

He began walking once more through the forest, pointing out what was, increasingly clearly, the remains of a massive man-made landscape. There was not just one moat but three, arranged in concentric circles. There was a giant circular plaza where the vegetation had a different character than that of the rest of the forest, because it had once been swept clean. And there had been a sprawling neighborhood of dwellings, as evidenced by even denser black soil, which had been enriched by decomposed garbage and human waste.

As we walked around, I noticed an embankment that extended into the forest in a straight line. Heckenberger said that it was a road curb.

"They had roads, too?" I asked.

"Roads. Causeways. Canals." Heckenberger said that some roads had been nearly a hundred and fifty feet wide. "We even found a place where the road ends at one side of a river in a kind of ascending ramp and then continues on the other side with a descending ramp. Which can mean only one thing: there had to have been some kind of wooden bridge connecting them, over an area that was a half mile long."

They were the very same kind of dreamlike causeways and settlements that the Spanish conquistadores had spoken of when they visited the Amazon, in which Fawcett had so fervently believed and which twentieth-century scientists had dismissed as myths. I asked Heckenberger where the roads led, and he said that they extended to other, equally complex sites. "I just took you to the closest one," he said.

Altogether, he had uncovered twenty pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu. The settlements were about two to three miles apart and were connected by roads. More astounding, the plazas were laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and the roads were positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett said that Indians had told him legends that described "many streets set at right angles to one another.")

Borrowing my notebook, Heckenberger began to sketch a huge circle, then another and another. These were the plazas and the villages, he said. He then drew rings around them, which he said were the moats. Finally, he added several parallel lines that jutted out from each of the settlements in precise angles-the roads, bridges, and causeways. Each form seemed to fit into an elaborate whole, like an abstract painting viewed from a distance. "Once my team and I started to map everything out, we discovered that nothing was done by accident," Heckenberger said. "All these settlements were laid out with a complicated plan, with a sense of engineering and mathematics that rivalled anything that was happening in much of Europe at the time."

Heckenberger said that each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from two thousand to five thousand people, which means that the larger community was the size of many medieval European cities. "These people had a cultural aesthetic of monumentality," he said. "They liked to have beautiful roads and plazas and bridges. Their monuments were not pyramids, which is why they were so hard to find; they were horizontal features. But they're no less extraordinary."

Heckenberger's discoveries have been documented in numerous scholarly journals; in 2003, he published a paper in Science titled "Amazonia 1492: Pristine Forest or Cultural Parkland?" He also recently published a book detailing his discoveries, called "The Ecology of Power." His work has been hailed as proof that the rain forest once contained civilizations nearly as rich and complex as those of the Inca and the Maya and Europeans. And Heckenberger has helped to upend the view of the Amazon as a counterfeit paradise that could never sustain what Fawcett had envisioned: a prosperous, glorious civilization.

Others have fuelled this revolution in archeology. Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who is an archeologist at the University of Illinois, has discovered, along the floodplains of the Amazon, buried settlements that may be eleven thousand years old. Scientists have also begun to find enormous man-made earth mounds scattered across the region. Geologists have uncovered so much black earth from ancient settlements that they now believe the Amazon may have sustained millions of people. One prominent scholar, Donald Lathap, even argues that the Amazon may have been the wellspring of high civilization throughout the Americas-that an advanced culture had spread outward, rather than vice versa.

Heckenberger, who is somewhat more cautious, said, "We can't get ahead of ourselves." But, he added, "Anthropologists made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, 'Well, that's all there is.' The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That's why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find."

As we walked back into the Kuikuro village, Heckenberger stopped at the edge of the plaza and told me to examine it closely. He said that the civilization that had built the giant settlements had been nearly annihilated. Yet a small number of descendants had survived, and we were no doubt among them. For a thousand years, he said, the Xinguanos had maintained artistic and cultural traditions from this highly advanced, highly structured civilization. He said, for instance, that the present-day Kuikuro village was still organized along east and west cardinal points and its paths were aligned at right angles, though its residents no longer knew why this was the preferred pattern. Heckenberger added that he had taken a piece of pottery from the ruins and shown it to a local maker of ceramics. It was so similar to present-day pottery, with its painted exterior and reddish clay, that the potter insisted that it had been made recently.

As Pinage and I headed toward the chief's house, Heckenberger picked up a contemporary ceramic pot and ran his hand along the edge, where there were grooves. "They're from boiling the toxins out of manioc," he said. He had detected the same feature in the ancient pots. "That means that a thousand years ago people in this civilization had the same staple of diet," he said. He began to go through the house, finding parallels between the ancient civilization and its remnants today: the clay statues, the thatched walls and roofs, the cotton hammocks. "To tell you the honest-to-God truth, I don't think there is anywhere in the world where there isn't written history where the continuity is so clear as right here," Heckenberger said.

Some of the musicians and dancers were circling through the plaza, and Heckenberger said that everywhere you looked in the Kuikuro village "you can see the past in the present." I began to picture the flutists and dancers in one of the old plazas. I pictured them living in mound-shaped two-story houses, the houses not scattered but in endless rows, where women wove hammocks and baked with manioc flour, and where teen-age boys and girls were held in seclusion as they learned the rites of their ancestors. I pictured the dancers and singers crossing moats and passing through tall palisade fences, moving from one village to the next, along wide boulevards and bridges and causeways.

The musicians were coming closer to us, and Heckenberger said something about the flutes, but I could no longer hear his voice over the sounds. For a moment, I could see this vanished world as if it were right in front of me. Z. ?

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/19/050919fa_fact_grann#ixzz1LEl6Qcak
And You Thought Abercrombie & Fitch Was Pushing It? By JAIME WOLF
ov Charney's office, in the corner of the top floor of American Apparel's factory headquarters in downtown Los Angeles - like American Apparel retail locations around the world, like Charney's house in nearby Echo Park and his apartment on the Lower East Side of New York, like Charney's mind itself - is a colorful, cluttered, retro-themed and stimulating place. Strewn around the vintage 1970's couches, you're likely to see an assortment of fabric scraps and prototype T-shirts beside samples of unusual light bulbs that Charney wants to test for store displays. On his desk sit copies of Playboy from the 1980's, their pages carefully annotated and tabbed with colored stickers denoting their depiction of socks, pants, T-shirts, electronics, car designs and other markers of style from the period. Next to these is a stack of come-on letters from television and film casting directors hoping to get Charney to supply them with the kind of fresh and unusual faces on display in American Apparel's provocative print ads. Further over you'll find some books that Charney has been consulting, including a collection of Andy Warhol's early hand-painted works; "The Concise 48 Laws of Power," by Robert Greene; and "The Medium Is the Massage," by Charney's fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan. Pinned to the rear wall is some classic National Geographic-style cheesecake: pages ripped from a 1975 "Girls of Polynesia" calendar. It's an element echoed in a handful of the American Apparel stores, which feature displays of original covers from erotic magazines from the 70's and 80's, including Oui and Penthouse, and also sell paperback photo collections of the work of Yasumasa Yonehara, a Japanese photographer working in the erotic snapshot tradition pioneered by Nobuyoshi Araki.

One morning this past winter, a dozen or so youthful American Apparel managers, nearly all of them women, were gathered in Charney's office for a meeting. Charney, a scrawny bundle of nervous energy, is a stream-of-consciousness C.E.O. There are no regularly scheduled reviews of marketing and production issues or strategic planning and the like; instead Charney deals with everything as it flows to him. And so, in the midst of evaluating the possibilities for a third production shift in American Apparel's factory in downtown L.A. so that clothing could be manufactured 24/7 and of Charney trying to whip his team into a frenzy about introducing a new gift card to lure people into their stores, a phone call came in from Burlington, Vt. Charney put it on the speaker so that the entire room could hear. The caller was one of those middle-aged men whose efforts to sound hip wind up making them seem slightly more square than they actually are. Hoping to interest American Apparel in advertising on his Web site, he was first eager to establish his bona fides with Charney.

"I have a great collection of 3-D - I guess you'd call it erotica," the man said. "But it's certainly vintage, and it's from the 50's, privately done. And I also have a whole bunch of Bettie Page. Well, that's not why I'm calling, but I just wanted to tell you I thought it was very cool when I walked into your store and saw the.. . ."

As the young women sitting around Charney's desk rolled their eyes and stifled giggles, Charney listened patiently. The man's Web site, a broadband venture, aimed to report and disseminate news about the environment.

"Now, me, I'm an old activist," the man explained. "And I really enjoyed your Web site and your mission statement. Because in Burlington there's this peace and justice association, about paying fair wages in the U.S., and you're doing righteous work. I want to congratulate you on that."

Grinning, Charney shouted, "It's a pervert with ethics!" More laughter.

"I've lived in London," the caller said. "I've lived in Europe. Murder, bombs, poison: now that's offensive. Naked people are beautiful, and-"

"God bless America!" Charney exclaimed.

"Absolutely," the man said. "Absolutely."

Dov Charney proudly refers to himself as a "Jewish hustler." But he is quite possibly the most unorthodox Jew in the history of the shmatte business. A complicated, charismatic and occasionally controversial figure - he is currently facing a sexual harassment suit - Charney is so acutely in tune with the cultural moment that he is somehow able to use the plain blank T-shirts that he sells to convey potent messages concerning contemporary sex and politics.

Charney, who is 37, originally made a name for himself as a designer and wholesaler of artisanal T-shirts made from softer, more finely knitted cotton than the commercial standard and cut for a snug, body-accentuating fit. (Alex Kuczynski, the Critical Shopper columnist for The New York Times, has written that they are "as close to the Platonic ideal of T-shirt as you can get.") In the past few years, however, he has become a peculiar sort of retail king. In the summer of 2003, when Charney rented a storefront gallery in Echo Park for an exhibit of photographs taken by his friend Luca Pizzaroni, it only occurred to him as an afterthought to offer some T-shirts for sale as well. The next day, when he discovered that he had rung up $1,500 in sales, he began signing more leases in hip neighborhoods in other cities. As of January, Charney had established more than 110 American Apparel stores in Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Seoul, Tokyo and Tel Aviv, with plans to open another 40 by year's end. Sales of American Apparel goods in 2005 totaled approximately $250 million, and the company's L.A. factory, which now employs more than 3,500 people and turns out more than 9,000 separate items, is the single largest garment factory in the United States.

By the looks of American Apparel's colorful array of basic clothing, it would be easy to conclude that the company is the Gap with a social conscience: two of Charney's key ideological concepts are "sweatshop free" and "vertical integration." All of American Apparel's clothing is made in downtown L.A., by workers to whom Charney pays an average of almost twice the minimum wage (and sometimes much more) and to whom he offers subsidized health care, meals and free English lessons, as well as regular massages. Charney says he believes that he can have a greater degree of quality control and quicker responsiveness to the marketplace by keeping everything in house.

But it's not just on the factory floor where American Apparel does not play by the rules of the Gap. While the Gap's imaging exemplifies the kind of sandblasted, bland notion of good-looking young Americans who have been the standard since long before "Dawson's Creek" or "The O.C.," the models in American Apparel's print ads challenge conventional notions of beauty. Before the ballyhooed Dove soap campaign, Charney embraced the notion of "real" advertising, photographing young ethnic and mixed-race men and women with asymmetrical features, imperfect bodies, blemished skin and visible sweat stains on the clothes they are modeling - the kind of artsy, latter-day-bohemian, indie-culture-affiliated young adults who live and shop in the neighborhoods where American Apparel stores are located.

The ads are also highly suggestive, and not just because they are showcasing underwear or clingy knits. They depict young men and women in bed or in the shower; if they are casually lounging on a sofa or sitting on the floor, then their legs happen to be spread; frequently they are wearing a single item of clothing but are otherwise undressed; a couple of the young women appear to be in a heightened state of pleasure. These pictures have a flashbulb-lighted, lo-fi sultriness to them; they look less like ads than photos you'd see posted on someone's Myspace page.

Accompanying the pictures is some text, another anomaly in fashion advertising: "Chanaye, an 18-year-old self-professed hippie of Afro-Cuban descent," one begins, "is taking a year off school to 'work, travel and experience all the [expletive] that [she] would not have had time for."'

These aren't ads that you'll see on the side of a bus or in famous magazines. American Apparel places advertising in the blogosphere, linking from pop-culture sites like Gawker.com to photo essays and copy on its own Web site; on the back pages of alternative newspapers like The Village Voice, L.A. Weekly or The Onion; in slightly obscure art-hipster publications like Purple Fashion and Fantastic Man; and in the profane, anti-P.C. lifestyle magazine Vice, whose louche tastes and attitudes run in close concert with Charney's. The full-page ad that American Apparel takes in that magazine every month represents the company's single-largest advertising expenditure. "Vice is our Vanity Fair," says Iris Alonzo, American Apparel's creative director and one of Charney's closest creative collaborators.

There's an old Chicago blues song called "Back Door Man," a canonical piece of pop music braggadocio written by Willie Dixon and first recorded by Howlin' Wolf, in which an aging satyr boasts of his subterranean allure: "Men don't know," its refrain goes, "but the little girls understand." In his own way, Charney has mastered a similar subliminal lingo, capturing and retransmitting, with subtle amplification, the casual polymorphous perversity of today's youth culture.

The first-movers of culture, whom Charney refers to as Young Metropolitan Adults, have embraced an aggressively sexualized world, a continuum that includes the hip, subversive and degenerate aesthetic of Charney's friends at Vice magazine, Web sites like Suicide Girls and photographers like Terry Richardson, more stupidly raunchy phenomena like the "Girls Gone Wild" video series or Paris Hilton and, increasingly, the actual intersection of pornography with mainstream entertainment. In this context, the adjective "pervy," a word that often appears in accounts of Charney, is itself a perverse sign of approbation.

One day this winter while I was visiting Charney's house in Los Angeles, he pulled a DVD case off the stack near his television. "Look at this," he said. It was an adult film, and the cover art featured a buxom girl in a short red tank top sexily eyeing the camera.

"What about it?" I asked.

"She's wearing my underwear!" Charney bellowed, and indeed she was - a bright red pair of his boy briefs. He's proud of such things, and perhaps he should be: Charney's deft ability with signs and signifiers has brought him to the point where professional purveyors of purely sexual imagery are taking their cues from him. Certainly it's no accident that a recent story in Adult Video News, a trade magazine for the porn industry, admiringly cited American Apparel's Web site, which features a gallery section with slide shows of its various models, as "one of the finest soft-core Web sites going these days."

Charney is equally savvy about his social mission. His efforts to provide a humane environment for his workers and to pay them well are laudable, but Charney also understands the way that political gestures and activism have become yoked to certain modes of consumerism. We now live in a time when buying a rubber bracelet is considered enough to make you feel as if you've made a meaningful contribution to the fight against cancer and when shopping at Whole Foods is sufficient to affirm your commitment against industrial agribusiness. As if in winking acknowledgment of this, Charney once published an American Apparel ad featuring a young guy in one of his T-shirts, sitting on a sofa next to a copy of the anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters.

Charney's grasp of various erotic and political energies currently at loose in the culture and his relationship to contemporary American sexuality are reminiscent of Hugh Hefner in the early days of Playboy. Hefner's vision made Playboy more than just a magazine: it was an entire world and a business based on cult of personality, presided over by an eccentric and charming control freak. And like Charney, Hefner embarked on a program to expand the definition of sexiness: in contrast to Hollywood standards of glamour (and more underground standards of smut), the Playboy Playmate was meant to embody "the girl next door." In an updated 21st-century way, the American Apparel ideal is Charney's Young Metropolitan Adult, the hottie (male or female) from the 'hood, whom you might see walking down the street, at the local coffee shop or working behind the counter at an American Apparel store.

Hugh Hefner also carried on sexual relationships with several of his Playboy Playmates - and in the early years he marked his territory via subtle visual clues in the magazine's pictorials, like his shaving brush and comb on the bathroom sink or his tie hanging in the background. Charney, whose love life usually includes several women at once, does the same thing. The messages being conveyed by American Apparel about sexuality are also about Dov Charney's sexuality. He sometimes photographs the models himself, and when they are pictured in bed it may be in his bed or on his couch. On occasion, he has put girlfriends in ads, and the photos seem to suggest that they were taken while getting it on: his bare chest and a pair of sky-blue gym shorts beneath a woman straddling him or his face partially visible on the pillow next to a happily disheveled young woman.

Charney is pushing boundaries, and knowingly so, and he maintains that your response to his boundary-pushing determines whether you count as a young person or an old person in today's society. "Look historically at how the baby boomers changed the course of culture," he told me a few weeks ago over the phone. "Well, the same thing is happening now. The skepticism of the Eisenhower generation toward how the boomers were behaving in the 60's is the same. These things take place when there's a population bulge. The boomers basically defined everything at one point because there were so many of them. But the boomers are getting older, so they are less liberal."

Charney draws no distinction between work and leisure; there is always some part of the company that needs his attention. Late one Saturday night in mid-January, Charney was seated in front of his laptop at his dining-room table, studying photographs e-mailed to him by young women interested in becoming American Apparel models. Dozens do so every week, he says, from which maybe 1 out of 10 has some appeal for Charney. If they make the final cut, they receive $50 an hour for catalog and advertising photo shoots and $150 per day, plus transportation and lodging, for working the American Apparel booth at trade shows.

Charney's taste is fairly eclectic, but there are certain things at which he draws a hard line. Makeup is one. Plucked and trimmed eyebrows are another. To my surprise, short hair is a third. Looking over some fetching snapshots of a pixieish U.C. Santa Cruz student, "half-Japanese, half-white," showing herself off in a polka-dot bikini and biting into a strawberry, Charney nixed it on account of her Audrey Hepburn haircut. "You never see a girl we shot with short hair," he said. "That's unnatural."

Tattoos and piercings, generally speaking, are also out. But as I started to catalog these criteria, Charney took issue with my attempts to pin him down. "Don't try to simplify and sensationalize it," he snapped. "I could fall in love with a girl with a tattoo. But to send a picture of yourself for a modeling audition tattooed out, that's very 2001."

What Charney is seeking is an elusive quality he can refer to only as "style." When you have it, it's immediately evident; you're "on point." Among other things, people with style are good at sussing out other people with style, and Charney counts on a small style council to keep him apprised of good locations for his stores, to scout models and to help him know when and how to introduce new clothing items or modify existing ones.

Charney likes to promote American Apparel as a "next-generation business," a company driven by young people's energy, young people's values and young people's style. But the question remains whether its success can be duplicated, for American Apparel is a deeply personal project, a reflection of Charney's own idiosyncratic tastes and obsessions.

Charney was raised in Montreal by artsy parents: his father, Morris, an architect, and his mother, Sylvia Safdie, a painter and sculptor (and also the sister of Canada's renowned architect, Moshe Safde) raised him in an environment that encouraged creativity and social activism. Childhood friends say that growing up Dov was hyperactive and attention-hungry. Surrounded by art and design, he developed a voracious, magpie attraction to minutiae, urban clutter, signs and streets and building detail.

Growing up in Canada in the years before Nafta, Charney noticed a large disparity between certain consumer goods available there and those that could be bought across the border, and he became infatuated with the comfortable casual clothing that he discovered on vacations in Florida to visit his grandmother: he could feel the difference between basics like Hanes cotton T-shirts, socks and underwear and the poorer-quality polyester blends that were for sale at home. He began a fixation that continues to this day on what he calls American commodity manufacturing: clothing items and other goods that defy fashion and stand outside of seasonal requirements, things that are simple, well made and possessed of such innate organic style that they become iconic: Levi's 501's, Sperry Top-Sider deck shoes, Russell Athletic heather-gray T-shirts.

As a teenager, he began buying Hanes T-shirts in the U.S. and bringing them back to Montreal to sell. He kept the business up when he left to attend Tufts University near Boston and was ultimately so successful that he dropped out to enter the rag trade full time, taking on the name American Apparel simply because of the mythic status that American-made goods had assumed for him. When Hanes and Fruit of the Loom moved their production offshore in the 80's and 90's, Charney felt that knowledge of quality garment sewing was being lost. He also rebelled against the boomer tendency for a shapeless, boxy "husky" fit rather than a more tailored cut for shapely young bodies. By 1997, Charney was producing his signature styles, which quickly acquired a following.

While American Apparel is a company that produces and sells mass-market goods, Charney has from the outset organized and maintained it like a traditional atelier. A small circle of people, primarily but not exclusively women, function as Charney's creative brain trust and can be counted upon not just to refine and execute his ideas but also to add their own to the mix. Charney tends to hire them on little more than a whim or vibe, based on a random encounter or a funny conversation. Twenty-seven-year-old Alexandra Spunt, a senior content adviser at American Apparel, was interviewing Charney via phone for The Montreal Mirror, an alternative weekly in which he bought ad space, when he asked if she wanted to come to Los Angeles and work for him. "It was a conversation where Dov talked for about an hour and a half, and I spoke for maybe 10 minutes," she says, two years after the fact and alternately bemused and bewildered by it all. Marsha Brady, a 38-year-old New Yorker, was a former handbag designer and manufacturer working in a vintage furniture store that Charney used to frequent near American Apparel's store on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. After exchanging various ideas with her about design history and aesthetics, he hired her to supervise the décor and arrangements of a handful of his most important locations around the world.

Iris Alonzo is perhaps Charney's most important creative partner. He says that her fashion sense and style antennae are so acutely sensitive that he relies on her to know what's coming next. Recently, Mexico City has taken particular hold of Alonzo's imagination, and she has focused much of American Apparel's advertising and promotion around it. This is another perfectly calibrated move for the company, seizing on the coolness quotient that Mexico City had already attained and then using American Apparel's own resources to create an additional level of hype. Not only did Alonzo, who is 26, establish an American Apparel store in Mexico City (a store in which the local staff is paid just under $7 an hour), she started and continues to edit a monthly bilingual newspaper, Mexico City Monthly, featuring a kaleidoscopic blend of articles, photos and artwork spotlighting Mexican culture and street style. Currently in its fourth issue, The Monthly is available free at all American Apparel stores worldwide.

harney has instilled his crew with an evangelical fervor: they work long hours, and for less money than they would get working for other hip clothing companies. But it's a convivial, youthful and artistic environment. Input on things like the print ads is collective, with various versions being e-mailed or instant-messaged back and forth for comment and refinement. Job definitions are fairly fluid. Spunt may technically be responsible for supervising American Apparel's written material (in ads, on the Web site), but she found herself one morning admiring the "rad" vintage T-shirt worn by a customer in her local coffee shop, talked him into lending it to her and brought it to the factory, where it was copied and subsequently produced as the company's popular Henley shirt.

This kind of retro-pastiche lies at the heart of American Apparel's aesthetic; in a very deep sense, it simply represents Charney's attempt to enshrine that time in the late 70's and early 80's when he first became aware of style and how it was expressed. From a fashion standpoint, surely one of Charney's most impressive achievements has to be the vogue he has created for the "tighty whitey" style men's brief, which had long come to signify all things dorky. Charney's version, available in bright colors with contrasting piping, has become one of the the company's best-selling items, at $12 a pair. Its origin lies in Charney's longtime attachment to the Hanes brief (size 32) of his young adulthood.

Slowly but surely, Charney is moving his reference points closer to the present. If his cotton gym shorts were pure mid-70's throwbacks, then his nylon ones have everything to do with the 80's. On a recent visit to the factory, I noticed in the hallway outside his office that he had hung a giant enlargement of a photo of Jane Fonda in an aerobics studio from the early 80's; in another recent conversation, he mentioned Woody Allen's mid-80's film "Hannah and Her Sisters."

Ultimately, though, the originality of Charney's vision lies less in any particular aspect of American Apparel than in the deftness with which he is able to appropriate disparate energies from elsewhere - Benetton's multiculturalism, Araki and Nan Goldin's eroticism, the art-gallery ambience of Agnès B. - and recombine them. Weronika Cwir, a 31-year old law-school dropout, who writes Web site copy and functions as the company's house theorist and intellectual, likes to describe the American Apparel aesthetic by quoting an old Polish phrase: "Na pograniczu kiczu i absolutnego piekna," which roughly translates as "On the brink of kitsch and absolute beauty."

Following Dov Charney's idea of a win-win business, clothing that's made by workers who are well paid and happy is very likely to be higher quality clothing. And a company staffed by good-looking people, where people are free to get it on with one another, is going to be a place where people are motivated to come to work every day. If erotic energy drives the fashion business, the logic goes, then why shouldn't that energy be able to spill over into the lives of the makers? Conversely, why shouldn't the erotic energy generated by good-looking young people who are involved with one another spill over into the goods? "Sex is a way to bring people closer," Charney says, and he hews to an ideal in which people who are intimately involved with one another can also work together creatively.

Of course, this ethos can get him in trouble, as it did two years ago while he was being profiled for Jane magazine by the writer Claudine Ko. When journalists are around, Charney's natural sense of theater can shift into a higher gear: he knows what makes good copy, and he is happy to exaggerate his outrageous antics if it will get people talking. But during the reporting for Ko's piece, Charney did something he now regrets. Within the context of a flirtatious conversation about sexuality and the pleasure Charney derives from masturbation with a willing partner, he decided to demonstrate for Ko, and it became a repeated motif in their later encounters. The article left a lasting impression of him as a boss who can't keep it in his pants.

Last year, three former employees and an independent contractor filed three sexual-harassment lawsuits against Charney and American Apparel, two of them in Los Angeles and one in Chicago. Notably, none of the suits accused Charney of untoward sexual behavior but concentrated instead on things like the sexualized workplace environment and the language that Charney casually uses. In November, the Chicago suit was dismissed, and one of the Los Angeles suits was settled out of court. The third case is pending.

Charney's persona and the image he has worked to create for the company open him up to charges of exploitation and sexual harassment. But he is eager to defend himself against what he perceives as sexual shame tactics. "I'm fighting for my life!" he told me. "It's inhumane to cast my sexuality in a negative light. It's the same as poking fun at a homosexual or a transvestite or a woman who sleeps with many men. How can you watch Tony Soprano and the next day be so antiseptic? You can't expect people to operate in a vacuum outside of popular culture."

One result of the lawsuits is a document that all American Apparel employees are now required to sign, which declares: "American Apparel is in the business of designing and manufacturing sexually charged T-shirts and intimate apparel, and uses sexually charged visual and oral communications in its marketing and sales activities. Employees working in the design, sales, marketing and other creative areas of the company will come into contact with sexually charged language and visual images. This is a part of the job for employees working in these areas."

Legally, of course, Charney cannot dictate what is and isn't sexual harassment, but given that his company is already worth $250 million - and that an investment group is currently considering lending him $60 million to expand into new ventures - it is not hard to see why he is trying to inoculate himself.

Charney harbors many intriguing ambitions. He plans to add to the amenities for his garment workers by establishing a check-cashing facility on site, as well as a gym and subsidized day care. Alonzo is in the process of setting up a dedicated Internet radio station, which will provide the soundtrack for all American Apparel's stores. Charney also wants to design and run a boutique hotel. He wants to establish a new kind of store that he alternately envisions as a "Sharper Image for 25-year-olds" or a "7-Eleven for hipsters." Either way, it will be an urban purveyor of staple goods and useful electronics. He talks about financing film production. And then there is "Jacques-Charley," a pet project of his and Alonzo's. While some at American Apparel laugh at the mention of it and claim that the syllables "Zhac-Sharlee" are merely something Charney enjoys repeating in an exaggerated French accent, "Jacques-Charley" would be a Dov Charney-style magazine - colorful, hectic and stimulating, mingling social issues, fashion, art and erotica and featuring photos that go a little further than his advertising does.

The last time I spoke to Charney, he had just flown to Miami Beach. Concerned about the sales volume in his stores there, he was walking up and down the boardwalk handing out his new $5 gift cards to bring traffic into the store. Talking from his cellphone, he was adamant about the rightness of his cause. "American Apparel is the new normal," he said. "It's fun to say, 'He's wild and crazy,' but I'm not wild and crazy. This is the way the adult generation is going to live. They're not preoccupied by monogamy. Exciting things can happen. They're mobile; they can travel; they're willing to take chances; they're open-minded and ready for change. That's what the boomers presented for America, and that's what this new generation presents for us. I want to be in business with them."

Jaime Wolf last wrote for the magazine about the disc jockey Nic Harcourt.
The Final Comeback of Axl Rose
Four years after disappearing from public view, Axl Rose is back on the scene, looking like a wax figure of himself, absorbing the crushing blows of Tommy Hilfiger, biting the legs of security guards, and gyrating, shrieking, and storming off stages across the land. John Jeremiah Sullivan grapples with the ghosts of the greatest-or weirdest-frontman of all time
By John Jeremiah SullivanSeptember 2006 (I)

He is from nowhere. I realize that sounds coyly rhetorical-in this day and age, it's even a boast, right? Socioeconomic code for I went to a second-tier school and had no connections and made all this money myself.

Yeah, I don't mean it that way. I mean he is from nowhere. Given the relevant maps and a pointer, I think I could convince even the most exacting minds that when the vast and blood-soaked jigsaw puzzle that is this country's regional scheme coalesced into more or less its present configuration after the Civil War, somebody dropped a piece, which left a void, and they called the void Central Indiana. I'm not trying to say there's no there there. I'm trying to say there's no there. Think about it; let's get systematic on it. What's the most nowhere part of America? The Midwest, right? But once you get into the Midwest, you find that each of the different nowherenesses has laid claim to its own somewhereness. There are the lonely plains in Iowa. In Michigan there is a Gordon Lightfoot song. And Ohio has its very blandness and averageness, faintly comical, to cling to. All of them have something. And now I invite you to close your eyes, and when I say "Indiana"...blue screen, no? And we are speaking only of Indiana generally, which includes Southern Indiana, where I grew up, and Northern Indiana, which touches a Great Lake. We have not even narrowed it down to Central Indiana. Central Indiana? That's like, "Where are you?" "I'm nowhere." "Go there." And when I asked Jeff Strange, a morning-rock deejay in Lafayette, how he thought about this part of the world-for instance, did he think of it as the South? after all, it's a Klan hot spot (which I am inclined to read as a somewhat desperate affectation); or did he think of it as the Midwest or what-you know what he told me? He goes, "Some people here would call it 'the region.'"

That's where he's from.

William Bruce Rose Jr.; William Bruce Bailey; Bill Bailey; William Rose; Axl Rose; W. Axl Rose.

That's where he's from. Bear that in mind.

(II)

On May 15, he came out in jeans and a black leather jacket and giant black sunglasses, all lens, that made him look like a wasp-man. We had been waiting-I don't really know how to calculate how long we'd been waiting. It was the third of the four comeback shows in New York, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The doors had opened at seven o'clock. The opening act had been off by eight thirty. It was now after eleven o'clock. There'd already been fights on the floor, and it didn't feel like the room could get any tenser without some type of event. I was next to a really nice woman from New Jersey, a hairdresser, who told me her husband "did pyro" for Bon Jovi. She kept text-messaging one of her husband's friends, who was "doing pyro" for this show, and asking him, "When's it gonna start?" And he'd text-message back, "We haven't even gone inside." I said to her at one point, "Have you ever seen a crowd this pumped up before a show?" She goes, "Yeah, they get this pumped up every night before Bon Jovi." I didn't want to report that last part, but in the post-James Frey era, you have to watch your topknot.

Then he was there. And apologies to the nice woman, but people do not go that nuts when Bon Jovi appears. People were: Going. Nuts. He is not a tall man-I doubt even the heels of his boots (red leather) put him at over five feet ten. He walked toward us with stalking, cartoonish pugnaciousness. I feel like all anybody talks about with Axl anymore is his strange new appearance, but it is hard to get past the unusual impression he makes. To me he looks like he's wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o'clock in the morning about twelve years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes a gathering of strawberry red intricately braided hempen fibers, the sharply twisted ends of which have been punched, individually, a half inch into his scalp. His chest hair is the color of a new penny. With the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in Predator, or of that monster's wife on its home planet. When he first came onto the scene, he often looked, in photographs, like a beautiful, slender, redheaded 20-year-old girl. I hope the magazine will run a picture of him from about 1988 so the foregoing will seem a slightly less creepy observation and the fundamental spade-called-spade exactitude of it will be laid bare. But if not, I stand by it. Now he has thickened through the middle-muscly thickness, not the lard-ass thickness of some years back. He grabs his package tightly, and his package is huge. Only reporting. Now he plants his feet apart. "You know where you are?" he asks, and we bellow that we do, we do know, but he tells us anyway. "You're in the jungle, baby," he says, and then he tells us that we are going to die.

He should be pleased, I think, not only at the extreme way that we are truly freaking out to see him but also at the age range on view: There are hipsters who were probably born around the time Appetite got released, all the way up to aging heads who've handed in their giant rock hair for grizzled rattails, with plenty of microgenerations in between. But why should I even find this worth remarking? The readers of Teen magazine, less than one year ago, put him at number two (behind "Grandparents") on the list of the 100 Coolest Old People...Axl Rose, who hasn't released a legitimate recording in thirteen years and who, during that time, turned into an almost Howard Hughes-like character-ordering in, transmitting sporadic promises that a new album, inexplicably titled Chinese Democracy, was about to drop, making occasional, startling appearances at sporting events and fashion shows, things like that-looking a little feral, looking a little lost, looking a little like a man who's been given his first day's unsupervised leave from a state facility. Now he has returned. The guitarists dig in, the drummer starts his I-Am-BUil-DINg-UP-TO-THE!-VERSE! pounding section, and although it may give away certain deficiencies of taste on my part, I must say: The sinister perfection of that opening riff has aged not a day.

There's only one thing to do, and you can feel everybody doing it: comparing this with the MTV thing in 2002. If you've seen that, you may find a recounting here of its grotesqueries de trop, but I say, never forget. About the guitar player Buckethead. About the other guitar player. About Axl's billowing tentlike football jersey or the heartbreaking way he aborted his snaky slide-foot dance after only a few seconds on the stage projection, like, "You wanna see my snaky dance? Here, I'll do my snaky dance. Oh shit, I think I just had a small stroke. Run away." Or the audible gasp for oxygen on the second "knees" in Sh-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na knees, kn[gasp!]ees. The running and singing that came more and more to resemble stumbling and squawking as the interminable minutes groaned by. The constant, geriatric-seeming messing with the earpiece monitor. I'll stop. My point is, it's different tonight. For one thing, these guys can handle or choose to handle Slash's parts. Bucket-head has been replaced by a guy called Bumblefoot (again, reporting), and Bumblefoot can shred. So can Robin Finck, formerly of Nine Inch Nails. Remember those experiments where they shot up spiders with acid? If they'd shot up storks instead, and one of the storks had broken loose and dressed in womany wizard's clothing and learned how to play guitar, that'd be Robin Finck (but then, all extremely tall people are inherently misshapen). Listen, these guys aren't fake-booking, like happened on MTV. Everything's note for note. And although we could get into the whole problem of virtuosity as it applies to popular music-namely, that for some reason people who can play anything will, nine times out of ten, when asked to make something up, play something terrible-still, if you mean to replace your entire band one instrument at a time and tell them, "Do it like this," you'll be wanting to find some monster players.

The whole arc of the show has this very straightforward plot, and I hope my crudity is in the service of truth-telling here: It's a battle between the dissonance of seeing all these guys who were not in Guns N' Roses jumping around with Axl and playing Guns N' Roses songs-between the off-putting and even disturbing dissonance of that-and the enduring qualities of the songs themselves. The outcome will determine whether tonight was badass or "Sort of sad, but it's Axl, y'all." What happened? Well, call me a twisted fanboy, but I thought he won. His voice is back, for starters. He was inhabiting the notes. And his dancing-I don't quite know how to say this. It has matured. From the beginning, he's been the only indispensable white male rock dancer of his generation, the only one worth imitating in mockery. I consider the moment in the "Patience" video when he does slow-motion snaky slide-foot dance while letting his hands float down as if they were feathers in an airless room-one fleeting near-pause in their descent for each note that Slash emphasizes in his transition to the coda-the greatest white male rock dance moment of the video age. What Axl does is lovely, I'm sorry. If I could, I would be doing that as I walk to the store. I would wake up and dance every morning like William Byrd of Westover, and that would be my dance. And while I cannot say he is dancing as well tonight as he used to, that so fluidly are his heels gliding out and away from his center they look each to have been tapped with a wand that absolved them of resistance and weight, and although he does at particular moments remind one of one's wasted uncle trying to "do his Axl Rose" after a Super Bowl party, he is nevertheless acquitting himself honorably. He is doing dammit just dropped a bowling ball on my foot spin-with-mike-stand dance; he is doing prance sideways with mike stand like an attacking staff-wielding ritual warrior between-verses dance. And after each line he is gazing at the crowd with those strangely startled yet fearless eyes, as though we had just surprised him in his den, tearing into some carrion.

(III)

Very-near-verbatim exchange with my wife, Mariana, June 27, 2006:

HER: What?

ME: Oh, my God. Axl just bit a security guard's leg in Sweden. He's in jail.

HER: Is that gonna affect your interview with him?

ME: No, I don't think they ever really considered letting me talk to him... Biting somebody on the leg, though-it forces you to picture him in such a, like a, disgraced position.

HER: Does anybody help Axl when that happens?

(IV)

I'd been shuffling around a surprisingly pretty, sunny, newly renovated downtown Lafayette for a couple of days, scraping at whatever I could find. I saw the house where he grew up. I looked at his old yearbook pictures in the public library. Everyone had his or her Axl story. He stole a TV from that house there. Here's where he tried to ride his skateboard on the back of a car and fell and got road rash all up his arm. He came out of this motel with a half-naked woman and some older guys were looking at her and one of 'em threw down a cigarette, not meaning anything by it, but Axl freaked out and flipped 'em off and they beat the crap out of him. Hard to document any of this stuff. Still, enough Wanted On Warrant reports exist for Axl's Indiana years to lend credence to the claim that the city cops and county troopers pretty much felt justified, and technically speaking were justified, in picking him up and hassling him whenever they spotted him out. One doubts he left the house much that they didn't spot him, what with the long, fine, flowing red hair. Must have been sweet to be Axl.

I went to the city cops. They've mellowed along with the town. In fact, they were friendly. They found and processed the negatives of some heretofore unknown mug shots for me, from '80 and '82, the latter of which (the one where he's shirtless) is an anonymous American masterpiece. Then the ladies in the records department rummaged some and came back with this report, which I've never seen mentioned in any of the bios or online or anything. It's written by an officer signing himself "1-4." I took it back to the Holiday Inn and spent the rest of the afternoon reading. Let's call it The Sheidler Incident. It begins:

FULL NAME: BAILEY, WILLIAM BRUCE...

ALIASES: BILL BAILEY...

CURRENT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT: SELF EMPLOYED-BAND

CHARGE: W[ANTED]O[N]W[ARRANT]BATTERY...

AGE: 18; HEIGHT: 5'9"; WEIGHT: 149

HAIR: RED; EYES: GRN; BUILD: SLENDER; COMPLEXION: FAIR...

Here's how it all went down that day-allegedly. I'm about to cherry-pick the pivotal bits. A little kid named Scott Sheidler was riding his bike in front of an older kid named Dana Gregory's house. He made skid marks on the sidewalk. Dana Gregory ran out, picked Scott up under the armpits, kicked over his bike, and ordered the boy To get on his hands and knees and scrub the skid marks off the sidewalk. The kid went squealing to his old man, Tom Sheidler. Tom Sheidler went to Gregory and asked if it was true, what Scotty had said. Dana Gregory said, "Yes and I'm going to beat the fuck out of you." The mom, Marleen, ran up to the scene and began to shout. Around the same time, Bill Bailey appeared, red, green, slender, and fair. And here I need to let the report take over, if only temporarily, as I can't begin to simulate its succinctness or authority:

M. Sheidler stated that Bailey was also arguing with Sheidler and that he was using the "F" word in front of her kids. M. Sheidler stated that she went up to Bailey and pointed her finger at Bailey and told him not to use the "F" word in front of her kids. M. Sheidler stated that Bailey, who has a splint on his arm, then struck her on the arm and neck with the splint. I looked at M. Sheidler and could see some red marks on her arm and neck which could have been made by being struck.

This matter of which hand it was subsumes the narrative for a stretch. Marleen Sheidler says "with the splint," and little Scott says "with a splint," but Dana Gregory's younger brother Chris 15 says "with the opposite hand that his splint is on" (adding that Bailey struck Sheidler in response to "Sheidler Strikeing [sic]" him). Bill Bailey himself then goes on to say that he "struck M. SHEIDLER in the FACE with his LEFT HAND the hand with out the SPLINT." Once again, this only after "MARLEEN SHEIDLER struck him in the face" (though seconds earlier, by his own admission, he'd told her "to keep her fucking brats at home"). The story ends with a strangely affecting suddenness: "BAILEY stated SHEIDLER then jumped at him and fell on his face, he then left and went home..."

The thing I couldn't stop wondering as I read it over was: Why were they so freaked out about the skid marks? Is making skid marks on the sidewalk a bad thing to do? It makes me think I spent half my childhood inadvertently infuriating my entire neighborhood.

(V)

Local lafayette morning rock deejay Jeff Strange, on Axl's extremely brief but long-reported fisticuffs with the diminutive and seemingly gentle designer of mall clothes Tommy Hilfiger; actually, "fisticuffs" is strong-accounts suggest that the fight consisted mostly of Hilfiger slapping Axl on the arm many times, and photos show Axl staring at Hilfiger with an improbable fifty-fifty mixture of rage and amused disbelief, like, 'Should I hurt it?':

"Man, I saw that, and I thought, That is straight Lafayette."

(VI)

I found Dana Gregory. I called his stepmom. He's Axl's oldest friend and worked for him at one time in L.A., after Guns had gotten big. When I sat down at the table in the back-patio area of a pub-type place called Sgt. Preston's, he had sunglasses on. When he pushed them up into his bushy gray hair, he had unnervingly pale mineral-blue eyes that had seen plenty of sunrises. Sunrises surrounded by laughing dolphins and swirly, twirly pinwheels. He'd been there. You knew it before he even spoke. He'd done a spectacular amount of crazy shit in his life, and the rest of his life would be spent remembering and reflecting on that shit and focusing on taking it day by day. The metamorphosis of Bill, the friend of his youth, in whose mother's kitchen he ate breakfast every morning, his Cub Scouts buddy (a coin was tossed: Bill would be Raggedy Ann in the parade; Dana, Raggedy Andy), into-for a while-the biggest rock star on the planet, a man who started riots in more than one country and dumped a supermodel and duetted with Mick Jagger and told Rolling Stone he'd recovered memories of being sodomized by his stepfather at the age of 2, a man who took as his legal name and made into a household word the name of a band-Axl-that Gregory was once in, on bass, and that Bill was never even in...This event had appeared in Gregory's life like a supernova to a prescientific culture. What was he supposed to do with it? I found him intensely compelling.

I said, "Do you call him Bill or Axl?"

He smiled: "I call him Ax."

"Still talk to him much?"

"Haven't talked to him since 1992. We had sort of a falling-out."

"Over what?"

He looked away. "Bullshit." Then, after a few pulls and drags, "It might have been over a woman."

He was nervous, but nervous in the way that any decent person is when you sit down in front of him with a notebook and are like, "I have to make a two-thirty flight. Can you tell me about the heaviest things in your life? And order more spinach-'n'-artichoke dip. I can expense it."

He finished beers quickly. He used, repeatedly, without the slightest self-consciousness, one of my favorite American idioms-"Right on," spoken quickly and with the intonation a half octave higher on "Right," to mean not "That's correct" or "Exactly" but simply "Yes," as in "Hey, you like to party?" "Right on."

"Tell me about L.A.," I said. "You said you were working for him out there. What kind of stuff?"

"Fixing shit that he broke," Gregory said.

"Did he break a lot of shit?" I said.

"His condo had these giant mirrors going all around it. And every now and then, he'd take that spaceman statue they give you when you win an award on MTV and smash up the mirrors with it. Well, he slept till four o'clock in the afternoon every day. Somebody had to let the guy in when he came to fix the mirrors. Shit like that."

He told me another L.A. story, about the time Axl picked up Slash's beloved albino boa constrictor and it shat all over Axl. And Axl had on some expensive clothes. He got so mad he wanted to hurt the snake. He was cussing at it. But Slash picked up his guitar-here Gregory imitated a tree-chopping backswing pose-and said, "Don't. Hurt. My. Snake." Axl backed off.

I guess we sat there a pretty long time. He has four children and four grandchildren. When I said he seemed young for that (can you imagine Axl with four grandchildren?), he said, "Started young. Like I was saying, there was a lot of experimentation." His ex-wife, Monica Gregory, also knew Axl. She gave him his first P.A. Gregory said he talks to her only once a year, "when I have to." He said what he wants is to lower the level of dysfunction for the next generation. He told me about how he and Axl and Monica and their group of friends used to go to a park in Lafayette after dark, Columbian Park-"We ruled that place at night"-and pick the lock on the piano case that was built into the outdoor stage and play for themselves till the small hours. I'd wandered around Columbian Park. It's more or less across the street from where those boys grew up. Not twenty feet from the stage, there's a memorial to the sons of Lafayette who "made the supreme sacrifice in defense of our country," and it includes the name of William Rose, probably Axl's great-great-great-grandpa, killed in the Civil War, which I suppose was fought in defense of our country in some not quite precise, rather abstract way. And now, as Gregory talked, I thought about how weird it was, all those years of Axl probably reading that name a hundred times, not making anything of it, not knowing that it was his own name-he who one day, having discovered his original name while going through some of his mother's papers, would sing, I don't need your Civil War and ask the question What's so civil about war, anyway?

Back then, Gregory said, Axl played all kinds of stuff. He mentioned Thin Lizzy, which you don't hear done much anymore. "But the only time I ever really heard him sing was in the bathroom. He'd be in there for an hour doing God knows what. Prancing around like a woman, for all I know."

"So, what is there of Lafayette in his music, do you think?"

"The anger, man. I'd say he got that here."

"He used to get beat up a lot, right?" (More than one person had told me this since I'd come to town.)

"I beat him up a lot," Gregory said. "Well, I'd win one year, he'd win the next. One time we was fighting in his backyard, and I was winning. My dad saw what was going on and tried to stop it, but his mom said, 'No, let 'em fight it out.' We always hashed it out, though. When you get older, it takes longer to heal."

It was awkward for me, trying incessantly to steer the conversation back toward the Sheidler business without being too obvious about it. Did he honestly have no memory of the fracas? He kept answering elliptically. "I remember the cops wanted to know who'd spray-painted all over the street," he said, smiling again. "The night he left for L.A., he wrote, 'Kiss my ass, Lafayette. I'm out of here.' I wish I'd taken a picture of that."

Finally, I just grew sort of exasperated and said, "Mr. Gregory, you can't possibly not remember this. Listen: You. A kid with a bike. Axl and a woman got into a fight. He had a splint on his arm."

"I can tell you how he got the splint," he said. "It was from holding on to an M-80 too long. We thought they were pretty harmless, but I guess they weren't, 'cause it 'bout blew his fucking hand off."

"But why were you so mad about the skid marks in the first place?" I asked.

"My dad was in construction. Still is. That's what I do. It's Gregory and Sons-me and my brother are the sons. Mostly residential concrete. My brother, Chris" (this was little CHRIS GREGORY 15, I realized, from the report, the one who probably spared Axl a battery charge by corroborating the assertion that M. SHEIDLER had struck first), "he's dead now. He was 39. A heart thing. My dad still can't bring himself to get rid of the 'Sons.' Anyway, see, we poured that sidewalk. He'd get so pissed if he saw it was scuffed up-'Goddammit, you know how hard it is to get that off?' He'd think we done it and beat our ass. So, I saw [little Scott Sheidler's handiwork], and I said, 'No, I don't think that's gonna do.' "

That was all. I couldn't get too many beats into any particular topic with Gregory before his gaze would drift off, before he'd get pensive. I started to get the feeling that this-his being here, his decision to meet with me-was about something, that we had not yet gotten around to the subject he was here to discuss.

"You know," he said, "I've never talked to a reporter before. I've always turned down requests."

"Why'd you agree to this one?" I asked.

"I wasn't going to call you back, but my dad said I should. You oughta thank my dad. My son said, 'Tell him what an asshole that guy was, Dad.' I said, 'Ah, he knows all that shit, son.'"

"Is it that you feel it's been long enough, and now you can talk about all that stuff?"

"Shit, I don't know. I figure maybe he'll see the article and give me a call. It's been a long time. I'd really love just to talk to him and find out what he's really been into."

"Do you still consider him a friend?" I said.

"I don't know. I miss the guy. I love him."

We were quiet for a minute, and then Gregory leaned to the side and pulled out his wallet. He opened it and withdrew a folded piece of white notepaper. He placed it into my hand, still folded. "Put that in your story," he said. "He'll know what it means." I went straight to the car after the interview and remembered about the note only when I was already on the plane. Written on it in pencil were a couple of lines from "Estranged," off Use Your Illusion II:

BUT EVERYTHING WE'VE EVER KNOWN'S HERE.

I NEVER WANTED IT TO DIE.

(VII)

Axl has said, "I sing in five or six different voices that are all part of me. It's not contrived." I agree. One of them is an unexpectedly competent baritone. The most important of the voices, though, is Devil Woman. Devil Woman comes from a deeper part of Axl than do any of the other voices. Often she will not enter until nearer the end of a song. In fact, the dramatic conflict between Devil Woman and her sweet, melodic yang-the Axl who sings such lines as Her hair reminds me of a warm, safe place and If you want to love me, then darling, don't refrain and Sometimes I get so tense-is precisely what resulted in Guns N' Roses' greatest songs. A lot of people will try to convince you that the band's street-tough image and attitude are what made them so massive. Of course, that's foolish. The "media" adore street-tough image and attitude and, via a curious circular maneuver, will frequently work to convince you that street-tough image and attitude are the reason you love some band, but you, the people of the world, tend to buy 15 million copies of a debut album because it's chockablock with hits. G N' R wrote four or five untouchable pop songs, and that's why we're still talking about them-that's why the mere fact of Axl's mounting a comeback is newsworthy. You go, 'Dude, speaking of circular! You're a widget in the whole tremendous machine that's trying to make it seem newsworthy!' Yes and I'm going to beat the fuck out of you.

Take "Sweet Child o' Mine," which, in my unassuming view, shares with the Wrens' "I've Made Enough Friends" the distinction of being the most perfectly achieved rock 'n' roll song of the past twenty years. It's not that you don't love it from the beginning, what with the killer riffs and the oddly antiquated-sounding chorus, yet a sword hangs over it. You think: This can't be everything. Come on-I mean, Now and then when I see her face / It takes me away to that special place? Then, around 5:04, she arrives. The song has veered minor-key by then, the clouds have begun to gather, and I never hear that awesome, intelligent solo that I don't imagine Axl's gone off somewhere at the start of it, to be by himself while his body undergoes certain changes. What I love is how when he comes back in, he comes in on top of himself ("five or six different voices that are all part of me"); he's not yet all the way finished with I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I when that fearsome timbre tears itself open. And what does she say, this Devil Woman? What does she always say, for that matter? Have you ever thought about it? I hadn't. "Sweet Child," "Paradise City," "November Rain," "Patience," they all come down to codas-Axl was a poet of the dark, unresolved coda-and to what do these codas themselves come down? Everybody needs somebody. Don't you think that you need someone? I need you. Oh, I need you. Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? I wanna go. Oh, won't you please take me home?

(VIII)

I know the collage number gets cute fast, but I beg you to indulge me in a personal-experience thing. It's about when I drove back to Indiana with my oldest friend, Trent. We'd grown up in the same small river town and both went off to school elsewhere at about the same time, so we romanticized our childhood haunts and playmates a little, the way you do. The summer before our senior year of high school, we made a sentimental journey home to drop in on everybody and see how each had fared. This is 1991, when Use Your Illusion came out. "Don't Cry" was on the radio all the time. It turned out to be one of the more colossally bleak afternoons of my life. To a man, we'd divided along class lines. Those of us who'd grown up in Silver Hills, where kids were raised to finish high school and go to college, were finishing high school and applying to colleges. Those who hadn't, weren't. And there were these two guys from our old gang, Brad Hope and Rick Sissy. Those aren't their real names, though their real names were just as strange. Their fathers were working-class-one drove a bus and the other a concrete truck; the latter couldn't read or write. But the public elementary where we met them was mixed in every sense. And there's something about that age, from 9 to 11-your personality has appeared, but if you're lucky you haven't internalized yet the idea that you're any different from anyone else, that there's a ladder in life.

We stopped by Ricky's house first. Ricky had been a kind of redneck genius, into everything. You know those ads in the back of comics that say you can make a hovercraft out of vacuum-cleaner parts? Ricky was the kid who made the hovercraft. And souped it up. He was taller and chubbier than the rest of us and had a high-pitched voice and used some kind of oil in his hair. Trent got into the University of Chicago and wound up writing a 200-page thesis on the Munich Conference, and even he would tell you: Ricky was the smartest. One time Ricky and I were shooting pellet guns at cars in the small junkyard his father maintained as a sort of sideline. We were spiderwebbing the glass. All of a sudden, Ricky's dad, who had just been woken up from one of his epic diurnal naps, hollered from the window of his bedroom, "Ricky, you'd better not be shooting at that orange truck! I done sold the windshield on that." I'll never forget; Ricky didn't even look at me first. He just ran. Dropping the pistol at his feet, he ran into the forest. I followed. We spent the whole rest of the day up there. We found an old grave in the middle of a field. We climbed to the top of Slate Hill, the highest knob in our town, and Ricky gave me a whole talk on how slate formed, how it was and was not shale.

I remember the scared, ecstatic freedom of those hours in the woods. When Trent and I found Ricky, he was sitting alone in a darkened room watching a porn movie of a woman doing herself with a peeled banana. He said, "What the fuck is that thing on your head?" I was in a bandanna-wearing phase. This one was yellow. He said, "When I saw you get out of the car, I thought, Who the fuck is that? I 'bout shot you for a faggot." We asked him what was going on. He said he'd just been expelled from school, for trying to destroy one of the boys' restrooms by flushing lit waterproof M-80s down the toilets. Also, he'd just been in a bad jeep accident; his shoulder was messed up somehow. All scabbed over, maybe? This entire conversation unfolded as the woman with the banana worked away. Ricky's dad was asleep in the next room. Retired now. We told him we were headed over to Brad's next. He said, "I haven't seen Brad in a while. Did you hear he dorked a spook?" That's what he said: "dorked a spook."

Brad had a real mustache already. He'd always been an early bloomer. When we knew him well, he was constantly exposing himself. Once I watched him run around the perimeter of a campsite with his underpants at his ankles going, "Does this look like the penis of an 11-year-old?" And it did not. Brad used to plead with his mom to sing "Birmingham Sunday" for us, which she'd do, a cappella, in the kitchen. Now he was all nigger this, nigger that. Trent was dating a black girl in Louisville at the time. Neither of us knew how to behave. Brad must have noticed us squirming, because he looked at me at one point and said, "Ah, y'all probably got some good niggers in Ohio." That's where I was living. "We're fixin' to have a race war with the ones we got here," he said. He had dropped out of high school before they had a chance to expel him. It had been only four years since we'd been sleeping over at his house, doing séances and shit, and now we had no way to reach one another. A gulf had appeared. It opened the first day of seventh grade when some of us went into the "accelerated" program and others went into the "standard" program. By sheerest coincidence, I'm sure, this division ran perfectly parallel to the one between our respective parents' income brackets. God, if I could I'd drop lit waterproof M-80s down every "tracking" program in the country. I remember Ricky and I running into each other in the hallway the first day of seventh grade and with an awkwardness that we were far too young to handle, both being like, "Why aren't you in any of my classes?" When I think about it, I never saw those boys again, not after that day.

Axl got away. That's what I wanted to tell you.

(IX)

And then about three hours after I wrote that last sentence, I was sitting there thinking, Did he?

(X)

There were hundreds of blue flags draped along the south bank of the Nervión in Bilbao, and across the top of each it said GUNS N' roses. The flags were of Moorish blue, and they shook against a spotless sky that was only barely paler. Late that night, in the hills over the city, the band headlined a three-day festival, and the river valley echoed the sound so clearly, so helplessly, people in the old part of town could, if they understood English, make out the individual words, but for now Bilbao retained its slightly buttoned-up tranquillity and charm. There's a fountain next to the Guggenheim that fires bursts of water every four or five seconds, and the olive-skinned kids jump up and down in it. They just strip to their underpants and go wild, male and female, and to watch them at it was lovely. Can you imagine, in the center of some major American city, a bunch of 12-year-old girls in their panties capering in the water, their lank hair flinging arcs of droplets? Hard to say which would be greater, the level of parental paranoia or the actual volume of loitering creepy creepos. Here things seemed so sane. Axl and the boys hadn't landed yet. They were still in the air.

The district where they played is called Kobetamendi. It's high up, and from there you could see the city, the river, the spires, the flashing titanium scales of the museum. When it got dark, you could see the lights. When there aren't stages set up at Kobetamendi, it's just a large empty field with a road and, across the road, some modest farmhouses. As I reached the crest of the hill, a rap-rock band was playing. I don't "get," as they say, rap-rock, and I'm a person who's cultivated a taste for some fairly awful music. The justification for rap-rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are being barked by an overweight white guy with short hair and forearm tattoos. The women from those few little farmhouses had gathered at their fence; they leaned and mumbled and dangled their canes. One of them was one of the oldest-looking old people I have ever seen, with stiff white hair and that face, like the inside of a walnut shell, that only truly ancient women get. She and her friends were actually listening to the rap-rock, and part of me wanted to run over to them and assure them that after they died, there would still be people left in the world who knew how horrifying this music was, and that these people would transmit their knowledge to carefully chosen members of future generations, but the ladies did not appear worried. They were even laughing. I'm sure they remembered Gypsy circuses in that field in eighteen ninety something, and what was the difference, really?

Want to know how to get backstage at shows, peckerheads? Okay, I'm 'a tell you. First, find a Portuguese model. And we're not talking the kind of model who hip-hop dances in halftime shows; we're talking the kind who gets flown to Tokyo for the day. She will have brought along two friends from Lisbon, but there will be a pass waiting for only one of them. Somebody forgot to forward un correo electrónico. Now, there will be two passes waiting for you, because when you first requested the passes, you thought you were bringing a photographer, but in the event, you've come alone. Stand and listen to her and her two friends be like, "What'll we doooo?" for a while. Choose your moment. Go up to her and say, "I couldn't help overhearing that you need another pass. I happen to have an extra. I even have an extra special-access badge I can give to your friend." At this point, the model will say, in the Spanish she turns out not to speak all that much better than you, "It's a miracle!" Next, she will get you stoned. This really happens! Her friend to whom you gave the pass will boast of being the owner of the third-largest collection of Axl Rose paraphernalia in the world, and the revelation that he intends to include your spare, mint-condition media badge in this collection will lead to levels of bonhomie and group fealty beyond your prior imagination, until finally, when the security guard on the back ramp leading up to the stage, who does not even make eye contact with the Portuguese model as she floats past him, puts his palm against your chest, as if to say, "Whoa-that's a little much," she will turn around briefly and say, "Está conmigo." She will say this with about the level of nervousness and uncertainty with which she might say, to a maître d', "Smoking." Before you can thank her, you'll be watching Axl dance from such an inconceivable propinquity that if you were to bend your knees, thrust your hands forward, and leap, you would be on the front page of the entertainment section of El País the next day for having assaulted him in front of 25,000 people.

Jesus. I've been a part of plenty of virtual seas of screaming sweaty kids before, but to see one from the stage, from just above, to see that many thousand people shaping with their mouths some words you made up in your head one time while you were brushing your teeth (needless to say, I was trying to imagine I wrote them)...it's heady. Two half notes followed by two quarter notes in immediate succession, followed by a beat of silence, that's the staccato rhythm of the chant: "Guns and RO-SES, Guns and RO-SES"...Axl's pounding with the base of his mike stand on the stage in time to it. There's a kid with a beard who looks at you every ten minutes or so, puts his hands on his ears, and mouths the word "pyro." Then you're supposed to put your hands on your ears, because the explosion is about to take place ten feet away. Sometimes the kid forgets-he's busy-and then everyone goes "Aaaarrrgh!" and clutches rather than cups their ears.

There's a sort of shambling older dude next to me in a newsboy cap, with a guitar in his hands-a tech, I figure, or else someone who already knew about the Portuguese-model trick. Then he runs out onto the stage, and I'm like, "That's Izzy Stradlin."

Izzy, I'm convinced, is the reason the band sounds so much better than they did two months ago in New York. He started joining them for three or four songs the very next night and has been showing up periodically ever since. His presence-or to put it more accurately, the presence of another original member of the band-seems to have made the other guys feel more like they are Guns N' Roses and less like, as El Diario Vasco will put it tomorrow, "una bullanguera formación de mercenarios al servicio del ego del vocalista," which I'm pretty sure means something like "a noisy bunch of mercenaries in the service of the vocalist's ego." (Cognates, you know.)

The Spanish press-man, they weren't kind. They said Axl was a "grotesque spectacle"; they called him "el divo" (I intend to steal that); they talked about the endless, Nigel Tufnel-esque "solos absurdos" that he makes each of the band members play, in an effort to get the audience to emotionally invest in the new lineup (it's true that these are fairly ill-advised, as has been the rock solo generally since Jimi died). One article says that "Las fotos de Axl dan miedo," which translates literally and, I think, evocatively as "The pictures of Axl give fear," "with his goatee that gives him the look of a Texas millionaire." In a crowning moment, they say that he has "the voice of a priapismic rooster." They say he demands his room be covered in Oriental carpets and that he not be required to interact with the other band members. That he arrived on a separate plane. They say security guards have been ordered never to look him in the eye. They say the other band members also hate one another and demand to be placed on different floors of the hotel. They say he's traveling with a tiny Asian guru named Sharon Maynard, "alias Yoda," and that he does nothing without her guidance, that she chooses the people he should hire by examining their faces. But mostly the Spaniards are fixated, as have been all the European media gangs on this tour, with the secret oxygen chamber into which he supposedly disappears during the shows and from which he emerges "más fresco que una lechuga"-fresher than a head of lettuce.

I cannot confirm or deny the oxygen thing, and it's hard to say whether the constant mentions of it in the press are evidence of its being real or just a sign that people are recycling the same rumor. The manager of a Hungarian band called Sex Action, which opened for G N' R, claims to have seen the device itself, but Hungarians make up tales like that for entertainment, and anyway, I heard people in the men's room at the Hammerstein being like, "Maybe he keeps an oxygen tank back there or something-ha ha!" trying to account for the way he kept bolting from the stage-fleeing, that's how it looked-not just between songs but during them as well.

What I can tell you, based on my privileged vantage point, is that there is a square cell entirely covered in black curtains just to the rear of stage left. You cannot see as much as a crack of light through the curtains, and I kept trying. Axl runs into this thing about fifteen times during the course of a show. Sometimes he emerges with a new costume on-makes sense-but sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he goes in there when one of the guys is soloing or something-makes sense-but sometimes he goes in there at a moment when it's really weird and distracting not to have him onstage. I do not know whether Sharon Maynard is in this cell. I do not know what he does in there. If he's huffing reconstituted gas, I don't know whether it's in a Michael Jackson "This is good for me" sort of way or if he has a legitimate lung problem. I don't know anything about what goes on in the cell, only that it exists and that being in there is important to him. Past that, let's give the man some privacy. Crissakes, you people are Nosey Parkers.

I'm afraid that, overall, I can't agree with my fellow ink-stained wretches in the Old World. This show kicks much ass. He is sounding fuller and fuller. Every now and then the sound guy, just to make sure the board is calibrated, pushes his mike way up in the mix, and we hear nothing but Axl, and the notes are on. Nor is he fat. In fact, he looks pretty lithe. At one point, he puts on a rather skimpy T-shirt and sprints from one end of the stage to the other, and it is not a fat boy's sprint, with quivering man dugs, a sight from which one must turn away; it is the sprint of the cross-country runner he used to be. Dana Gregory told me Axl used to run everywhere. Just run and run. Dana Gregory said there was one time out west when G N' R played in a stadium that had a track around it, and Axl just started sprinting around the track during a song. When a security guard, believing him to be a crazed fan, tried to tackle him, Axl kicked the guy in the face. "That happened ten feet in front of me," Gregory said. And now here the bastard was, ten feet in front of me. The moon looked like she was yelling for help because some dark power was erasing her side. They brought out a piano so that he could do "November Rain," and the way they positioned the piano, he was facing me directly. Like we were sitting across a table from each other. This is as close as I ever got to him and as close as I ever wanted to get, truth be told. And what I noticed at this almost nonexistent remove was the peace in his features as he tinkled out the intro. Absolute peace. A warm slackness to the facial muscles way beyond what Botox can do, though I'm not saying it didn't contribute. His face was for now beyond the reach of whatever it is that makes him crazy.

After the final encore, he and the rest of the band ran down a ramp into the open door of a waiting van. Big, heavy men in black ran alongside them, like drill instructors. The van squealed away. Big, heavy black cars pulled out alongside the van. And then there was quiet. The Basque country.

(XI)

They were the last great rock band that didn't think there was something a tiny bit embarrassing or at least funny about being in a rock band. There are thousands of bands around at any given time that don't think rock is funny, but rarely is one of them good. With G N' R, no matter how sophisticated you felt yourself to be about pop music (and let's leave aside for now the paradoxical nature of that very cultural category), you couldn't entirely deny them. They were the first band I got to be right about with my elder brother. You know what I mean? I think it was that way for a lot of people in my generation. All my life, my brother had been force-feeding me my musical taste-"Def Leppard sucks; listen to the Jam"-and now there was finally one band I wouldn't have to live down; and I recall the tiny glow of triumph, blended with fraternity, that I felt when one day he said, "Dude, you were right about Guns N' Roses. That's a good record." That was Appetite, of course. Things got strange after that. Now, I've read all this stuff that said Nirvana made Guns N' Roses obsolete. But Guns N' Roses were never made obsolete. They just sort of dimmed. What, you think if they got back together, with something even approximating the original lineup, and put out a record with, let's say, one good radio song on it, the record wouldn't sell a jillion copies? I saw that show in New York City; I saw the crowd. It would.

Closer to the case is that G N' R made Nirvana possible. When you think about the niche that Nirvana supposedly created and perfected-a megaband that indie snobs couldn't entirely disavow, no matter how badly they wanted to-G N' R got there first. They didn't get all the way there, I realize. They dressed silly. They didn't seem to know the difference between their good songs and their crap songs. But we have to remember, too, how they came along at a time when bands with singers who looked like Axl and thrust their hips unironically, and lead players who spread their legs and reeled off guitar-god noodling weren't supposed to be interesting, melodically or culturally or in any other way. G N' R were. They were also grotesque and crass and stupid sometimes, even most of the time. Even almost all of the time. But you always knew you were seeing something when you saw them.

I don't know where this new situation is headed. Velvet Revolver? Are they any good? Seriously, I'm asking. Everybody I know who's heard the leaked Chinese Democracy tracks says the album sounds like a bummer. Shouldn't the band just get back together? Don't they know how huge that'd be? But Dana Gregory told me Slash and Izzy will never play full-time with Axl again: "They know him too well."

I don't know him at all. Maybe if his people had let me talk to him, he'd have bitten and struck me and told me to leave my fucking brats at home, and I could transcend these feelings. As it is, I'm left listening to "Patience" again. I don't know how it is where you are, but down south where I live, they still play it all the time. And I whistle along and wait for that voice, toward the end, when he goes, Ooooooo, I need you. OOOOOOO, I need you. And on the fist Ooooooo, he finds a note so tissue-shredding it conjures the image of someone peeling his own scalp back, like the skin of a grape. I have to be careful not to attempt to sing along with this part, because it makes me, like, sort of throw up a little bit. And on the second OOOOOOO, you picture just a naked glowing green skull that hangs there vibrating gape-mouthed in a hyperbaric chamber.

Or whatever it is you picture.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN is a GQ correspondent.
September 24, 2006
The Ballad of Big Mike By MICHAEL LEWIS
I. Looking for the Next Anti-Lawrence Taylor

As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent. The Briarcrest Christian School team didn't have many black players either, and Michael Oher was black. But what made Michael Oher especially peculiar was that no one in Memphis had anything to say about him. Lemming had plenty of experience "discovering" great players. Each year he drove 50,000 to 60,000 miles and met, and grilled, between 1,500 and 2,000 high-school juniors while selecting All-American teams for ESPN and College Sports TV. He got inside their heads months before the college recruiters were allowed to shake their hands. Lemming had made some calls and found that the coaches in and around Memphis either didn't know who Michael Oher was or didn't think he was any good. He hadn't made so much as the third-string all-city team. He hadn't had his name or picture in any newspaper. Had Lemming Googled him, "Oher" would have yielded nothing on Michael. The only proof of his existence was a grainy videotape some coach had sent him out of the blue.

From the tape alone, Lemming couldn't say how much Michael Oher had helped his team, just that he was big, fast and fantastically explosive. The last time he met a player with this awesome array of physical gifts was back in 1993, when he went to the Sizzler Steakhouse in Sandusky, Ohio, and interviewed a high-school junior working behind the counter named Orlando Pace. "Michael Oher's athletic ability and his body - the only thing you could compare it to was Orlando Pace," Lemming said later. "He kind of even looked like Orlando Pace. He wasn't as polished as Orlando. But Orlando wasn't Orlando in high school." Pace had gone from Lemming's All-American teams to Ohio State, where he played left tackle and won the Outland Trophy, given to the nation's finest college lineman. In 1997, he signed the largest rookie contract in National Football League history, to play left tackle for the St. Louis Rams, and later signed an even bigger one (seven years, $52.8 million). Pace became, and remained, the team's highest-paid player - more highly paid than the Rams' star quarterback, Marc Bulger; the star running back, Marshall Faulk; and the star wide receiver, Isaac Bruce. He was an offensive lineman, but not just any offensive lineman. He protected the quarterback's blind side.

When Tom Lemming walked into the football meeting room at the University of Memphis looking for Michael Oher, the ghost of Lawrence Taylor was with him. The great New York Giants linebacker of the 1980's was the first of a series of speedy and exceptionally violent pass rushers who tilted the finances on the N.F.L.'s line of scrimmage. The players on the blind side of a right-handed quarterback - both offensive and defensive - became, on average, far more highly paid than the players on the visible side. By 2004, the five most highly paid N.F.L. left tackles were earning an average of nearly $3 million a year more than the five most highly paid right tackles and more than the five most highly paid running backs and wide receivers.

When Tom Lemming looked at left tackles, he thought in terms of others he had selected for his All-American teams who went on to be stars in the N.F.L.: Pace, Jonathan Ogden, Tony Boselli, Walter Jones. These people looked nothing like most human beings or even like the football players Lemming interviewed in the late 1970's and 80's. Among this population of giants, the left-tackle type still stood out. Freak of nature: when he found one of these rare beasts, that's the phrase that popped into Lemming's mind. When Lemming put the high-school junior Ogden on the cover of his annual prep report in 1992, Ogden was 6-foot-9 and weighed 320 pounds. (He would fill out in college.) When he did the same with Pace the next year, Pace stood 6-foot-6 and weighed 310 pounds. (And hadn't stopped growing.) The ideal left tackle was big, but a lot of people were big. What set him apart were his more subtle specifications. He was wide in the rear and massive in the thighs: the girth of his lower body lessened the likelihood that Lawrence Taylor, or his successors, would run right over him. He had long arms: pass rushers tried to get in tight to the blocker's body, then spin off of it, and long arms helped to keep them at bay. He had giant hands: when he grabbed a defender, it meant something.

But size alone couldn't cope with the threat to the quarterback's blind side, because that threat was also fast. The ideal left tackle also had great feet. Incredibly nimble and quick feet. Quick enough feet, ideally, that the prospect of racing him in a five-yard dash made the team's running backs uneasy. He had the body control of a ballerina and the agility of a basketball player. The combination was just incredibly rare. And so, ultimately, very valuable.

By the 2004 N.F.L. season, the average N.F.L. left tackle's salary was $5.5 million a year, and the left tackle had become the second-highest-paid position on the team, after the quarterback. In Super Bowl XL, played on Feb. 5, 2006, the highest-paid player on the field was the Seattle Seahawks' quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck - who was just finishing the first season of a new six-year deal worth $8.2 million a year. The second-highest-paid player on the field was the man who protected Hasselbeck's blind side, the left tackle Walter Jones, who made $7.5 million a year.

After he saw the tape of Michael Oher, Lemming tried to reach the kid by phone. He found out that his surname was pronounced "oar," but that's about all he learned. He was accustomed to the social lives of high-school football stars: the handlers, the harems, the informal advisers, the coaches. The kids Lemming sought to meet were not, typically, hard to find. This kid not only had no handlers; he didn't appear to exist outside of school. He had no home; he didn't even have a phone number. Or so said the Briarcrest Christian School when Lemming called looking for Michael Oher. Briarcrest officials were mystified by Lemming's interest in their student, but they were also polite and finally agreed to have someone drive Michael over to the University of Memphis football facility for a face-to-face interview. "I'll never forget when he walked into the room," Lemming told me not long ago. "He looked like a house walking into a bigger house. He walked in the door, and he barely fit through the door." He wasn't just huge. He was huge in exactly the right ways. "There's the big-blob 300-pounder, and there's the solid kind," Lemming went on to say. "He was the solid kind. You also see big guys, tall guys who weigh a lot, but they have thin legs. They're fine in high school, but in college they'll get pushed around. He was just massive everywhere."

What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming's 28-year career as a football scout. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him. . .and refused to speak. "He shook my hand and then didn't say a word," Lemming recalled. ("His hands - they were huge!") Lemming asked a few questions; Michael Oher just kept staring right through him. And soon enough Lemming decided further interaction was pointless. Michael Oher left, and he left behind blank forms and unanswered questions. Every other high-school football player in America was dying for Lemming to invite him to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. Michael Oher had left his invitation on the table.

What never crossed Tom Lemming's mind was that the player he would soon rank the No. 1 offensive lineman in the nation, and perhaps the finest left-tackle prospect since Orlando Pace, hadn't the faintest notion of who Lemming was or why he was asking him all these questions. For that matter, he didn't even think of himself as a football player. And he had never played left tackle in his life.

II. School of Hard Knocks, West Memphis Branch

When the file on Michael Oher from the Memphis City Schools hit his desk in the summer of 2002, Steve Simpson, the principal of Briarcrest Christian School, was frankly incredulous. The boy, now 16, had a measured I.Q. of 80, which put him in mankind's ninth percentile. An aptitude test he took in eighth grade measured his "ability to learn" and placed him in the sixth percentile. The numbers looked like misprints: in a rich white private school like Briarcrest, you never saw single-digit numbers under the column marked "percentile." Of course, logically, you knew such people must exist; for someone to be in the 99th percentile, someone else had to be in the first. But you didn't expect to meet them at the Briarcrest Christian School. Academically, Briarcrest might not be the most ambitious school. It spent more time and energy directing its students to Jesus Christ than to Harvard. But the students all went on to college. And they all had at least an average I.Q.

In his first nine years of school, Michael Oher was enrolled in 11 different institutions, and that included a gap of 18 months, around age 10, when he apparently did not attend school at all. Either that or the public schools were so indifferent to his presence that they neglected to register it formally. Not that Oher actually showed up at the schools where he was enrolled. Even when he received credit for attending, he was sensationally absent: 46 days of a single term of his first-grade year, for instance. His first first-grade year, that is; Michael Oher repeated first grade. He repeated second grade, too. And yet the school system presented these early years as the most accomplished of his academic career. They claimed that right through the fourth grade he was performing at "grade level." How could they know when, according to these transcripts, he hadn't even attended the third grade?

Simpson, who had spent 30-plus years in area public schools, including 29 in Memphis, knew what everyone who had even a brief brush with the Memphis public schools knew: they passed kids up to the next grade because they found it too much trouble to flunk them. They functioned as an assembly line churning out products never meant to be market-tested. At several schools, Michael Oher had been given F's in reading his first term and C's the second term, which allowed him to finish the school year with D's - they were giving him grades just to get rid of him. And get rid of him they did: seldom did the child return to the school that passed him. The year before Simpson got his file, Michael Oher passed ninth grade at a high school called Westwood. According to his transcripts, he missed 50 days of school that year. Fifty days! At Briarcrest, the rule was that if a student misses 15 days of any class, he has to repeat the class no matter his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D's to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade-point average the student would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.

If there was a less promising academic record, Simpson hadn't seen it. Simpson guessed, rightly, that the Briarcrest Christian School hadn't seen anything like Michael Oher either. Simpson and others in the Briarcrest community would eventually learn that Michael's father had been shot and killed and tossed off a bridge, that his mother was addicted to crack cocaine and that his life experience was so narrow that he might as well have spent his first 16 years inside a closet. And yet here was his application, in the summer of 2002, courtesy of the Briarcrest football coach, Hugh Freeze, who offered with it this wildly implausible story: Big Mike, as he was called, was essentially homeless and so had made an art of sleeping on whatever floor the ghetto would provide for him. He crashed for a stretch on the floor of an inner-city character named Tony Henderson, who at nearly 400 pounds himself was known simply as Big Tony. Big Tony's mom had died and as her dying wish asked Tony to enroll his son Steven Payne at a "Christian school." Big Tony had figured that as long as he was taking Steven, he might as well take Big Mike, too.

But Big Mike wasn't like Steven. Steven had a father and a bed and a decent school transcript. He could cope with a conversation. Big Mike, in company, seemed as lost as a Martian stumbling out of a crash landing. Simpson had tried to shake his hand. "He didn't know how to do it," he says. "I had to show him how to shake hands." Every question Simpson put to Big Mike elicited a barely audible mumble. "I don't know if 'docile' is the right word," Simpson says.

The disposition of Michael Oher's application to Briarcrest was Steve Simpson's decision, and normally he would have had no trouble making it: an emphatic rejection. Beneath the Briarcrest coat of arms was the motto: Decidedly Academic, Distinctly Christian. Michael Oher was, it seemed to Simpson, neither. But this was only Simpson's second year at Briarcrest, and its football coach, Freeze, had phoned Simpson's boss, the school president, a football fan, and made his pitch: This wasn't a thing you did for the Briarcrest football team, Freeze said; this was a thing you did because it was right! Briarcrest was this kid's last chance! The president in turn phoned Simpson and told him that if he felt right with it, he could admit the kid.

Simpson thought it over and said, Sorry. They would take Steven, but there was just no chance Michael Oher could cut it in the 10th grade; the fourth grade might be a stretch. But the pressure from the football coach, coupled with a little twinge inside his own heart, led Simpson to reject the applicant gently. He granted a single concession: if Michael Oher enrolled in a home-study program and performed at a high level for a semester, Briarcrest would admit him the following semester. Since there wasn't much chance any program would pass him, Simpson suspected that he would never hear from the football coach, or Michael Oher, again.

He was wrong. Two months later - six weeks into the 2002-03 school year - his phone rang. It was Big Tony. It was a sad sight, Big Tony said, watching Big Mike stare at these books sent to him by the Gateway Christian School, which he had enrolled in, without any ability to make heads or tails of them. Big Tony didn't have the time or the energy to work with him. Big Mike was trying so hard but getting nowhere, and it was too late for him to enroll in a public school. What should they do now?

That's when Simpson realized he had made a mistake. In effect, he had removed a child from the public-school system. He had tried to handle this problem the easy way, for him, and it backfired. After a sleepless night, he called Michael Oher - apparently still sleeping on Big Tony's floor - and said, "We are going to take a chance on you, but you're not going to play ball." No basketball, no football - he couldn't even sing in the choir until he proved to the school that he could handle the work. Michael didn't say much at all in response, but that didn't matter to Simpson. "My conscience would be clear if we gave him a chance," he says. His thoughts turned to the teachers: how would he explain this mess to them?

III. A Very Big and Very Blank Slate

Jennifer Graves had run Briarcrest's program for students with special needs for nine years. "I decided early on in my life," she says, "that Christ was calling me to work with the kids who did not have it so easy." But her mission took on a different and less hopeful tone when in the fall of 2002 this huge black kid was dumped in her lap. She, too, had seen the file on Michael Oher that had come over from the public school system. After the transcript came the child himself, accompanied by Simpson. "He said, 'This is Michael Oher, and you'll be working with him,"' Graves recalls.

She took him around and placed him in the middle of every classroom. "By sixth period of the first day everyone knew who he was," she says. "And he hadn't said a word." It was a matter of days before the reports poured in from the teachers, every last one of them asking the same question of her that she asked of Simpson: why had Briarcrest let this kid in? "Big Mike had no conception of what real school was about," she says. "He'd never have his books with him, didn't speak in class, nothing. He had no academic background, no foundation at all."

Michael Oher was only a few weeks into his tenure at the Briarcrest Christian School before several teachers suggested he should be on his way out. He wasn't merely failing tests; he wasn't even starting them. The only honest grade to give him in his academic subjects was zero.

The situation appeared hopeless and humiliating for all concerned. Word of the new student's various failures inevitably reached Simpson, who also began to sense the dimensions of the void in the child's life experiences. He didn't know what an ocean was or a bird's nest or the tooth fairy. He couldn't very well be taught 10th-grade biology if he had no clue what was meant by the word cell, and he couldn't very well get through 10th-grade English if he had never heard of a verb or a noun. It was as if he had materialized on the planet as an overgrown 16-year-old. Jennifer Graves had the same misgivings: the boy reminded her of a story she had read in a psychology journal about a child who had been locked away inside a closet for years. "That child didn't even have tactile sense," she says, "but it felt like the same sort of thing. Big Mike was a blank slate."

IV. A Rich White Family Takes an Interest

When Sean Tuohy first spotted Michael Oher sitting in the stands in the Briarcrest gym - watching the practice of a basketball team he wasn't allowed to play on - he saw a boy with nowhere to go but up. The question was how to take him there.

Sean was an American success story: he had come from nothing and made himself rich. He was a star point guard at Ole Miss, drafted by the New Jersey Nets. And while he didn't make it in the National Basketball Association, he took his preternatural court sense into the business world and made his fortune - sort of. He owned a chain of 60 Taco Bells, KFC's and Long John Silver restaurants, along with a mountain of debt. If everything broke right, he might soon be worth as much as $50 million. If everything did not, he could always call games on the radio for the N.B.A.'s Grizzlies, which he had been doing since they arrived in Memphis in 2001. What Atlanta was to the American South, Sean Tuohy was to the white Southern male. Prosperous. Forever upgrading the trappings of his existence. Happy to exchange his past at a deep discount for a piece of the future.

It wasn't enough. The restaurants ran themselves; the Grizzlies gig was a night job; church was on Sundays. He needed a bit more action in his life. And he now had all the time in the world for what he still loved more than anything: hanging around school gyms and acting as a kind of consultant to the coaches at the Briarcrest Christian School in their dealings with their players. Like every other parent and student at Briarcrest, Sean had been born again, but his interest in the poor jocks might have run even deeper than his religious belief. Sean was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interested in opera singers or a Jesuit scholar in debaters. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. "What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss," he told me once, "was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up."

Sean was 42 years old. His hairline had receded, but not quite to the point where you could call him bald, and his stomach had expanded, but not quite to the point where you could call him fat. He was keenly interested in social status - his own and other people's - but not in the way of the Old South. Not long after he became a figure in Memphis - a putatively rich businessman who had his own jet and was the radio voice of the Memphis Grizzlies - he had feelers from the Memphis Country Club. He didn't encourage them because, as he puts it: "I don't hang with the blues. I'd rather go to a high-school football game on Friday night than go to a country club and drink four Scotches and complain about my wife." He delighted in the sight of people moving up in the world. Country clubs were all about staying in one place.

When he introduced himself to Big Mike, Sean was already knee-deep in the various problems and crises of the few black students at the Briarcrest Christian School. Sean's daughter Collins, a sophomore at Briarcrest and on her way to becoming the Tennessee state champion in the pole vault, occasioned almost constant exposure to them: she was on the track team; they were on the track team. Collins had mentioned Big Mike to him. When she tried to pass him on the stairwell, she said, she had to back up to the top because she couldn't fit past him. Without uttering a peep, he had become the talk of the school.

She said everyone was frightened of him at first, until they realized that he was far more terrified of them. Sean had seen Big Mike around the school three or four times. He had noticed that he wore the same clothes every day: cutoff blue jeans and an oversize T-shirt. Now he saw him in the stands and thought, I'll bet he's hungry. Sean walked over and said, "You don't know me, but we have more in common than you might think."

Michael Oher stared intently at his feet.

"What did you have to eat for lunch today?" Sean asked.

"In the cafeteria," the kid said.

"I didn't ask where you ate," Sean said. "I asked what you ate."

"Had a few things," the kid said.

Sure you did, thought Sean. He asked if he needed money for lunch, and Mike said, "I don't need any money."

The next day, Sean went to the Briarcrest accounting department and arranged for Michael Oher to have a standing account at the lunch checkout counter. He had done the same for several of the poorer black kids who had come to Briarcrest. In a couple of cases, he had, in effect, paid their tuition by giving money to a school fund earmarked for scholarships for those who couldn't afford tuition. "That was my only connection with Michael," he said later. "Lunch."

Sean left it at lunch, and at lunch it might have ended. But a few weeks afterward, the Briarcrest Christian School took its Thanksgiving break. On a cold and blustery morning, Sean and his wife, Leigh Anne, were driving down one of the main boulevards of East Memphis when just ahead of them a huge black male stepped off the bus. He was dressed in the same pair of cutoffs and T-shirt he always wore. Sean pointed him out to his wife and said: "That kid I was telling you about - that's him. Big Mike."

"But he's wearing shorts," she said.

"Uh-huh. He always wears those."

"Sean, it's snowing!"

And so it was. At Leigh Anne's insistence, they pulled over. Sean reintroduced himself to Michael and then introduced Michael to Leigh Anne.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"To basketball practice," Michael said.

"Michael, you don't have basketball practice," Sean said.

"I know," the boy said. "But they got heat there."

Sean didn't understand that one.

"It's nice and warm in that gym," the boy said.

As they drove off, Sean looked over and saw tears streaming down Leigh Anne's face. And he thought, Uh-oh, my wife's about to take over.

The next day in the afternoon, Leigh Anne left her business - she had her own interior-decorating firm - turned up at Briarcrest, picked up Michael and took off with him. A few hours later, Sean's cellphone rang. His wife was on the other end.

"Do you know how big a 58-long jacket is?" she asked.

"How big?"

"Not big enough."

Leigh Anne Tuohy grew up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but shed them for another - and could not tell you exactly how it happened, except to say, "I married a man who doesn't know his own color." Her father, a United States marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. The moment the courts ordered the Memphis City Schools integrated in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she became a student in its first year. "I was raised in a very racist household," she says. Yet by the time Michael Oher arrived at Briarcrest, Leigh Anne Tuohy didn't see anything odd or even awkward in taking him in hand. This child was new; he had no clothes; he had no warm place to stay over Thanksgiving. For Lord's sake, he was walking to school in the snow in shorts, when school was out of session, on the off chance he could get into the gym and keep warm. Of course she took him out and bought him some clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before and would do it again. "God gives people money to see how you're going to handle it," she says. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.

V. Troubles Adjusting

Coach Freeze recalls the moment he realized that Big Mike was not any ordinary giant: a football practice at which this new boy, who had just been admitted on academic probation, had no purpose. Big Mike just wandered onto the field, picked up a huge tackling dummy - the thing weighed at least 50 pounds - and took off with it at high speed. "Did you see that - did you see the way that kid moved?" Freeze asked another coach. "He ran with that dummy like it weighed nothing." Freeze's next thought was that he had misjudged the boy's mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. "That's when I had them weigh him," Freeze says. "One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale." The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later told was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow - delightfully beefy for a high-school sophomore. Especially one who could run. "I didn't know whether he could play," Freeze says now. "But I knew this: we didn't have anyone like him on campus."

For his first year it didn't matter. He failed his classes and didn't play anything. As far as the Briarcrest teachers could determine, he didn't have a thought or a fact or an idea in his head. But then almost by accident they figured out that he needed to be tested orally, whereupon he proved to them that he deserved high D's instead of low F's. It wasn't clear that he was going to acquire enough credits to graduate with his class, but Simpson and Graves stopped thinking they were going to send him back out on the streets, and they let him play sports. He joined the basketball team at the end of his sophomore year and soon afterward the track-and-field team (throwing the discus and putting the shot). In his junior year he finally got onto the football field.

The problem there, at first, resembled his problems in the classroom. He had no foundation, no idea what he was meant to do as a member of a team. He said he had played football his freshman year at Westwood, but there was no sign of it in his performance. When Freeze saw how fast he could move, he pegged him as a defensive tackle. And so for the first six games of the 2003 season, he played defense. He wasn't any worse than his replacement, but he wasn't much better either. One of his more talented teammates, Joseph Crone, thought Big Mike's main contribution came before the game, when the opposing team stumbled out of its locker room or bus and took the measure of the Briarcrest Christian School. "They'd see all of us," Crone says, "and then they'd see Mike and say, 'Oh, God."'

But during the games he seemed confused. When he wasn't confused, he was reluctant. Passive, almost. This was the last thing Freeze expected. Freeze didn't know much about Michael Oher's past, but he knew enough to assume that his player had some kind of miserable childhood in the worst part of West Memphis. A miserable childhood in the worst part of West Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense: it made you angry; it made you aggressive; it made you want to tear someone's head off. The N.F.L. was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood.

The trouble with Michael Oher as a football player was the trouble with Ferdinand as a bull: he didn't exhibit the anger of his breed. He was just a sweet kid who didn't particularly care to hit anybody. Or as Freeze puts it: "He just wasn't aggressive. His mentality was not a defensive player's mentality."

VI. Finding a New Home

That fall, in 2003, Michael spent his nights with at least five different Briarcrest families - including the Tuohys - but most nights he spent with Quinterio Franklin, a teammate at Briarcrest. One night after a track meet, Michael was left without a ride home, and Leigh Anne offered to take him wherever he wanted to go. "Terio's," he said, and off they went. . .30 miles into Mississippi. "It was a trailer," she says. She couldn't believe there was room enough inside the place for him. She insisted on following him in to see where he slept. He showed her his old air mattress on the floor. It was flat as a pancake. "I blow it up every night," he said. "But it runs out of air around midnight."

"That's it," she said. She told him to gather up all his stuff. "You're moving in with me."

With that, he picked up a single Glad trash bag and followed her back into the car. Right up to that moment Leigh Anne hoped that what they and other Briarcrest families had done for Michael added up to something like a decent life. Now she knew it didn't. She took over the management of that life. Completely. "The first thing we did," she says, "was have a cleansing of the clothes."

Together they drove to every house in Memphis where Michael had stashed his clothing. Five houses and four giant trash bags later, she was staring at a pile of his belongings. "It was stuff people had given him," she says. "Most of it still had the tags on it. Stuff he would never wear. I mean, there were polo shirts with little penguins on them." For the next couple of weeks, Michael slept on the Tuohys' sofa, and no one in the family stated the obvious: this was Michael Oher's new home and probably would be for a long time. He was, in effect, a third child. "When I first saw him, I was like, 'Who the heck is this big black guy?"' says Sean Jr., who was 8 at the time. "But Dad just said this was a kid we were trying to help out, and so I just said all right." Sean Jr. had his own uses for Michael: the two would vanish for hours on end into the bedroom and play video games. Just a few months after his arrival, Leigh Anne would point to Michael and say, "That is Sean Jr.'s best friend." His sister, Collins, says he became comfortable quickly: "When he kept staying and staying, Mom asked him if he wanted to move in. He said, 'I don't think I want to leave.' That's when Mom went out and bought the dresser and the bed."

After she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do - "it was ruining my $10,000 couch" - but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or if it did, it might collapse in the middle of the night, and he might crash through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day, Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. When the futon arrived, she showed it to Michael and said, "That's your bed." And he said, "That's my bed?" And she said, "That's your bed." And he just stared at it a bit and said, "This is the first time I ever had my own bed."

Sean, for his part, had long since given up probing into Michael's past. The boy had a gift for telling people as little as possible and also for telling them what they wanted to hear. "The right answer is the answer that puts an end to the questions," Sean told me. He finally decided that Michael did not have "the slightest interest in the future or the past. He's just trying to forget about yesterday and get to tomorrow. He's in survival mode: completely focused on the next two minutes." He persuaded his wife to take a more detached view of the question, Who is Michael Oher? and Leigh Anne agreed, at least in principle. "What does it matter if he doesn't know the names of his brothers and sisters?" she said unconvincingly. "Or where he went to school? Or if he went to school?"

They decided to move forward with Michael on a need-to-know basis: if they needed to know some detail about his past, she harassed Michael until he gave her an answer. If they didn't - and mostly they didn't - she would leave him alone. "It is what it is," she said. "The past is the past." She had a big talk with Michael and told him: "We're just going to go forward. There is nothing I can do about whatever might have happened to you before now. If it's going to cause you problems and you're not going to be able to go forward without dealing with it, maybe we need to get help from someone smarter than I am."

He just looked at her and asked, "What does that mean?"

And she half-thought his past actually didn't matter all that much to him. "Like the way a woman blocks out childbirth," she says now, "I think he just blocked out a lot of his childhood."

VII. The Scouts Are Impressed

Tom Lemming's private scouting report was sent to nearly all the head coaches of Division I college football programs, and so more than 100 head college football coaches learned that this kid in Memphis, whom no one had ever heard of, was the most striking left-tackle talent since Orlando Pace. And Pace was now earning more than $6 million a year playing left tackle for the St. Louis Rams. It was only a week or so after Lemming's report went out that the Briarcrest Saints football team met for two weeks of spring practice. Hugh Freeze was there, of course, since he was the head coach and ran the practices. Tim Long was there, too, because he coached the offensive line. Like several of the coaches, Long was a Briarcrest parent, but he was also a 6-foot-5, 300-pound former left tackle at the University of Memphis, and he had been a third-round draft pick of the Minnesota Vikings. Long was awed by Michael Oher's raw ability immediately. "When I first saw him," he says, "I thought, This guy is going to make us all famous." But then he coached him in the final games of his junior year, after Michael was moved to right tackle on the offensive line, and Long wondered why he wasn't a better player. One game, he pulled Michael out and sat him on the bench because he thought the team was better off playing another guy.

The only other coach at the Briarcrest spring practices with any experience of college or pro sports was Sean Tuohy. Hugh Freeze had asked Sean to help out as an assistant coach - which meant his usual role as coach to the coach and unofficial life counselor to the players. When Sean told Leigh Anne he planned to coach football, she laughed at the idea of it: her husband didn't know a reverse from a play-action pass. The first thing Sean learned about coaching football was that you shouldn't do it in a BMW. He came home the first day and told Leigh Anne: "I need to buy a pickup truck. I'm the only one without a pickup truck." A few days later, he bought one.

That first afternoon of spring practice, Sean rolled up in his new truck to find the players lined up and stretching. The other coaches were there already. But there was this other, highly unusual cluster of identically dressed men: college football coaches who had turned up to watch practice. They stood to one side, but you could tell them by their identical dark slacks and coaching shirts with their school's emblem emblazoned on the chest: University of Michigan, Clemson University, University of Southern Mississippi, University of Tennessee, Florida State University. These weren't head coaches, just assistants. But still. College coaches of any sort weren't in the habit of visiting Briarcrest. The Briarcrest football field was in the middle of nowhere. Few of the players had any idea, at first, why these men were present. The Briarcrest coaches knew why, because Freeze had just told them, but they were still as surprised as the players. "I don't know why they were there," Tim Long says. "I guess his size just got him noticed."

The most complicated set of social rules on the planet - the rules that govern the interaction of college football coaches and high-school prospects - forbid the coaches to speak directly to a high-school junior until the July before his senior year. In the spring of his junior year, they are allowed to visit his school twice and watch him from a distance. So the coaches made a point of not saying anything directly; they just kept off to the side and stared. "I'll never forget it," Long says. "We did calisthenics and agility. Then board drill, right away. We're 10 minutes into it. Michael's first up."

The board drill - so named for the thin six-foot-long board on the ground that it's conducted on - is among the most violent drills in football. The offensive lineman straddles one end of the board and faces the defensive lineman. At the sound of the whistle, they do whatever they must to drive the other fellow off the end of the board. Facing off against Michael Oher during a football game was one thing: he was often unsure where to go, and you more than likely had help from teammates - if you didn't, there was plenty of room to run and hide. Getting onto the board across from him, for a fight to the death, was something else. No one on the team wanted to do it.

After a while, out stepped Joseph Crone, the team's biggest and most powerful defensive lineman. He was 6-foot-2, maybe 270 pounds, and a candidate to attend college on a football scholarship. To him, this new mission, going helmet to helmet with Big Mike, had the flavor of heroism. "The reason I stepped up," Crone says, "is that I didn't think anyone else wanted to go up against him. Because he was such a big guy."

Crone still didn't think of Michael Oher as an exceptional football player. But if he hadn't been a force on the field, Crone thought, it was only because he had no idea what he was supposed to do there. And Crone noticed that he had improved the past season and by the final game looked very good indeed. "He was figuring it out," Crone says. "How to move his feet, where to put his hands. How to get onto people so they couldn't get away." But even if Big Mike had no idea what he was doing on a football field, Crone found him an awesome physical specimen. He had a picture in his mind of the few opposing players who had made the mistake of being fallen upon by Big Mike. "They looked like pressed pennies," he says. "They'd get up, and their backs would be one giant grass stain. I couldn't imagine being on the other side of the ball going against Mike." Now, by default, he was.

The two players dropped into their stances with the eyes of the Southeastern Conference, the Big Ten, Conference USA and the Atlantic Coast Conference upon them. Joseph Crone's mind was working overtime, he says: "I'm sitting there thinking: Man, this guy is huge. I got to get low on him. I got to drive my feet."

"Best on best!" shouted Coach Freeze and blew his whistle.

When it was over - and it was over in a flash - the five college coaches broke formation and made what appeared to be urgent private phone calls. The Briarcrest athletic director, Carly Powers, turned to his left and found that one of them, in his bid to separate himself from the others, had wandered up beside him. "He was whispering into his phone, 'My God, you've got to see this!"' Powers says. The Clemson coach, Brad Scott (who was the former head football coach at the University of South Carolina), actually ran out onto the field, handed his card to Freeze and said, "I've seen all I need to see." If Michael Oher wanted a full scholarship to Clemson, it was his. "Then," Tim Long says, "the Clemson guy got in his car and drove eight or nine hours back home."

Freeze was as impressed and surprised as anyone: it could have been a training film. Big Mike had picked up 270 pounds and dealt with them as he might have dealt with thin air. In the middle of spring practice his junior year, Michael Oher became a preseason First-Team High School All-American. From that moment on, Freeze had to give up pretty much everything he was doing and retire to his office to deal with the long line of college football coaches who wanted to spend quality time at the Briarcrest Christian School. In the frenzy, Freeze learned exactly what he had on his hands. Not just a big old lineman. Not some cement block, interchangeable with other cement blocks of similar dimensions. A future N.F.L. left tackle.

Freeze had played Michael on defense at first and then, when that didn't work, had moved him to right tackle. And so Michael Oher had never actually played left tackle. That was understandable: the left tackle wasn't a big deal in high school because the passing game and thus the pass rush weren't quite so important. Freeze now understood that in big-time college football and in the N.F.L. the left tackle was some kind of huge deal. You find the freak of nature who can play the position brilliantly, and you have one of the most valuable commodities in professional sports.

After spring practice, Freeze informed the boy who had been playing left tackle that he was being moved to right tackle. Michael Oher was taking over his position.

VIII. A Force on the Field

Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy had their doubts. Michael had wandered into their lives, moved into their home and quickly become entirely dependent on them. He was meant to be a football player, but until everyone started telling him he was a star football player, he had shown hardly any interest in football. When thrown into games during his junior year, he spent most of his time wandering around the field in search of someone to fall over. He looked completely lost and passive. The left tackle might be the one guy on the field whose job was to reduce the level of violence. But even the left tackle, if he was to succeed, needed to play with aggression. And the few people who had paid attention on the few occasions when Michael played in football games hadn't seen even a hint of aggression.

Michael's first test was not an official game but a preseason scrimmage at home at the start of his senior year, against a team from Munford, Tenn., 25 miles outside of Memphis. Leigh Anne took her usual seat in the stands on the 50-yard line, two rows from the top, right beneath the "N" in "SAINTS." She sat among a cluster of players' mothers, all of whom had definite views about the quality of Briarcrest's coaching and football strategy. They kept a cellphone handy just in case, as Leigh Anne puts it, "we had any opinions or thoughts on the game that we felt Hugh or Sean needed to know." She was the coach in the sky box, and already she watched football games in a way few Americans did: focused on the offensive line. A play would end, and she would have missed entirely what had happened to the ball. "I don't know about 'keeping his pad level down' and 'getting fit' and all these key little nichey phrases that the football coaches use to talk about what linemen do," she says. "All I can tell is if Michael's lying on top of somebody. And if he's spread-eagled on top of somebody, that's good."

Sean also took his place, a few yards down the sidelines from Hugh Freeze, where he could get a different view of the action than the head coach had. Freeze, who fully grasped Sean's near-magical ability to boost the confidence of teenage boys, had taught him football just so that he might put him in charge of the Briarcrest quarterbacks. Sean still kept one eye on Michael, but tonight he missed the signs. From the first play of the game, the Munford defensive end who lined up directly across from Michael targeted him for special ridicule. The Munford player was about 6-foot-2 and couldn't have weighed more than 220 pounds, and yet he wouldn't shut up. Every play, he had something nasty to say.

Hey, fat ass, I'm a kill you!

Hey, fat ass! Fat people can't play football! I'm a run your fat ass over!

The more he went on, the angrier Michael became, and yet no one noticed. Freeze ordered up plays that called for Michael to block a linebacker or to pull and sweep around the right end and leave the defensive end across from him alone. The first quarter and a half of the scrimmage was uneventful - until Freeze called a different sort of play.

Leigh Anne rose from her seat to beat the crowd to the concession stand and so had her back to the action when the people in the stands around her began to laugh.

"Where's he taking him?" she heard someone say.

"He's not letting go of that kid!" shouted someone else.

She turned around in time to see 19 football players running down one side of the field after the Briarcrest running back with the ball. On the other side of the field Briarcrest's No. 74, Big Mike, was racing at full speed in the opposite direction, with a defensive end in his arms.

From his place on the sideline, Sean watched in amazement. Freeze had called a running play, around the right end, away from Michael's side. Michael's job was simply to take the defender who had been jabbering at him and wall him off. Just keep him away from the ball carrier. Instead, he had fired off the line of scrimmage and gotten fit - which is to say, gotten his hands inside the defender's shoulder pads - and then lifted the Munford player off the ground. It was a perfectly legal block, with unusual consequences. He drove the Munford player straight down the middle of the field for 15 yards, then took a hard left, toward the Munford sidelines. "The Munford kid's feet were hitting the ground every four steps, like a cartoon character," Sean says. As the kid strained to get his feet back on the ground, Michael ran him the next 25 or so yards to the Munford bench. When he got there, he didn't stop but piled right through it, knocking over the bench, several more Munford players and scattering the team. He didn't skip a beat. Encircling the football field was a cinder track. He blocked the kid across the track and then across the grass on the other side of the cinder track. And kept going - right to the chain link fence on the far side of the grass.

Flags flew, grown men cursed and Sean called Michael over to the sidelines.

"Michael," said Sean, "where were you taking him anyway?"

"I was gonna put him on the bus," Michael said.

Parked on the other side of the chain-link fence was, in fact, the Munford team bus.

"The bus?" Sean asked.

"I got tired of him talking," Michael said. "It was time for him to go home."

Sean thought he must be joking. He wasn't. Michael had thought it all through in advance; he had been waiting nearly half a football game to do just exactly what he had very nearly done. To pick up this trash-talking defensive end and take him not to the chain-link fence but through the chain-link fence. To the bus. And then put him on the bus. And Sean began to laugh.

IX. Passing Grades

While Sean handled the sports end of things, Leigh Anne took over Michael's academic life. Every day, without fail, she went through his North Face backpack. He would fail a quiz or get a D on a paper and never think it worth mentioning. He wouldn't throw away his papers or test grades, but he wouldn't volunteer them either. She would find the paper balled up at the bottom of the backpack. That was the biggest problem at first: Michael wouldn't tell you when there was a problem. He had the most intense desire to please without the ability to do the things that pleased. He had spent his whole life treating his mind as a problem to be covered up. He had grown so accustomed to not sharing a thing about himself, or perhaps never being asked about himself, that he didn't even know how to begin.

To get into the N.F.L., Michael Oher needed to first get into college. And to get into college, he needed to meet the academic standards prescribed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. had a sliding scale of ACT scores and grade-point averages; the higher the ACT, the lower the required G.P.A. Given Michael's best ACT score, to play college football he would need a 2.65 overall G.P.A. He had finished his sophomore year with a 0.9. A better performance at the back end of his junior year, when he moved into the Tuohy home, raised his cumulative average to 1.564. That's when Leigh Anne took over more completely. Before Michael's senior year, she called all his teachers at Briarcrest and asked them to tell her exactly what Michael had to do to earn at least a B in their classes. She didn't expect them to just hand Michael a grade - though she wouldn't have complained if they did. But to her way of thinking, a B was the fair minimum to give any normal person willing to take the simple steps. She would hound Michael until he took those steps. Just give me the list of things he needs to do, she told the teachers, and he will do them.

Two days into his senior year, he came home, dropped his massive backpack onto the kitchen table and said, "I can't do this." Leigh Anne thought he was about to cry. The next morning, she told him to suck it up and pushed him right back out the door. But that's when Leigh Anne brought in Sue Mitchell, whom she met at a sorority function.

As a tool for overhauling the grade-point average of Michael Oher, as well as for broadening his experience of white people, Sue Mitchell had a number of things to recommend her. In her 35-year career she taught at several Memphis-area public schools. At Bartlett High School, just outside Memphis, she took over the cheerleading squad and whipped it into five-time national champions. She applied to work at the Briarcrest Christian School, but Briarcrest rejected her out of hand because though Mitchell said she believed in God, she had trouble proving it. ("The application did not have one question about education," Mitchell says. "It was all about religion and what I thought about homosexuality and drinking and smoking.") She wasn't born again, and she didn't often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, "We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!"

Still, in spite of these presumed defects, Mitchell was relentless and effusive - the sort of woman who wants everything to be just great between her and the rest of the world but, if it isn't, can adjust and go to war. And that's what she did. She worked five nights a week, four hours each night, free, to help get Michael Oher into Ole Miss, her alma mater. The Tuohy family looked on with interest. "There were days when he was just overwhelmed," says Collins, who saw the academic drama unfold both at school and at home. "He'd just close his book and say, 'I'm done."' When he did this, Mitchell opened the book for him. She didn't care much about football, but she fairly quickly became attached to Michael. There was just something about him that made you want to help him. He tried so hard and for so little return. "One night it wasn't going so well, and I got frustrated," Mitchell says, "and he said to me, 'Miss Sue, you have to remember I've only been going to school for two years."'

His senior year he made all A's and B's. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael started out a distant last and had instantly fallen farther behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, "You didn't lose; you just ran out of time."

He had had a truly bizarre academic career: nothing but D's and F's until the end of his junior year, when all of a sudden he became a reliable member of Briarcrest's honor roll. He was going to finish with a grade-point average of 2.05. Amazing as that was, however, it wasn't enough to get him past the N.C.A.A. He needed a 2.65. And with no more classes to take, he obviously would not get it.

Now it was Sean's turn to intervene.

From a friend, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called "Character Education." All you had to do in such a "character course" was to read a few brief passages from famous works - a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there - and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A's earned from character courses could be used to replace F's earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

Thus began the great Mormon grade-grab. Mainly it involved Sue Mitchell grinding through the character courses with Michael. Every week or so, they replaced a Memphis public school F with an A from B.Y.U. Every assignment needed to be read aloud and decoded. Here he was, late in his senior year in high school, and he had never heard of a right angle or the Civil War or "I Love Lucy." But getting the grades was far easier than generating in Michael any sort of pleasure in learning. When Briarcrest gave him a list of choices of books to write a report on, Mitchell, thinking it might spark Michael's interest, picked "Great Expectations." "Because of the character of Pip," she says. "He was poor and an orphan. And someone sort of found him. I just thought Michael might be able to relate." He couldn't. She tried "Pygmalion." Again, he hadn't the faintest interest in the thing. They got through it by performing the work aloud, with Michael assigned to the role of Freddie. "He does wonderful memory work," Mitchell says. "It's a survival technique. You can give him anything, and he'll memorize it." But that's all he did. Engaging with the material in any deeper way seemed impossible. He was as isolated from the great works of Western literature as he was from other people. "If you asked him why we're doing all this," she says, "he'd say, 'I got to do it to get to the league."'

XI. Graduation

There was one final piece of unfinished business in Michael Oher's Briarcrest career. The senior yearbook picture was due, and Michael didn't have one. It was a Briarcrest tradition for every senior to have his baby picture in the senior program. Her lack of a baby picture for Michael drove Leigh Anne to distraction. "You don't want to be the only senior who doesn't have a baby picture in the annual!" she told him. She made Michael give her the name of the foster home he admitted to having lived in when he was 8. She called the foster mother, who sounded vague; at any rate, she had nothing on him. She went down to his biological mother's apartment and harassed her for pictures. Later, she finally came upon one shot, taken by an employee of the Tennessee Department of Children's Services when Michael was about 10 years old. She brought it home and gave it to Michael.

Michael looked at it and exclaimed, "Mama, that's me!"

"That sure is you!" she said.

Then he took it into the den and stared at it for 15 minutes.

But the picture didn't solve the problem. It wasn't a baby picture. One spring night Leigh Anne had an idea. She flipped on her computer and went online and found, as she puts it, "the cutest picture of a little black baby I could find." She downloaded the stranger's photo and sent it in to Briarcrest.

The Briarcrest Christian School held its graduation ceremony in a church in May 2005. The Tuohys were all in the audience, of course, and they brought Sue Mitchell with them. Steve Simpson was there, and so was Jennifer Graves, who says that she has never seen anyone work so hard for a piece of paper as Michael Oher worked to get his Briarcrest diploma. Big Tony was on hand - even though his son, Steven, wouldn't graduate until the following year. The Briarcrest president gave a long speech filled with many words of warning to the graduating class. He explained that when they left Briarcrest and went out into the world, they would encounter "all kinds of groups that claim some kind of privilege based on their lifestyles or perversions." (There was no need to say "gay"; they knew all about sodomy.) He spoke sternly about the danger of "seeking false happiness in a variety of narcissistic pleasures." After that final jolt of fear from God, the graduates were called forward to collect their rewards. Steve Simpson called their names, one by one; one by one, they stepped up. Michael wasn't called until nearly the end. He sat waiting in the back row, upper lip tucked beneath lower, either choking back his emotion or settling his nerves.

"Michael Jerome Oher," said Steve Simpson and smiled.

XII. Collegebound

The N.C.A.A. still needed its proof of Michael's new and improved grade-point average by Aug. 1. Ole Miss was willing to admit Michael Oher as a student, but the N.C.A.A. stood between them in a couple of ways. First, it had opened an investigation and voiced the suspicion that the Tuohys had become Michael's guardians and put him into their wills as an equal of their own children only so that he might play left tackle for their alma mater. Next, the N.C.A.A. said his grade-point average was just a tad too low for him to play college football. On July 29, Michael took his final B.Y.U. test - another character course. Sean sent the test to Utah by Federal Express, and the B.Y.U. people promised to have the grade ready by 2 o'clock the following afternoon. "The Mormons may be going to hell," Sean says. "But they really are nice people." With Michael's final A in hand, Sean rushed the full package to the N.C.A.A.'s offices in Iowa. The N.C.A.A promptly lost it. Sean threatened to fly up on his plane with another copy and sit in the lobby until it was processed - which led the N.C.A.A. to find Michael's file. While it remained suspicious and didn't close its investigation, the N.C.A.A. on Aug. 1, 2005, informed Michael Oher that he was going to be allowed to go to college and play football.

One year later, Michael Oher was a first-team freshman All-American, the starting left tackle of the Ole Miss Rebels and the most awesome force on a football field that a lot of college line coaches had ever seen. He was on a collision course with the second-highest-paid job in the N.F.L. He could read and write and now blended so well socially into rich white Memphis that rich white Memphis almost forgot he was black. Drowned in nurture, his I.Q. test score had risen between 20 and 30 points. And his new parents, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, were so pleased with the results of their experiment that they began to figure out how best to go back into the inner city and do it all over again.

Michael Lewis is a contributing writer for the magazine. This article is adapted from his new book, "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game," to be published next month by W.W. Norton & Company.
One Spoonful at a Time By HARRIET BROWN
On a sweltering evening in July of last year, I sat at the end of my daughter Kitty's bed, holding a milkshake made from a cup of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and a cup of whole milk. Kitty (the pet name we've used since she was a baby) shivered, wrapped in a thick quilt. "Here's your milkshake," I said, aiming for a tone that was friendly but firm, a tone that would make her reach for the glass and begin drinking. Six-hundred ninety calories - that's what this milkshake represented to me.

But to Kitty it was the object of her deepest fear and loathing. "You're trying to make me fat," she said in a high-pitched, distorted voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She rocked, clutching her stomach, chanting over and over: "I'm a fat pig. I'm so fat."

That summer, Kitty was 14. She was 4-foot-11 and weighed 71 pounds. I could see the angles and curves of each bone under her skin. Her hair, once shiny, was lank and falling out in clumps. Her breath carried the odor of ketosis, the sour smell of the starving body digesting itself.

I kept my voice neutral. "You need to drink the milkshake," I repeated. She lifted her head, and for a second I saw the 2-year-old Kitty, her mouth quirked in a half-smile, her dark eyes full of humor. It was enough to keep me from shrieking: Just drink the damn milkshake! Enough to keep me sitting on the end of the bed for the next two hours, talking in a low voice, lifting the straw to her lips over and over. The milkshake had long since melted when she swallowed the last of it, curled up in bed and closed her eyes. Her gaunt face stayed tense even in sleep.

Kitty's anorexia was diagnosed a few weeks before, at the end of that June. My husband and I knew something was wrong for several weeks; we just didn't know what. She'd started reading Gourmet and planning lavish dinner parties. She called me at work several times a day, needing to know what dinner would be the next night and the next. She exercised for hours each night, doing situps and push-ups in her room. On Mother's Day she worried that she might have obsessive-compulsive disorder, because she couldn't stop thinking about meals and food.

My husband and I told ourselves, She's 14, we can't be overprotective. We said to each other, I wouldn't be that age again for anything. Kitty didn't want to see a therapist; we didn't want to insist. Yet.

She was thin, too thin. She ate fruit and vegetables, turkey and low-fat yogurt - healthful choices. But as she crossed the floor at her eighth-grade graduation, we saw that something had changed; suddenly she looked emaciated. I called the pediatrician the next morning.

The day anorexia was diagnosed, the doctor told Kitty to eat more and told us to find her a therapist. Two weeks later we met with an eating-disorders specialist who talked to Kitty as if she were 3 years old. That's when we panicked; we'd been pinning our hopes on the therapist, but clearly she was not going to save the day. So we tried to get Kitty to eat: we encouraged, we reasoned, we yelled. Kitty cried, said she wasn't hungry, her stomach hurt; she would eat at her friends' houses, at camp, tomorrow.

On a hundred-degree day that July, she spent hours frying chicken and baking carrot cake, then ate almost none of it. I begged her to drink water; she swore she wasn't thirsty. Late that night, she put her hand on her chest. "My heart feels funny," she said. The emergency room doctor admitted her with an abnormal EKG; she was dehydrated, and her resting heart had slowed to 31 beats a minute (normal is 60 to 80). When she didn't eat, they moved her to the I.C.U., where a frazzled doctor ordered a feeding tube. Kitty wept. "I won't be able to taste my food!" she cried.

I wanted to shout, "But you're not eating anything!" The doctor gave her a choice: eat a protein shake and a small bowl of spaghetti in half an hour, or he would order the tube. She did it - and she kept eating, three tiny hospital meals a day, more than she'd eaten in weeks.

That first night in the hospital, we asked Kitty's pediatrician where her other anorexic patients went for treatment. "When they're this sick, they go away," she said, referring to inpatient eating-disorder clinics, where people often stay for two or three months. The nearest was an hour away and cost $1,000 a day, most of which would not be covered by our HMO. Kitty was terrified at the prospect. "Don't make me leave you," she cried. It would have been easier on one level to send her away to some place that could help her. But we couldn't send her off when she was so frightened.

We visited an adolescent day program at a local psychiatric hospital; it felt like the set of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." On every subject except food, Kitty was completely rational; how would rehashing eighth grade in the hospital's "school" help her?

Had the diagnosis been, say, diabetes, we would have been given a list of guidelines and medications - a road map for recovery. We would have looked at research and treatment protocols. Look anorexia up on Amazon, and you'll find hundreds of titles, but we couldn't sort the useful books from the flaky ones. And in terms of treatment, there isn't much systematic scientific research on the disease. No one could tell us exactly how to make our daughter well. All they could say for sure was that the odds weren't good. Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it's estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry. It is thought that if anorexia is not treated early on, during adolescence, it tends to take an average of five to seven years for the person to recover - if it happens at all. I pictured Kitty, starved and weak, at 16 and 18 and 21, and felt sick.

I went home and started researching, hoping to find another option. Among the few studies done on anorexia treatment, I came across one from 1997, a follow-up to an earlier study on adolescents that assessed a method developed in England and was still relatively unknown in the United States: family- based treatment, often called the Maudsley approach. This treatment was created by a team of therapists led by Christopher Dare and Ivan Eisler at the Maudsley Hospital in London, in the mid-1980s, as an alternative to hospitalization. In a hospital setting, nurses sit with anorexic patients at meals, encouraging and calming them; they create a culture in which patients have to eat. The Maudsley approach urges families to essentially take on the nurses' role. Parents become primary caretakers, working with a Maudsley therapist. Their job: Finding ways to insist that their children eat.

The two studies showed that 90 percent of the adolescents recovered or made significant gains; five years later, 90 percent had fully recovered. (Two other studies confirmed these results.) In the world of eating disorders, I was coming to understand, this was a phenomenally high success rate.

The idea that parents should be intimately involved in the refeeding of their children can be quite controversial, a departure from the conventional notion that the dynamic between parent and child causes or contributes to the anorexia. Many therapists advocate a "parentectomy," insisting that parents stay out of the treatment to preserve the child's privacy and autonomy. They say that a child must "choose" to eat in order to truly recover. Maudsley advocates see the family as the best chance a child has for recovery; no one else knows the child as well or has the same investment in the child's well-being. That felt right to us.

Over the last few years, most eating-disorders researchers have begun to think that there is no single cause of anorexia, that maybe it's more like a recipe, where several ingredients - genetics, personality type, hormones, stressful life events - come together in just the wrong way. Maudsley practitioners say that focusing on the cause is secondary, ultimately, because once the physiological process of starvation kicks in, the disease takes on a life of its own, unfolding with predictable symptoms, intensity and long-term consequences. Anorexics become almost uniformly depressed, withdrawn, enraged, anxious, irritable or suicidal, and their thinking about food and eating is distorted, in part because the brain runs on glucose, and when it has been deprived over a long period of time, when it's starved, it goes haywire. It's important to get the patient's weight up, fast, because the less time spent in starvation, the better the outcome. Adult anorexics who have been chronically ill for years have much poorer prognoses than teenagers.

I called Daniel Le Grange, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, who directs the eating-disorders program there. Le Grange spent five years training at Maudsley Hospital in England, and he and James Lock, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry and pediatrics at Stanford, have written Maudsley treatment manuals for physicians and therapists and a book for parents. The two are in the middle of a $4 million N.I.H.-financed study designed to measure the effectiveness of the Maudsley approach. Le Grange compared anorexia to cancer. "If you leave it, it's going to metastasize," he said. "You need to figure out an aggressive way to eradicate it as quickly as you can. You're not going to hear an oncologist say, 'Oh, it's Stage 0 cancer, let's wait till it becomes Stage 3.' "

I asked Le Grange what he thought about a critique of Maudsley: that it violates the usual boundaries between child and parent, derailing the adolescent work of separation and individuation. "If your child has diabetes and doesn't check her blood sugar often enough, you'd make sure she did," Le Grange reassured me. "What we're trying to achieve is taking anorexia away so the child can go on her way unencumbered by the eating disorder. What could be more respectful of adolescent development?"

There were no local Maudsley therapists, so my husband and I lined up a pediatrician (in whose office Kitty was weighed weekly), a psychiatrist (whom she saw weekly, then twice a month), a therapist (weekly) and a nutritionist (two or three visits). We didn't know if Maudsley would work. We didn't know if it was, objectively speaking, the best choice. But anything was better than watching Kitty disappear, ounce by ounce, obscured by the creature who spoke with her voice and looked out through her eyes. Anything.

On Day 2 of refeeding Kitty, our younger daughter, Lulu (also her nickname), turned 10. We had cake, a dense, rich chocolate cake layered with raspberry filling - one of Kitty's favorites. Of course she refused it. I told her that if she didn't eat the cake, we'd go back to the hospital that night and she would get the tube. I hated saying this, but I hated the prospect of the hospital more. The tube felt like the worst thing that could happen to her, though of course it was not. Five minutes after Kitty was born, I fed her from my own body. Now the idea of forcing a tube down her throat, having a nurse insert a "bolus" every so often, seemed a grotesque perversion of every bit of love and sustenance I'd ever given her.

She sat in front of the cake, crying. She put down the fork, said her throat was closing, said that she was a horrible person, that she couldn't eat it, she just couldn't. We told her it was not a choice to starve. We told her she could do nothing until she ate - no TV, books, showers, phone, sleep. We told her we would sit at the table all night if we had to.

Still, I was astonished when she lifted the first tiny forkful of cake to her mouth. It took 45 minutes to eat the whole piece. After she'd scraped the last bit into her mouth, she lay her head on the table and sobbed, "That was scary, Mommy!"

At age 4, Kitty went for a pony ride and was seated on an enormous quarter horse. When the horse reared, she just held on. Afterward I asked if she'd been scared. "Not really," she said. "Can I go again?"

This was the child who was now terrified by a slice of chocolate cake.

That night, when I checked on her in bed, she mumbled, "Make it go away." I now knew what "it" was. It seemed as if she were possessed by a vicious demon she must appease or suffer the consequences. I pictured its leathery wings and yellow fangs inside her. Each crumb Kitty ate was an act of true bravery, defiance snatched from its curved talons. I've heard women joke, "I could use a little anorexia!" They have no idea.

This demon was described nowhere in the books I was frantically reading. It wasn't until I stumbled on a 1940s study led by Dr. Ancel Keys, a physiologist at the University of Minnesota, that I began to understand. During World War II, Keys recruited 36 physically and psychologically healthy men for a yearlong study on starvation. For the first three months they ate normally, while Keys's researchers recorded information about their personalities, eating patterns and behavior. For the next six months their rations were cut in half; most of the men lost about a quarter of their weight, putting them at about 75 percent of their former weight - about where Kitty was when she was hospitalized. The men spent the final three months being refed.

Keys and his colleagues published their study in 1950 as "The Biology of Human Starvation," and his findings are startlingly relevant to anorexia. Depression and irritability plagued all the volunteers, especially during refeeding. They cut their food into tiny pieces, drew meals out for hours. They became withdrawn and obsessional, antisocial and anxious. One volunteer deliberately chopped off three of his fingers during the recovery period. The demon, I thought.

"Starvation affects the whole organism," Keys wrote. Given what I'd seen of Kitty, that made sense to me. But I wondered why - if starvation triggers the cognitive, emotional and behavioral changes that are so uniform in anorexia - the Minnesota volunteers did not develop the intense fear of eating and gaining weight that characterizes the disease. And what about the millions of people around the world who are starving because they don't have enough food - why don't they develop anorexia?

Once more I turned to Le Grange, who explained that at the core of anorexia is the notion of starvation in the midst of plenty; starvation when food isn't available doesn't usually trigger the same response. As for the Minnesota volunteers, he said, they were males (most anorexics are female), and they were beyond adolescence, outside the developmental window when anorexia tends to strike. More important, the volunteers ate about half their caloric requirements for six months; most anorexics eat far less, over a much longer period of time. "We're talking about a 14- year-old who is profoundly starved for 12 months," he said. "These guys were semistarved for a relatively brief period." It's not just the weight; it's the pattern of behavioral reinforcement. Each time an anorexic restricts what she's consuming, the anorexic thoughts ("I'm so fat, I'm such a pig") and behaviors (constant exercising, for example) are strengthened. Which is why it takes not just weight gain but the experience of eating meal after meal after meal to truly cure the disease.

Of course this brings up the question: which comes first, physiological starvation or the mental and emotional changes of anorexia? "You or I would earn the Nobel Prize if we figured that out," Le Grange said. "It's a bit of both, probably, and the two impact each other. So if you are constitutionally slender and it's easy for you to diet, and you like ballet, and you live in the United States, and you're 13, and your personality is perfectionist, your chance of developing this illness is very, very high."

Switch gymnastics for ballet, and Le Grange had just described Kitty. I used to hope she'd get a B in school so she'd see that the world didn't come to an end. Clearly, she wasn't going to be O.K. in a week or a month or six months. We were embarking on a long journey, one that would change us all.

A week into refeeding, I'd become an expert in high-calorie cooking. I made macaroni and cheese with butter and whole milk, chicken breasts dredged in egg, rolled in bread crumbs, fried in butter. Carrot cake with cream-cheese icing. Thousand-calorie milkshakes and muffins. When a body is in a state of starvation, it isn't enough to simply eat a normal diet, Dr. Walter H. Kaye, director of the eating-disorders program at the University of California at San Diego, explained to me. The body requires huge numbers of calories to gain weight and maintain it. Every few days we added 300 calories; by Day 9, Kitty was eating 2,100 calories a day. Still, she'd lost another half pound, which panicked me until the pediatrician explained that Kitty's metabolism, slowed by starvation, was now revving high. It's not unusual to lose weight at first, she said; just keep feeding her.

A heating pad helped with the stomachaches and bloating that followed each meal. But nothing helped with the thoughts and feelings. Faced with a plate of food, the demon inside my daughter bargained, cried, lashed out. Her anxiety was so great that there was no reward that could motivate her to eat. Her fear of the tube was what kept her eating in those first few weeks. I wondered what would happen when she'd gained a few pounds and the tube was no longer a possibility.

Meanwhile, the demon sat at our table and spewed venom: "I'm a lazy pig. You're trying to make me fat." And, one night, terrifyingly: "I just want to go to sleep and never wake up."

With that comment, Kitty's younger sister, Lulu, looked up from her plate, her face full of anguish, and bolted from the table. I found her in the basement. "I don't want to go to my sister's funeral!" she cried. "Neither do I," I told her.

Later that night, when Kitty and Lulu were asleep, I stood in the middle of the kitchen and thought of how our lives had shrunk to the confines of these four walls. The counter and sink were piled high with dirty plates, ice cream tubs, glasses and pans. Between shopping, cooking, eating with Kitty, spending time with Lulu and going to work, my husband and I had no time for cleaning, much less anything else. Suddenly I was filled with fury. I grabbed a dish and smashed it on the linoleum, where it broke into half a dozen pieces. I broke another, and another, and another. There were so many things I couldn't fix or make right, so many feelings I couldn't handle. I swept the pieces into a bag and carried them outside. Tomorrow we would eat off paper plates.

Three weeks into refeeding, Kitty was consuming 3,000 calories a day; she'd gained about eight pounds. My husband or I would sit with her while she ate three meals and two snacks each day; we needed to know she was eating, and she needed us to compel her to eat, to get past the demon's grip on her. One of us brought her to work, as we had when she was an infant. In many ways this process felt like reparenting as well as refeeding, taking her back to a time when she was totally dependent on us.

Some parents don't want to or can't go backward like this. Some don't have flexible work schedules and can't be home for every meal and snack. Some are overwhelmed by the relentless and exhausting work of refeeding. For any of these parents, Maudsley may be impossible. It works best when two parents are involved - so they can take turns losing it, offstage - and when those parents agree that their top priority is refeeding. I heard stories from other families about anorexics who slipped meals into the trash when softhearted Dad was in charge, or about weight-conscious mothers who couldn't bring themselves to serve their daughters that much food. When we started refeeding Kitty, my husband had never thought much about nutrition, and the idea took some getting used to. By late August, though, he could tell you how many calories were in a pat of butter, a chicken breast, a glass of milk. And he was often far more patient with Kitty than I.

During that first month, Kitty smiled once or twice, which made us feel hopeful for the first time since the spring. We watched movies together and took walks around the block - the only exercise she was allowed. We had moments that seemed almost normal.

But the night before she was set to start high school, four weeks in, the demon re-emerged. This time it was far worse than anything we'd experienced, maybe because Kitty was stronger now. At the dinner table, she put her matchstick arms around herself and shouted, "I don't want to go to high school and have everyone say, 'Look at Kitty, look how fat she got over the summer!' "

She refused to eat anything. We cajoled and begged and threatened. She wept and flailed and lashed out. I left messages for the psychiatrist, the therapist, the pediatrician. I told her we'd have to go back to the hospital, though I suspected she now weighed too much to be admitted. Finally I reached a psychiatrist on call, who suggested that we give her a tranquilizer and put her to bed. "If she won't eat in the morning, bring her in," advised the psychiatrist. I was relieved, and also terrified: What if this was the start of a new downward slide?

But the next morning she ate breakfast as usual. After school, she came home with a couple of friends she hadn't seen since spring. As I made milkshakes for all of them, I was surprised to hear Kitty say jokingly, "We know all the ice creams with the most calories!"

One friend said, "We want to know which ones have the least!"

"Yeah," chimed in another, "because my butt is huge!" Another girl said,

"I hate my thighs!" There was a chorus of agreement.

I offered, "You girls are beautiful and healthy and strong." But I felt incredibly sad. Even face to face with the devastating effects of this disease, they were criticizing their bodies.

I've heard the arguments that media depictions of unrealistic female bodies are what drive girls to starve themselves - the Kate Moss syndrome. And it's tempting to see anorexia as a metaphor, a result of a cultural crisis in the zeitgeist. If this were true, though, millions of American girls and women would become anorexic instead of the roughly 1 to 3 percent who do. Clearly there are other factors involved.

My nightly Internet prowling turned up some interesting research by Kaye, the director of the eating-disorders program at the University of California. While Kaye suspects that social and cultural factors contribute to anorexia, he says that recent studies suggest that genetics is the most significant factor for anorexia and bulimia. He has found chromosomal abnormalities in anorexics, as well as irregular levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. The National Institutes of Health is currently spending $10 million in a five-year study to look at the genetic links of the disease.

I grew up in a household where disordered eating was the norm. My aunt was bulimic; my mother enrolled us both in Weight Watchers when I was 15. She recorded her weight each morning on a chart and went on to become a Weight Watchers lecturer, delivering weekly pep talks to a roomful of people who were engaged in an ongoing war with their own bodies. You had to stay vigilant, lest your appetite betray you and the pounds creep back on. I'd tried to teach my daughters to enjoy good food and to love their bodies, but maybe I hadn't gotten over my dieting-obsessed childhood. Or maybe I'd passed along a genetic predisposition that triggered Kitty's illness. The deeper into refeeding we got, though, the less I worried about causes. We could figure that out later. The important thing was to get Kitty to eat and gain weight.

By October, we'd settled into a pattern. My husband, whose work schedule is flexible, ate lunch with Kitty most days; I covered that meal when he couldn't. Kitty gained another six pounds and, encouragingly, grew an inch. But she hadn't felt hungry since before the diagnosis. I worried that anorexia had permanently short-circuited her brain-body connection; how would she ever regulate her own eating?

The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming. One night she sat at the table, hands over her eyes, in front of a plate of salmon and squash. "I'm bad! I'm bad!" she said, sobbing. "I won't eat, I won't!"

Calmly I said, "Food is your medicine and you've got to take it." Long minutes ticked by. Eventually she said: "I want to eat, but I can't. If I eat now I'll be a total failure!" The anorexia talk spilled out of her, on and on and on. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and say, "Of course you don't have to eat, poor baby." But I couldn't give the disease an inch. If I did, the same thing would happen the next day and the next day. We had to sit there until she ate, no matter how long it took.

By the first week of November, Kitty was up to 90 pounds, 10 pounds short of her target weight. More important, her mood improved significantly. But later in the month, she developed an upset stomach, which isn't unusual during refeeding, and began refusing the daily milkshakes. She complained of dizziness, wanted to know what I would be serving her, then argued for something else. She raged at me and at herself. One afternoon she cried so much she "accidentally" threw up her lunch. Back in September she tried to make herself throw up a few times; about half of all anorexics do become bulimic. Luckily, Kitty was never able to do it. I hoped she hadn't learned how.

In December, Kitty gained and lost the same pound over and over. At the end of the month she was still, frustratingly, at 90 pounds, still deeply in the grip of the disease. We boosted her intake to 4,000 calories a day. In mid-January, finally, her weight went up four pounds. It was astonishing, how much food she needed, but not unusual. Anorexics become metabolically inefficient; their temperatures rise, and they tend to burn off calories rather than put on flesh. "That's one reason for the high rate of relapse," Dr. Kaye told me. It's hard to gain enough weight to truly recover, and even harder to maintain it.

As went the fall, so went the spring. The pounds came on, very slowly, and Kitty's spirits continued to lift. More and more, she hung out with boys. "They don't talk about how fat they are," she explained. And they didn't make her feel self-conscious about eating. "Yo, Kitty, you done with your 10,000-calorie milkshake yet?" one boy said one afternoon in March, and she actually giggled.

In April, Kitty grew another two inches, which meant that her target weight went up, too. I felt despair at the thought that it would take longer now for her to gain enough weight, longer for her to get well. I told myself that her health was more complex than a number on the scale, that she was recovering. But I couldn't forget the sunken, unspeakably sad look in her eyes that past summer and fall.

One day in May, she came home from school grinning. "Guess what?" she said. "Sue brought cake to school, and I ate a piece. Aren't you proud of me?" All year she'd avoided parties, potlucks, lunches - any get-together that involved food. The fact that she ate a piece of cake, one of her "scary" foods, meant that she gave up, for a moment, being the anorexic at the back of the room. She became one of the group.

But the next day I made her and Lulu bagels with melted cheese, and Kitty complained, "You know I don't like sesame bagels." "You used to," I said. I knew what was behind this, and I wanted her to say it. I wanted it out in the open.

"They have more calories than plain bagels!" she burst out. But she calmed down quickly. "I know that was an eating-disordered thing to say. I couldn't help it," she said quietly, and ate the bagel.

I felt proud of her ability to name the demon and defy it. I wished we could just yank it out of her, unhook the claws that tormented her body and mind.

On a morning this past June, she called me at work to say the two most beautiful words in the English language: "I'm hungry!"

"I'm so happy!" I blurted out.

"I'm happy, too, Mom," she said.

She reached her target weight a few weeks later, and maintained it through the summer and early fall. Maudsley therapists say that true recovery entails weight restoration and functioning well psychologically and socially. Kitty would continue to see a therapist from time to time, to work on perfectionism and other issues. For now, though, she seemed happy and whole. The phone rang for her; friends trooped through the house. Life seemed normal again.

But one night recently I dreamed I was running through a strange house, looking for my daughter. I found her - though it wasn't really her - and grabbed her by the arm. "You didn't eat dinner last night, did you?" I shouted. "What did you have for breakfast?" Not-Kitty smiled. "A teaspoon of air," she said sweetly. I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter's face and spoke with her voice.

The Maudsley approach advocates separating the disease from the sufferer, the anorexia from the adolescent. And this helps, especially on the worst days. But it's also true that the demon is part of our family now, lurking in the shadows. We will never forget it. We don't know if or when it will re-emerge - two months from now, two years, five years. We don't know if we've done the right thing. Is Kitty cured? Will she ever be cured? There are so many questions I can't answer.

That morning, I got out of bed in the gray predawn and went down to the kitchen. I pulled out eggs, milk, butter and raspberry jam and set to work making crepes. It was all I could think of to do.

Harriet Brown is the author of "Mr. Wrong: Real-Life Stories About the Men We Used to LOve," to be published by Ballantine in January. She's currently at work on a book about anorexia.
Raising the Dead
At the bottom of the biggest underwater cave in the world, diving deeper than almost anyone had ever gone, Dave Shaw found the body of a young man who had disappeared ten years earlier. What happened after Shaw promised to go back is nearly unbelievable-unless you believe in ghosts.
By Tim Zimmermann

ALIEN WORLD: Australian cave diver Dave Shaw exploring South Africa's Bushman's Hole, October 2004 (Alex Tehrani)
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Ten minutes into his dive, Dave Shaw started to look for the bottom. Utter blackness pressed in on him from all sides, and he directed his high-intensity light downward, hoping for a flash of rock or mud. Shaw, a 50-year-old Aussie, was in an alien world, more than 800 feet below the surface pool that marks the entrance to Bushman's Hole, a remote sinkhole in the Northern Cape province of South Africa and the third-deepest freshwater cave known to man.

Shaw's stocky five-foot-ten body was encased in a black crushed-neoprene drysuit. On his back he carried a closed-circuit rebreather set, which, unlike traditional open-circuit scuba gear, was recycling the gas Shaw breathed, scrubbing out the carbon dioxide he exhaled and adding back oxygen. He carried six cylinders of gas, splayed alongside him like mutant appendages. On the surface, Shaw would barely have been able to move. But in the water, descending the shot line guiding him from the cave's entrance to the bottom, he was weightless and graceful, a black creature with just a flash of skin showing behind his mask, gliding downward without emitting a single bubble to disrupt the ethereal silence.

Only two divers had ever been to this depth in Bushman's before. One of them, a South African named Nuno Gomes, had claimed a world record in 1996 when he hit bottom, on open-circuit gear, at 927 feet. Gomes had turned immediately for the surface. But Shaw, a Cathay Pacific Airways pilot based in Hong Kong and a man who had become one of the most audacious explorers in cave diving, didn't strive for depth alone. He planned to bottom out Bushman's Hole at a depth that no rebreather had ever been taken, connect a light reel of cave line to the shot line, and then swim off to perform the sublime act of having a look around. At that moment late last October, cocooned in more than a billion gallons of water, Dave Shaw was a very happy man.

Shaw touched down on the cave's sloping bottom well up from where Gomes had landed, clipped off the cave reel, and started swimming. There was no time to waste. Every minute he spent on the bottom-his VR3 dive computer said he was now approaching 886 feet-would add more than an hour of decompression time on the way up. Still, Shaw felt remarkably relaxed, sweeping his light left and right, reveling in the fact that he was the first human ever to lay line at this depth. Suddenly, he stopped. About 50 feet to his left, perfectly illuminated in the gin-clear water, was a human body. It was on its back, the arms reaching toward the surface. Shaw knew immediately who it was: Deon Dreyer, a 20-year-old South African who had blacked out deep in Bushman's ten years earlier and disappeared. Divers had been keeping an eye out for him ever since.

Shaw turned immediately, unspooling cave line as he went. Up close, he could see that Deon's tanks and dive harness, snugged around a black-and-tan wetsuit, appeared to be intact. Deon's head and hands, exposed to the water, were skeletonized, but his mask was eerily in place on the skull. Thinking he should try to bring Deon back to the surface, Shaw wrapped his arms around the corpse and tried to lift. It didn't move. Shaw knelt down and heaved again. Nothing. Deon's air tanks and the battery pack for his light appeared to be firmly embedded in the mud underneath him, and Shaw was starting to pant from exertion.

This isn't wise, he chastised himself. I'm at 270 meters and working too hard. He was also already a minute over his planned bottom time. Shaw quickly tied the cave reel to Deon's tanks, so the body could be found again, and returned to the shot line to start his ascent.

Approaching 400 feet, almost an hour into the dive, Shaw met up with his close friend Don Shirley, a 48-year-old British expat who runs a technical-diving school in Badplaas, South Africa. After Shirley checked that Shaw was OK and retrieved some spare gas cylinders hanging on the shot line below, Shaw showed him an underwater slate on which he had written 270m, found body. Shirley's eyebrows shot up inside his mask, and he reached out to shake his friend's hand.

Shirley left Shaw, who had another eight hours and 40 minutes of decompression to complete. As Shirley ascended, it occurred to him that Shaw would not be able to resist coming back to try to recover Deon. Shirley would have been content to leave the body where it was, but Shaw was a man who dived to expand the limits of the possible. He had just hit a record depth on a rebreather, and now he had the opportunity to return a dead boy to his parents and, in the process, do something equally stunning: make the deepest body recovery in the history of diving.

"Dave felt very connected with Deon," Shirley says. "He had found him, so it was like a personal thing that he should bring him back."

When Shaw finally surfaced in the late-afternoon African sun, he removed his mask and said, "I want to try to take him out."
DEEP-WATER DIVERS have always been the daredevils of the diving community, pushing far into the dark labyrinths of water-filled holes and extreme ocean depths. It's a small global fraternity-there are no more than a dozen members-and in the history of recreational diving, only six people other than Shaw have ever pulled off successful dives below 820 feet. (More people have walked on the moon, Don Shirley likes to point out.) At least three ran into serious trouble in the process (including Nuno Gomes, who got stuck in the mud on the bottom of Bushman's Hole for two minutes before escaping). And two have since died: American Sheck Exley, who drowned while diving the world's deepest sinkhole, Mexico's 1,080-foot-deep Zacatón, in April 1994; and Britain's John Bennett, who disappeared while diving a wreck off the coast of South Korea in March 2004.

"Today extreme divers are far exceeding any reasonable physiology capabilities," says American Tom Mount, a pioneer in technical diving and the owner of the Miami Shores, Florida-headquartered International Association of Nitrox and Technical Divers (IANTD). "Equipment can go to those depths, but your body might not be able to."

Aside from the dangers of getting trapped or lost, breathing deep-dive gas mixes-usually a combination of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen known as trimix-at extreme underwater pressure can kill you in any number of ways. For example, at depth, oxygen can become toxic, and nitrogen acts like a narcotic-the deeper you go, the stupider you get. Divers compare narcosis to drinking martinis on an empty stomach, and, depending on the gas mix you're using, at 800-plus feet you can feel like you've downed at least four or five of them all at once. Helium is no better; it can send you into nervous, twitching fits. Then, if you don't breathe slowly and deeply, carbon dioxide can build up in your lungs and you'll black out. And if you ascend too quickly, all the nitrogen and helium that has been forced into your tissues under pressure can fizz into tiny bubbles, causing a condition known as the bends, which can result in severe pain, paralysis, and death. To try to avoid getting the bends, extreme divers spend hours on ascent, sitting at targeted depths for carefully calculated periods of decompression to allow the gases to flush safely from their bodies. As divers say, if you do the depth, you do the time.

For any diver who can stomach the risks, Bushman's Hole is world-class. It's located on the privately owned Mount Carmel game farm, 11,000 acres of rolling, ocher-earthed veldt sparsely thatched with silky bushman grass and dotted with sun-baked termite mounds. Not until you top a small rise a few miles from the farm dwellings do you notice a break in the clean sweep of the land, where the earth starts to fall in on itself as if a giant hammer had come smashing down. The resulting crater is hundreds of feet from rim to rim and walled on one side by a sheer cliff. If you hike down the steep, stony path on the opposite side, you come to a small, swimming-pool-size basin of water, covered in a green carpet of duckweed. This is the entrance to Bushman's Hole.

No one had any idea how deep Bushman's was until Nuno Gomes arrived. On his first visit, in 1981, the Johannesburg-based Gomes dived to almost 250 feet, dropping down through a narrow chimney that opens up into an enormous chamber below 150 feet. In 1988, he set an African depth record of just over 400 feet, and Bushman's reputation as a deep diver's cave started to spread. In 1993, Sheck Exley showed up. Supported by a team that included Gomes, Exley became the first diver to hit bottom, touching down at 863 feet on the hole's sloping floor.

During the Exley expedition, Gomes performed a sonar scan of the hole. It revealed Bushman's to be the largest freshwater cave ever discovered, with a main chamber that was approximately 770 feet by 250 feet across and more than 870 feet deep. (Gomes later found a maximum depth of at least 927 feet.)

Diving Bushman's is exhilarating. The narrow entrance is claustrophobic, but once you reach the vast main chamber, it's like spacewalking. For a young cave diver like Deon Dreyer, it must have been irresistible. Deon grew up in the modest town of Vereeniging, about 35 miles south of Johannesburg, and loved adventure in all its forms. He shot his first buck at the age of ten. By 17 he was racing a souped-up car around local tracks, tinkering with his motorcycle, and designing obscenely loud car stereos. Another of his passions was diving. "He couldn't sit still, never, ever, ever," says his younger brother, Werner, now 27.

Deon had logged about 200 dives when he was invited to join some South Africa Cave Diving Association divers at Bushman's Hole over the 1994 Christmas break. They planned a descent to 492 feet and asked Deon to dive support. He was thrilled. Two weeks before the expedition, Deon's grandfather passed away. Sitting around a barbecue with his family one night, Deon spoke with boyish hubris. "He said if he had a choice of how to go out in life, he'd like to go out diving," recalls his father, Theo, 51, the owner of a business that sells and services two-way radios.

Deon's mother, Marie, a petite 50-year-old, begged Deon not to go. In 1993, Bushman's Hole had already taken the life of a diver named Eben Leyden, who blacked out at 200 feet. (A dive buddy rushed him to the surface, but Leyden didn't survive.) And then, on December 17, 1994, the hole claimed Deon Dreyer.

For Marie and Theo, the nightmare started with a policeman's knock at the door. They rushed to Mount Carmel, where slowly the story came out. The team had been doing a practice dive. On the way back up, at 196 feet, Deon appeared to be fine, exchanging hand signals with his buddy. The group continued ascending. At 164 feet they suddenly noticed a light below them. A quick, confused diver count came up one short. Team leader Dietloff Giliomee wasn't sure what was happening. Then another diver, in the eerie glow of his submersible light, dragged his finger across his throat. Giliomee desperately started swimming down but stopped when he realized the light below him was already more than 100 feet deeper and fading fast. "I decided it was a suicide chase," he wrote in the accident report.

No one knows for sure what killed Deon. The best guess is deep-water blackout from carbon dioxide buildup. Two weeks after the accident, Theo paid to bring in a small, remotely operated sub used by the De Beers mining company. It found Deon's dive helmet on the vast floor of Bushman's, but there was no sign of his body. Resigning themselves to the idea that Deon would stay in the hole for eternity, Theo and Marie placed a commemorative plaque on a rock wall above the entry pool. "He had the most majestic grave in the country," Theo says. "And I said, 'Well, this will be his final resting place.' "

But on October 30, 2004, Dave Shaw called Theo and said, "I will go and fetch your son." Theo immediately responded, "Yes, absolutely yes." More than anything, he realized, he wanted to see his boy again
IF RECOVERING DEON from the bottom of Bushman's Hole was a feat of extraordinary ambition and danger, combining extreme depth with demanding work, Shaw and Shirley were just the guys to pull it off. On his first dive, in 1999, with his then-17-year-old son, Steven, in the Philippines, Shaw had found a sport whose challenges he couldn't resist. He quickly pushed past the standard reef tours and went wreck diving. Soon enough he discovered the caves, and he was hooked.

As an airline pilot, Shaw could dive all over the world-in Asia, the United States, Mexico, and South Africa. He was born in the small town of Katanning, in Western Australia, and from the age of three, when he built his first toy aircraft out of cardboard, Shaw knew he wanted to fly. By the time he was 18, in 1973, he was working as a crop duster. That same year he met the Melbourne-raised Ann Broughton at a youth camp in Perth. He took her up in an airplane on their first date, and 20 months later they were married. In 1981, Shaw became a missionary pilot, moving with Ann to Papua New Guinea, where Steven was born. A daughter, Lisa, followed in 1983, and the Shaws relocated briefly to Tanzania before moving to New South Wales, Australia, where eventually Shaw began flying corporate jets. In 1989, he settled in with Cathay Pacific, moving his family to Hong Kong.

Shaw loved to poke around deep underwater, so he was committed to the closed-circuit rebreather for its remarkable efficiency and the warm, moist gas recycling produces. The oxygen supply is automatically monitored and adjusted by a digital controller strapped to a forearm, and pretty much the only oxygen consumed is that which the diver metabolizes. In contrast, divers using traditional open-circuit scuba (the majority of divers today) inhale ice-cold mixes and exhale huge volumes of gas into the water. (Rebreather divers like to call them "bubble blowers.") As a result, extreme open-circuit divers often need a dozen or more gas cylinders, constantly court hypothermia, and, without automatic control of their oxygen levels, end up breathing-and absorbing-more helium and nitrogen, running up a greater decompression tab. When Nuno Gomes went to the bottom of Bushman's Hole on open circuit in 1996, he didn't hang around at all, used more than 54,000 liters of gas, and had to spend almost 12 hours in the water. When Shaw went to the bottom on his rebreather, he tooled around exploring, used only 5,800 liters of gas, and got back to the surface in nine hours and 40 minutes.

The chief drawbacks to rebreathers are that they are expensive (upwards of $5,000), require the diver to constantly monitor the digital controller settings (open-circuit divers just have to breathe), and, until Shaw came along, had not been proved at great depths. But Shaw was convinced that rebreathers were the future of diving. In 2003, he purchased a rare Mk15.5 rebreather, developed by the U.S. Navy for deep submarine evacuation, and modified it with a Hammerhead controller that he filled with paraffin oil, as a sort of internal shock absorber that would help the components withstand intense pressures. Then he set about diving his custom rig to successively greater depths.

Don Shirley, an understated man with steel-frame glasses and a scraggly beard, was a kindred spirit. He grew up in Surrey, England, and spent 22 years as an electronics specialist in the British Army, which took him through the Falklands War and to the Persian Gulf. He dived every spare minute he had, specializing in deep wrecks off the coast of Britain. In 1997, he retired from the army and moved to South Africa, looking to start a new life as a technical-diving trainer in an exotic English-speaking land. He and a partner set up the South African franchise of IANTD, alongside a deep, flooded asbestos mine in the beautiful grassy hills a couple hundred miles east of Johannesburg. He dubbed the spot Komati Springs, spent hundreds of hours a year in the water, teaching technical and cave diving, and developed the mine, with its deep shafts, into a premier dive site. In 2003, he married Andre Truter, a feisty 38-year-old Afrikaner with short brown hair and a sly smile. Together they live in a thatch-roofed bungalow, surrounded by a pack of rambunctious dogs with names like Sheck and Argon.

In the fall of 2002, a bearded man with an Australian twang appeared at Shirley's dive center. "Hi, I'm Dave Shaw," the man said. "Do you mind if I go dive your hole?" Shirley sized up the bluff Aussie and liked what he saw. Soon Shaw was flying in regularly to dive, and Shirley went with him whenever he had time. In October 2003, at Komati Springs, Shaw set a rebreather cave record of 597 feet, with Shirley diving backup. Two days later, Shirley, with Shaw just behind him, became the first diver to reach the very end of the mine's deepest shaft, at 610 feet. Shaw and Shirley had logged more than a hundred hours underwater together in the nearly two and a half years they'd known each other. "It was stunning being in the water with Dave, very relaxed," Shirley says.

Shirley introduced Shaw to the enticing depths of Bushman's in June 2004. Shaw turned up with his modified Mk15.5 and dived it to 725 feet, another world record for a closed-circuit rebreather in a cave. His DUI drysuit and Thinsulate underwear kept him warm. He peed happily into the water via a valve in his drysuit that had a catheter running to a condom (informally known as "the Urinator"), and topped up, intermittently pulling his regulator out of his mouth, on candy bars and water lowered in a string bag at shallow decompression stops. He fell in love with the place
IN NOVEMBER 2004, back home in his apartment in Hong Kong, Shaw was in almost daily e-mail and phone contact with Shirley. The Big Dive, as they started to call it, was set for early January, and one of the most elusive questions was the condition of Deon's body. The forensics experts they consulted weren't sure but guessed the corpse would be mostly bone. Shaw decided he'd better try to get it into a body bag for the trip to the surface or risk having it fall apart. Together with Ann, he designed a silk bag with drawstrings, long enough to fit over Deon's fins.

Ann, a 49-year-old deputy head principal at Hong Kong's German Swiss International School, was nervous about the dangers her husband faced. "I want someone to ring me as soon as you are on your way up," she insisted. Shaw agreed but gave Ann the impression the dive would be taking place a day later than scheduled. That way, he could just call her when he was back on the surface and say, "Don't worry. It's all over and I'm fine." If he wasn't fine, he gently told Ann, he would arrange to have someone call Michael Vickers, their minister at Hong Kong's Anglican Resurrection Church.

On the evening of Saturday, January 1, Ann made the 45-minute drive to Hong Kong's Chep Lap Kok airport with 250 pounds of dive gear in her car. Shaw had been flying that day, and she met him at the Cathay Pacific offices and drove him to the departure area for his flight to South Africa. They sat together in a coffee bar. "You're not crying, are you?" he asked. "No," Ann replied bravely. Shaw got up to leave for his flight. He didn't say, "I love you." He didn't need to. She knew.

Shaw arrived in Johannesburg six days before the dive. His first stop was Komati Springs, where he practiced getting a body into the bag underwater, with Shirley playing the part of Deon's corpse. At 66 feet, it went smoothly, taking Shaw only a couple of minutes. A day later, he and Shirley drove to Mount Carmel, where seven South African rebreather divers, handpicked by Shirley, and a police team from Cape Town and Pretoria (since there was a dead body involved) were assembling. The dive would go off on the coming Saturday, January 8, and Shirley's dive plan was like an underwater symphony. Shaw was looking at a dive that would last roughly 12 hours, and would hit the water around 6 a.m. All the other divers would key off Shaw's dive time and head for specific target depths either to help look after Shaw or pass Deon's body to the surface. The first diver Shaw would meet on the way back up was Shirley, at 725 feet. He would hand the body bag over, and, if things went well, Deon would be out of the water about 80 minutes after Shaw's dive had started.

Shirley had done everything in his power to minimize the risks. He planned to have 35 backup cylinders of gas in the water-enough so that he, Shaw, and even some support divers could survive total rebreather failure. He arranged for a rope-and-sling system to be set up that could haul a diver on a stretcher up the cliffs of the hole to a recompression chamber that the police trucked in. To cope with any medical emergencies, Shirley had recruited a doctor-Jack Meintjies, a specialist in diving physiology at the University of Stellenbosch, outside Cape Town-to be on hand. When Meintjies realized that up to nine divers would be in the water, and learned the depths they would be going to, he almost backed out. "There were too many potential bodies. You are dealing with multiple divers going deep, and that's serious," Meintjies says.

Shaw, for one, was quietly confident. At Mount Carmel, he stressed repeatedly that the effort was an "attempted" body recovery. "The dive is huge," he told a collection of reporters and cameramen gathered a day before the dive. "No one has ever attempted anything even vaguely approximating a body recovery from these sorts of depths." He also talked about his motivation with the team. "I think what you are doing for the Dreyers is great," said Peter "Big B" Herbst, a 42-year-old dive instructor and the owner of Reef Divers, a dive shop and tour operator in Pretoria. Shaw looked at him, winked, and said, "Face it, B, we're doing this for the adventure of it."

Shaw did have one wrinkle to sort out. He had partnered up with South African documentary filmmaker Gordon Hiles to chronicle the recovery of Deon. Hiles had designed an underwater camera housing for a lightweight, low-light Sony HC20 Handy- cam and attached it to a Petzl climbing helmet. Shaw was not used to wearing a helmet. He liked to carry a high-intensity light on the back of his hand, and if he needed both hands underwater, Shaw would normally sling the light and cable around his neck so it wouldn't snag on anything. The helmet cam would make it hard to do that. Shaw tried the device in the swimming pool at Mount Carmel and decided he was comfortable with the design and weight. He told Hiles that, instead of slinging his light around his neck, he would occasionally set it out to the side.

Three days before the dive, Shaw carried the camera on an acclimatization dive to 500 feet. It came out in perfect running order. "A very impressive bit of gear," Shaw said to Hiles. "I'm sure you'll be impressed with my video footage as well." Everyone laughed.

The divers gathered for one last briefing on Friday. It was a warm, beautiful evening, and Shaw had some final points to make. "The most important person on this dive is you. If you have a problem, deal with your problem and forget about me," he told the team. "It's better to have one person dead than two." He had a separate, private conversation with Shirley, who had upgraded his rebreather for the dive with an oil-filled Hammerhead controller so he could get all the way to the bottom of Bushman's if he had to. Shirley had asked his friend, "If you have problems, do you want me to come down?"

Shaw considered the question and answered, "Yes, but only come down if I signal."

Shirley and Shaw had one last message for the gathered team. "If Dave doesn't make it, if I don't make it, we stay there," said Shirley. "That's the end of the story. We don't want to be recovered."
At 4 A.M. ON SATURDAY, January 8, Shaw and Shirley rose in the dark to prepare for the dive. It had been a rough night for Shirley. The previous evening, as he was changing the battery on his new Hammerhead controller, a wire snapped. Without the unit, he wouldn't be able to make the dive. Shirley was devastated. Shaw felt deeply for his friend but was prepared to proceed without him. He put Shirley and Peter Herbst in touch with Juergensen Marine, the Hammerhead manufacturer. At 9 p.m.-the cutoff time he had set for himself-Shaw went to bed. With the help of Juergensen, a soldering iron, and some tinfoil, Herbst managed to jury-rig a fix. The Hammerhead powered up, and Shirley was a go again.

In the gray predawn light, Shaw and Shirley began the ten-minute drive to the hole, listening to iPods to relax. Shaw had bought two in Hong Kong, loaded them with mixes he called Deep Cave 1 and Deep Cave 2, and given one to Shirley as a gift. (Shirley's favorite tune for the ride to the crater was Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love.") At the water, they started squeezing into their drysuits. Knowing how long he might be underwater, Shirley added an adult diaper to his ensemble. The rest of the team-the support divers, the police divers, the paramedics-assembled as well, and the rocky, uneven ground around the surface pool became crowded, dive equipment spilling over every flat surface. Verna van Schaik, 35, a South African who had set the outright women's depth record of 725 feet at Bushman's in October, settled in with a large sheaf of dive tables. Shirley had asked her to run the dive as surface marshal, and van Schaik, who has magenta hair and a dolphin tattoo on her right ankle, was hoping she was going to have an easy day.

At 6:13 a.m., video camera whirring quietly on his head, Shaw shook Shirley's hand, said, "I'll see you in 20 minutes," and ducked into the dark waters of Bushman's Hole. A few minutes later, Theo and Marie Dreyer made their way to the water's edge. They had come late so that Shaw wouldn't feel any additional pressure to bring Deon back.

Shaw dropped quickly, letting the shot line squeak through his fingers. He hit the bottom in just over 11 minutes, more than a minute and a half faster than he had planned, and immediately started swimming along the cave line. As soon as the corpse loomed ahead, he pulled out the body bag. Then he knelt alongside Deon and went to work. He almost certainly could feel the narcosis kicking in. The helium and reduced nitrogen of his trimix would have limited the effect, but it was probably still as if he had downed four or five martinis. He had been on the bottom of Bushman's Hole, at 886 feet, for just over a minute.

Thirteen minutes after Shaw submerged, Shirley got the go signal from van Schaik and dropped toward his rendezvous point with Shaw, at 725 feet. Approaching 500 feet, he looked down. The water was so clear he could see Shaw's light almost 400 feet below him. It was about where he expected it would be, in the region of the shot line. There was only one problem: The light wasn't moving. Shirley knew instantly that something had gone very wrong. By this time, more than 20 minutes into his dive, Shaw should have been ascending. Shirley should have seen bubbles burbling up as Shaw vented the expanding gases in his rebreather and drysuit. But there was no movement. No bubbles. Nothing but a lonely, still light.

There is no room for emotion or panic in the bowels of a dark hole. Shirley stayed calm, his actions becoming almost automatic. Shaw hadn't signaled for help, but Shirley would be going to the bottom. A motionless diver at 886 feet is almost certainly a dead diver, but it was Dave Shaw down there. Shirley had to see if there was anything he could do, or at least clip Shaw to the shot line so his body could be recovered. OK, here we go, then, he said to himself.

At about 800 feet, deeper than he had ever been, Shirley heard the slight, sharp crack of enormous pressure crushing something, and then there was a thud. He looked down: The Hammerhead controller on his left forearm was a wreck. Without it, Shirley would have to constantly monitor the oxygen levels in his rebreather and inject oxygen into his breathing loop manually. It was a full-time occupation, an emergency routine at a life-threatening depth. Shirley was certain that if he went down to Shaw he would join him for eternity. He got his rebreather back under control and started back up the shot line, flipping through the alternate decompression profiles he was carrying with him on slates. He was facing at least another ten hours in the water. After a few minutes, Shaw's light was swallowed by the darkness below him.
BACK ON THE SURFACE, van Schaik and the crowd around the hole had no idea what was going on far beneath them. Twenty-nine minutes after Shaw had gone under (and about six minutes after Shirley had seen that his light was not moving), support divers Dusan Stojakovic, 48, and Mark Andrews, 39, started their dive to rendezvous with Shaw at 492 feet. As they closed on their target depth, they realized there were no lights coming up, and no sign of Shirley or Shaw. Their plan called for them to wait two to four minutes. They stayed for six. Then it was time to go. "There's no heroics in this diving," Stojakovic says bluntly. "You dive your plan."

Before Andrews and Stojakovic started up, they peered once more into the void. This time they could see a light, but they couldn't tell who it was. Andrews took out an underwater slate and wrote, DID NOT MEET D + D, @ 150 [METERS] FOR 6 MIN. 1 LIGHT BELOW? NOT SURE D'S LIGHT OFF. On the way up, they passed Peter Herbst, and then Lo Vingerling, 60, another support diver, who were on their way down. They showed each the slate and continued ascending. They needed to get the slate to the surface.

Herbst is a bearish Afrikaner with unruly graying hair and a love of a good joke. He's also a first-rate diver who never shies from a tough job. The single light meant there was trouble, and without hesitation Herbst descended past his target of 275 feet. Whoever was underneath him might need help, and Shirley was one of his best friends. Just a little deeper, just a little deeper, he kept telling himself. As the diver got closer he found himself praying, Please, please, God, let it be Don.

Just past 400 feet, Herbst pulled even. It was Shirley. Sorry, Dave, Herbst silently apologized. He flashed Shirley the OK sign and got one back. Then Shirley asked Herbst for a slate. He scribbled on it for a second and returned it. It read, DAVE NOT COMING BACK. Now it really hit Herbst. No Deon. No Dave. Reflexively, he peered deep into the hole. He saw nothing, just blackness. He checked Shirley again, and Shirley indicated that he should head up. Lo Vingerling was the next diver to reach Shirley. He signaled that he would drop down to do a last sweep for Shaw. Shirley stopped him, then drew his hand across his throat.

On the surface, the Dreyers waited nervously. It had been more than an hour since Shaw submerged, and the police divers were due to return with their son's body any minute. Theo wrapped his arms around Marie, and they peered into the dark pool. A nervous hush settled over the group. It was broken by the rattling of stones inside a plastic Energade bottle. The bottle was attached to a line dropping 20 feet into the hole, so that the divers could send slates up as they sat decompressing.

It was the slate from Andrews and Stojakovic, and was passed to van Schaik. Somehow, instead of "1 light below," van Schaik understood the slate to read "no lights below." She assumed it was saying that both Shaw and Shirley were gone. Within minutes, the police divers surfaced, empty-handed. In an instant, the entire, noble enterprise fell apart. Divers were dying. There was 30 seconds of stunned silence around the hole, then van Schaik calmly announced, "OK, we are on our emergency plan."

Within 20 minutes another slate arrived. It was from Shirley, and it had been raced to the surface by the next diver to reach him, Stephen Sander, 39, a former police-special-forces diver. DAVE NOT COMING BACK, it stated bluntly, repeating the slate Shirley had given to Herbst. On the flip side it detailed Shirley's new decompression profile. Van Schaik felt some relief-one of her two dead divers was alive-but glancing at the figures on the slate, she could see that Shirley had gone very deep and would run the risk of getting bent as he came up.

For the Dreyers it had been a tragic half-hour. A day that had started out promising the recovery of their son's body was now going to end with Shaw and Deon both at the bottom of Bushman's Hole. The Dreyers backed away from the water, helpless to do anything, and made their way to the farmhouse. Marie was in agony, crying and thinking about Shaw's wife and family. She wandered into Shaw's room and saw his shoes, wallet, cell phone, and clothes, all neatly laid out. It's like he's coming back soon to use it all again, Marie thought. But she knew he wasn't.

Derek Hughes, an underwater cameraman who was working with Gordon Hiles, also left. Before the dive, Shaw had asked him to call Michael Vickers, the Shaws' minister, if there was trouble. Hughes climbed to the top of the crater to get cell-phone reception and placed the call. Vickers asked him if he was sure Shaw wasn't coming back. Hughes waited another two hours before making the trip up the crater to call Vickers again. He was sure
IT WAS 7 P.M. SATURDAY EVENING in Hong Kong, and Ann Shaw was in her living room. Her 21-year-old daughter, Lisa, was with her, on break from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The doorbell rang, and Ann opened the door to see Vickers, accompanied by two friends from church. Ann thought the dive wasn't taking place until the next day, but as soon as she saw the somber group, she knew. Vickers explained that Dave was five hours late. He suggested there was still a chance he could reappear. "Oh, no, he won't," Ann replied. "Not if he's been down there so long."

Ann, who has a deep faith in God, tried to believe that there was some higher purpose in what was happening. More than anything, though, she was struck by how completely her life had changed in the brief time it took Vickers to relay the news. The last time she'd had that feeling was 30 years earlier, at 19, as she walked down the aisle to be married, with Dave Shaw, himself just 20, waiting for her at the altar.

Back at the hole, van Schaik didn't have time to think much about Shaw. With five other divers in the water and only two reserve divers on the surface, she had to focus on Don Shirley. She sent Gerhard Du Preez, 31, into the hole to find him, with instructions to check everyone on his way down. Du Preez found Shirley just below the ceiling of the main chamber, checked that he was OK, then turned immediately for the surface to report back.

Alone again, Shirley continued his retreat. As he approached the chamber ceiling at about 164 feet, he started feeling faint. Instinct told him to get off his rebreather and onto his open-circuit bailout before he lost consciousness. He stuffed the regulator into his mouth, and as soon as he did, the cave started to spin around him. Shirley didn't know it yet, but a small bubble of helium had formed in his left inner ear, causing extreme vertigo. He was in a washing machine, and off the shot line. In the dark, all he could see with his light as he spun was black, followed by the flash of the cave roof, then black. He saw a flash of white go by, and then again. It was the shot line, and without thinking he thrust out his hand to grab it. That grab kept him alive. If he had missed, he would have drifted off, lost in the blackness. Up or down, it wouldn't really have mattered. Depth or the bends would have finished him, and van Schaik and her divers would have returned to an empty line.

The washing machine finally slowed just long enough for Shirley to read the backlit screen of his primary VR3. It showed he had come up to 114 feet. It also warned him that he needed to be down at 151 feet. Hand over hand, Shirley descended. As he reached his new depth, nausea hit him and he started to vomit. Shirley would feel the heave coming, pull the regulator from his mouth, throw up, and then replace the regulator. Fighting the vertigo and nausea, he managed to grab some spare gas cylinders from the cluster clipped onto the shot line nearby. The thought that he might die never occurred to him. I will survive, I will survive, he kept telling himself.

After about 20 minutes, Truwin Laas, 31, van Schaik's second reserve diver, appeared. Shirley scratched on his slate, I'M HAVING A BAD TIME. I'VE GOT VERTIGO AND I'M VOMITING. Laas made sure Shirley was breathing the right gas mix for the depth, decided he was stable, and left quickly to update van Schaik. Shirley, alone again, started cycling repeatedly through a subroutine of survival, asking himself, Where should I be now? How long should I be here? And where do I have to go? Each breath was a conscious act that got harder as he tired. Suck, hold, exhale. Suck, hold, exhale. I will survive. I will survive.

Now the marathon began. Van Schaik started cycling divers down to stay with Shirley. Du Preez, Laas, Sander, and Vingerling dived repeatedly that day, racking up three or four dives apiece despite the risk of getting the bends themselves. (Herbst, who was out of action for hours with a suspected minor bend, went down once more; Andrews and Stojakovic had been too deep to dive again.) The divers clipped Shirley to the shot line in case he convulsed or passed out, unclipping him only to move him from one decompression stop to another. Every movement brought a new round of vomiting. "It was heartbreaking to hear," Vingerling says, mimicking the spastic violence of Shirley's dry heaves.

Before the dive, Shirley had told the team that if anything went wrong, his wife, Andre, was to be given the bad news straight and fast. Andre, who had stayed behind at Komati Springs to run the dive center, had been getting regular updates. After one call, a slate was taken to Shirley. MESSAGE FROM ANDRE, I LOVE YOU, it read, and then, YOU'D BETTER HANG IN THERE OR ELSE.

After more than ten hours in the water, Shirley finally reached a depth of 20 feet. He was exhausted and approaching hypothermia, but he stayed there decompressing for almost two hours. The next circle of hell was at just ten feet and had to be endured, according to the tables, for a full two hours and 20 minutes. As soon as Shirley settled in, a sharp pain flared in his left leg, a sign that more bends could be on the way. It was time to take his chances on the surface. LOWER LEFT LEG HURT. COULD BE LACK OF USE? he wrote on a slate. Soon after, Sander appeared. I'M HERE TO TAKE YOU HOME, he wrote.

Shirley was carried out. He had been in Bushman's Hole almost 12 and a half hours. "Don't cut the drysuit," he managed to growl when he saw Du Preez coming at him with a pair of shears. Shirley was winched up the cliff face, and within 22 minutes he was in the recompression chamber
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, as word spread of Shaw's death, the Dreyers and most of the dive team went home. Andre Shirley arrived on Sunday, after driving all night from Badplaas, to take her husband for additional recompression treatments in Pretoria. But Herbst stayed at the hole, and he was in a grim mood. It had been left to him to retrieve all the lines and gas cylinders that still hung in Bushman's depths, work he had started on Monday. By Wednesday, he was ready to go after the deepest cylinders, and he had called in his Afrikaner diving buddy Petrus Roux to help, with the police assisting at shallower depths. Standing at the water's edge, the police team held an impromptu memorial service for Shaw. Police diving superintendent Ernst Strydom and Roux read from the Bible. Herbst hadn't planned to say anything, but emotion gripped him, and a few words came.

"I'm going to miss you, mate," he said, as if Shaw could hear. "It's a good place. Rest here, stay here." The group sang "Amazing Grace" as black clouds threatened rain. And then Herbst and Roux dived into the hole.

They dropped to 300 feet and attached lifting buoys to the shot line to raise the cylinders still at 500 feet to a more manageable depth. When they returned to the surface, they were approached by police diver Gert Nel, who had been helping to clear lines in the chimney. "Did you see them?" Nel asked quietly. "See what?" Herbst asked. "The bodies," Nel said. "We saw Deon and Dave stuck in the cave at 20 meters."

Herbst rested up and returned to the water. As soon as he cleared the narrow neck of the chimney, his cave light locked on to Shaw, floating eerily upright, his arms spread wide and the back of his head and shoulders jammed against the ceiling. Shaw's light was hanging below. Looped around it was the cave line he had attached to Deon in October, and cradled almost perfectly in the line, its legs hanging down as if on a swing, was the headless body of Deon Dreyer. Herbst realized that Shaw's light must've gotten tangled in the cave line. When Herbst and Roux had lifted the shot line with the buoys, it had pulled the cave line-and with it Deon and Shaw-off the bottom. As Shaw ascended, the gases in his body, as well as those in his suit, rebreather, and buoyancy wing, had started to expand. Up he had gone, dragging Deon with him.

Herbst brought Deon out first. The police team laid a white body bag along the water's edge and lifted Deon into it. There was a surprising firmness under the wetsuit, and Strydom was shocked to get a whiff of rotting flesh. One of Deon's flippered feet fell off. A policeman tossed it into the bag alongside the body, and the zipper was closed. Shaw had died doing it, but Deon's body had finally been taken back from Bushman's Hole.

Shaw was recovered next. It was a distressing job. His body was grotesquely swollen from the change of depth and pressure, and it was locked by rigor mortis in the free-fall position. Herbst, standing in the surface pool, had to cut Shaw out of his equipment. "That was quite bad," he says, choking up.

Herbst cut the helmet cam free, too. Gordon Hiles, who had been filming the morning's work, was relieved to see that the camera's housing was still intact. Herbst was exhausted, with a pounding headache. He needed to call Don Shirley and Ann Shaw. But more than anything, he wanted to see what was on that video
IT'S NOT AN EASY THING to watch a person die, especially if that person is a friend. Less than an hour after the helmet cam was removed from Shaw's head, as Hiles made a copy of the video for the police at the top of the crater, Herbst watched the film of Shaw's last dive. Later, he and Shirley (who calls it "a snuff tape") examined it frame by frame, backward and forward, multiple times, to try and understand every nuance of Shaw's death.

The picture is dark, and sometimes hard to see. But along with the sounds of Shaw's breathing, picked up with perfect clarity by the camera in the stillness of the cave, the video tells the tale of Shaw's final moments. When Shaw reaches the body of Deon Dreyer, he is 12 minutes and 22 seconds into the dive, and he's been on the bottom for just over a minute. He pulls the body bag out and starts to try and work it over Deon's legs. As he does, a cloud of silt obscures the picture. When it clears, Deon's body, its head having fallen off, is floating in front of Shaw.

This was totally unexpected. Deon, as it turned out, was not completely skeletal, and he was no longer stuck in the silt. Instead of decomposing, his corpse had mummified into a soaplike composition that gave it mass and neutral buoyancy. And for some reason-no one has an explanation-the body had become unstuck from the mud as soon as Shaw started working on it. "The fact that the body was now loose, and not pinned to the ground, was not one of the scenarios that we had thought about," Shirley sighs. "The body was not meant to be floating." It's a lot easier to slip a bag over an immobile body than a body floating and rolling in front of you at 886 feet.

Shaw starts fumbling and, for the first time, lets out an audible grunt of effort.

Herbst, listening intently through headphones, heard the steadily increasing distress in Shaw's breathing and knew there was trouble coming. "Breathe slower, man, breathe slower," he urged out loud. Watching the video with a clear head, it is hard not to wonder why Shaw didn't just turn around right then and abandon the dive. In October, he had turned for the surface as soon as his breathing rate increased. Now he was panting, and Deon, who was attached to the cave line, was floating free. The body could have been pulled up. "All the options involved putting the bag on," Shirley explains. "He's sticking with his plan. Which is what you've got to do." Still, when Shirley first saw the video, he couldn't stop himself from pleading, "Leave it, leave it, leave the body now. It's loose and can come up."

Shaw, however, is responding only to the pounding of his narcosis and his determination to finish the job. He keeps working to control the body, letting go of his cave light so he can use both hands. Deon is rolling and turning in front of him, resisting Shaw's efforts to get him into the bag. Shaw has been at it for two minutes, and the cave line is seemingly everywhere. It snags on his cave light, and Shaw pauses to clear it.

At this, Shirley and Herbst bridled. A cave diver should never let gear float loose. "It's a recipe for disaster," says Shirley, who will always regret not being present when Shaw told Hiles he would put the light to the side at times. "Do not do that," he would have warned him.

Now Shaw is acting confused. He is working at the torso, instead of the feet. His movements have lost purpose. After more than two and a half minutes of work-and three minutes and 49 seconds on the bottom-Shaw pulls his shears out, fumbling to open them. The plan was for him to cut the dive tanks away as he rolled the bag over Deon. Shaw's breathing rate continues to increase. Suddenly he loses his footing on the sloping bottom. He scrambles back to the body in a cloud of silt. The grunts of effort, hateful little bursts of sound, are painfully frequent.

Shirley and Herbst guess that Shaw's narcosis was then closer to six or seven martinis. "You focus on the one thing. You don't focus on the dive anymore," Herbst says. "The one thing becomes everything. And I think with Dave it became the body, the body, the body."

Still, Shaw keeps checking the time on his dive computer. After five and a half minutes on the bottom, he's aware enough to know he has to leave, but he doesn't get far. The video shows the bottom moving beneath him. Then Shaw's forward progress stops. His errant cave light has apparently snagged the cave line tied to Deon's tanks. Shaw knows he has caught something and turns awkwardly. His breathing starts to sound desperate. He pulls at the cat's cradle of cave line, as if trying to sort it out. Every breath is now a sharp grunt. Shaw struggles to move forward again but is anchored by the weight of Deon's body. The shears are still in his hand, but he never cuts anything. The pace of his breathing keeps accelerating, and there is a tragic, gasping quality to it, so painful to listen to that Herbst and Shirley will no longer watch the video with sound.

Twenty-one minutes into the dive, the sounds finally start to fade. Dave Shaw, with carbon dioxide suffusing his lungs, is starting to pass out. He is dying. It's heartbreaking to watch. A minute later there is no movement
DON SHIRLEY SURVIVED that day, but he didn't walk away unscathed. He emerged from the recompression chamber at Bushman's, which was pressurized to a depth of 98 feet to shrink the helium bubble in his head, after seven hours, disoriented and barely able to stand. He was so weak that Herbst dragged a mattress over from the police camp so Shirley could sleep right there. Over the next two weeks, he endured ten more chamber sessions, for a total of 27 hours of treatment. It was more than a month before he could think clearly or walk down a crowded street without his perception and balance running haywire. "When I first saw him, I got a hell of a shock," Andre Shirley says. "He could not walk without support, and his thinking patterns had been affected. He would sound sane, but two minutes later he would forget what he'd said."

Shirley has improved with time, but the helium bend left him with permanent damage that has impaired his balance. In May he went diving again for the first time, with Peter Herbst hovering protectively alongside. He closed his eyes, turned somersaults, and with relief discovered that the Big Dive had not taken one of the things he loves most. "A cave is a place where I live," Shirley says.

A week after Shaw died, Gordon Hiles brought the video to a guest house in Pretoria, where Shirley was staying while undergoing recompression treatment at the Eugene Marais Hospital, and Shirley finally watched it. "It was difficult to see, but I really wanted to know firsthand what went on," he says. Later that day, Shirley took the video to the hospital, where he met with Herbst and Dr. Frans Cronje, medical director of Divers Alert Network Southern Africa, who was overseeing Shirley's treatment and assisting with the official accident investigation. They watched the video on a large screen and spent hours poring over every detail.

Shirley was so focused on what he was watching that he started mimicking Shaw's breathing. Then, determined to "see for myself what happened," Shirley volunteered for an unusual experiment. As Cronje carefully observed, Shirley sat with a CO2 monitor in his mouth and headphones on his ears, watching the video one more time. Every time Shaw breathed, Shirley breathed. Eventually Shirley was huffing through 36 shallow, extremely rapid breaths a minute.

"There was extreme hyperventilation," Cronje says. "On a rebreather at that depth, it would have been very ineffective." Shirley's breathing became so distorted that by the time Shaw faded to just six breaths per minute and then lost consciousness, Shirley was also on the verge of blacking out. His hands were weak and he could barely move. Cronje concluded that Shaw had passed out from carbon dioxide buildup and eventually drowned.

It took Shirley a full half-hour to bring his breathing back under control.

"I actually died with Dave," he says.
NUNO GOMES is the last person alive today who knows what it's like to dive to the bottom of Bushman's Hole, and he understands why Shaw had trouble reacting to a body that was suddenly floating instead of anchored. "You don't think of a new plan while you are down there. It doesn't work. Your mind is clouded. You cannot do it," Gomes says. But he also wonders whether Shaw should have done more buildup dives to increase his tolerance for narcosis-much the way a climber will try to acclimatize to altitude-and his ability to recognize when it reaches dangerous levels. "When he started putting the body in the bag and it didn't work, he should have immediately turned around and left," Gomes says.

Gomes is an open-circuit diver, and his priority is setting records. (In June, he reclaimed the world depth record, reaching 1,044 feet in the Red Sea.) "I didn't think it was worth the risk of a diver losing his life to recover the remains of Deon Dreyer," he says flatly. Even so, Gomes honors Shaw as a fallen comrade. "It was a noble dive, a heroic dive. He did what he believed in, and I've got to say he had a lot of courage," Gomes says. "At the end of the day, he achieved what he wanted to achieve, even though he paid for it with his life."

None of the divers who were with Shaw in Bushman's Hole think the dive was reckless. As support diver Mark Andrews puts it, "If you asked me about the chances before the dive, I'd have said there is a 99 percent chance of success, and a 1 percent chance he'll have to leave the body. And zero percent that Dave wasn't coming back."

Verna van Schaik, who is used to people telling her she is pushing too deep, is sorry Shaw died but not sorry for him. "Dave was going to go back," she says. "The fact that Deon was there just made it more interesting and more exciting. Dave knew the risks. They were his risks, and he took them."

Every diver there that day will keep diving, and instead of second-guessing Shaw, they say they are proud of him. "Dave took rebreather diving where it has never been before. People never knew about [rebreathers] until he died showing what can be done," Peter Herbst says. "Two hundred meters [656 feet] was a damned deep dive on a rebreather. This guy went half as deep again. He made the envelope bigger."

Ten days after Bushman's Hole gave the bodies back, Theo and Marie Dreyer went to see their son. When the morgue attendant asked them to step in, Marie wasn't sure what to expect. When she saw a fully fleshed-out body, her tears stopped, and she felt happy. There was no head, but lying in front of her was her boy. Theo marveled that Deon's legs still held their athletic shape. Marie couldn't believe he was still in his Jockey underwear. "We saw him," she explains, her eyes shining. Overwhelmed, she stepped forward and took her dead son in her arms.

Ann Shaw had hoped her husband would rest forever in Bushman's Hole. When Herbst called to tell her that his body had been recovered, she was completely unnerved. After some anguish, she decided Shaw's ashes should be scattered in South Africa, the place he had come to love so much. Ann continues to live and work in Hong Kong. Every once in a while, when she has a problem with the computer, or needs help in the kitchen, she finds herself thinking, Why did you do this to me? Because now I have to do everything. But it's not anger she feels, just loss. "He needed to dive, and I accepted that," she says. "I wasn't about to change him or to tie him down."

Lisa Shaw, in a eulogy for her father, wrote, "I know having faced death before that my father was unafraid and was completely at peace with the prospect. I know and he knew that the Lord would be right there ready to take him on to new adventures. I am also at peace because he died doing something he loved; very few of us will ever get that privilege." Steven Shaw, who is 23 and is studying for a master's degree at the Melbourne College of Divinity, finds some solace that his father died helping others. "But now I'm feeling more just sad that Dad's gone," he says.

Shirley misses Shaw, too, and has a picture of himself with Shaw, peering out of a recompression chamber, on his computer's screen saver. "Dave died exploring and trying to achieve something he wanted to do," Shirley says. "That to me is better than dying in a car crash." Still, every day Shirley thinks, Ah, I've got to tell Dave that-only to remember that he can't.

Shaw is not far, though. On a beautiful evening in May, Don and Andre Shirley took a bottle of wine and a small wooden box to the summit of a mountain a short drive from their home. Below them, the rich, pungent grasslands of Mpumalanga swept all the way to the distant horizon, and the Komati River glinted in the golden light. Next to a wild fig tree, the couple raised their glasses in a quiet toast. As the sun dipped low, they opened the box and threw Shaw's ashes into the air. The ashes hung for an instant, a cloud of a man. Then the African earth took them, and Dave Shaw was gone