The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.

One thing that normal children learn quickly is how to form a negative sentence. They begin by saying “No have toy,” and proceed directly to the next stage, where they bury the negation within the sentence: “I not have toy.” Then they figure out how to use a supporting verb and say, “I do not have a toy,” and the prodigies contract the verb to “don’t.” Genie stayed stuck at the “No have toy” stage for almost three years, and four years after she was talking in strings she was still speaking in the abbreviated nongrammar of a telegram.

According to Rigler, “the lady running one of the foster homes was rather bizarre.” He recalled visiting the home “from time to time” and counseling Genie in her occasional outpatient visits to Childrens Hospital. “The woman was very rigid, and Genie had a powerfully strong will,” he said. “Ultimately, the collision occurred over the issue of her toilet behavior. What happened in this home was that she became constipated, and this got to the point where it was very painful. The woman tried to extract fecal matter with an ice-cream stick. There was no injury. But she was traumatized.”

I have come to see family history as similar to architecture in certain ways. Like architecture, it is quiet. It encompasses, but does not necessarily demand attention. You might not even notice that it’s there. Like architecture, too, family history can suddenly loom into consciousness. For example, you can sit in the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street—designed by Carrère & Hastings, and perhaps the greatest building in New York—with your nose in a book, or busy with the catalogue and transactions with clerks, all the while oblivious of the splendid interior around you. You can forget it utterly, or perhaps not have noticed it at all that day, and then, casually looking up, be astonished, even momentarily disoriented by what you see. So it is with family history. One can go about one’s life with no thought of the past, and then, as if waking from a dream, be astonished to see that you are living within its enclosure.

There was a lot of drinking—these were very late nights—with rich food thrown in, and a boxing match perhaps, or a visit to a music hall to see the Florodora girls. Or there might be a bit of opera and several stops at regular men’s clubs, or sexual intervals in one or another of the private hideaways that Stanford kept in addition to his secret club’s hideaways. It’s an indication of the pace at which Stanford lived that his night life often included late-night stop-offs at the office. There are several descriptions by colleagues of Stanford dashing in, sometimes dressed in evening clothes, and brushing everything aside to jot down a design that had come into his head, commandeering any draftsman who happened to be around doing late-night work and forcing him to focus on Stanford’s project. When Stanford was done, the draftsman would be likely to find red mustache hairs and bits of chewed and splintered pencil all over the work—Stanford would twist his moustache furiously as he drew—and a sea of crumpled paper on the floor.

On the evening of June 25, 1906, during the intermission of “Mamzelle Champagne” in the Roof Garden restaurant and theatre, Stanford went backstage to get the phone number of one of the actresses—there are indications that he was already involved with two others. During the second half of the show, when Harry K. Thaw came up to him in a highly agitated state and wielding a gun, Stanford simply stared at him. It could be that he felt invulnerable. It could be that he recognized inevitability. Or it could be that in the stillness, the unendingness of that moment he chose not to move.

I stood there perfectly still, just as I had sat for countless medical photographs: full face, turn to the left, the right, now a three-quarter shot to the left. I took a certain pride in knowing the routine so well. I’ve even seen some of these medical photographs in publications. Curiously, those sterile, bright photos are easy for me to look at. For one thing, I know that only doctors look at them, and perhaps I’m even slightly proud that I’m such an interesting case, worthy of documentation. Or maybe I do not really think it is me sitting there, Case 3, figure 6-A.

I rooted around in the cabinets and came up with a hand mirror and, with a bit of angling, looked for the first time at my right profile. I knew to expect a scar, but how had my face sunk in like that? I didn’t understand. Was it possible I’d looked this way for a while and was only just noticing it, or was this change very recent? More than the ugliness I felt, I was suddenly appalled at the notion that I’d been walking around unaware of something that was apparent to everyone else. A profound sense of shame consumed me.

Because I was never going to have love (this realization, too painful to linger over, I embraced swiftly and finally), I cast myself in the role of Hero of Love. Instead of proving my worth on the chemotherapy table, I would become a hero through my understanding of the real beauty that existed in the world. I decided that it was my very ugliness that allowed me access to this other beauty. My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn’t my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to?

Since we began to live in Desolation years ago, friends have said that if it were not for their children, professions, political activism, mortgages, debts to spouses of ex-choice, and bad knees, they would gladly do what we do. “We uphold the culture of our generation,” they tell us. “You and Mark live its dream side.” Their envy does not detect the physical costs of professional vagrancy. Far from armchairs, ceilings, sock drawers, and a street address, but within sight of the downslide toward retirement, we are out here dragging heavy rafts and sleeping on the ground, underpants full of sand. When others travel with us on a ranger patrol, at the end of the trip Mark always asks the rhetorical “Would you like to have my job?” “It has been really nice,” they answer, sprinting up the boat ramp to their Land Cruisers. 

You can recheck gear, tighten the last strap, wriggle down harder in your seat, and open and shut your fists on the oar grips, but there is the moment when pure river terror takes over and you yield to it with a great surge of love and terror. Wire Fence Rapid has a steep drop down a slender tongue of silk, a long, mirror-slick, mesmerizing sheen of descending water. A split second before the raft hits the five-foot wall of roiling lateral waves at the tongue’s tip, I am spellbound by an aromatic river of air curling above the water itself, a cool, stony, turbulent smell, the smell of rapids.

Grand Slam Canyon promises the Grand Canyon without the Grand Canyon’s pesky discomforts—its infernal heat, wind, roadlessness, and size that defies the three-day vacation, its cacti, lizards, snakes, biting insects, burro poop, boulders, rapids, the possibility of death. Amidst hundred-foot peaks, swimming pools, water slides, pueblos, and a replica of the Grand Canyon’s Havasu Falls, inside a climate-controlled, vented, pink womb of a dome, Grand Slam Canyon visitors will fly through rapids and waterfalls in a roller coaster. They will, as the woman on Desolation’s boat ramp once wondered about the Green River, take out at the same place they put in. The River made better than itself.

The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.

In business, so entrenched has extortion become that the Bombay High Court recently ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a legitimate business expense. Extortion is a form of tax. Since there is a parallel justice system, there have to be parallel taxes. It used to be that there was only one gang—Dawood’s. But now that there are multiple gangs operating, as soon as the businessman pays one, all the others line up for their payments, so he finds himself paying four or five gangs at once. He might even be paying freelance extortionists, people who pose no real threat. The implicit or explicit tradeoff in the protection racket—you give me money, I give you protection from myself and others—no longer applies. The gangs are powerless to afford protection against the others. It is less a protection racket now and more like a simple mugging: You give me your money or I’ll kill you.

The narrative principles that propel the plot are alien to those of, say, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I spent two years. I entertain myself by imagining what would happen if the script were put up in workshop. My contribution to the script is minimal at best. I propose an idea that departs from the standard Hindi film formula. Vinod thinks about it. “We can’t do it because if we put it in the film the audience will burn down the theater. They will rip out the seats and burn down the theater.”

I withdraw the suggestion.