"It was as though she was a foreigner learning English," he said. "She was right in my face, trying to define the words I was uttering, to absorb them and process them. She was looking, thinking, repeating, interpreting. Looking at my mouth, studying my lips, moving her lips. I have to tell you I was disappointed when she stopped doing this. Someone who truly listens."

He was looking at her, smiling.

"She talked to people then, strangers. Still does sometimes. You still do sometimes," he said. "Who do you talk to?"

Jessie shrugging.

"People on line at the post office," he said. "Nannies with children."

She chewed her food, head down, using the fork to twirl the omelette on the plate before she cut it.

We shared a bathroom, she and I, but she rarely seemed to be in there. A small airline kit, the only trace of her presence, was tucked into a corner of the windowsill. She kept soap and towels in her bedroom.

She was sylphlike, her element was air. She gave the impression that nothing about this place was different from any other, this south and west, latitude and longitude. She moved through places in a soft glide, feeling the same things everywhere, this is what there was, the space within.

Her bed was never made. I opened the bedroom door and looked several times but did not enter.

We sat out late, scotch for both of us, bottle on the deck and stars in clusters. Elster watched the sky, everything that came before, he said, there to see and map and think about.

I asked him whether he'd been to Iraq. He needed to consider the question. I didn't want him to believe that I knew the answer and was asking the question in order to challenge the breadth of his experience. I didn't know the answer.

He said, "I hate violence. I fear the thought of it, won't watch violent movies, turn away from news reports on television that show dead or wounded people. I had a fight, I was a kid, I went into spasms," he said. "Violence freezes my blood."

He told me that he had all-source clearance, or access to every sensitive sliver of military intelligence. I knew this wasn't true. It was in his voice and face, a bitter wishfulness, and I understood of course that he was telling me things, true or not, only because I was here, we were both here, in isolation, drinking. I was his confidant by default, the young man entrusted with the details of his makeshift reality.

"I talked to them one day about war. Iraq is a whisper, I told them. These nuclear flirtations we've been having with this or that government. Little whispers," he said. "I'm telling you, this will change. Something's coming. But isn't this what we want? Isn't this the burden of consciousness? We're all played out. Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. We're the mind and heart that matter has become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now.

He refilled his glass and passed me the bottle. I was enjoying this.

"We want to be the dead matter we used to be. We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. When I was a student I looked for radical ideas. Scientists, theologians, I read the work of mystics through the centuries, I was a hungry mind, a pure mind. I filled notebooks with my versions of world philosophy. Look at us today. We keep inventing folk tales of the end. Animal diseases spreading, transmittable cancers. What else?"

"The climate," I said.

"The climate."

"The asteroid," I said.

"The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?"

"Famine, worldwide."

"Famine," he said.

"What else?"

"Give me a minute."

"Never mind. Because this isn't interesting to me. I have no use for this. We need to think beyond this."

I didn't want him to stop. We sat drinking quietly and I tried to think of further workable prospects for the end of human life on earth.

"I was a student. I ate lunch and studied. I studied the work of Teilhard de Chardin," he said. "He went to China, an outlaw priest, China, Mongolia, digging for bones. I ate lunch on open books. I didn't need a tray. The trays were stacked at the beginning of the line in the school cafeteria. He said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare. There was a North American camel. Where is it now?"

I nearly said, In Saudi Arabia. Instead I passed the bottle back to him.

"You told them things. Were these policy-board meetings? Who was there?" I said. "Cabinet-level people? Military people?"

"Whoever was there. That's who was there."

I liked this answer. It said everything. The more I thought about it, the clearer everything seemed.

He said, "Matter. All the stages, subatomic level to atoms to inorganic molecules. We expand, we fly outward, that's the nature of life ever since the cell. The cell was a revolution. Think of it. Protozoa, plants, insects, what else?"

"I don't know."

"Vertebrates."

"Vertebrates," I said.

"And the eventual shapings. The slither, crawl, biped crouch, the conscious being, the self-conscious being. Brute matter becomes analytical human thought. Our beautiful complexity of mind."

He paused and drank and paused again.

"What are we?"

"I don't know."

"We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field."

I went in for ice. When I returned he was pissing off the deck, standing on tiptoe to get the emerging stream to clear the rail. Then we sat and listened to animal cries somewhere off in the thickets and we remembered where we were and didn't speak for a time after the sounds died away. He said he wished he had remained a student, gone to Mongolia, true remoteness, to live and work and think. He called me Jimmy.

"You'll have every opportunity to talk about these things," I said. "Talk, pause, think, talk. Your face," I said. "Who you are, what you believe. Other thinkers, writers, artists, nobody's done a film like this, nothing planned, nothing rehearsed, no elaborate setup, no conclusions in advance, this is completely sort of barefaced, uncut."

I spoke these lines in a whisky babble, half aware that I'd said all this before, and I heard a deep breath and then his voice, quiet and contained, even sad.

"What you want, my friend, whether you know it or not, is a public confession."

This could not be right. I told him absolutely not. I told him I had no intention of doing anything like that.

"A deathbed conversion. This is what you want. The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me."

I fought off this notion, inwardly, and told him I had no special ideas beyond what I'd described.

"You want to film a man breaking down," he said. "I understand that. What's the point otherwise?"

A man melting into the war. A man who still believes in the righteousness of the war, his war. How would he look and sound on film, in a theater, on a screen anywhere, talking about a haiku war? Had I thought about this? I'd thought about the wall, the color and texture of the wall, and I'd thought about the man's face, the features that were strong but also collapsible in the show of whatever cruel truths might come spilling into his eyes, and then I thought about Jerry Lewis in closeup in 1952, Jerry ripping off his tie as he sang some weepy Broadway ballad.