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

Miles spoke softly behind me.

“Jeremy, if you were going to jump, you would’ve done it already.”

He walked back across the blade room to the door we’d entered a hundred years ago. He tried the knob, and it opened. He waited for me at the door.

I turned back to the hole.

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

But it wasn’t a movie.

And I didn’t jump.

God help us, we left her there.

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

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

“Hey Miles.”

“Yeah?”

He didn’t look at me.

“Why’d you quit law?”

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

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

Miles closed his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was a mistake, in retrospect.”

“You must’ve had a reason. Do you remember?”

Finally he sighed.

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

“That’s it? That’s why you quit?”

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

“That’s good. The law worked.”

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

“So?”

“So? So it’s not free will. He’s just a slave. The law didn’t make him good.”

“The law’s not supposed to make him good. It’s supposed to stop him from being evil.”

“So where does morality come from, then?”

“I don’t know. Religion.”

“Fine. He moves the baby because God wants him to. Isn’t that just a different kind of law? Maybe he’s scared of going to hell. Isn’t that just another kind of prison?”

“Parents, then. Culture.”

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

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

“You’re talking about goodness,” I said. “You’re talking about goodness, and she’s down there.”

Miles looked startled.

“You asked about my career.”

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

“It’s just philosophy.”

“It’s nothing-if you don’t get off this couch. I want you to shut your big fucking mouth because it’s all bullshit.” My head was going to explode, the blood was rushing so hard. “Get up. Get off your fat ass and get off this couch because we are going to save her. We are going to get her out of that dark place and make her okay. Do you hear me, Miles? Do you?”

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

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

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

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

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

But when I saw his face, I knew.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Miles said. “But I can’t help you.”

He walked into his bedroom and shut the door.

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

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

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

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