“What I told you about the tiger cages was true: I saw myself down there. But I didn’t tell you the why of it. Now you know. I think I just couldn’t stand being that meaningless to someone. And it was as if the meaninglessness got out, somehow. Escaped from me, and infected everything, draining all the color from the world.

“It was the indifference of the world—the indifference of the boy I loved to me, the indifference of the guards to the suffering of the people in the cages, the indifference of all of it, that made me crazy. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t stand to be a part of it. I felt cut off from people. How could they just ignore what was going on around them? The suffering of others? The striving of others? Their feelings? It was like they were clad in armor, and I didn’t have that armor.

“It wasn’t about the sex. About some idea that he had taken advantage of me. He did, but he also didn’t. I wanted him to, and looking back I know that I knew he didn’t care about me. So it wasn’t that. It was about the indifference. It was the fact that even this extraordinary intimacy—being linked, physically, chemically, to one another—changed nothing. I said it was as if everyone but me was clad in armor. That’s not right. It’s as if everyone but me was made of armor. Was hardened, all the way through. And I saw that I would always be vulnerable to them, and I needed to hide.

“The best way to do that was to concentrate on a goal. Something difficult. Something that would take up so much of my mind that I wouldn’t have the time to feel too much. Oxford helped, and then the science. It saved me. Or I thought it did. But when it was my turn not to be indifferent, I failed that same test. I was indifferent to the villagers, the local population. I had thought of myself as someone who cares for everything, and cares too much—but in fact I only cared for some things. Other things, I discarded. I didn’t think at all of their struggles for survival, their subsistence living and how it blinded them to any of the magic I saw in my cuttlefish, any of the magic I saw underwater at all. They needed to live, and this place was where they made their living. They needed to live, and I was a threat.