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As the sexual tussle that would result in the birth of little Kamtchowsky was getting underway, another Argentine—a psychiatry student and philosophy TA—was awarded an ad honorem post caring for teenage microcephalics at the Montes de Oca Colony. Slovenly and socially awkward in person, pretentious on the page, Augusto García Roxler’s natural habitat was the shadows of academia. His future as one of the foremost theorists in his field was so much in doubt as to be quite literally unforeseeable; he prowled through the scabrous libraries of the Department of Medicine, blind to everything but his own ideas (and what he took to be prodigious signs proving their validity), living as if walled off from the rest of the world, and in particular from the majestic, blood-drenched corridor in which the great events of his time were taking place.

He was too shy to be openly pedantic and too nondescript to inspire any sense of mystery. His genius would remain hidden for decades; more importantly, when it finally filtered through—its rays thin and tentative, the bony extremities of a blind man groping about in the darkness—it would only ever reach a single consciousness. Only one (the chosen one, the perfect one) would decide its fate. Only one would gather and sustain its battered photons, rebuild them, send them flitting spirit-like across the monstrous face of the facts. But before that, long before that, back when young Augusto was still spending his days measuring microcephalic crania and undressing oligophrenics and catatonics for his experiments, there was a book, and then a night, a single terrifying night, in which his theory caught its first whiff of the earth’s crust. He was thirty years old, or perhaps a bit older, when he finished the first draft of what would eventually become his Theory of Egoic Transmissions.

The Theory’s earliest progenitor had sent its first tentative shoots into the air back in 1917, when the Dutch anthropologist Johan van Vliet published an article in Nature describing a series of experiments on human subjects. An inveterate traveler and confessed admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Professor van Vliet saw no reason why his field of study should focus exclusively on wealthy Westerners, or on the proletariat of the remotest corners of Europe. He believed that in order to formulate an authentic theory of human psychology, a theory that would speak to the deepest modes of human action, it was necessary to work with elements taken from outside the process of choreographic adaptation known as Culture.

For his Ad intra res cogitans experiment—its title was taken from that of his diary—Johan van Vliet organized a small expedition to Dahomey, now part of Benin, in West Africa. At the time, Dahomey was relatively accessible for European travelers, thanks to its two-hundred-year history as a producer and exporter of palm oil and slaves for the White Man. France had recently overthrown the country’s last native dynasty; the consul general (who happened to bear an extraordinary resemblance to Voltaire) gave Van Vliet directions to a Fon encampment that lay en route to the northern jungle. Two of Van Vliet’s disciples—Dr. Fodder and Dr. Fischer—had recently arrived from England. As they stood in line for quinine pills at the consular infirmary, Van Vliet, eager to get into the jungle as soon as possible, forced himself to thumb slowly through an old copy of Le Figaro.

The Fon people treated them kindly, gave them campsites with good views into the bush, and provided them with smoking materials. The Fon believe not in a single, all-powerful God, but in a spirit-world that is complex and unstable, and shortly after arriving at the encampment, Van Vliet—a genuine pioneer in psychological experimentation—began skulking about wearing nothing but a loincloth. He smeared mud all over his flabby academic flesh so as to move about “unseen” at night. He walked barefoot at all times, and spent hours staring at the moon (which seemed much bigger and brighter than it had during his expeditions to the North Sea, where he’d been researching conflict theory in sea spiders). At times he fell asleep seated there on the porous soil, his notebook still in hand. He took notes using ink made of resin, palm char, and bone ash, and one day while mixing up a batch he befriended a small monkey with almond-shaped eyes. As he anxiously studied the language of the Fon, he quickly learned that of the birds, and set up a provisional academic office complete with all his notebooks high in the branches of a topped tree that had once been home to a family of bushbabies.

At this point in history, psychological theory was having itself quite un moment. In 1917, Alfred Adler had concluded his fifty-two page work on homosexuality, showing the phenomenon to be the result of an inferiority complex toward one’s own sex. In 1920, Sigmund Freud published his Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Three years earlier Jung had arranged for a private printing of the seven sermons to the dead he’d written and ascribed to Basilides of Alexandria (Septem Sermones ad Mortuos), and in 1926, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, having recently decided that he possessed neither the talent nor the experience a literary career required, abandoned his dream of becoming a fiction writer and applied to do a PhD in psychology. Inspired by Bertrand Russell’s commentaries on Watson’s behaviorist theories, Skinner’s earliest experiments on pigeons (“‘Superstition’ in the pigeon,” 1947) were followed by others of subtle mechanistic design applied first to individual human beings, and then (albeit only in theory) to massive groups (a territory previously considered the exclusive domain of utopian literature); these mega-groups lived in communes where the children were raised according to a strict creed of operant conditioning and various other protocols of social engineering.

Given this context of psychology on high boil, and the fact that Johan van Vliet didn’t belong to any of his field’s prominent schools of thought, it will come as no surprise that his radically original projects were dismembered by the jaws of time without ever putting up a struggle. In fact, amidst the murky circumstances of Van Vliet’s disappearance into the jungle, Time’s appetite left the new theory headless. One of his disciples, Manfred Fodder, who’d managed to get the results of the African sojourn published in Nature, was eventually absorbed into the Skinnerian hordes; the other, Marvin Fischer, continued to impart the master’s theory at occasional conferences until finally giving up and joining the legions of Otto Rank—who, in 1926, was excommunicated by none other than the Father of Psychoanalysis himself for the sin of “anti-Oedipal heresy.”

In spite of their firsthand experience of Van Vliet’s genius, neither Fodder nor Fischer was capable of serving as medium for the Dutchman’s voice when seated at the wide oak tables of academia. Neither had his gift for the sort of edge-of-your-seat conceptual theater that might impress their fellow intellectuals, most of whom had given the man up for dead. Neither knew how to summon the murmur of Van Vliet’s singular theory up through the sublunar language of workaday academics. A man with a theory is someone who has something to shout, but a dead man with a theory requires a séance, and even then his spirit is a wad of half-chewed bread lolling about in the medium’s mouth, occasionally pushing back against the teeth but certain to disintegrate and destined to be spit out. The academic presentations given by Fodder and Fischer came out sounding like the bleating of two goats lost and alone in the far hills. Translated into English and German to accommodate the ears of their colleagues, the content resembled the strange unintelligible wailing of a newborn, at best indistinguishable from other theories. The year after Rank’s exile began, Fischer published Cerebral Response and Egoic Transmissions: An Introduction. He and Rank met regularly to discuss their respective hypotheses, but it wasn’t long before Fischer passed away, leaving no philosophical descendants.

The Montes de Oca Colony (founded in 1915 as the Coeducational Asylum-Colony for the Retarded) is located in the district of Luján approximately eighty kilometers from Buenos Aires, and its grounds cover two hundred thirty-four hectares. The patients live in a group of buildings surrounded by vast green spaces—woodlands of elm and acacia, of cypress, of river oak and eucalyptus—interspersed with immense open meadows that stretch to the horizon, on the edges of which are a series of bogs and pits into which the patients sometimes fall to their deaths. Days and even weeks can pass before the scavenger birds begin to circle above the site; at other times it is the asylum’s guard dogs who suddenly appear chewing on shreds of clothing and human bones. In either case the proper form is promptly filled out to document the disappearance.

It was in the course of a stormy night here at the Colony that young Augusto, while reading in his pajamas on the cot in his small bedroom in the infirmary, first understood the implications of Van Vliet’s theory. The realization coursed through his body like an electric current. Far too excited to sit still, Augusto threw on a shawl his mother had knitted and walked out onto the porch, which lay half in ruins. Rain filtered through the slats of the overhang; a sludge of water and splintered wood dripped down his face. He thought of Van Vliet’s visage, of the pointy tip of the man’s nose, of the flaring nostrils, a face more similar to that famous portrait of Hobbes than Augusto’s own genetic corpus could ever have mustered, and now the Dutchman’s shade watched him from the core of the night, both maw and wolf. The theory was practically unprecedented, and long misunderstood; more importantly, it had the sound of a precursor to Augusto’s own fantasies. The raindrops kept falling, and he opened his mouth to drink them in. He had in his hands the fetal tissue of intuition. Now he had only to flatten it against the throat of his beliefs, to beat down all other voices, to submerge, to expunge the outside world from his mind until his mission was complete. A flash of lightning set the sky aflame; the rain curtained his vision in all directions. Augusto dried his face, then let out a shout. A spectral figure was coming toward him up the gravel path.

The infirmary was set somewhat apart from the rest of the asylum’s buildings (labeled Incontinent, Oligophrenic, Violent, Catatonic, Gerontological, Crippled, and Women, respectively); the evening curfew applied equally to patients and doctors, forbidding them from leaving their buildings unaccompanied at night. Lightning seared Augusto’s vision, and his imagination’s soliloquies bore him into space. The specter was now within meters of the porch on which the horrified Augusto stood: scrawny legs and pointed skull, some random John Doe drenched to the bone and white against the dark, still drifting toward him. The man’s brain couldn’t have weighed a whit more than 104 grams, the weight of Prévost’s brain as described by Paul Broca in his study of murderers executed by guillotine (“Le cerveau de l’assassin Prévost,” 1880, Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, pp. 233–244). Augusto opened his mouth, but no words came out. The shawl slipped from his right shoulder; he stretched out his hand as if to control the man telekinetically. It was only Titín, one of the microcephalics. The rain washed down through the rags in which he was clothed; his filth-matted hair hung stiffly along the sides of his face. His eyes shot wide open, and a flash of horror lit Augusto’s face; Titín screamed as his Pavlovian conditioning kicked in and he began to remove his clothes. Augusto slipped quickly back in through his door, locked it, and double-checked all of the shutters to make sure they were properly latched. Outside, the storm raged ever stronger, lashed at the fields and graves, sent bolt after bolt down into the trembling trees.

The ideas that sprang into being as a result of this meeting of the three agents required of all theories (viz. the Precursor, the Theoretician, and the Victim) remained comatose for most of the twentieth century. Then, though no clear connection had yet been made between them, the hypothetical possibilities that had been created by their proximity to one another found, like the spirit gods of the Fon, the perfect body in which to make themselves manifest.