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said, “Of course, I’d be more impressed if you’d taken an ordinary Caribbean starfish and turned it into a Jewish one.”
    â€œJewish?”
    â€œWith six points.”
    â€œBiology is not a joke, Mr. Ambrose.”
    We finished our dinner in silence, leaving behind two vacant lobster shells and seven empty beer bottles. Outside the house a thousand insects sang and sawed in wondrous harmony, as if a population of Buddhist homunculi now occupied the banana plants and the mangroves, ringing their little bells.
    Wrapped in the beer’s muzzy embrace, I shuffled to the porch and climbed into the hammock. For the next hour, I read my paperback of Walker Percy’s The Message in the Bottle, wondering whether Londa Sabacthani might be suffering from what Percy called “the loss of the creature,” the alienation that modern man has inflicted on himself by ceding the world’s most valuable things—its natural wonders, artistic marvels, erotic energies, and common sense—to dubious cults of expertise. I extinguished the Coleman lantern and closed my eyes. Half awake and half asleep, half in bed and half in Xanadu, I entertained many strange fancies, eventually imagining that Charnock had experimented on me. In this reverie my hands had become leopard paws, my nose was a boar’s snout, and my gums had sprouted two-inch fangs. When I went to the bathroom later that night to void the residual beer, I made a point of looking in the mirror.
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    BEYOND HIS WIZARDRY WITH DNA , Charnock was apparently a competent cook, for I awoke to find him preparing two complex omelets stuffed with cheese, peppers, onions, and morsels of shrimp. The meal passed without conversation. It was not yet eight o’clock, and already I was sweating. I drank two glasses of ice water. Fragrances drifted in from the jungle—sweet gardenias, dulcet hibiscus, silken magnolias. The previous night’s insect musicians had returned to their burrows, and the island now belonged to the birds, filling the air with territorial caws and proprietary arpeggios.
    Shortly after breakfast, a Jeep pulled up outside Charnock’s A-frame, driven by a raffish, safari-jacketed Latino with a drooping black mustache and olive skin, a by-God Ramar of the Jungle pith helmet shadowing his face. He introduced himself as Javier Cotrino, Dr. Sabacthani’s personal assistant, dispatched to chauffeur me to her mansion. For the next twenty minutes, Javier and I lurched and bounced along an unpaved road, descending into a verdant valley flush with hibiscus and bougainvillea, until at last we came to a high chain-link fence surmounted by spirals of barbed wire. We drove beneath a raised crossing gate, angled like a satyr’s intractable erection, then continued past acacia groves and cypress stands toward the rising sun.
    The mansion in question—Faustino, Javier called it—was straight out of the antebellum American South, complete with square columns and great tufts of Spanish moss drooping from the roof like a gallery of beards in a costume shop. As we climbed the steps to the veranda, Javier warned me that Dr. Sabacthani had slept badly the previous night, and I must not take her exhaustion for haughtiness. We passed through the front door, its central panel carved with a bas-relief Aztec deity who’d evidently actualized himself for the sole purpose of being unappeasable, then proceeded to a geodesic dome whose hundred hurricane-proof glass triangles served to shield a private jungle from the ravages of Gulf storms. Ferns, vines, and orchids flourished everywhere. Fumes compounded of humus and nectar filled my nostrils. The air felt like hot glue. At the center of all this Darwinian commotion, an immense mangrove tree emerged from a saltwater pond, its naked roots entwined like acrobatic pythons, its coiling limbs bearing small green fruit suggesting organic Ping-Pong balls. Beneath the tree, dressed in a