Ettinger has seen membership grow steadily, and his team is performing more suspensions now than at any other time. “In recent years we’ve been getting maybe three or four a year, I guess,” he says. Ettinger, like his patients and their pets, is waiting for the day they can all be revived. In much the same way as drowning patients can be resuscitated after long periods without breathing,

Ettinger believes researchers will find a way to reverse the tissue damage that accompanies long-term freezing, allowing his customers to be resuscitated too. Until then, their bodies will remain submerged, or “suspended,” in liquid nitrogen, in vast containers called cryostats, the largest of which is capable of storing up to 16 bodies at once. With an eye toward the future, the folks at the institute are aware that the bodies they freeze must be in the best shape possible. In other words, they must be fresh and, to minimize tissue breakdown, the initial phases of suspension must be performed in the minutes immediately after a patient is declared dead. “We can have people on the spot if we know ahead of time,”

Ettinger says. The sooner after death the process is begun, the more likely it is to be successful, he says. When his wife died last year, technicians were standing by to begin her suspension immediately. “There were only seconds lost,” he says. Immediately after death, a flurry of activity begins as technicians rush to prepare the patient’s body for cooling and suspension. The body is stripped of any clothing and an anticoagulant solution is injected via either the femoral or the carotid artery. Pumped around the patient’s circulatory system, this solution prevents the blood from clotting and causing ischemic tissue damage.

Technicians cool the body with cold packs while transporting it to the institute’s fully equipped laboratories. Blood pressure and acidity are measured constantly, while a device for heart/lung resuscitation maintains vascular flow, pushing anticoagulant around the body, looping through arteries, veins and capillaries to permeate the brain. Once body temperature is stabilized at 16 degrees Celsius, the patient’s blood is thoroughly washed out with buffered physiological saline, which also contains mannitol to prevent fluid migration from the rapidly cooling cells.

Finally, after the patient’s blood is removed and disposed of, the body is suffused with a glycerine-based cryoprotectant solution that protects the tissues from freezing damage, and then it is slowly cooled again using cold carbon dioxide vapors. After it reaches dry ice temperatures, the body is cooled further to minus 196 degrees Celsius, which arrests further degradation or decomposition.

“This plant,” he says again slowly for emphasis, “is a dancing plant.”

Kampermpool stands maybe 5 and a half feet tall. He strides through the nursery, disappearing occasionally behind a screen of orchid stems to reappear seconds later on the other side, his green-and-white polka-dot shirt flashing between gaps in the swaying thicket.

It is almost 6:30 in the morning and we are standing in Kampermpool’s plant nursery in Udon Thani Province, in tropical northern Thailand. It is already hot and humid in the small and unremarkable town, which sits about 35 miles south of the Laos border surrounded by rice paddies and knots of thick jungle. A mile or so to the south of the nursery is downtown Udon Thani, which consists of brightly lit Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, pizza joints and multiplex movie theaters. Another mile farther south, a small and crowded station links the town by train to Bangkok, about 10 bumpy hours southwest.

At night, elephant handlers — bent, little toothless mahouts — park their elephants implausibly under the store awnings downtown, to shelter from the rain that comes nightly. But this morning at his nursery, it is not yet 7 o’clock, the sun is still low in the sky, and Kampermpool, who is 65, has already been up for hours, singing softly to his dancing plant. It responds to music, he says proudly. “This is the third generation, my friend,” Kampermpool continues, pointing at the dancing plant again. “It’s a Desmodium gyrans. It’s the third generation, OK? Third crossing, OK? Self-pollinated, my friend, third time, third generation.”

The dancing plant grows unchecked in a secluded enclosure at the back of Kampermpool’s nursery, bursting from a brick trough filled with dark wet soil. Black netting hangs in folds overhead to block the sun’s harmful rays, and barbed wire prevents thieves from breaking in to the enclosure at night and stealing a prized sample of the plant. Surly workers kick halfheartedly at clumps of mud in the fields; bales of barbed wire bake in the sun. To the untrained eye, Kampermpool’s nursery looks more like a gulag.

Kampermpool doesn’t care. He cares only about his dancing plant. If a fire broke out tomorrow among the orchids, jumping steadily from trough to trough and advancing slowly, relentlessly, through the nursery, Dr. Pradit Kampermpool would think of only one thing: The Plant.

He would run selflessly through thick banks of smoke to raise the alarm, to build a firebreak with orchids, to take an emergency clipping of his dancing plant and store it in the damp safety of his mouth, to do something! … anything! … just to save it … save The Plant!

Share this observation with Kampermpool and he’ll take it as a veiled threat, stepping backward cautiously, narrowing his eyes, and asking, “What fire? Tomorrow? What do you mean, fire?” After that, he clams up. He’s sulking. The sun climbs higher. The fields get warmer. The pointed little leaves of his dancing plant — his Desmodium gyrans — nod and bounce in the breeze. The bird warbles again. He shrugs. “I spent seven years on this plant,” he explains sheepishly.

The Plant twitches.

Before Kampermpool could start breeding The Plant, he first had to find it. Ask him where it came from and he quickly gets coy, simultaneously jabbing a stubby little thumb at the green hills over his shoulder, pointing vaguely at some trees on the other side of the road, and nodding his head toward Laos in the north, all the while muttering quietly to himself.

When he was a young man, Kampermpool carefully states, considering every word to be sure of giving nothing away, the elders of the hill tribes scattered to the north would talk about a species of plant that danced. They used the dancing plants, he says, high in the mountains, in the jungle villages and the border towns, to make tea.

It was 1976. Kampermpool began to search for the plant. “I hired people to check for me,” he says. “I found one in Yunnan, in China, but the leaves are bigger; they have some near Kanchanaburi, near Burma, but nobody pays attention — it looks like a weed.”

And it does look like a weed. A couple of sprigs of Kampermpool’s plant would not look entirely out of place atop a salad. Neither would it attract attention sprouting from between two paving slabs. If a trusted friend told you it was bok choy, you would not question it.

Eventually, says Kampermpool, crouching suddenly behind a thick clump of orchids and hunching his shoulders, his hired workers found a dancing species growing deep in the jungle. Kampermpool shifts his weight to the balls of his feet, leans forward, and whispers from behind his hand. “Shhhhhhhh,” he says. He is no longer standing in his nursery with the morning sun slanting through the clouds: Dr. Pradit Kampermpool is back in the jungle.

“So I’m watching,” he whispers, parting imaginary foliage and squinting through the years, past the rows of orchids and the bales of barbed wire, to an imaginary clearing. “Hmmm…” he says softly. “Well, the leaves are similar.” He pauses for effect. “Then it moved a little bit!” he shouts, flinging his arms in the air and jumping backward.

It was 1991. The search for the dancing plant was over. It had taken 15 years. “This plant nearly disappeared from the world,” Kampermpool says, “so I dug it up.”

It is a simple statement. Kampermpool is not trying to be literal, but that is exactly what he did. He dug it up. He took a shovel deep into the jungle, dug up the plant, shook the dirt from its roots, brought it back here and carefully planted it in the trough filled with dark, wet soil that sits at the shady end of his nursery. It has remained there ever since, its roots probing the rich mulch that Kampermpool regularly shovels on and gently pats down. Finally, the complex breeding programs, the 24-hour nurturing — the watering, fertilizing, measuring, sampling, pruning, trimming — the crossbreeding, the biopsies, the singing, the coaxing, the watching, the constant monitoring, could begin. First he bred the plant, and then he bred it again — second generation, my friend, OK? — and then later still, he crossbred it with a Chinese species of gyrant to create a hybrid. Slowly, over the years, the plant became The Plant.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

On Oct. 31, 1873, Charles Darwin wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, “Now I want to tell you, for my own pleasure, about the movements of Desmodium [gyrans] … The little leaflets never go to sleep, and this seems to me very odd; they are at their games of play as late as 11 o’clock at night and probably later.”

Darwin was the author of “The Origin of Species,” published in 1859. Hooker, his friend and confidant, was the director of England’s Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, a repository for thousands of plant species collected from all over the world. On June 10, 1850, Hooker collected a specimen from Sikkim, a northeast Indian state that sits snugly in the Himalayan foothills, with Nepal a few miles to the west, Bhutan to the east, and China stretching out to the north; on June 30, 1850, he collected another sample from Khasia, in Meghalaya state, southeast of Sikkim. Hooker sent the specimens back to Kew.

Darwin began studying Desmodium gyrans — or Hedysarum, as he sometimes called it — and the movements of its little leaflets as early as 1855, after borrowing one of Hooker’s specimens. “I do hope it is not very precious,” Darwin wrote, thanking Hooker for the loan, “for, as I told you, it is for probably a most foolish purpose. I read somewhere that no plant closes its leaves so promptly in darkness, and I want to cover it up daily for half an hour, and see if I can teach it to close by itself.” More than 20 years later, Darwin was still trying.

If the pointed little leaves of his borrowed specimen twitched to sounds as Kampermpool’s do, Darwin never noticed it, or if he did, he never mentioned it. And if he sang to his specimen as Kampermpool does, bending close and whispering into its bushy leaves, crooning softly, gently wheedling, cajoling, and coaxing it to move, he never mentioned that either.

“I am working away as hard as I can at all the multifarious kinds of movements of plants,” he wrote to German researcher Fritz Muller on July 24, 1878, “and am trying to reduce them to some simple rules, but whether I shall succeed I do not know.”

Characteristically, Darwin did succeed. Two years later, a book-length monograph titled “The Power of Movement in Plants” was published. It was the last book published during Darwin’s lifetime, representing more than two decades of research on moving plant species. During that time he performed round after round of experiments, measuring the movements of the leaves in all conditions, depriving the plants of light and nutrients, syringing water onto the leaves to simulate rainfall, subjecting them to extreme temperatures, and removing slices from the plants.

Darwin’s Desmodium gyrans specimen moved when he syringed water onto the leaves. As the water landed on its pointed little leaflets, it set the plant twitching, and Darwin measured the movements. He wrote again to Muller in April 1881, and concluded that the movements were designed “to shoot off the drops of water.”

“If you are caught in heavy rain,” he continued, “I should be very much obliged if you would keep this notion in your mind, and look to the position of such leaves.”

Still, Darwin was not finished with the plant. Long before it became The Plant — more than a century before it was discovered in the jungle and transported to Kampermpool’s nursery in Udon Thani — Desmodium gyrans had a hold over Darwin that was almost as strong as the one it now has over Kampermpool. On April 16, 1881, a year after the publication of “The Power of Movement in Plants,” Darwin dispatched a note to his friend Lord Avebury. The first line reads, “Will you be so kind as to send and lend me the Desmodium gyrans by the bearer who brings this note.”

Once again, he was requesting a specimen; but Darwin never finished his research on Desmodium gyrans. He died a year later, on April 19, 1882. He was buried next to Sir Isaac Newton, beneath a flagstone in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey, and any theories he had secretly harbored about the plant were buried with him.

Kampermpool will eagerly tell you there’s an important difference between the plant Darwin studied more than a century ago and the specimen growing in the Udon Thani nursery.

“It’s a dancing plant!” he will predictably insist.

“This plant is a dancing plant!”

That, Kampermpool will proudly state, is the difference. It dances. Indisputably, Darwin’s plant moved and, Darwin believed, the movements shook water droplets from its leaves following a heavy rainfall. But Kampermpool’s plant — The Plant — responds to music — to music! — and Kampermpool has actively encouraged this behavior for more than a decade by selectively breeding and crossbreeding the young plants that respond most enthusiastically to his singing.

Darwin called the plant Hedysarum; modern botanists call it either Desmodium gyrans or, more correctly these days, Codariocalyx motorius; its common name is Telegraph plant or Semaphore plant — after the leaf movements, which resemble semaphore signals. Kampermpool — who is burying his face in his plant’s leaves again, disappearing almost up to his ears, and cooing softly to it — calls his plant Miss Udon Dancing Sunshine.

In fact, since it was first described by Dutch physician and naturalist Maarten Houttuyn — who named it Hedysarum motorium in 1779 — the plant has been called at various times, Hedysarum gyrans (1781), Desmodium gyrans (1825), Desmodium roylei (1834), Codariocalyx gyrans (1842), Pseudarthria gyrans (1844), Meibomia gyrans (1891), and Desmodium motorium (1938). Botanical taxonomy sometimes gets a bit cluttered, says Gwilym Lewis, the principal scientific officer at Kew. Lewis tries to make sense of it :”Although the plant was first recognized and described in 1779,” writes Lewis by e-mail, “it has been moved by subsequent authors into different genera, e.g., Desmodium motorium (Houtt) Merr. (where Merr. is an abbreviation for Merrill). This new combination made in 1938 is also based on Hedysarum motorium, or, put botanically, Hedysarum motorium is the ‘basionym’ of both Desmodium motorium and Codariocalyx motorius. OK so far?”

Not really. But despite the confusion, Lewis assures me they are all the same plant: a leguminous Asian shrub. According to the International Legume Database and Information Service, it is not hard to find and is widely distributed throughout Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Laos, Malaysia, Martinique, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. It can even be found on the Society Islands, a chain of islands dotted remotely in the South Pacific. In Mauritius, in the 19th century, it was cultivated intentionally.

But Codariocalyx motorius or Desmodium roylei or Meibomia gyrans, or whatever you choose to call it, does not dance. It twitches. Very early in the morning, as the rising sun burns the mist off the fields, provided the weather has not been too hot, too humid or too dry, as long as the soil conditions are favorable, and it is not too windy, the leaves of Kampermpool’s dancing plant respond to his singing by twitching. Otherwise, The Plant spends most of its time hidden by orchids and protected by netting and barbed wire, its pointed little leaves nodding and bouncing in the breeze.

It dances, says Kampermpool defensively. “According to our experiments,” he says, “when we are using electronics it doesn’t work well. It likes humans, it likes musical instruments, but they have to be played by humans, my friend. If you sing a song composed by the king, it’s dancing better. This is very strange.”

Put a question — any question — to Kampermpool and he will respond instead by talking about The Plant. Because of this, he is an enigma. He might have children but, then again, he might not; allegedly, he spent several years in Iraq, researching desert plants, but perhaps this is not the case. His doctorate degree might be honorary, or he might have earned it conventionally — we don’t know. It is possible — and Kampermpool certainly makes it sound as if he has — that he has met the King of Thailand, His Majesty Bhumibol Adulyadej. [Editor's Note: Two years after the original publication of this story, a representative of Dr. Pradit's contacted Salon to state that the doctor had never met the King of Thailand, nor did he intend to give the impression that he did so.] So it is not surprising that, when asked about The Plant and the mechanism that actually makes its little leaflets move, Kampermpool sighs and rolls his eyes, recalling instead the day he found The Plant under the cool canopy of the jungle. Then he gives an extemporaneous lecture on the years he has spent breeding and studying The Plant; or claims that more than 30,000 tourists visit the nursery each year to see The Plant, although none are present this morning; and talks about his plans to market The Plant globally — you will be our planner; you will have a position forever — and voices his concerns that dark operatives, who stalk the nursery at night, will seize control of The Plant.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

According to a 1998 study that appeared in the journal Chronobiology International, the plant’s movements are caused by the swelling and shrinking of motor cells in special organs buried deep within the leaves, called pulvini. Via the pulvini, protons are pumped into the lateral leaflets, which in turn causes the movement, in and out, of charged ions. “During the pump state,” the paper reports, “ions are taken up, causing water influx and swelling of the motor cells. Depolarization causes loss of ions and water efflux (the motor cells shrink).” In other words, as protons are pumped into the pulvini, ions enter too, bringing water with them; when the charged ions leave the pulvini passively, the water migrates from the pulvini too. The movement of water molecules causes the motor cells in the leaves to shrink or swell and, as the water enters and exits, the plant’s little leaflets twitch.

But there is little point sharing this information with Kampermpool. Almost certainly, he would show his derision by first elaborately making the sound of a soufflé collapsing — Pshummph! — and then refusing to comment any further.

Pshummph!

Charles Darwin?

Pshummph!

Pulvini?

Pshummph!

Kampermpool shrugs, stands back and sighs, and then points at the plant again. “I will ask my people to prepare tea for us, my friend,” he says, signaling to a man leaning on a hoe before marching off toward his house and officially ending the discussion.

“This is tea,” he says a few minutes later, raising a cup to his lips and slurping noisily. “It’s dancing tea, you know, my friend. Boil it in hot water and drink it,” he says. “We’re drinking every day!”

Kampermpool is sitting in the shade, taking dainty sips from his teacup, with his little finger cocked and carefully pointed at the white clouds that march across the sky above his house. “This is an excellent tea for antioxidants,” he says between sips. “In 15 minutes, your cheeks will become red. The next morning, my friend, you will feel very light.”

It smells a lot like marijuana.

“No,” shouts Kampermpool, slapping the table. “No marijuana!”

Maybe not, but studies performed in the 1960s suggest that the leaves and roots of Desmodium gyrans — and likely Miss Udon Dancing Sunshine — contain psychedelic compounds, like N,N-dimethyltryptamine.

N,N-dimethyltryptamine?

Pshummph!

- – - – - – - – - – - -

It is hot and humid year-round in Udon Thani. Walking through the town is like wading through warm water. Despite this, Kampermpool rushes round his nursery like a black-haired dynamo, absent-mindedly watering his wilting plants.

Most days, after he has finished tending to his plants, he will find a shady spot, make a pot of tea, and wait for the fields to get dark around him. He is a busy man; sometimes he teaches a class at the university. He keeps busy to escape the inescapable: that he is stuck. Finally, after all these years, Dr. Pradit Kampermpool is stuck with The Plant. He has spent a fortune researching, breeding and crossbreeding this weedy-looking plant whose pointed little leaves nod and bounce in the breeze. The decades of research have cost him more than his house is worth.

He loves The Plant. It represents a 25-year odyssey for Kampermpool; it has been his only constant in a sea of change. The Plant also provides an object lesson in what can happen to someone who invests everything in something that eventually turns out to be nothing. And now, after 15 years spent scouring the jungle for The Plant and then another 10 years of careful breeding, Kampermpool is finally stuck with it, stubbornly defending the indefensible assertion that it is, in actual fact, a dancing plant.

“It’s a dancing plant.”

He stands beside The Plant now, looking at it sadly. It has its roots in him; the same roots that he unhurriedly shook soil from, wrapped in a moist cloth, and carried back to the nursery all those years ago. Each year those roots have inched a little deeper into his life, probing silently, delving. A root can split a boulder in two in the same way, moving unnoticed and undetected through the strata. Dr. Pradit Kampermpool might be able to tell you that, but he’s walking to the shady end of his nursery with quick little steps, his shiny black hair bobbing among the orchid stems, swinging a watering can, and singing.

This story has been changed since it was originally published.

Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was “Slaughterhouse Five.” Banned in several states — and branded a “tool of the devil” in North Dakota — it carried the snappy alternative title: “The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale: This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.”

Catchy. With an alternate title like that, it’s safe to assume the 79-year-old Vonnegut might have something to say about the Sept. 11 attacks, bringing Dresden to downtown Manhattan, and also the current war in Afghanistan, life and death, and what might come after.

I phoned Vonnegut for an interview. One of the first things he said was, “You don’t sound like an American.” He’s right. I’m English, which wasn’t a problem until he blamed me for the destruction of Dresden, an event that took place 27 years before my birth. Incidentally, this makes me — by his estimation — much too young to be taken seriously. Regardless, I maintain my innocence.

What is the purpose of life?

Well, I have a son who writes very well. He just wrote one book; it’s called “The Eden Express.” It’s my son Mark, who is a pediatrician and who went crazy and recovered to graduate from Harvard Medical School. But anyway, he says, and I’ve quoted him in a couple of my books, “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” That’s pretty good, don’t you think?

Death is a central theme in many of your books. Why does it play such an integral role in your fiction?

Well, it’s so terribly interesting to everyone. There’s two things that people can’t take their eyes off: People fucking and people getting killed. [laughs] These events seem to be terribly interesting. And also, we don’t see it very often. I had one young woman, a student of mine, complain that she had never seen a dead person, and I said to her, “One must be patient.”

Your mother committed suicide in 1944, on the eve of Mother’s Day. You’ve also written extensively about your time as a soldier in World War II. Do you think these experiences, which took place when you were in your 20s, contributed to your attitudes toward death?

No, because they were quite firmly fixed. You know, if I’d been raised a Catholic, as a good boy I would have believed, or tried to believe, what the Catholics believe, for instance. My ancestors, first ancestors, came over here before the Civil War and they were all freethinkers and they were much influenced by science. They were educated people and figured that really the priest or the preacher didn’t know what the hell he was talking about [laughs] and that Genesis was a lot of baloney and Jonah and the whale and so forth. So they were rationalists, I guess is what they were called, but they were a religious sect, they called themselves freethinkers.

I think in my piece I did for Studs Terkel [in Terkel's new book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith"] I said that we try to behave as well as we can without any expectation of reward or punishment in the afterlife and we serve the highest abstraction with which we have any familiarity, which is our community. And that’s been quite enough.

Nietzsche, who got a bum rap, incidentally — he had nothing to do with Nazism in any way — he said in effect, in German of course, “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.” I know something terribly important is going on. I mean, my Lord, everything’s so busy, and so, yeah, I have that kind of deep faith. So skepticism isn’t a luxury at all. Death is … I love sleep. Aye, there’s the rub. Perchance to dream.

In the novel “Deadeye Dick” the protagonist accidentally shoots a pregnant woman on Mothers Day 1942. Is there a parallel between the event in your novel and your mother’s death?

Oh, I would suppose that, I was 19, 20, 21, something like that when she did it, and I think that any child — I mean, one reason suicide is a bad idea — is any child is going to blame himself or herself to a certain extent: What did I say? What did I do?

In your last book, “God Bless You Dr Kevorkian,” you make several visits to heaven as a roving reporter, via carefully controlled near-death experiences, to interview the spirits you encountered in the hundred yards of vacant lot between the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates. It’s a great book. But do you believe in heaven at all?

It’s fun to think about, you know. I’ve actually imagined afterlives because it’s amusing. Because of the hospitality problem and the entertainment problem, it’s hideously impractical [laughs]. In one of my books, I forget which one, I imagine a heaven where, when you died, you got to be whatever age you were happiest on Earth. And it was a mess for me because my father was 10 years old. [laughs]

And he was difficult to relate to?

A real pain in the ass! [laughing harder]

What age would you choose to be if that were the case?

The best age for a man is 44. How old are you?

I’m 28.

All right. Well, when you’re 44 people will finally take you seriously.

In December 1944, you were captured by the German army and became a prisoner of war. As you described in “Slaughterhouse Five,” you narrowly escaped death during the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945.

Yes, by your people [the English], may I say. We were just the longest good neighbors in the daytime. You guys burned the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm in that one big flame, because there was nothing to breathe, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

I claim no responsibility for the firebombing of Dresden

Well, I’m fond of your people on occasion. I was just thinking about Bomber Harris, the marshall who was in charge of the RAF [Royal Air Force] who believed in attacks on civilian populations to make them give up, although quite the opposite had happened in Britain … But a whole lot of RAF guys objected to a monument being put up to Bomber Harris. I think it probably finally did get up, but a hell of a lot of RAF guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do. And that’s really sportsmanship and, of course, Brits are famous for being good sports.

But the bombing [on Sept. 11], no, it was hellish. People in Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Los Angeles are all reeling from this terrible attack. And of course, everybody’s reeling from what they saw on TV. [laughs] That’s where we’ve gotten to now. We just respond to something that happens on TV. But I think, God, weren’t they smart, the guys who did this? I had no idea those buildings were so fragile.

How close is your apartment to the site of the World Trade Center?

About three miles. A long way off. You know, I think about an amazing event like this, the firebombing of Dresden, any huge event: My God, Vesuvius has erupted again!

With the immediacy of television, do you think the attacks were overemphasized when compared with events like the firebombing of Dresden, during which 135,000 people were killed?

What I object to is that it’s totally distracting, just as the O.J. Simpson case was totally distracting, and Gary Condit. And so TV has the power to make us think about one thing. And, you know, in Congress now all sorts of monkey business is going on, anti-environmentalist stuff, because the TV just keeps us focused on ground zero and Afghanistan.

Do you think our military response to the attacks has been appropriate?

Well, our foreign policy for years has been based on unmanned kamikazes. [laughs] You know, we’ve let quite a few of those go.

You were once attacked while speaking at the Library of Congress and accused of speaking ill of the United States, the most wonderful nation in the world. In a 1999 interview, in defense of your cynicism, you said simply, “But it is a shitty country.” It seems there are people out there who agree with you.

I’d forgotten — but that’s pretty good [laughs]. It is preposterous to imagine that you belong to something as big as the United States. It’s like saying, “Howdy, I’m from Asia. Where are you from?” [laughs] You know, every artist in the United States worth a shit was against the Vietnam War, which was, you know, cruelly stupid and unnecessary. So every writer, every painter, every poet, every musician was against the Vietnam War. And I have said that it’s like a laser beam, you know, where all the beams of light are aimed in one direction and so all art, the total art world, and also a whole lot of other decent people, would form this laser beam, everybody aimed at the Vietnam War to stop it. And the power of this weapon turned out to be that of a custard pie, two feet in diameter, dropped from a stepladder six feet high [laughs]. It made no fucking difference.

In a number of your novels you state that evolution was really a bum deal, supplying man with brains that were far too large for his own good. With the attacks of Sept. 11, and the current bombing campaign in Afghanistan, do you think maybe we’re seeing some effects of these large brains of ours?

Well yes. Evolution is utterly — whatever the mechanism is, and I don’t think much of natural selection as a mechanism — but whatever the mechanism is, it has no conscience, it has no purpose.

But, you know, a science fiction clichi is that we don’t know how to stop war or cure cancer, till people in flying saucers come and tell us how to do it, or till we grow an extra lobe on our brains and get smarter. We’re getting smarter. Human beings are getting smarter, just like elephants in trouble, you know, saying, “Hey, you know, we’re in trouble but we’ll be OK if we put on a couple of hundred more pounds.” Or a giraffe saying, “Boy, life is hell now but if we add a couple of feet to our necks we ought to be OK.”

What would your alter ego Kilgore Trout say about the terrorist attacks?

Oh, I’ll have to think a minute because I’m not really his spokesperson — he’s a separate personality. [Pauses] He ignored an awful lot. And specific events. I think he probably didn’t make a comment. It would have been like an automobile accident or something.

Not too important, then?

No, but he’s certainly interested in oceanic changes. Huge slow ones. Irresistible ones.

How would you like to die?

I don’t know. When I was a soldier I just didn’t want to be hurt. I hoped it wouldn’t hurt. So I suppose painlessly because I hate pain and I love sleep. My dear sister died of cancer and her very last words were, sort of wondering, “No pain. No pain.” That was so nice.

I once read an interview in which you were asked how you would like to die and you said, “In a plane crash on Mount Kilimanjiro.” Were you in a better mood that day?

[Laughs] No, that was actually a Ray Bradbury story and that’s how he thought Hemingway should have died. Maybe I said it sometime. Just fucking around. I have the feeling now that I had at the end of the Second World War: I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do, please can I go home now? And I have that feeling now, and then I think, “Well, where the hell is home?” And what I’m yearning for is back in Indianapolis when I had a brother and a sister and a mother and a father and I can’t get that, but, if it were possible, I would like them alive and I would die among them.

Do you believe there is anything afterward at all?

No. Well, I don’t know. It’s biochemical to be redistributed, certainly. I think what Jung feared was that his intelligence would get mixed up with everybody else’s. [laughs]

Have you written a suitable epitaph for yourself?

Yes, well, I’ve already said so in the books: “Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.”

What are you most scared of?

Bad things happening to my children and grandchildren.

What book influenced you the most?

“Candide” by Voltaire, I guess.

What book do you most wish you’d written yourself?

I wish I had written “Romeo and Juliet.”

How do you define success?

I don’t know. No answer.

What do you truly believe in?

Well, again, getting back to Nietzsche’s statement, as a person of deep faith, I obviously believe in something in the end. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a great big something.

Do you have any regrets?

Plenty.

Given the opportunity, would you fix them?

No. Oh, I suppose, yeah. I don’t like the question.

Are you working on a new book at the moment?

Yes, but like everybody else, I was just shocked by the World Trade Center thing. Also what it’s done to the world economy. I mean, boy, you think those towers were something? It’s such a fragile economy. Don’t joke about economics because that’s how you get food.

In several of your novels, characters become unstuck in time. In “Timequake,” a bump in the space-time continuum causes everyone to relive the decade between 1991 and 2001, repeating everything they did the first time they lived it. Do you believe that, like characters caught in a timequake, we all have a chronology we are destined to follow, no matter what?

I think maybe the future has as much to do with who and what we are now as the past. It may be that you continue. Life is … there’s enough to think about. But I do suspect that the future has a hell of a lot more to do with stuff right now than we realize. And it wouldn’t help much to realize it.

So essentially, we’re all following a path that has been set for us, without having much control over it?

I’m afraid so. Why, are you in trouble?

My mission: to interview the interviewer. With a record like Terkel’s, such a proposition could be daunting, but it’s not. Hard of hearing, he shouts down the phone in a friendly, wheezy voice, curses his hearing aid, asks me to speak up, to repeat myself, curses his hearing aid again and, at the same time, manages to talk at breakneck speed about anything and everything.

His doorbell could ring any moment, he says. He’s expecting someone who wants his autograph. “I’m a half-assed celebrity in town,” he jokes. Ironically, Terkel had already started working on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” — meeting and interviewing subjects — when his wife died. “Well, it’s a crazy moment,” he says. “Don’t call it serendipity, because it’s tragic. I lost my wife.” Death had come home. Terkel continued to do interviews in the months that followed, and managed to complete the book. He has since begun work on two more book projects.

“Hold the wire,” he shouts suddenly when the doorbell finally rings. He reads my phone number back to me loudly, reads it again, excuses himself and hangs up. A little later, he calls back and we have a chance to talk.

“I’m going to have a martini,” he says later still, as the interview draws to a close, “let’s see, it’s 20 to 5 here. H.L. Mencken said, ‘Don’t drink before sundown. Don’t drink before sundown! ‘ Well, it’s not sundown yet and I’m going to have a Bombay gin martini, and then we’ll see what happens.”

Why did you decide to write a book about death?

Death is the one experience none of us has had and all of us will have. As Kurt Vonnegut says in the book, it’s the most ordinary thing in the world. At the same time, the book is about life, primarily. It’s about life. I always like to do a sotto voce, cup my hand over my mouth and say: It’s about l-i-f-e. Life.

In the introduction, you mention that author Gore Vidal suggested that you write a book about death as early as 1970. Why has it taken so long for you to finally approach the subject?

I had a radio show in Chicago for many years, on WFMT, a classical music station. I was its one aberration. It was an eclectic program, and I used to have a lot of people on, writers that I liked. And one of the writers was Gore Vidal. One day at the bar he says, “You ever thought about doing a book about people’s thoughts on death?”

I said, “Oh my God.” I was having a martini; I looked in the martini glass and all I saw was an olive. I was always told: “A book on death? They don’t want to talk about that, you’re crazy.” But they want to talk about it. They want to. The irony is, it’s the most alive book I’ve ever done.

Religion figures heavily in the responses of many of your subjects.

There’s a recurring refrain in the book, you’ll spot it: “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Now, it sounds like one of those New Age bromides, but it’s not. They want no middleman between themselves and God, whatever He, She or It is. And I find that fascinating. I find myself astonished by many of the responses.

Saul Bellow, a fellow octogenarian, once wrote that every man has his own poems.

Oh, that’s wonderful. I like that.

Reading the oral histories you’ve collected here, it seems that Bellow was right and that what you’ve managed to do is capture your subject’s poems.

I’m so glad you said that. I’m a gold prospector. I’m digging. Out of that digging comes tons of ore. Thirty pages. A lot of it is fat — [I'm] cutting the lean from it, getting at the core. Now I’ve got eight pages. But it’s still not a necklace, or a watch, or a gold bracelet. I have to bring it all together, and that’s my necklace. Now the editing, that’s the delicate part, now I’m a brain surgeon. You spoke of the poem within; I believe we all have it. The key to interviews is listening to the person, even to the silences. This is all parenthetical, you don’t mind do you? I’m doing stream of consciousness now. I’m a short Joyce.

You asked many of your subjects if they feared death. Do you fear death?

At this stage in the game, I’m 89 years old, I have two martinis a day, two cigars a day, my wife’s gone and my friends are gone too. I’ve had a good run. However, I’m greedy. So I want to do a couple of books. I probably won’t finish them, but it makes the day go quicker. So do I fear death? Not especially.

How did the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 change our perceptions of death?

Well that’s a good question. You see, I’d started the book long before that. Has it changed my perception of life and death, you mean? If anything, it’s italicized it. If anything, more than ever, [the Sept. 11 attacks were] a tragic, stupid event, a barbaric event that has made the book even more pertinent than it may have been before. And I find this ironic and tragic at the same time.

How can I put it? What has happened has made us more vulnerable. We are not the Fortress America. I think that’s the last thing Thomas Paine had in mind 200 years ago. Following “Common Sense” he wrote “Rights of Man,” and in that he spoke of this new society, this open society, and he said it could lift the world, lift it. I’m talking about 1791 he was writing it. He didn’t mean for us to be Fortress America. If we are Fortress America, then we are against “Them,” whoever “Them” is — the rest of the world, of course. So suddenly it’s happened. We are vulnerable and in this vulnerability, I hope we’re more human. You see, to err is human, to be vulnerable is human and so, in a sense, I’m looking now to find something hopeful that’s come out of this, ironically enough, that we ourselves may recognize what it is to be “the other.”

So you think the attacks should teach us all how to empathize?

You know, when we saw that picture of that little girl running, the Vietnam shot, that little terrified girl, napalm around her — remember that? That should be our little girl from now on. That’s the thing you see. That little girl should be considered our little girl.

Remember Einstein? I still lean on Einstein. I love to quote Einstein because no one dares contradict me. Einstein said shortly before he died, he was so overwhelmed, his own findings led to Hiroshima, subsequently — the irony — he tore his hair when he learned about Hiroshima. He never expected [the bomb] to be dropped on human beings, and then he said something along the lines of, “Everything in the world has changed with the split atom except one thing — the way we think.” We have to think anew. If we don’t think anew we’re in the soup.

And are people now thinking anew?

Remember, all my books have dealt with the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary Americans. And we saw it of course with the tenacity of the firefighters and the cops and the paramedics and everybody. So the ordinary American, I think, senses something deep down, inchoate though the feeling is, that our spokesmen, politicians or whoever they are, don’t understand at all.

Will the current campaign — this long War Against Terrorism we’ve embarked upon — become another Vietnam for the United States?

I don’t know. I wish to hell I knew because there’s no precedent for this. It won’t even be Vietnam because Vietnam was a country, where of course we had no business being to begin with. It was an obscene misadventure. Now, there are groups, there are fragments, we know that. Afghanistan is a fragmented land and it’s one warlord against another, and even the Northern Alliance, when it comes to human rights, have not been overwhelmingly great. I think we have to have this new move, a whole new Einsteinian approach. I return to him all the time.

For “The Good War” you collected oral histories of soldiers from World War II. Do you think the war experience is universal? Will the oral histories of the soldiers currently in Afghanistan sound the same as those you collected for “The Good War,” or have we lost something over the last 50 years?

Well, we have lost something in the last 50 years. I think the Cold War’s aftermath is still around and about. Now, ironically enough, our ally is Russia. Here we go again. Archibald McLeish wrote a wonderful piece during the most frigid parts of the Cold War for Harper’s, I think, and he said, “We are enthralled to them,” — the Soviets — “and they’re enthralled to us. No matter what they do, we’ll do the opposite. No matter what. And no matter what we do, they’ll do the opposite.” So I thought of that, and that still hovers even though things have been reversed now. There’s Putin and Bush — buddy-buddies: the irony. But no, it can’t be the same. It’s different.

How was World War II different from the current campaign against terrorism and the Taliban?

It was a war against Hitler, of course, against fascism, against all there was. It subsequently had to be fought, but you can’t compare the two. There is no one country involved now. Not Afghanistan. We know they’re warlords, knocking each other off. They’re purchasable too and so you can’t compare them. There’s confusion, there’s bewilderment. So at this moment, we’re at a crossroads. Will we learn? You see, you always come back to Einstein again. We have to think anew. It’s not just Them, a Third World, distant. It’s one, whether we like it or not.

Has George W. Bush proven himself as president of the United States?

Oh, no. No. Whom is he helping domestically with the tax cuts? You know very well who tax cuts help. The big CEOs are being rewarded, while thousands are being laid off.

If not George W. Bush, then who?

When it comes to the military and the Pentagon, Gore was as fervent for expanding the military budget as Bush is. So I don’t think it would have changed much with Gore, as far as the bombings are concerned. Possibly it might have been different as far as the domestic program is concerned. That might have been the difference. Oh God, I don’t know. Would FDR have been the guy? Well, he’s my favorite president of course. At the same time we know what he did in the Executive Order 9066 — Japanese Americans’ internment. And that was a big blot, a horrendous blot. But nonetheless, he would have been the closest to it. We need a statesman, a new kind of statesman, and I don’t see any on the horizon.

By launching a protracted bombing campaign, have we responded appropriately to the Sept. 11 attacks?

No, no. No bombing campaign. Bombing is the one thing bin Laden was for. He loves the idea of being bombed. It makes him a hero, a martyr among the great many in that whole region of the world.

We are the richest country in the world and everybody, I think, is capable of change. I don’t care who they are, everyone is capable of change. I’m not saying bin Laden, who is as nutty as a fruitcake and is an example of fundamentalism — in this case Islamic — that’s gone crazy. I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about the fact that everyone in the world, generally, is capable of change. I found that out. My greatest interview, I think, was with an ex-Klansman, a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and [about] his redemption and change. I feel we’re the richest country in the world. We know there’s more food that we need to feed every man, woman and child.

Now, if in our largesse we said: “This is what we’ll do, all over the world, everywhere.” Suppose we bomb them all over the world with food, clothing and shelter. I think it would alter us considerably. I know this sounds altruistic, it sounds goofy, it sounds idealistic in a comic way. Yet, it’s the way. We’d be the most beloved nation in this epoch. So there you have it. As I say, this guy’s a goof, who’s talking to you now, an idealist. But on the contrary, that ideal is a reality, that ideal is being realistic. That’s the ticket. You got an earful.

In his 1987 book, “The Discovery of the Titanic,” Ballard wrote: “My childhood idols were imaginary explorers at the technological frontiers of science — people like Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo and his Nautilus. As long as I can remember, I’ve been enthralled by the sea. But I’ve always been more interested in what goes on underneath the waves than on the surface.”

In a 1997 PBS interview Ballard said: “The ocean was my friend — my best friend. And I wanted to be the first kid to put footprints on the sand after a tide. I loved the story of Robinson Crusoe, walking this deserted beach, finding treasures that had been washed up. And I’ve never grown up. I mean, I still have that childish desire to poke around.”

And Ballard has been poking around for decades, racking up one successful expedition after another, in almost every ocean on Earth. A few he’s crossed off his list are the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Black Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Sea of Cortez, Lake Ontario, Loch Ness, Amazon River and Kuban River (in Russia). After almost 40 years of exploration, he’s running out of bodies of water to explore.

For almost two months, I’ve tried ceaselessly to interview Ballard, with no success. He is always “on travel” or “at home with his family” or “on a book tour with National Geographic” or “on travel” again. As difficult as he is to reach, it’s tempting to think that perhaps Ballard doesn’t really exist, or that he mysteriously disappeared several years ago and his name is now nothing more than a front for a large, faceless corporation: trademarked, incorporated, copyrighted, licensed, patented and protected. His assistants have assistants, who have secretaries. He’s that busy.

Born in 1942 in Wichita, Kan., Robert Ballard grew up in San Diego, just a few miles from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He was a high school student when the Trieste, a two-man U.S. Navy bathyscaph, left its San Diego port in 1959, to plumb the Marianas trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. It took the two crewmen more than five hours in the cramped bathyscaph to descend 36,198 feet to the bottom of the trench. It was a journey that can be summarized as follows: darkness, darkness, fish … darkness, darkness, weird fish … darkness. The farther you go, the darker it gets and the weirder the fish become, until finally you’re so deep that there is no longer any light and almost no species of fish that can survive the extreme conditions.

This probably doesn’t sound too appealing to most of us and, to some of us, it may sound like torture, but to Ballard it was the perfect job description. Eight years later, schooling completed, he entered the U.S. Navy and was assigned to the Deep Submergence Laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod, Mass.

During his 30-year stint there, Ballard made what is probably his most famous discovery: the RMS Titanic, resting on a shelf in 12,500 feet of water, 1,000 miles east of Boston. Ballard and his team used a device called the Argo — designed by Ballard — to search the ocean floor for any signs of wreckage or debris from the Titanic, which sank in 1912.

Like a deep-sea Swiss Army knife, the Argo, sporting an array of gadgets, is thrown overboard and trawled beneath a research vessel to map the seafloor below as researchers make gridlike passes above. It has night-vision video cameras, a color camera, an echo sounder and a side-scan sonar system that can survey areas 300 meters wide in just one pass.

On Sept. 1, 1985, after searching for almost a week, Ballard’s team glimpsed some rusted boilers on the seafloor on the video monitors. Slowly, more than two-and-a-half miles below the surface, the Argo passed over the Titanic’s extensive debris field: A silver-plated soup tureen, shoes, serving platters, corked wine bottles and pieces of coal littered the ocean floor in a long trail. Finally, rising sharply from the ocean floor like a ruined city was the wreck of the ship, lying in three pieces, rusted, with fish swimming its corroded hallways.

Describing the event, Ballard wrote: “As the images on the video screen grew more and more vivid — large pieces of twisted hull plating, port-holes, a piece of railing turned on its side — for the first time since I had started on this quest 12 years before, the full human impact of the Titanic’s terrifying tragedy began to sink in. Here at the bottom of the ocean lay not only the graveyard of a great ship, but the only fitting monument to the more than 1,500 people who had perished when she went down.” Returning a year later with Alvin, a three-person manned submersible, Ballard carefully explored the wreck, capturing footage later used in the 1997 motion picture “Titanic.”

As a child, fueled first by Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Ballard began reading accounts of early deep-sea exploration by people like William Beebe, who built a crude bathyscaph in 1930, diving to depths of 1,500 feet in waters off Bermuda. Beebe wrote, and Ballard read with grim relish, that if the bathyscaph sprang a sizable leak, the sheet of water entering the capsule would cut a man in half; even a narrow stream of water caused by a pinprick hole, or a misplaced rivet, was capable of drilling straight through Beebe and his partner, Otis Barton, as they sat bolted inside the chamber.

In an interview from 1991, Ballard said: “Like the space shuttle, you could never lose sight of the fact that you were doing something dangerous. It may be apparently routine, but if you mess it up, it will bite you, and it has over the years. I had a fire once — not in Alvin, in a French bathyscaph — at 9,000 feet, and almost died.”

But to Ballard, the risk of any project is a reasonable trade-off for the answers it might provide. You can get a better sense of how Ballard views his expeditions by taking a look at the names he gives some of his equipment and projects: There’s the Argo, named after the ship that carried Jason to the Golden Fleece in Greek mythology; the Little Hercules, a one-man submersible named after the mythological strongman; and the JASON Project, a program Ballard began in 1989 that allows schoolchildren to participate in live video feeds of Ballard’s expeditions.

The mythological characters keep popping up for a reason. Ballard views his expeditions as epic adventures in search of a deep-sea Golden Fleece, hidden and preserved for centuries by the conditions at the bottom of the ocean. His discoveries should matter to all of us. In his most recent book, “Graveyards of the Pacific,” he writes: “I’ve been doing this a long time now — from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Mediterranean to the Black Sea — peering through murky depths to see what history can tell us, getting a new and unique perspective on things that shaped our view of the world, and ourselves.”

Before 1985, Ballard’s research efforts concentrated on the geological formations of the ocean floor and the unusual species that populate them. Discovering the Titanic marked a shift in his career from studying natural history to studying human history.

He was the first American to enter, photograph and map regions of the mid-oceanic ridge, an underwater mountain range — more than 40,000 miles long and up to 500 miles wide — that runs in a continuous belt around the Earth. The ridge is the largest geological feature on the planet, zigzagging among the continents, bisecting the oceans and rising 15,000 feet above the seafloor. In other words: Been there, done it, mapped it.

While on the Galapagos Hydrothermal Expedition in the late 1970s — to investigate unexpected rises in temperature on the ocean floor — Ballard discovered and described several new species living near hydrothermal vents 9,000 feet below the surface.

In “Eternal Darkness,” Ballard describes what he saw: “Warm water shimmered up from cracks in the lava flows. It was turning a cloudy blue as manganese and other minerals, carried from deep within the seafloor, precipitated out of solution to form a solid coating on the cooler surrounding rocks. But that was not all. The seafloor was teeming with life.”

For several days, Ballard explored the hydrothermal vents, taking specimens and preserving them in Russian vodka purchased at port in Panama. In other words: Been there, done it, mapped it, sampled it and pickled it in vodka.

He writes: “The dominant macroorganism living near the vent openings was the giant red tube worm, or Riftia pachyptila. These spectacular organisms form large clusters, or hedges, standing up to ten feet high. All around them we could see shimmering flows of milky white, mineral-rich water.”

This was new: worms that looked more like B-movie monsters, growing in great thickets on the seafloor. They have no mouth, no eyes and no intestinal tract. They’re ugly. They’re “bursting out of John Hurt’s stomach and flying across the room in a bloody mist” ugly. Protected by a hard, white outer casing, the worms stand upright in clusters, poking the red tips of their bodies into the surrounding water to absorb oxygen.

Like many of the species in the Galápagos’ rift valley, they had never before been described and were unknown to science; like his heroes before him, both real and fictitious, Ballard had successfully descended into the unknown, the lost world, and brought back something exotic for the rest of us to inspect.

The tube worms represented the strange otherworldliness of the ocean that has fascinated Ballard for so long; they were his Golden Fleece, as were the wreck of the Titanic, the mid-oceanic ridge and so many of the other discoveries Ballard has made during his extraordinary 40-year career. He has undoubtedly spent more time underwater than anyone else alive.

In a 1999 interview, Ballard said: “If you were to compare the number of people who have been into outer space with the number who have been to the average depth of the ocean, I think more people have been in outer space. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon before we went to the largest mountain range on Earth, which lies under the ocean.”

And that’s what makes Ballard’s career so extraordinary. For more than 10 years, he spent four months of every year at sea, exploring the seafloor. The way Ballard sees it, we don’t need to go into space, and we don’t even need to trek to the Amazon Basin, or to frozen Antarctica, when thousands of square miles of ocean floor remain unexplored. Just a few miles off the coast, off any coast, are discoveries to be made.