“We always felt like there was something to honor in the clandestine nature of our communications with him but it’s wearing off.”

There was a time, he said, when a communiqué from Lacombe would come through and they’d all gather around the printer like supplicants, to read these emails full of outré declarations about cave bears and cavemen. But that time had passed.

“My position, and Pascal knows this, it’s not anything I’ve kept hidden, is that you can’t go back. To live in a cave and renounce technology, renounce everything, that’s like”—he laughed—“about the most modern thing a person could ever do.”

I asked how so. It was fine to be curious. I was curious.

“A caveman isn’t rejecting what’s around him. That’s for intellectuals, people who have overthought everything. You have to deal with life as it is. This guy is talking about half a million years ago, but he’s writing about it on a computer. He’s a crudivore, renouncing the cooked, while people have been eating cooked food forever, and he’s renounced agriculture, which the people in this area have been practicing for twelve thousand years.”