Sign Languages

FRIENDS OF BECCARI

August 3rd

Still on the banks of the Trinity

David Fisher

The Hotel Charybdis

Taormina, Sicily

My dearest Dave,

I’m sorry I haven’t answered your last two letters, but much has happened the last six weeks. How are you and Marta? Here all seems well enough (only I’m suffering from the last month of summer heat). B. is relieved she’s finished here with no summer session and, at Harper State next semester, only two courses. The children are fine. As usual, J. is still full of music and song; L. suffers from the imminent departure. She spends all day outside at play.

I wonder how the book on D. M. Thomas is coming? Only last night I decided to open the Old Bushmill’s single malt, sit on the deck (next to the table crowded with ailing and dead bonsai — you were right, as usual, I don’t spend the necessary time with the little bastards. And now, with the move in a couple of weeks, maybe it’s best they all shed their leaves), and think of you. By the time you do get back — via Bolzano, Lake Como, etc. — we’ll be settled in and the new place, new semester, new town (smaller but cheaper, I hope) will surround us.

Anyway, I sat on the deck and drank, missed our conversations, and realized I couldn’t sit, drink, remain silent about what’s happened though I don’t know what to make of it all yet; though I think, in many ways, it answers a hundred questions we’ve asked each other over the last four years since you drove in from Phillips College and hated all the right things with a fine sense of humor.

I tried my best to drop it last month; I hoped it’d be smothered by the impending cross-country move. But somehow that only tantalizes it, provokes it. And your absence has me hulking through the department, unable to talk, everything quickly becoming even more foreign than it was the first time I saw it all. I know you’ll understand.

Of course what our lovely writers do is fascinating, you know. Absolutely so. But it’s not completely right because it does nothing to explain what I saw in Tegucigalpa. When we taught Poe, Dostoyevsky, Calvino, many, many others, we emphasized their distortions, bulging seams, oddities of time and place, repeated movements, sudden illnesses as exciting ways into the same old reality, some new way of exploring the same old human situations. They all just teased reality through a bit of illusion. Maybe the protagonist was insane and his madness gave him new insight or a frighteningly clear perspective.

Though the character is a murderer like Mathias in The Voyeur, he remains a man, and the world he distorts into repeating patterns found on beaches, tablecloths, suitcase linings is still an island the reader takes as real with sand, salt breezes, sea gulls. All these invented perspectives ways of seeing the same old things with vitality. Didn’t we tantalize our students with the insights and outlooks of deranged men, ill men who reinterpreted the ordinary, the static, while we talked on and on in comfortable classrooms with hissing radiators and flaking paint?

It’s method we admired, isn’t it? New ways of seeing old dilemmas. But the world was always the world around them — a world of bridges over rivers, whores with tuberculosis — not something free-floating and amorphous with mysterious, unlimited possibilities. We certainly took comfort in that. In that, and in knowing, beyond anything else, that men sulking in dark cellars, writhing in nightmares, writing fantastic books were always men. Men as we understood them — even in madness, even as murderers.

We cagily with great ease of mind, told our classes there were only a dozen themes available, all the rest is brilliant variation. We were smug, weren’t we? But none of this explains my brother and Odoardo Beccari.

I’m sure you remember how often I’ve spoken of my brother. I know, when I wrote you last, I mentioned how he’d taken off on an old-style world tour in the spring. His was the biggest success of the Clarke family. Where I never “quite got through with school,” as mother quips, his was a meteoric rise. After high school and the Navy (anything, he said, to escape the late ‘50s) he finished college at UT, then went into the state legislature while in law school, etc., etc. Now, at fifty, he’s a hell of a criminal defense lawyer in Patroon. Remember we once talked about the Hopkins case — the papers termed him “The Beast”—and how my brother turned down the offer to defend? But those are the sorts of cases he’s taken since losing his bid for state prosecutor general back in ‘74.

For years he had a tremendous impact on me. He was the first person in our family to go to college, almost assuring I would, making my own children’s education a certainty. He’d get me to memorize and recite Kipling poems when I was six or seven and he was home on furlough. We love one another in the typical Clarke fashion — nothing demonstrable at all. Tight-lipped, hands in pockets, expectations present but unspoken.

But over the last few years there’s been a change with him. It’s so noticeable even my mother has commented on it, though she’s put it down to absence of familial responsibilities, etc. Approaching fifty is dreadful, I’m sure (and you know better than me, right?). With him it’s made for a certain restlessness and listlessness simultaneously. It’s almost (and here’s where I’m sure we discussed him as an example) proved our point that one drifts into conservatism because it’s less complicated (offers a clear right and wrong view, good and bad), seems the natural outcome of age and its subsequent tendency to withdraw and avoid contact with what’s ugly, complicated, and sorry in the world.

Anyway, without children, he’s poured himself into the law, and in it, I think, he’s passed from some idealistic desire to help the unfortunate to a dwelling on the unsavory character of his clients, their melodramatic and awful plights; most of all, on their refusal to accept the consequences of their actions. His politics have gone from McGovern to Reagan and beyond (he holds some absolutely horrific views on personal freedoms vs. the state’s power, etc.). I know we talked all about this when we discussed some of our colleagues, whom we dubbed “The General Staff.” And we noticed that almost axiomatically as compassion lessened, stature and bucks grew. So did feelings of disappointment, isolation. Now the naive and youthful worldview was something to be embarrassed about like a vestigial tail, an open fly. They were grownups now and only children saw things without wise cynicism.

Sorry I’m drifting, though I wanted you to recall what I’ve said about my brother and what we together have said about the way the world’s turning lately. Now, quite unexpectedly, I’m afraid I may have an answer for such stuff.

Here’s the important point of all this; the simple but mind-boggling thing which outdistances all our lovely writers who altered the man and the world in ways we could understand and accept, indeed applaud and admire. What the Friends of Beccari can do is something utterly fantastic and profoundly disturbing.

Allan wired me from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, about six weeks ago. He sent me airfare with a cable asking me to join him for a week or ten days and saying we’d fly back together. B. was a bit upset at the whole idea of, as she said, “the boys getting to play,” but she didn’t really mind. She and Allan have never gotten along very well for all sorts of reasons, and besides, her father was ill with his prostate again. So, she chided me but was finally eager about the trip. She and the girls decided they’d spend the time at her parents’, easing her mother’s duties.

He’d left four months earlier, closed down the office, let the secretaries go, and simply slipped away without an itinerary. Mother was dismayed at the immaturity of it all. I was delighted because I realized he needed immediate relief from his job. And, I suppose, I hoped he’d mellow his cynicism somehow and return some sort of optimistic liberal as he’d once been when I was in high school (In the state legislature, he’d authored bills broadening the state’s pitiful social services). Anyway, he’d once been my hero and I wanted the best for him. A trip that’d provide him with whatever he needed. Though I guess I foolishly believed he only needed time alone in some exotic place to shake a fifty-year-old man’s summing up of things. I honestly don’t know what I really expected to find in Tegucigalpa, his last stop before coming home. I never once thought about those Kipling poems he’d made me memorize, or his romantic view of the military (even, honest-to-God, after four years in the Pacific with the Navy!). All of which had been given to me too, a legacy from him. But I’d stopped with it years ago through Sassoon, etc. Though I readily admit it can still fascinate. Why else do I so enjoy The Raj Quartet, all those ancient Bengal Lancer movies? Now it all wells up and frightens me because of the possibilities.

Anyway, he wired that he’d arrived and I flew from Houston to Tegucigalpa. I’m not a good traveler, as you well know, so all the way I was disoriented, fearful of foreign languages, saw myself as homeless, unable to eat or drink in comfort. Stepping out of the plane, I encountered the unruly crush of hundreds of people. Though it was cooler and less humid than in Houston, the tropical sun seemed sharper, closer.

I had the address of his hotel, but out in front of the terminal, standing before one of a hundred battered Toyotas, was a shabbily dressed wiry fellow who rushed up to me with a sealed envelope. Torn open, it revealed a note from my brother, though hastily written (I guessed then) because it was his handwriting but not clearly so. In it he told me to stay with the bearer, who’d bring us together.

Four hours earlier I was in traffic on the way to Houston Intercontinental, but now it was all different — just off-key and foreign enough to exclude me without fascinating.

I have few impressions of Tegucigalpa. It seemed full of cars and the staggering vegetation of tropical places (though Florida’s my only true reference). All the time I was rereading, refolding the note. I had no expectations really. But I had thought we’d meet in his hotel, have dinner, etc. And though this was hardly upsetting, it was unexpected enough to worry me.

We left the city, at least its center, and wound up a hillside and turned abruptly into an almost hidden driveway — a brass plaque and opened, heavy iron gates blurred past. Here was a wide pearly gravel drive traveling even higher up the hillside until it ended in a small parking lot full of expensive vintage cars. As I paid the driver, who remained in the car and passed my light bag out the window with some difficulty, I heard the sounds of powerfully stroked tennis balls and splashes into water, though neither court nor pool was visible through the thick but well-manicured trees and shrubs.

I relaxed a bit under the wide archway of the front door. This could be anywhere, I thought. San Francisco, Houston. And though I also realized its sumptuousness — beveled glass panes in the heavy oak doors, muted carpet, and the glimmer of brass in the vestibule beyond — I’d really only seen such in magazines and movies.

The doors suddenly swung open and, as I’d been whisked through the city, I was now rushed into the paneled darkness and glittering brass. The liveried Honduran spoke quickly and too quietly for me to comprehend as he took my bag in his left hand and my elbow in his right. There was some sort of central hallway. In one room off it there was an incongruous fire blazing dramatically in a magnificently manteled fireplace. In another, farther along, the high walls were crowded with trophy heads, their glass eyes sparkling in the dismal light. Jerking my head around and pulling against the man’s grasp, I managed to slow us enough to see two youngish men standing near the far window of the room next to the fully erect trophy of a gigantic brown bear, its paws aggressively outstretched. I sensed they turned to look my way, though we hurried past. Here, muffled by brocade carpets and tapestried walls, our feet made no noise. Somewhere, far off, or close at hand — it’d be impossible to say — there was the click of billiard balls.

This is too perfect, I remember thinking — trophies, tall angular men, billiards — when my silent guide stopped, set my suitcase just inside a door, and gently pushed me forward as if I were a bashful child. And certainly I was worse than that at the moment. The two-hour roar of the jet engines, the frantic taxi ride, this perfect movie set — all of it coalesced in my bowels with a sharp stitch of pain. I felt the sweat on my forehead, and I staggered a bit in the gloom and reached out to steady myself on a table edge, rattling some immaculate arrangement of delicate cups on pale lace.

“Are you all right, Donnie?”

I turned to the doorway but the Honduran was gone, the suitcase at my feet. Allan stood across the room silhouetted by the French doors.

“What’s wrong?”

The gas pain relented after a moment, and I straightened gingerly and crossed the red-and-blue Persian rug to the French doors, the only source of light. Beyond them I noticed one end of a tennis court. On it a thin man expertly returned the white ball. He was dressed in a white shirt and white, long pants. Surprised at the costume, I realized that the two men standing by the bear had had on some sort of uniform. Scarlet-and-black tunics of some sorts.

“Donnie, answer me. Are you all right?”

His back to the light, Allan took my hand from my side and squeezed it firmly. Sensing my confusion, he acted the guide now and carefully placed me in one of the two high-backed leather chairs that faced one another over a low mahogany table. The French doors to my left allowed in dull green light filtered by the luxurious vegetation.

“Donnie, how are you?”

Looking up at Allan’s voice I looked into the face of a total stranger. I must have said something because, half-rising in protest at all of this, the man rose too and took my shoulder and firmly pushed me back into the chair. I rose again, heard myself sputtering words of complaint. Who the hell are you? Where’s my brother? What is this crazy place? Everything came tumbling out. And all the time I stared into the lean angular face and blue eyes, the chin strong as a rock, and listened to the voice soothe me in tones I thought I fully recognized but, just as quickly, didn’t. I realized this man’s accent was foreign, clipped, most un-East Texas. But here and there it was surely my brother’s voice, the tone from childhood when once he’d purposefully thrown the Softball at my head, the rush of blood from my eyebrow terrifying him more than it had me. The boy’s voice of concern, responsibility, fear.

“Donnie, old Donnie,” the tall, graceful man kept saying, his beautifully manicured hands on my knee and arm. “It is me. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. Everything’s really quite grand.” Again, the frightening accent strong in places, the soothing tone present nonetheless. The most unsettling thing I know — the deceit of the normal, the expected.

I wiped my face with the heels of my hands merely redistributing the grime of the last few hours.

“I’ve come back to tell you something. Are you listening? Donnie, will you pay attention?” Now there was irritation in his awesome voice. Irritation at me, my inability to stay with things until completion. His chiding I used to cringe at. You’ll never learn that way, he’d say. His own hands deft, his own patience often worn thin by my ineptitude. He spoke louder, and the Honduran quickly appeared behind his chair. He gave clipped commands, the voice completely foreign. His accent most definitely English.

“We’ll have coffee, all right? Then I’ll tell you something.” Dismissing me, he turned his face toward the French doors.

What do I do? I kept thinking as I watched his face. Should I run screaming for the police? I must have moved again, perhaps straightened my legs from under the table, because the man looked around, and, for the first time, the light outside brightened and fell full on his face.

“Allan,” I shouted, my voice ringing the cups by the door. His hand again on my shoulder, I looked into a face that matched the disquieting voice. He’d favored my mother most; his face a bit plump, his chin fairly strong, his cheekbones hidden, porous skin scared by severe acne when he was a teenager. But in this man those most familiar features had blended with others. The chin was more pronounced. The skin softer, more finely grained. The entire face gracefully elongated. The pale blue eyes of my brother were now cobalt.

Perhaps I actually did faint. There is some brief gap here filled with the sounds of distant voices. Then, quite suddenly everything was happening again as if someone had simply adjusted the volume and picture. There was a cup of coffee in my hands, and I drank the strong liquid.

Dave, I know I’ve taken too long getting here, to the point. But you’ll understand why in a moment. You’ve known me for years now. You know my smallest defects. I’m a poor sport and a bad player — an embarrassing combination. I’ve been unfaithful to B., and you, the man of principles, have never once chided me. I drink and clutch my enlarged liver. You’ve understood my own feeble writings and bolstered my often flagging career. I’d never do anything to cause you or anyone alarm, grief, upset. I’ve written this damned letter a half-dozen times. I’m not frantic now; I don’t think I ever really was. I finally flew back to Houston and went home and lied to everyone. Later I drove up to his office in Patroon and went up the stairs to his apartment above and rattled the door. He’s left all of that behind like a discarded carapace, a shed skin.

Jesus Christ, this draft’s no better than any of the others.

I drank the coffee, my hands trembling. It wasn’t a conversation. Allan spoke, his face, as it moved in and out of the light, like his voice — a mixture of my brother and things foreign, graceful, sophisticated.

“I’ve come back to tell you,” he began, refilling my cup. “I wanted you to understand, old man. Thought you ought to know.” He grinned, his teeth long and straight, no chip on the left incisor from my pushing him, at the age of fifteen, off the foot of our parents’ bed.

It was all monologue. He didn’t expect me to respond. Soon into it, he grew still and looked out the window. His awesome voice in the quiet tone one uses for moments of passion, terror, or despair.

My own thoughts jumbled and choking. Listen, I had to keep telling myself. My bowels rumbling, hurting.

Allan didn’t mention Odoardo Beccari for a long time; he didn’t take the long, thin book from his jacket until later.

Instead he issued a torrent of invective. His usual complaints even more harsh, bitter, unyielding. He ranted about the blacks at home. But it’s the same all over, and he waved his long fingers in exasperation. The country gone to hell. The liberals still thinking everything’s valuable and worth saving. Such disgusting concern for the puny and weak. “By God,” he kept saying, “what’s a healthy, strong white man to do?”

The diatribe grew stronger, more vehement. He quickly passed the point where one could dismiss it all with some offhand remark. I’d argued with him a thousand times, you know that, but now he was so utterly different. He seemed stronger, more sure. He said things we’ve all thought but known to hide if we can’t extinguish them entirely. They were black, cruel ideas spoken by a tall, graceful man in a mellifluous voice.

His whole body quivered with excitement; he stood and began pacing in front of the French doors. Outside the tennis court was empty.

Where had all the pride in country and race gone? Who’d given the world all the advances over the last thousand years? Even before. Savages, weakness, moral corruption. Womanish-men. Mannish-women. The world gone topsy-turvy. He’d seen it from his trip; he knew the world. Poorly run governments. He let it all loose in bursts of words.

Such a burden on some of us, but a burden we had to shoulder, he said from behind me, his beautiful hands on my shoulders, his sweet breath on my ears. Betrayal, he said. That summed it all up. But the British had tried, even the French. Not the fucking Spanish. Look at their goddamned legacy worldwide. Everywhere now they’re only small people with minds full of crap. Soft, useless children.

“But I came across this.” He took a book from his coat pocket. “This and the friends of Odoardo Beccari.” He sat heavily, his face florid and contorted; he slapped the book on the table. “Here… it’s all in here. All we need. And many of us,” he waved his hand around, “have found it. Here. But in Malaysia first, you see. God, was I lucky they found me. At the hotel, old sport. They knocked on the door and I let them in and they were full of the answers I’d been looking for. We’re all looking for. We’ve just started here. You should see us in Southeast Asia. And India… well, there’s a starting place, eh?” Allan laughed and sat back and talked. My dismay grew. I’m certain my own face reddened; sweat dampened my collar.

I never could figure the book out. I hoped you might. I thought of you, after I’d taken it. But later it disappeared. Stolen back, I think, by the Friends of Beccari. And I went to our so-called library, too. But there was only his book on the botany of Borneo first printed in 1904. Later I met Bob Finley, the guy we liked on the Curriculum Committee, at the Faculty Club and mentioned Beccari to him. He’s in anthropology and knew a little himself, but remembered a travel book by Redmon O’Hanlon he’d read two summers ago, and it filled in a few more details. From O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo I learned about Beccari’s pro-Lamarckian, anti-Darwinian position; there was only the briefest mention of his idea of “plasmative epochs,” the secret of which the Friends had somehow manipulated, formulated, practiced, preached to the select like Allan.

But there in Tegucigalpa, in the private club of the Friends of Beccari, Allan told me the gist of it all though he was wrung with emotion: once in actual tears; shortly thereafter, in chuckling delight.

He was born again, in the truest sense. You see, in Beccari’s hypothesis a “plasmative epoch” allows for every living thing to adapt more easily to external conditions. Certain stimuli can alter form. Beccari even allowed, it seems, for the possibility of conscious alterations. Creative evolution. If dogs, Beccari wrote, had associated with people during such an epoch, they’d be talking. Dreams, he wrote, are simpler than Freud would have them. They’re recollections of previous plasmative states. Beccari’s own frequent dream of flight was, to him, nothing more than his own birdness from a distant plasmative state altered yet again by a later one.

Allan clapped his hands in delight, his voice familiar and foreign. “You see, it only remained to figure out if such epochs could be orchestrated, predicted, arranged. Really all we learned was how to coax them along. A few rather difficult calculations. Some rare natural ingredients… nothing artificial!” He wagged his un-Allan-like, graceful finger at me that had once been as pudgy and short as our mother’s. “No drugs.” He nodded and leaned back.

I opened my mouth but didn’t speak. Only my legs were working. My feet, under the table, crossing and uncrossing.

Allan laughed loudly and talked on about the Friends of Beccari and their grand design to “change things back a bit,” as he put it. Politics, religion. Abruptly, he returned to his vehement attack on society. And, just as quickly and firmly, I believed none of this was true; it wasn’t really happening, or, if it were, someone, maybe my real brother, Allan, just outside the door, was having a tremendous laugh at my expense. This private club wasn’t anything to be suspicious about, the book at my knee could be anything — a volume of Jane Austen, an old company ledger — and there were only regular things around, things of this world: servants, billiards, tennis, a swimming pool. Here I was, alone, in Honduras with someone who only vaguely favored my brother as, perhaps, hundreds of people do. And all this absurd Beccari stuff. You want to be this? Read a book and… what? Wish? Add and subtract? Take peyote? Join our secret society? Conspiracy, plot, the convolutions of the late twentieth century. I was deeply confused. I’d left Houston only five hours earlier.

“Look at India,” Allan was saying calmly. “Christ, what a mistake to let the coloreds have it. What would it be like if we were still in charge, old sport? Just think of it!” Then, there was a low voice from the door and we both turned to see the same liveried servant who’d brought me in and, behind him, two military officers in uniform.

“Ah, ha.” Allan smiled and stood. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. These Americans,” he nodded toward the doorway, “show up for strategy sessions now and again. Several of our chaps are really quite something in military ops. Me, I’m plodding along. Sadly it’s necessary these days. Nothing’ll come easy, I fear. Anyway, we’re glad to oblige. Those bloody ‘Nigger-aguans’ are giving us hell.” With a pat on my shoulder, he went through the door and they walked a ways down the hall. I could still hear their mumbled voices.

But I paid little attention. Instead, without a single completed thought, I stood and put the book in my pocket. Edging quietly around the table, I took two steps and opened the French doors. Again, I didn’t pause to think but crossed the lawn, passed the empty tennis court, and intersected the gravel drive near the gate. The whole way, from the doors to the street to a bus stop down the hill, I imagined the tall angular men standing at the French doors watching my descent. And one of them was most certainly my brother, Allan, his hand on the shoulder of an American Army colonel. The look on his face the old look of disappointment. You’ve no patience, he’d chide. Where’s your self-control?

You know me, Dave. I’m a mediocre scholar, a better-than-average carpenter, someone who’s meticulous about income taxes, my children’s education. So you know I didn’t run off into Tegucigalpa in shambles, in the state of one of our young protagonists — feverish from starvation, in a rage over money, gasping from the final stages of tuberculosis. True, I was terrified at what I’d done by taking the book, my mind running in highest gear. Downtown I stepped off the bus in front of a hotel, and realized I’d left my suitcase in that room near the door. Fortunately, I had my traveler’s checks and passport in my coat pocket so I managed to check in. Later I hurried out, away from the book, and bought a couple of shirts, some underwear, and an inexpensive nylon overnighter.

But I was distraught, dismayed. Fully dressed, I sat on the balcony, the city noises of Tegucigalpa the same as everywhere else, only the smells really different. Harsh, animal, uninhibited by rules or regulations.

The book was impossible to read. It had been cheaply printed, which didn’t help. But even had it been perfectly legible, it was mostly equations, formulas, diagrams of islands or amoebas — I couldn’t tell which. And where there were written passages, the words, though English, were in some meaningless combinations of code. Here and there someone had underlined a series of numbers or a phrase. In the margins there were interjections, I think, but those too were all scrambled.

The first night I awoke with my new pajamas soaked through, and, in the dark, I groped my way to the flimsy bureau and searched out the book and took it to bed, pushed in far up under the mattress and realized, by my action, something I’d kept quiet and secret from myself — they might come for this. Early the next morning I flew to Panama City.

But all this was thought out, you see. It wasn’t really panic. I was worried, I admit. The more unintelligible the dirty yellow book, the more unsettled my peace of mind. And besides, I simply couldn’t come home five or six days early, could I? I had no plans at all about what I’d say to B.

I toured Central America, I guess. Though I didn’t pay much attention at all to San José or Belize. I spent most of my money in airports, hotel restaurants. The last couple of days I spent the good part of the day bent over the book, searching through its pages again and again, drawing on cheap hotel stationery the figures, diagrams, copying the passages. I needed to understand what was happening.

The last night, under the weak yellow light in the dirty bathroom, I inspected my face, jerked closer to the glass, my heavy breath fogging it, to stare at my lips. I didn’t think I’d ever looked closely at them before. Now they seemed foreign. I moved them, mouthed a dozen crazy phrases from the Friends of Beccari, and waited. The water dripped in the stained lavatory; a phone rang through the thin walls. My lips moved again, but this time I spoke out loud. “Jesus Christ,” I said over and over. Just look at yourself.

I flew back to Houston the next day and landed in an afternoon thunderstorm full of heat and dazzling flashes of light. I stood a long time at the baggage carousel until I realized my suitcase had passed me several times. But it wasn’t the nylon bag full of dirty underwear and shirts wrapped around the book. It was the leather suitcase the liveried servant had put just inside the door. You know, I didn’t even open it. The weary customs official waved me through and later in the car I just sat for a long time. The rain whipped across the parked cars in vast heavy sheets. I practiced making up stories. And decided to write you whenever I could.

That night, with B. at my shoulder, I laughed, grinned, talked loudly, my voice ringing around me and her and the children. The happy traveler had returned. No, Allan decided to stay. I unlatched the suitcase and, on top of my unused clothes, there was an array of souvenirs. Beautifully dressed dolls in native costumes; silver earrings for B. and, for me, a heavy mosaic, tesserae depicting some ancient Mayan ritual full of animals, bizarre men, the smoke of incense rising from stubby pyramids. Everyone talked at once.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the enclosed clipping. It’s from the Houston Chronicle about a week ago. Though it’s a bit hard to make out, what caught my attention were the white officers leading the Indian troops across the bridge. You know, it’s the old trouble in the Punjab with the Sikhs and here’s the second Gandhi making the same mistake his mother did of storming the Golden Temple in Amritsar. But anyway, that there were still Anglo officers made me examine it more closely and, though it’s pretty damned fuzzy, I’m almost positive the white officer yelling — the one who has lost his helmet and is half-turned to us — is Allan. Allan and those Friends of Beccari insinuating themselves in India again to lead the “coloreds” out of their own childish mistakes. There and elsewhere in Central America, Africa.

A couple of weekends ago I lied, said Allan’d phoned me at the university, and I drove up to Patroon.

It was a scorching day, there’d been little rain in a month. I thought about you much of the trip. And about what we’d said often — the world growing more callous, frighteningly racist again. I composed part of this letter on the drive, wondered what you’d think of my revelations. I guessed you’d believe me. I’m calm in my new misery. My despair isn’t clinical in its proportions. I know I hoped you’d offer some answers. Though what’s there to say, I wonder? It’s one thing to fight those ideas in your opponents — political, departmental, community. There’s some hope, even if it’s distant, of changing minds, altering viewpoints. But the Friends of Beccari become all those antiquated perspectives full of avarice, repression, distrust. Now the world steps back when, as we believed, it was just barely in the light. What will such western chauvinism bring now, at this late date? Can’t you see awesome numbers everywhere adopting it, clinging to it as the stained yellow book alters, regresses. The gibberish of numbers, diagrams, paragraphs offering the romance of antique order, control, clear-eyed white faces again in charge, the deferential, obliging masses hunkered down, their own good in all our minds.

I parked the car in front of the beautiful limestone building. The ground-floor office was locked. I squatted, opened the mail chute with my fingers, but there was no jumble of mail and all I could see were thick carpet and dark table legs.

I climbed the stairs at the side up to his apartment, but the door was locked and the expensive glass pane was frosted.

I sat for a while halfway down the steps waiting for something to happen. But what did I expect? Allan was something else. The cicadas sang in the heat. I figured I’d get a phone call some day soon. And a voice like theirs would tell me my brother was dead somewhere too far away for me to retrieve his body myself and that he, the perfectly modulated voice, having developed a close companionship with my brother, would take care of everything. Not to worry, old man.

I sweated on the steps. Then I stood. The apartment and office abandoned carapaces, cicada hulls, reflecting the perfect outlines but empty. My brother was Beccari Man, the newest-old manifestation. Dave, do you think there’s anything we can do? Whose responsibility is it, if not mine? Is it yours, too? Ours? I picked up one of the empty hulls, gently parted it from the wooden railing and held its weightlessness in my palm. From all around they pelted me with their triumphant cry of terrible release.

Awaiting your reply,

Don