Sign Languages (10 page)

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.