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.