Sign Languages

by James Hannah

  “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 a
dopting 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

  BACKYARDS

  Richard put the groceries on the table and walked back to close the door against the summer heat. For a moment he breathed deeply and inhaled the fishy odor he’d noticed yesterday the second day in his brother’s house. And though he’d looked for its source, he hadn’t found it.