Sign Languages by James Hannah Page A

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.
    â€œBut 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