“Doug, I think I need some air,” Virgil whispered, very quietly even for Virgil. He was watching the floor. Needle fear had made him sweaty.

“Right. Good idea,” whispering back in that hush of the library fraught with expectancy and tension, tugging on his arm. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

“I’m all right. Let go of my arm,” Virgil insisted.

“I don’t mind. You stand up and I’ll help. We’ll slip out to the gazebo and relax on a bench and watch the homeless people light their campfires in the meadow.”

“Doug, you’re hurting my arm. Please! I don’t want to go to the gazebo.”

A scattering of brothers swiveled heads to frown in our direction. One of these—it was Roger in his cowboy boots—waved. Neither Virgil (hunched uneasily over, palms clammy on knees) nor I (hands securely affixed to Virgil’s forearm) dared wave back. If you show Roger indication of receptivity to him, he’ll come over.

To Virgil I said, “You’re making a spectacle.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If I let go of your arm, will you pull yourself together and behave?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you running off. All right? I don’t want to have to come hunting for you.”

Gloominess from Virgil. Dead animals gazed down. Among the men gathered around Maxwell, a solemn, ethnomedical colloquium was in progress. Certain words—“rapture,” “zombie,” “potential blindness”—and longer phrases—“extensive psychomotor damage” and “Indigenous peoples along the lower Amazon use these substances in spirit rituals” and “Actually, in some cases, humans”—escaped, now and then, to rise up and echo dully against the bleak vaults above our heads. Finally from out of this ad hoc conference there came a wail, loud at first and growing louder like some animal’s sound. Every brother turned. The Doberman, hearing the sound, bounded from his place leashed to the armchair and made his own racket tugging things over. No one paid any attention to this. The wail rang out. It was coming from Max. Brothers closest to the sound did not know whether to approach or retreat as, first, Max’s hands, then his feet, next arms, and at last Maxwell’s legs began to tremble and to flail, all extremities storming the air near Milton and Siegfried and our young Christopher. Backward these three now fled. There was no holding their brother. Violently Max beat the air. Only Barry persisted—dutifully—in trying to comfort Maxwell’s sputtering head in his lap. “A tongue depressor! Hurry! In my valise!” cried the MD, but it was too late for this as Maxwell’s open hand swung furiously upward to slap Barry’s face and knock eyeglasses flying and the doctor himself tumbling backward against a table leg that stove him in the head. “Uhf,” Barry said. Then Fielding’s camera’s battery-powered spotlight bleached everything white, as Fielding climbed more or less aboard Max, shot down on the pharmacobotanist, took blows in the process. Fielding’s commitment to his craft was inspiring. Nevertheless, there was something garish about this scene. The documentary-film maker’s art is not only voyeuristic (we are, after all, meddlers in one another’s lives), but opportunistic—our poor Max suffering epiphanies on the rug and his own brother satisfied to hover above him and film it! Maxwell punched deliriously at nothing we could know. The noise rising from him was magnificent. It was a sound you might imagine coming out of a man being opened with a knife. It hurt to hear it. Virgil, hearing it, got that terrorized look he gets, eyes showing white, not a good sign, and I thought it’d likely be advantageous under these circumstances to go ahead and squire him around back for some air, so said to him, “Let’s go, Virgil.” Unfortunately leaving became immediately unfeasible. Max’s long scream, nearing its end, turned articulate. From the Persian carpet at the heart of the room, Maxwell, breathless and bloodlessly pale beneath Fielding’s camera shining down on him in his distress, cried, “Doug! Doug!”