It was a wretched, pewter-colored day. The red library walls were haunted by shadows and light cast from a multitude of low-wattage reading lamps that haloed the tables on which they sat illuminating our laps as we flopped down on sofas and chairs overhung by English hunt prints and the heads of game animals, mounted, desolate, African, gazing out from rectangles of wall framed in wood shelves crowded with Victorian matched sets and works by obscure poets.

“I hate this room. It stinks of death,” whispered Virgil, wedged beside me on a love seat. Virgil often felt, or he seemed to feel, to have felt, since his childhood, frightened and oppressed. It was impossible to say or do anything to make life less unpleasant for him. Nevertheless, we tried. “Lighten up,” I told him. A line of our brothers scuffed past us in search of places to sit. The library was filling with male energy and low sounds of voices saying, “Hey, man, scoot over and make space.” Soon it would be standing room only. The musty air would grow lush with our smells of sweat, shaving lotions, exhaled humid breaths. God help us. Already Virgil was hunched over on our shared cushiony seat, looking moist and claustrophobic with his head hovering between his knees, watery eyes scrutinizing the carpet. “Try reading a magazine,” I suggested. Then, from a distant corner of the room—a crash, the jolting shatter of glass exploding, a lamp going down. This always happens when we crowd together in the red library: someone trips on a cord or backs into a three-legged table flaunting a bud vase, or hurls his body too heavily onto a chair, with the result that some objet or piece of heirloom furniture winds up noisily destroyed; it’s alarming and inevitable and laughable. Today’s mishap appeared to be the work of Max, who, clearly startled by the overturned light’s impact, the noisy report of breaking china, stopped a moment to stare down at the lamp cord snarled around his ankle, the black electrical line snaking across the floor through porcelain strewn in brilliant white ruin near his shoes (the tiny conical lampshade having sprung free and gone flying, nearly knocking another lamp from another table), before looking up to gaze slowly here and there around the hushed room, then ask no one in particular, “Did I do that?”

Poor Maxwell. Ever since his return, last month, from a pharmacological botanical specimen–gathering expedition, he’s been noticeably agitated, clumsy and distracted in the manner of one plagued by either fever or crisis. Apparently, something strange had happened in Costa Rica, and now Max was walking into things and breaking them, at a rate of about one electrical fixture, decorative serving dish, potted plant, or item of statuary every three days.

“What’s wrong with him, do you think?” Virgil whispered barely audibly in my ear.

Together we watched Max kneel unsteadily down among the lamp shards. Siegfried and Stephen, both standing in Max’s vicinity when the accident happened, came over and crouched beside their brother, helped him collect fragments, which they all painstakingly swept—their six outstretched, middle-aged hands raking and pawing the carpet for nuggets of porcelain and indiscernible, translucent bulb splinters—into a tidy pile. I was astounded by how fat Stephen had become. Just looking at him made me want a whiskey and soda. He scooped a quantity of particles into his soft hands and trotted off toward the fireplace, where, despite the fact that it was sufficiently warm in the room—and would become, what with the steady infiltration of more and more of our bodies, suffocatingly so—old Hiram was leaning on his walker, performing his customary patriarchal act of rudely supervising construction of yet another of his stupendous, raging fires.