Dear Daisuke

The fevers are lessening, but I feel that I must be hallucinating. Takeshi is dead? How is this possible? I once saw him lift a grown Mongolian bull from a ditch on his shoulders. He was virtually immune to every bacteria, virus, toxin and poison known to man (he did this by consuming small portions of his own feces, but that is another story). You must tell me if you are confabulating again, Daisuke. Do not lead me astray as you did that time in upper Uzbekistan. If Takeshi has truly passed, tell me how this has happened so that I may come pay my respects.

Gunther

hari ha furue ru...

Uncle Gunther,

It has been so long since we last have spokn, I hope you have recovered well.  i have some distressing news.  father is dead.  I cannot get into the details now, uncle, but I will reach out to you again in a few days.  Guangzhou has become shadowy again…  quickly, I will leave you with Father’s final words before he slipped away:  “Gunther,… hari ha furue ru…”   “the needle trembles.” 

Goodbye, uncle, plse be careful.  Otosan passed in great pain … it’s possible fever not malaria but something else.  Otosan same.  Miss him.  Ibex is back.

Daisuke

Dear Takeshi

I must apologize for the years it has been since I last wrote.  I am writing to you from my bed in Feira de Santana where I have been laid up with malaria.  While the fevers have not been pleasant, it has afforded me time to reflect upon my useless life.  Useless, you may say?  Yes Takeshi, useless.  For what have I truly done in these past 40 years?  True, the Apurina tribe still exists due to my intervention of Presidente Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's mad plan to raze their floresta.  And yes, was it not my idea to get Vaclav Havel to stop writing about revolution and to start doing something about it?  But how do these things compare to my failure to prevent the extinction of the Pyrenean Ibex?  Their melancholy hoo-hoo cry will echo for eternity within my feverish brain. 

I am haunted by Thoreau's words, that most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.  I am driven by an inconsolable bitterness, that I am such a man.  The dreams of my youth have passed their expiration and there were doors to possibility that are now closed and sealed tighter than the calcium vault of an oyster.

Forgive my melancholy.  The quinine affects me strangely.  However, I fear that it is only unmasking the great hoax that I call my life. 

Gunther