EXCERPT Of course Bento had never seen him before, his scabby black Rastafarian Brazilian, his Pernambucan Negusa Nagast. Who’s ever seen anything like that? A Black Indo-Eastern army equipped with throwing weapons, driving away the masters of the Dutch anomaly, masters at the cutting edge of commercial, political, and military progress from the West Indies. Points versus cutting edge. American anomaly versus European anomaly—or, more precisely, versus what the man dressed as Oswald, the European homo habitus, is able to understand as an anomaly by way of his chronic messianism, which prevents him from thinking of the anomalous as anything other than a vague prefiguration of something that is never going to happen. An invisible moose that cannot be shot with an arrow. And of course it’s a question of the double. But not the one we think, the double of the Hoffmannian- Freudian tale of castration anxiety or the Dostoyevskian double, Goliadkin the younger versus Goliadkin the elder, doubles from cold countries where it’s still a question of father and son.…