Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (18 page)

“Entirely literal, old boy, I almost
regret to say. Wretchedly literal.” Smithe paused to light a cigarette, sending
a plump pillow of smoke off to be drilled into feathery oblivion by the
numberless bullets of the rain. “Yes. But if you knew your Peruvian ethnology
and whatnot, you’d know that this chap’s pyramid head is not completely without
precedent. Not in the high
Andes
, at any rate.”

Whereupon Smithe informed Switters of
the occasional practice among certain Andean Indians of strapping boards to the
soft heads of infants, molding them over time into cones that mirrored the
contours of the volcanos that loomed on their horizons and that they worshiped
as gods. Such sculpting of the skull—literally re-creating man in gods’
image—was common enough to have been well documented, and while contemporary
Kandakandero had no physical contact whatsoever with malformed Andean
volcano-worshipers, one could not rule out an interchange in centuries past.
Stories, moreover, had wings. Also, and Smithe would speak more of this later,
the Kandakandero seemed to have the ability to access information, events,
images,
et cetera
from great distances, a notion that failed to shock Switters
because the CIA had once experimented with a similar psychic technique (under
the term
remote viewing
), and several of the angels had become quite
adept at it before opposition from irate Christian hillbillies in Congress had
shut the project down.

There was doubt in Potney’s mind,
however, that End of Time’s pyramid head was a copycat creation. At least, not
entirely so. “I suspect DDT played a part in it. At the beginning.”

“DDT? In the Amazon?”

“Oh my, yes. You Yanks mightn’t fling
your poison about at home any longer, but that jolly well hasn’t stopped you
from shipping it abroad. Especially to the unsuspecting undeveloped.
Peru
reeks of it. Even back here, I’m afraid.”

“Ain’t no weevils fattening they
little selves on Nacanaca vegetables?”

“Wouldn’t think so, although the
chácara’s entomological interlopers aren’t the primary target, nor are malarial
mosquitoes. DDT arrives here from
Pucallpa
in five-gallon drums. The government issues it to the
Nacanaca, who trade it to the Ka’daks for hides and potions, or else the
Ka’daks simply bully it from them. Whatever. Both tribes use it for fishing.”

Smithe described a scene in which
Indians pour five gallons of pesticide into a small river, just above a rapids
or a waterfall, then stroll downstream to effortlessly scoop killed fish out of
the eddies.

DDT as trade-good fish poison was
finding its way into the jungle years before Boquichicos was settled, and
congenital deformity was thought to have increased as a result, though there
was no scientific proof of it. Smithe’s theory was that End of Time had come
into the world slightly mutated, due to maternal consumption of contaminated
fish. The Kandakandero had taken his affliction as a sign of divine favor and a
portent of supernatural abilities, and immediately consecrated him to
witchwork. Before he began his active apprenticeship, while he was still a
baby, the local shaman had placed his pointy little head in a series of
progressively larger mahogany presses (Switters thought of that old-fashioned pressed
tennis racket of his, heavy and wooden, that Suzy, with her modern lightweight
graphite number, had made such fun of), deliberately and dramatically
accentuating its pyramidal tendency.

It was only a hypothesis. It could
have been something altogether different, altogether unimaginable. What did
seem conclusive, however, was that by the time End of Time was a teenager, he
had ousted his people’s reigning shaman and assumed the man’s duties. And now,
at age twenty-five or thereabouts, he was regarded (by that handful of souls
aware of his existence) as either the most feared and mysterious member of the
most feared and mysterious tribe in that part of
South America
or as an addled medical oddity cashing in on the
small-change benefits of primitive superstition.

If Switters’s brow resembled the
coils in an electric heater, it wasn’t so much due to lingering doubt over the
veracity of Smithe’s story as to his effort to remember what his grandmother
had told him about pyramid power. According to Maestra, and she had it on good
authority, there was something about the configuration, the dimensional
relationships of a pyramid’s angles, the way it crystallized in static form the
essence of dynamic geometry, that caused it to focus, laserlike, an electromagnetic
or other atmospheric force (perhaps that energy the Chinese called
chi
),
concentrating it in a relatively small, prescribed area. Switters recalled
something about razor blades being sharpened and fruit kept from spoiling by
pyramid-focused rays. That, come to think of it, was the rationale behind
Sailor’s customized cage. He supposed that if a pyramid really could hone steel
and preserve peaches, a pyramid-shaped head might have a pretty entertaining
effect on the brain inside it—and it would probably be no great exaggeration to
describe as “most remarkable,” a “chap” with such a brain.

“So,” said Switters, “these Nacanaca
boys believe their ferocious cousins would get a kick out of Sailor’s cage
because it’s shaped like the head of their grand boohoo?”

Smithe nodded. “Something like that,
yes. Far be it from me to speak for the atavistic mind.” He paused to inhale
and exhale a blue-tinted wad of smoke. “There
is
a bit more to it. When
your bird blurted out that number about people needing to relax—clever turn,
that: your tutelage?—it struck a chord. This End of Time chap, he has some
novel ideas. A philosophy, one might be tempted to call it. Something beyond
the usual mumbo jumbo, at any rate. Relaxation, at least in the Nacanaca
understanding of the concept, fits rather neatly with it, I suppose. So, you
see, our blokes here have concluded that End of Time must have a supernatural
connection with this cage and its occupant, and while that’s a load of bosh, I
daresay he
would
be impressed. It’s likely he’d grant you an audience,
which would provide you with scrapbook fodder of the most exotic order, and me
with the possibility of riding in on your coattails.”

“You’ve socialized with him
previously?”

“Yes. Three years ago. At the way
station, for thirty-six hours. Bloody bugger really put me through it. Can’t
imagine why I’d want to go back—except that it’s, well,
haunted
me ever
since. And there’s the chance I might turn it into something. Original yet
academically rigorous. That first encounter went rather awry, I’m afraid.
Crossed the line. Um. I’m no Carlos Castaneda.”

Switters grinned. “Of course you
aren’t.”
You’re one of those people,
he thought,
who want to go to
Heaven without dying. Cowardice in the name of objectivity is fairly
characteristic of academics, especially in Merry Olde.
But he didn’t wish
to get into that. Instead, he inquired as to the nature of the living pyramid’s
so-called novel ideas. Considering the young shaman’s name—an inexact
translation by Smithe and Fer-de-lance, it turned out, of a virtually
unpronounceable Kandakandero word—he guessed his notions must have something to
do with eschatology, with apocalypticism, with time.

“Oh, there may be a bubble of that in
the keg. I didn’t bung into it. Not my end of the field, you see. Not that. Nor
the other, either, honestly, though it may be yours. Our chap, you see, is
rather obsessed with . . . with gaiety.”

Gaiety? Potney Smithe’s explanation
was a rickety trellis of sober anthropological observations, lathed in the fine
mill of British understatement, but rattled by occasional gusts of alcoholic
verbosity, and, of course, splintered here and there by cracks from Switters.
Once again, we shall attempt summation.

Kandakandero had always referred to
themselves as “the Real People.” Theirs was ethnocentrism in its unadulterated
form. Other tribes, other races were not merely deemed to be inferior humans,
they were relegated in the Ka’dak mind to the status of animals or ghosts. Then
End of Time came along. It’s very true, he told his clan, that we are superior
to other Indians because we have stronger magic and purer ways. As for white
men, they are so helpless and stupid they could not survive in the forest for a
single moon. Yet the white man can do wondrous things that we cannot.

Fly, for example. For decades, air
traffic between
Lima
and Belém or to and from
Europe
had passed over that area of the Peruvian jungle roamed by the seminomadic
Ka’daks, and more recently, small planes out of
Pucallpa
had been buzzing around. White men also had shiny
boxes that they attached to the sterns of their canoes to make them swim faster
than dolphins, and they possessed weapons so powerful and accurate they reduced
hunting and warfare to child’s play. In Boquichicos they had motionless boxes
that churned out more music than a tribe could make, other boxes that cooked
meat and yucca without a spark of fire. (The Ka’daks were well informed about
what transpired in Boquichicos, though whether they spied on the town from the
forest, accessed it psychically, or simply relied on Nacanaca gossip, Smithe
wasn’t prepared to say.) End of Time recognized that white men were a threat to
his people’s habitat, that eventually these pale weaklings with their noisy
magic would dominate the forest world and all within it, including the
heretofore invincible Ka’daks. White men were the new Real People, the spirits
obviously were favoring them. Why?

Over and over again, End of Time
drank his potions, snorted his snuffs, entered his trances, rubbed his portable
pyramid. He questioned sundry Nacanaca and once sat for five days in a treetop
observing, undetected, goings-on in Boquichicos. What was it about these men
(aside from a hideous complexion that no god could possibly find pleasing) that
made them so different from the older and once wiser Kandakandero? (No fool,
End of Time could distinguish between superficial and fundamental differences.)
Roughly speaking, they ate, drank, smoked, and slept the same. They shat,
pissed, and fucked the same. So what was the white man’s secret?

Finally, one day, it hit him like a
blow dart. The big secret was laughter.

Amazonian Indians, in general, tended
to be somber, and the Ka’daks were especially severe. Kandakandero did not
laugh. They did not even smile. Moreover, they had never laughed or smiled. The
very concept was alien to them. Smithe suggested that for “the Real People,”
life simply might be
too
“real”: too terrible, too short, too arduous,
too . . . vivid. Whatever the reason, you might as realistically expect a
Ka’dak to shout “E5mc
²
” as to chuckle. No giggle had ever, in all of
history, chased its tail around one of their campfires, no smirk had ever
cracked their war paint, no guffaw had ever taken up where a belch left off, no
titter or tee-hee had scratched for them its crystal fleas. The roar of
civilized laughter might strike them as ridiculous, but it wouldn’t strike them
as funny. The Ka’daks didn’t know from funny.

In a radical break with both instinct
and inclination, End of Time tried to teach himself to smile. He practiced
alone, monitoring his progress in a reflecting pool. The first time he smiled
for his gathered clansmen, he left them so astonished, so awestruck that half
fell, trembling, to their knees, and the rest ran away and hid in the bushes.
When he commenced to experiment with laughing, nobody was able to sleep for
months. And when he insisted that others learn the art of grinning and
chortling, the whole tribe nearly had a nervous breakdown.

The shaman persevered, however, even
as it occurred to him that his glee was hollow, mechanical, and contrived. He
sensed that an attitude adjustment must be required, that the perpetually
piercing level of intensity that characterized the Kandakandero might need to
be softened, toned down. (
Real People of the world, relax!
) Around the
occasion of Potney Smithe’s visit, End of Time was just coming to the
realization that white men didn’t laugh as a chore or on schedule or to please
the gods, that the mystical hee-haw was not self-induced but had to be
provoked; that some external happenstance, frequently invisible,
aroused
laughter in them.

At their initial meeting, with
Fer-de-lance as interpreter, Smithe labored to help the medicine man comprehend
the concept of humor. “Nothing approaching the subtler moods of irony,
naturally, but the more direct, earthy approach of juvenile mockery. Of course,
much of juvenile humor is sexual and scatological, and to the Ka’dak mind
there’s nothing the least bit funny about bodily functions. Their taboos are of
a different order. You might as well ask them to snigger at the sky.”

Still, Smithe felt, End of Time made
some progress in the area of lightheartedness, though he doubted there was any
such thing as a joke comprehensible to him or his fellows. “The same could be
said of the religiously fundamental and the politically doctrinaire,” piped in
Switters.

In repayment for Smithe’s having
assisted him in his uphill pursuit of gaiety, the misshapen shaman offered to
meet with him again the following day, and this next time Smithe could ask the
questions. Moreover, Smithe would be allowed to actually look at him,
face-to-face: during their first encounter, the witchman had concealed himself
behind a woven grass screen. Not surprisingly, there was a catch. Before Smithe
could be permitted to gaze upon the fabled pyramid head, the impure Englishman
would have to prove himself worthy to a collection of guides, overlords,
supervisors, kibitzers, and hecklers from the Other Side.