Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (19 page)

“I was recklessly unscientific, but
it was a lapse I believed I could turn to good account. Um. I knew a thing or
two about Amazonian hallucinogens, yage, ayahuasca and the lot, but my
objective knowledge fell lamentably short of the subjective experience. Oh,
Christ, yes!”

“Pot! You modest old fox.
Congratulations. You’re a Castaneda, after all.”

Reddening and sputtering, the
anthropologist seemed to swallow a bellyful of smoke. “No, no, far from it. I
sampled the sorcerer’s wares, but I didn’t sign on for an apprenticeship.
Nothing of the sort. I’m prepared to admit that I may previously have been
suffering an unjustifiable complacency concerning the limits of reality, but
that territory of . . . of terrors and senseless beauty is not any countryside
I long to tramp. As it was, I indulged in behavior of which my colleagues
strongly disapprove, and, in the end, I defeated my own purpose.”

“How so?”

It had been an extended ordeal of
vomit and hallucination, a long night spent surfing alternating waves of horror
and ecstasy—and in the shaky morning when End of Time had finally showed
himself, pyramid head and all, Smithe (less overwhelmed by the sight of that
capitate curiosity than he might normally have been) found himself somehow
disinclined, even unable, to interrogate the medicine man along the lines that
he had so carefully prepared. “I was a disgrace to my profession,” Smithe
contended. “I asked all the wrong questions.”

“What sort of things did you ask?”

“Never mind. Cosmological questions,
you might call them. Issues that swam to the surface as I was being dashed
about on that
yopo
ocean. Load of bosh, really.”

And that was all he would say.

Five months prior to Switters’s
arrival, Smithe had returned to Boquichicos at his own expense, hoping to get
another crack at the phenomenally pated Indian. Repeatedly rebuffed—End of Time
refused to encourage an atmosphere of familiarity with any outsider—Smithe now
dumped his eggs in Switters’s basket. Should the Yank be granted an audience,
maybe, just maybe, Smithe might tag along; and if not, then at the very least,
Switters could put in a word on his behalf. Both his university and his wife
were vexed with him, but he couldn’t turn back. Not just yet. He gave
indications of being, over End of Time, in a rough equivalent of the amorous
stupor that Switters was in over Suzy. Thus, out of empathy as much as
curiosity, and against that paralyzer, that strangler of enlightened progress
known as “better judgment,” Switters consented to let a ragtag gaggle of
Nacanaca carry off Sailor Boy into the jungle.

It was still raining, but
halfheartedly now, and in a matter of minutes a hard shock of sunshine would
blast their eyes and zap newly formed mud flows into charcoal dust and solar
cement. They stepped out from under the infirmary awning. A straggler, a
solitary traveler, the last and final raindrop of the morning—unapologetically
tardy, even arrogant, as if on an independent mission its meekly conforming
confederates could not possibly appreciate or understand—landed on the back of
Switters’s neck and rolled languidly, defiantly down his spine. He took it as
an omen, though of what he was not precisely clear.

There had been a new moon on the
previous evening, and both Smithe and the Nacanaca held the opinion that End of
Time would still be at the way station, the ceremonial lodge. As they watched
the Indians scamper onto the forest trail with the pyramid cage and its
somewhat bewildered occupant, Smithe rubbed his hammy paws together and said,
“Smashing! A smashing turn of events. One dares to nourish one’s hopes, whether
vainly or not one will soon enough find out. It would take the likes of you or
me the better part of a day to huff and puff our way to that squalid lodge, but
these blokes can cover the distance in a couple of hours. They’ll be back by
dusk, I’ll wager. By the way, old man, what’s the meaning of this I.O.U. you’ve
thrust upon my person?”

Leaving R. Potney Smithe to his
customary stool in the hotel bar, Switters climbed to his room, where he
activated his computer in satellite mode. It was guilt and little else—guilt
over the strange turn he’d permitted the parrot assignment to take—that
prompted him to want to e-mail Maestra. Alas, he couldn’t think of what he
might say to her. Certainly not the truth. Awaiting inspiration, he checked his
own mailbox, the personal not the official one. There were three messages
there, the first from his grandmother, herself.

> How come no progress report?
Shouldn’t you be
> home by now? I have a gut feeling you’re up to no
> good. The museum’s director of acquisitions came by
> today to see our Matisse and nearly peed his pants.
> Word to the wise, buddy.

> Get in touch.

The second message was from Bobby
Case, apparently still in
Alaska
,
piloting the spy plane known as the U2 and a more recent version called the
TR1.

> The 49th state is a harsh
environment for salty dogs. Girls too
> old, too grungy, or their daddies too well armed. Company
> continues to ignore my requests for transfer. O whither, O dither.
> I must be demented but I miss you, podner. Trust you’re up to no
> good.

>
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronnton
> nerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoor
> denenthurnuk!

That last was the only real news
in the message, implying as it did that Bobby had now gotten as far as the
fourth sentence in
Finnegans Wake
. He deserved a congratulatory note on
his headway—provided, of course, he hadn’t skipped.

E-missive No. 3 proved to be from—be
still, dear pulse!—none other than the baby-fatted skeleton in his closet, the
hormonal soprano in his choir stall, the lollipop Lorelei on his river rock,
the moon over his barnyard, the puss up his tree, the
baba-toohoohoo-denenthurnuk! of his heart. And it read:

> Don’t forget you promised to
help me with my term
> paper. Jesus loves you.

> Suzy

A libido torpedo? Not by any
means. Some men, true enough, would have been discouraged by Suzy’s note,
devoid as it was of the faintest blush of romantic undertone, but its very
simplicity and pragmatic directness, its very
chasteness
, if you will,
served only to amplify Switters’s ardor. Suddenly dizzy with desire, he toppled
onto the bed and commenced to moan.

Likewise amplified were his
misgivings about having permitted a befuddled anthropologist to entangle him in
some highly unpromising business involving a deformed witch doctor. If only he
had discharged his duty as planned, had delivered Sailor to a suitable
retirement community and taped the procedure as the parrot crossed the
threshold of geriatric autonomy, he might, in a few hours, be making his way
homeward to skittish teases, furtive squeezes, and who could guess how much
more. Moans of inflamed appetite were interspersed with moans of regret.

In contrast to so many of his
contemporaries, however, Switters failed to find in prolonged lamentation an
appealing form of recreation. It wasn’t so much that Switters was above
self-indulgence but, rather, that he preferred to indulge himself in merrier
ways. Thus, in not much more time than it took a gecko to circle the walls of his
room, disappearing finally into the rust-streaked, concrete shower stall, he
had willfully relieved himself of the burden of remorse (by simply refusing to
shoulder it:
people of the world, relax
), and shortly thereafter,
lightened his erotic load, as well (by means that shall not here be discussed).

He lay, naked and perspiring, upon
his bed, watching an inactive ceiling fan use electricity deprivation as an
excuse not to knock its brains out against the heavy air of the room; and, with
a calmer mind, he conceded that it might well be for the better that he was
delaying his reappearance in Sacramento, although in temporarily substituting a
visit to the Kandakandero for a visit to his mother’s, he suspected that he was
merely choosing the frying pan ahead of the fire. He smiled at this, as if
recognizing in himself a familiar trait, a lifelong willingness to take risks
in order to experiment with a different set of circumstances; and when he caught
himself smiling, he tried to visualize what the smiling lessons of the wild
Ka’daks must look like.

If End of Time’s thesis, that
civilized man’s powers were attributable to laughter, failed to strike Switters
as unduly outlandish, it was probably because it was not so far removed from a
favorite idea of Maestra’s: her theory of the missing link.

“What is it,” Maestra had asked quite
rhetorically, “that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals?
Well, as I see it, it’s exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor,
Imagination, Eroticism—as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of
glowworms or raccoons—Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an
appreciation of beauty for its own sake.

“Now,” she’d gone on to say, “since
those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to
which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is
less than human.
Capisce
? And in those cases where the defining
qualities are virtually nonexistent, well, what we have are entities that are
north of the animal kingdom but south of humanity, they fall somewhere in
between, they’re our missing links.”

In his grandmother’s opinion, the
missing link of scientific lore was neither extinct nor rare. “There’re more of
them, in fact, than there are of us, and since they actually seem to be
multiplying, Darwin’s theory of evolution is obviously wrong.” Maestra’s stand
was that missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in
the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual
sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded
and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority.

“That could be problematic,” Switters
had said, straining, at the age of twenty, to absorb this rant, “because only
people who, you know,
lack
those six qualities seem to ever run for any
sort of office.”

Maestra thoroughly agreed, although
she was undecided whether it was because full-fledged humans simply had more
interesting things to do with their lives than marinate them in the torpid
waters of the public trough or if it was because only missing links, in the
reassuring blandness of their banality, could expect to attract the votes of a
missing link majority. In any event, of the six qualities that distinguished
the human from the subhuman, both grandmother and grandson agreed that
Imagination and Humor were probably the most crucial.

The finer points of their reasoning
were vague to him now. There was something, to be sure, about how only those
with imagination could envision improvements and only those with a sense of
humor could savor a good laugh when those improvements backfired or turned to
crap. The idea of focusing on the laugh itself—on the grounds that of all our
different expressions of beingness, only laughter was pure enough, complex
enough, free enough, endowed with enough mystery of meaning, to accurately
reflect the soul—surely did not occur to them. But now Switters could see that
while it was extremely unlikely that End of Time would ever be able to
differentiate between, say, wise laughter and the yuks of jackasses braying at
refinements they were too coarse to comprehend, the young shaman, nevertheless,
might have stumbled on to something. Wondering what Maestra would make of it
all, and thinking, though not for the first time, how in the CIA, the terms
cowboy
and
missing link
could easily be interchangeable, he fell asleep.

He was awakened about three hours
later by a politely urgent rapping at his door. Employing his Panama hat as a
fig leaf, he cracked the door to find R. Potney Smithe, breathing hard from the
two flights of stairs and bubbling over with gin and news.

Word had reached Boquichicos—whether
by drumbeat, smoke signal, or telepathy, Smithe couldn’t discern—that the
Nacanaca delegation was already on its way back from the way station. It had
left the parrot and its cage behind. Switters voiced alarm, but Smithe brushed
aside his protests.

“End of Time will see you,” Smithe
announced. “The bloody bugger won’t see me, but he’ll see you. I say, old boy,
you look enormously ornamental in that hat. Um. Yes. In relation to the matter
at hand, however, you’d best get clothed. He’s sent for you. He wants to see
you
tonight.”

And so it came to pass that at
approximately four o’clock on that sultry November afternoon, Switters walked
into the jungle. He was wearing his last clean white suit (Potney could not
persuade him otherwise) and a tie-dyed T-shirt (Potney agreed that the Ka’daks
might take to its variegated colors). This garb was accessorized with rubber
boots, Panama hat, and a belt of khaki webbing, into which, hidden by the
jacket, the Beretta had been handily stuck. Completing the ensemble was a day
pack (Potney lent it) containing dry socks, a flashlight, mosquito root, salt
tablets, migraine tablets, drinking water, a notebook, pencils, the camcorder,
matches, and a snake-bite kit. “And would you fancy a tin of biscuits?” Potney
had asked as they stuffed the little rucksack, but Switters could not entertain
the notion of a biscuit unadorned by red-eye gravy.