Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (20 page)

In addition to the five tireless
Indians who would lead and escort him, he was accompanied by Fer-de-lance. The
product of a Nacanaca mother and a Spanish petroleum geologist, Fer-de-lance
(then called Pedro) had been removed by Jesuit missionaries at the age of nine
from the Nacanaca village where he was born and taken to Lima to be educated.
The Jesuits had been correct in their assessment of the boy’s intelligence.
Their mistake, perhaps, was in exposing such native keenness to too much
uncensored information, for in college, he began to seriously question the
Catholic faith, eventually dropping out of classes to join the Sendero
Luminoso. Gradually he had become disenchanted with leftist dogmatism, as well,
and returned to Boquichicos to reconnect with his roots.

“That’s often a false path, too,”
muttered Switters, referring to a contemporary U.S. penchant for tracking down
one’s ethnic identity and then binding oneself to its trappings and traditions,
no matter how irrelevant, rather than, say, liberating and transforming oneself
by inventing an entirely fresh identity. Nevertheless, he welcomed
Fer-de-lance—animal trader and aspiring shaman—for his linguistic abilities:
English, Spanish, Nacanacan, and even Kandakanderoan. “He should make an ideal
interpreter for me,” said Switters, “as long as he doesn’t get sidetracked by
any damn snakes.”

The plan was for Smithe to hike in as
far as the chácara on the following day. From the garden plot, where Smithe had
Nacanacan acquaintances, they would return together to Boquichicos, unless
Switters was able to convince End of Time to grant the Englishman another
interview.

“You
will
take good notes,
won’t you?” Smithe almost pleaded. “In the event he continues to reject me. I
must have something to show for this folly, besides a possible sacking and a
probable divorce.” Sincerely, yet with a degree of embarrassment, as if it were
comportment upon which his peers might frown, he commenced to pump Switters’s
hand. “Can’t thank you enough, old boy. Can’t thank you enough.”

“Forget it, pal. Errands ‘r’ me. Just
make sure my Pucallpa mariners don’t weigh anchor without me. I’m needed
Stateside on the double, help a young friend with her homework.”

With that, Switters turned and strode
into the rain forest, vanishing almost immediately in a sea of titanic trees, a
jumpy mosaic of light and shadow, a tunnel of filtered sunshine and violet
penumbras, a funhouse with dripping green walls and slippery linoleum, a
leaf-happy music hall set vibrating by sudden unpredictable animal soloists and
steadily thrumming insect choirs. He quickly became a minor figure in a dense,
tattered tapestry that was shagged with Shavian whiskers of moss, loosely
stitched with long, loopy threads of vine, and fluttered by spirits and unseen
Indian sentinels; while here, there, and sometimes everywhere this rank, spooky
tableau visually popped with blubber-lipped frogs, festive sparks of bird
flitter, and orchids the size of boxing gloves; with monkey shines, butterfly
stunts, phosphors, fruits, belted white worms that resembled the severed
fingers of the Michelin tire man, and lumps of suspect nougat that could be
toad or toadstool, either one. Yes, and as if layering on yet another
dimension, this whole scene seemed scented by syrupy petal pies and bubbling
ponds of decaying plant muck, a nose-puzzling mixture of contradictory aromas
(floral to fecal) perfectly befitting an environment where cure-all juices
coursed alongside poisonous saps, where the gorgeous and the marvelous
repeatedly alternated with the hideous and the dire, where brimming Life and
pertinacious Death held hands at the chlorophyll cinema; where Heaven and Hell
intermingled as they did at no other place on earth, except, perhaps, in the
daily emotions of poor fools in love.

This wasn’t quite what Switters had
had in mind when he told Maestra he needed to get away from cities for a while.
Nevertheless, he went forward. With the air of a man trying to eat the coating
off a chocolate-covered grasshopper, he walked into that very forest.

He would not walk out.

R. Potney Smithe was lounging in
the shade beside the garden patch, swatting flies, smoking cigarettes, and
attempting to coax residual gin molecules out of his own saliva, when he was
summoned to the ceremonial lodge by a Nacanaca runner. It was midmorning, and
he’d been at the chácara since the previous afternoon.

The summons surprised him. At first,
Switters’s lengthy absence had made him hopeful, but as the night passed, and
then the morning, he’d lost faith. Whatever was transpiring at that crude
structure he called a way station—a station on the way from a primitive yucca
patch to Christ knew what—there was scant cause to believe it might advance
his
fortunes in any considerable direction. Both the mysterious American (Ediberto
at the hotel said he was a tractor salesman: not bloody likely!) and the
grotesque shaman had their own special approaches to existence, and in those
approaches, neither the traditions upon which Smithe had been nurtured nor the
discipline in which he’d been schooled held any sway. One of those blokes was
as indifferent as the other. But now he’d been sent for, and if not to
interview End of Time, then what? Hope swelled anew, it could be said, though
to Smithe, the phrase “swelled anew” always suggested the recurrence of a
hemorrhoidal tribulation.

The trail was overgrown, and in
places, slick and steep. It took Smithe more than an hour to reach the lodge, a
three-sided sort of raised longhouse, supported by poles and blackened by
smoke. Upon his arrival, he found that End of Time was gone. The place, in
fact, was deserted, except for Switters, who lay peacefully asleep in
Fer-de-lance’s hammock, slung between two poles, and a couple of Nacanaca bucks
who seemed to be watching over him.

Disheartened and a bit perplexed, the
anthropologist climbed the unsteady ladder to the main platform and seated
himself on a mat beside the hammock. “Where are the Kandakandero?” he asked in
Nacanacan.

“Gone,” the Indians answered.

“Coming back?”

“No.”

“Where’s Fer-de-lance?”

“Went to see great snake.” They were
referring to an anaconda, reputedly forty feet in length, that was said to inhabit
a pool a few miles from there. Fer-de-lance frequently went looking for it,
though his intent—to capture it, kill it, or commune with it—had never been
disclosed.

“Has Señor Switters been sleeping
long?” Forgetting himself, he asked this in Spanish, then rephrased it in
Nacanacan.

Before either Indian could reply,
there came a grunt from the hammock. The device commenced ever so slightly to
swing. “Meaningless question, Pot,” said Switters. His voice was relaxed, and
so thick with sleep he could barely be understood. He yawned. He stretched. The
hammock pitched, as if upon a gentle tide. “You know as well as I that duration
is naught but an illusion around this here juju parlor.” He yawned again.

“An end to time, you mean?”

“There’s that, for damn sure.
Although Fer-de-lance is of the opinion that you two may have mistranslated our
witchman’s name.”

“Oh?” said Smithe.

Switters didn’t elaborate. Instead,
he yawned yet again and rubbed his eyes. “Whatever his name is, he’s some piece
of work.”

“Unique.”

“The most misused word in the English
language,
unique,
but I believe you’ve employed it immaculately. The
dude is genuinely one of a kind. Even without his medicines.”

“He gave you ayahuasca?”

“Yeah, and something extra in the
bargain. Some kind of powder he blew up my nose with a reed.”

“A wild turkey bone, actually. But
long and hollow, in that respect like a reed.”

“Okay. As an ethnographer, you’d know
such things. But, Jesus . . . ! I’m no stranger to mind-altering substances,
Potney—keep that under your hat if you don’t mind—but the stuff your man
dispenses takes the cake, the pie, the strudel, the whole damn pâtisserie.
Whew! Baby! It just keeps peeling away layers, one after the other, for hours.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, deep meditation can do that,
too, except in meditation, what’s peeling away are your own thought patterns.
Worries, anxieties, clichés, bright ideas, ambitions, plans, mental and
emotional hangups, all that half-conscious brain litter. You strip the layers
away, one by one, until the images grow fainter and fainter and the noise grows
quieter and quieter, and
bing
! you arrive at the core, which is naked
emptiness, a kind of exhilarating vacuum. But this shit! Each layer is a
separate dimension, a new world. They’re like landscapes, you travel around
inside them. And you’re not alone in there, they’re
occupied
.”

Smithe nodded. “Did you . . . ? The
bulbs?”

“Bulbs. Yeah. That’s a good name for
them. Shiny copper-colored bulbs. Orbiting the earth. Called themselves
masters, overlords.”

“Most disquieting. Told me they’re in
charge of absolutely everything. Run the show.”

“Me, too. Afterward, I asked End of
Time about it. He off-loaded one of those wicked homemade grins he’s been
working on and shrugged, ‘Oh, they always say that.’ Made it sound like they
were just big blowhards.”

“Boasting.”

“Yeah. Mind-fuckers. But who . . . ?
Or what . . . ?” Switters fell silent.

“Raises a great many questions, but
they’re devilishly difficult to formulate.”

“Hard to talk about. The whole experience.”

“Quite.” Smithe produced a silver
monogrammed case, from which he withdrew a cigarette. “Impossible to put into
words.”

“I know what you’re saying. But it
isn’t because words are inadequate. I won’t go that far.”

“Certain things words can’t convey.”

“Oh, but they can. Because those
things you’re referring to are . . . well, if they’re not actually made of
words or derived from words, at least inhabit words: language is the solution
in which they’re suspended. Even love ultimately requires a linguistic base.”

“All concepts are basically verbal
concepts? Now that you mention it, I have heard that theory advanced.” Smithe
spoke disinterestedly and at the same time anxiously. He hadn’t muddied and
bloodied himself bushwhacking his way to the lodge in order to sit around
arguing semiotics. Only genteel breeding was preventing him from interrupting
Switters with an irritated bellow:
Tell me about End of Time!

“Even if most of our best words have
been trivialized, corrupted, eviscerated by the merchandisers, by the
marketeers, by the. . . .” Switters broke off. He could feel a rant coming on,
but was too tired and, although his outward manner scarcely betrayed it, too
shaken to go through with it.

Smithe seized the chance. “Now, tell
me about—”

“The point is—” Like James Brown,
spent, limp, reeling to the microphone for just one more whoop, Switters
momentarily revived himself. “Words can still handle anything we can throw at
them, including the kitchen sink.
Finnegans Wake
proved that, if nothing
else. It’s a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in
the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks.”

“Um.”

“Our words are up to the job. It’s
our syntax that’s limiting.”

“And what’s so wrong with our
syntax?”

“Well, in the first place, it’s too
abstract.”

“And in the second place?”

“It’s too concrete.”

In the silence that greeted his
pronouncement, Switters snuggled down in the hammock and shut his eyes.

Switters rested for about ten
minutes, during which time the Nacanacas descended the ladder and laid some
yucca to roast in the embers of the firepit, while Smithe, in agitation, paced
the floorboards. When at last Switters reopened what Suzy called his
“big-bad-wolf eyes,” Smithe strode immediately to his side. “I say, was that a
Broadway show tune you were humming just now?”

Caught off guard, Switters nearly let
the
Cats
out of the bag. “That was . . . no, couldn’t have been.
Probably some—some riff from, uh, Zappa or else the, uh, Grateful Dead,” he
stammered, preserving a secret he shared not even with Bobby Case. “Speaking of
which, End of Time—if we’re going to persist in calling him that—would make the
consummate Deadhead, don’t you think? Skull shaped like an Egyptian tomb. Take
one of those turkey bones and blow Jerry Garcia’s ashes up his nostrils.”

Potney Smithe’s musical leanings
listed sharply in the direction of Vivaldi, but he was grateful (if not yet
dead) to find conversation returning to the Kandakandero shaman. “I’ve not been
stimulated overmuch by what I’ve heard so far. Do tell me what happened when
you turned up night before last to join your bird. What was said?”

A great deal had been said, much of
it, no doubt, lost in translation, but essentially, as Switters related it, his
encounter with End of Time was not greatly dissimilar to Smithe’s. The shaman
received him from behind a screen, a barrier that could not, however, conceal
his delight with the pyramid cage or its occupant. Sailor Boy, for his part,
was talking up a storm. Or was he? The customary admonishment, “Peeple of zee
wurl, relax!” squawked from behind the screen at thirty-second intervals, and
though the message hadn’t varied from the familiar in either content or tone,
its frequency of transmission was something radically new. Later, Switters
realized that the squawks could have been issuing from End of Time himself,
Amazonian Indians being famously adept at mimicking bird calls. Perhaps they
took turns, even: a man and parrot duet.