Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

  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 s
how 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.

  “We yakked all night—that Fer-de-lance is a whiz with nuances and complexities—jabbering about the pitfalls of morbidity, about levity versus gravity, struggle versus play, me mostly mouthing other people’s ideas, but your curandero man contributing some fairly engaging wrinkles of his own. He said, for example, that in order for his people to withstand the assault of the white man, they must fashion shields out of laughter. He means that literally, I think. Speaks of laughter as if it were a force, a physical force or natural phenomenon. And within the realm of laughter, he says, light and darkness merge, no longer existing as separate or distinct conditions. A people who could live in that realm would be free of all of life’s dualities. The white man can’t do the trick because he lacks the Kandakandero knowledge of the different levels of reality, and so far the Ka’daks can’t do it because they lack the buoyancy of the white man’s humor. The person who successfully combined the two would move through the world as a ‘shadow of light.’ Can you picture a shadow of light? A person in whom the luminous and the dark are inseparable? Reminds me a bit of neutral angels, if you’re familiar with the term.”

  “Um. I daresay he’s evolved intellectually since I had a go at him.”

  “For a dude whose brain is stuffed in a pyramid, that’s hardly surprising. That laugh of his is starting to get out of control, though. Sounds a lot like Woody Woodpecker. Friend of mine used to cackle like that to amuse the bar girls in Bangkok.”

  “Indeed? Well, do continue. What else?”

  “Ah, well, gee, I don’t know. We just kicked that gong around all night, like I said. Then, for breakfast, we ate my grandmother’s parrot.”

  Switters had not eaten Sailor Boy on purpose. At the time, in fact, he wasn’t aware that it was Sailor Boy he was eating. The gourdful of thin gray stew contained, so he presumed, the rubbery flesh of an overage chicken. It wasn’t until later in the day, after awakening from a four- or five-hour rest, that Fer-de-lance showed him the headdress that, prior to his departure, End of Time had woven from Sailor’s feathers. By then, it was too late to retch.

  The shaman had eaten the parrot to appropriate its magic. “You’re lucky he didn’t eat you as well,” Fer-de-lance had snarled when Switters expressed outrage. “Who do you think you’ve been dealing with? Some quaint poseur from central casting?” The parrot stew was served to Switters as a test. “He wanted to see how strong you are,” said the mestizo.

  There were other tests in line. Fer-de-lance challenged Switters to don the headdress at sunset and go stand alone in the forest. That would be the signal for End of Time to return, whereupon he would reveal himself, pyramid and all, and personally administer to the gringo blanco the vision root.

  “What was I going to do,” asked Switters, “turn tail and run? I’d come this far. My courage was in question. And, besides, I’d yet to lay eyes on the guy. Before curiosity kills it, the cat learns more of the world than a hundred uninquisitive dogs.”

  Thus, he replaced his Panama hat with poor Sailor’s plumage (How would that look on video?) and as dusk pressed the dimmer switch, transforming the verdant disorder of the diurnal jungle into a muscular monolith, an enveloping solid throb, a Stonehenge of whispers, a phantom colonnade, he walked gingerly away from the lodge to go stand alone in the gloom. He neither saw nor heard End of Time’s approach. Switters was standing there, staring, listening, barely breathing, unable, for some reason, to remember a single lyric to “Send in the Clowns,” when he felt something touch his shoulder, causing him to nearly jump over a treetop.

  “How did he look?”

  “You know how he looks. Like a youngish Amazonian Indian with the skyline of Cairo on his shoulders.”

  “His facial decoration? What color, what pattern? Achiote berry or tinhorao bark? His necklace? Bone, feathers, claws, seeds, or teeth? These details are significant.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Pot!”

  “You took no notes?” The tone was accusatory.

  “Not after that turkey bone went up my snout. I spent the next eight hours riding the quark. Pursued by my own ghost down the Hallways of Always. Hobnobbing with giant metallic cockroaches and transgalactic jive bulbs. You’ve been there. What do you expect?”

  “Yes, but you did agree. . . .”

  “The Hallways of Always, pal. One dies in there and is reborn. One doesn’t take notes. Come on, Pot. If not watched carefully, you could turn into another tedious anthropologist.”

  “Impaired while under the influence, but what about prior to and following?”

  “Very little of either. And somehow I don’t believe ‘impaired’ is the right word.” He paused. “Listen, I’m quite aware of the sort of stuff you’re after, and I’m sure that picturesque details by the dozen will come to mind eventually. Right now, my biocomputer’s down. I’m. . . . Death and resurrection, not to mention breakfasting on the longtime family pet, can take a lot out of a guy. Okay?” Again, he closed his eyes.

  Smithe walked away. Head bowed, nose pointed at the toes that, like fans of pink pickles, spread over the tips of his flip-flops, neck knotted, meaty hands clasped behind his broad back, he paced. Aware of the sort of stuff I’m after? he thought. Not bloody likely. Smithe, himself, was neither comfortably nor completely aware of the “sort of stuff” he was after. Direct testimony, certainly, yet something as far beyond ordinary field notes as End of Time was beyond Chief Sitting Bull; data that might fuel disquisition and exegesis of an academically pragmatic caliber, that might even make something agreeably quotidian out of the bizarrely exotic, yet would not conceal from the sensitive some flavor of the cosmological rites that had blown most of the patio furniture off his personal lanai. He supposed, in short, that he was searching for planks to bridge a rupture that had widened within him and without, ever since he had so unwisely . . .

  “Do you have to sulk like that?” Switters’s voice was tired but tough. “If word gets back to End of Time that you’re deficient in the category of joie de vivre, he’ll—”

  “He’ll what?” snapped Smithe testily.

  “He’ll cancel your damn rendezvous.”

  Smithe halted in mid-stride. His chin withdrew from his chest like a city slicker’s hand from a branding iron. “What rendezvous?”

  “The one I set up for you.”

  “Are you ragging me?”

  “Potney! If you can’t tru
st a Yank, who can you trust?”

  “He’s actually agreed to meet?”

  “At the next new moon. Be here or be square.”

  “You’re serious. How in the world? . . .”

  “All in a night’s work.”

  “For an errand boy?”

  “Precisely. Although in the gastrointestinal aftermath of ingesting fricassee à Sailor Boy”—he winced and it was not at all contrived—”I watched the errand I was sent to run, run through me.”

  The bells of his own jubilation prevented Smithe from hearing this last, which was just as well, regardless that in his elated state he might not have found it egregiously offensive. He was positively thrilled. His pale eyes sparkled, and strong white teeth, heretofore unrevealed, came out of the lipwork. “Bloody marvelous,” he crooned. “Bloody marvelous.”

  Smithe struck a match to the cork-tipped Parliament he’d removed from a case some minutes earlier but not yet lit. “My work concerns itself with what Linton has called ‘social heredity,’ which, as you might suppose, consists of the learned, socially transmitted habits, customs, morals, laws, arts, crafts, et cetera of whole cultures: tribes, bands, clans, villages. Groups of socially related people, in other words. To focus on a single individual within a group, even such an extraordinary individual as our End of Time, is virtually unprecedented. Unique in the annals. Um. The paper I intend to prepare will be controversial, surely, but if viewed in a broad light, could well, unless I’m rationalizing wildly, do my reputation a power of good.” He said all this as if he’d just that moment thought of it. “Could right things with Eleanor, too,” he added almost as an afterthought.

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.” Switters smiled. “Nothing like a jolt of unexpected boldness to make a woman’s nipples stiffen. Why, just before I left the hotel, I e-mailed a young Christian lady of my acquaintance that I was coming to palpitate her clitoris the way a worker ant milks its favorite aphid. That’ll burst her buttons, I guarantee. Unless my aged grandmother intercepts and intervenes.”