“Yep. The bastard’s been charging me twice the price for half the fun. When I avail myself of his services, that is. Since the excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages is the state sport of Alaska—they’d challenge for the gold at the Drunkard Olympics, but’d lose major points to Ireland in the charm category—I’ve been pretty much teetotaling, out of sheer contrariness, not wanting to be just another shitface in the crowd.” Accepting a wet bottle from Switters, he examined it at some length. “Nostalgia’s nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history, but I’d be lying like a cop in court if I was to tell you Sing Ha was anything but sucky beer.”
Switters nodded. “It went down well enough in Bangkok, where there was hardly any choice, but here in the land of a thousand brewskies, it does come across as rather weak-kneed and effete.”
“Tastes like butterfly piss. Of course, it’s brewed by Buddhists. Guess it takes a Christian to put some muscle in a liquid refreshment.”
“That’s it. It’s the fear and anger that’s missing in Sing Ha. Bereft of those punitive and vindictive qualities we Christers have come to respect and love. No bops in the hops. No assault in the malt. But, Captain Case, if you’re a no-show at Alaska’s finer watering holes, how do you spend your time up there? Needlepoint? Laboring to reach page two of Finnegans Wake?”
“Fly more than you might think.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have thought. With our increased satellite capabilities, why do we fly manned spy missions at all?”
The crosshatched crinkles around Bobby’s eyes stiffened slightly. “Can’t rightly address that, son.”
Caught off guard, Switters very nearly flinched. “Oh. Not my need to know?”
“There you go.”
In the CIA, there existed a pervasive and perpetual rule that a company employee, no matter how light his or her cover, no matter if coverless, must never divulge to anyone—spouse, parent, lover, friend, or even fellow CIAnik—more about his or her job than that person had a need, not an abiding interest but an actual need, to know. With Maestra and to a lesser extent with Suzy, Switters had been somewhat lax in adhering to that rule, which was why he may have been so surprised to find Bad Bobby, flaunter of a fair number of society’s more firmly held conventions and active critic of the multinational commercial entities to whose Muzak the company, with escalating frequency, now danced, strictly obeying it. Switters had long ago come to accept if not appreciate the fact that he himself was a study in contradictions, blaming the incongruities in his personality on his having been born on the cusp between Cancer and Leo, pulled in opposite directions by lunar and solar forces (that he maintained severe reservations about the reliability of astrology only reinforced the evidence). Now, he was starting to notice glaring inconsistencies in Bobby, as well. Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people, at any rate. Maybe those among us ever steadfast and predictable, those whose yang did not intermittently slop over into their yin, maybe those were candidates for Maestra’s subhuman category of “missing link.”
“Well. Then. Forgetting your official duties, in which I was only feigning a polite interest in the first place, can I ask if you’ve got anything drawn up on the monkey wrench board, anything that might be causing John Foster Dulles to rotate in his sarcophagus?” Upon uttering the name, Dulles, Switters spat. Upon hearing it, Bobby spat as well. Two molten pearls of Dulles-inspired spittle shimmered on the tiles. (It may or may not be instructive to note that the Dulles who stimulated this derogatory salute was the so-called statesman, John Foster, and not his brother, Allen, the very first director of the CIA.)
“You mean angelic aces up my sleeve? Nothing new. Cook some books, so to speak; jam a few signals here and there, and then the usual archival stuff. Still collecting data on Guatemalan smack squads, on company drug running, the Manson setup, UFO coverups, et cetera. Not much corporate, which is where the dirt is nowadays. Got more than enough, though, to make ’em think twice about ever sacking me. Otherwise, I’m not sure when or if I’ll play them cards.”
“You wouldn’t want to end up like Audubon Poe.”
“Aw, ol’ Audubon Poe’s doing fine and dandy, for a man with a blue sticker on his head. Leading a more productive life than me or you. At this flaccid moment of our personal histories.”
Before Switters could inquire after ex-agent Poe, Maestra appeared at the French doors to remind the two men that they’d promised to play her newest video games with her as soon as they’d finished their post-breakfast breather. It was now past noon, and Apocalyptic Ack-Ack was set up and ready to roll.
Bobby proved to be unbeatable at Apocalyptic Ack-Ack, but Switters was victorious at New World Order and Maestra creamed them both at Armies of Armageddon, so everyone was cheerful and devoured an extra large vegetarian pizza garrulously together before Maestra retired for a nap. The men peed, washed up, and changed clothes: Switters into his ginger Irish tweeds, Bobby into Wrangler jeans and a sweater so bulky and thick it must have taken a woolly mammoth and two Shetland ponies to make it. Then, after stopping once again to approve the brushwork of Henri M., they returned to the safety of the deck. There, in a grayish November glow that might have been filtered through frozen squid bladders, a kind of sunlight substitute invented by Norwegian chemists, Switters sat wondering how to broach the subject of his next move. It wasn’t long before Bobby provided a segue.
“So, son, what’re you gonna tell ’em back at the pickle factory?”
“Excellent question. My leave’s up in ten days. I’ll concoct something before I go rolling into the spookmeister’s oracle. He certainly couldn’t accommodate anything remotely resembling the truth. Not Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, I have to decide on what to tell Maestra.” He paused. “And Suzy.”
“Suzy?”
“Yes.”
“Your little stepsister?”
“Yes. I’ve decided to fly down to see her on Monday.” (It was then Saturday afternoon.)
“To get in her pants?”
“To help her write her first high-school term paper.” He paused. He smiled. “And . . .” He broke off.
“And what?”
“And get in her pants.” Instantly, he regretted the statement, not because it was false—he had every intention of consummating their relationship and believed she felt the same—nor because he was especially embarrassed by sharing his intent with his best friend, but, rather, because the crudeness of the remark, the casual male baldness of it, misrepresented the depth of his feeling for her. His beach-blanket buttercup. His dewy wolverine.
As for Bobby, he failed to respond right away. He, in fact, gave every indication of being pensive. Lost not only in thought but in vastness of sweater, he looked as small as an offscreen movie actor, and not many years older than Suzy herself. “Oh, you Switters,” he said at last. “You poor bastard. Do you know what you’re messing with here? Do you know you’re giving your address out to something that’ll make a shaman’s curse seem like a get-well card from Mother Teresa?”
Switters was mute, his beer arm stalled in midair between ice chest and mouth, so Bobby continued: “Do you know you’re messing with the single biggest taboo in our culture? A taboo worse than taxing the church and burning the flag rolled up in one, a taboo that’ll get your balls handed to you on a paper plate and every doctor in America’d break his Hippocratic oath and three golf dates rather than sew ’em back on?” He set down his beer and leaned forward toward the wheelchair. “I’m talking, of course, about the taboo against the sexuality of adolescent girls.
“Yes, son. The taboo of taboos in the United States of America, and I’m sticking my scrawny Texas neck out even to mention it. Good thing we swept for bugs.” Bobby retrieved his Sing Ha, took a long, unsatisfying swig, and leaned back. “It’s an indisputable, observable fact that even infants have sex lives—purely recreational, mindless, and self-centered, obviously: a simple matter of being pleasured
by genital stimulation—but it continues kinda marginally throughout childhood until by the time puberty hits ’em full force, they’re masturbating at such a rate it’s a wonder they don’t develop repetitive motion syndrome. Girls as well as boys, por favor. In fact, because human females mature faster, they get there first, and it’s doubtful if we slow boats to China ever catch up.”
Half-closing his eyes, Switters, perversely, tried to imagine Suzy masturbating, but it was beyond him, and, besides, Bobby was pressing on.
“The unadorned truth is, adolescent girls are horny as jackrabbits. It’s not their fault, nature designed it that way. For the protection of the species. And there’s nothing politics or religion can do to alter that physical reality, short of drugging the girls with medical depressants or siphoning off their hormones with rubber tubes. But because modern society is by nature unnatural, we’re in a state of absolute denial over it. Absolute denial. That our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and little sisters might be highly charged sexual dynamos makes us so uncomfortable, so queasy, that we, men and women both, have to lie to ourselves and each other and pretend it doesn’t exist.
“Well, that which you deny sooner or later rises up and bites you in the ass. That ol’ boy Miller dealt with this very subject in The Crucible, but we applauded the play and pretended it was about witchcraft or some such shit and went right on with our denial. And with our witchhunts. It’s the witchhunting that worries me. For Suzy’s sake as much as yours.”
“Uh-huh.” Switters nodded dumbly, but his beer bottle remained stationary midway between the Styrofoam container that had lowered its temperature and the organic container that would empty its contents and warm them up again.
“We ain’t in Thailand anymore, son. Remember that. It ain’t Denmark or Sweden, neither. Here, a girl’s got to sweep her natural biological urges under the rug. Keep ’em to herself and feel guilty about ’em. If not, she’ll be charged a stiff price, socially and psychologically. Our girls are culturally unprepared for the . . . the, uh, emotional intricacies of fucking. Although, at sixteen, your Suzy’ll be getting there pretty damn quick. In the meantime, though, I know you wouldn’t want to muddy her sweet waters. Not you, who’s got such a thing about innocence.”
“That again,” grumbled Switters.
“And you also have your own self to consider. Listen. Any adult male heterosexual who says he isn’t never turned on by pubescent girls is a liar or a geek, and you can tell him Bad Bobby said so. But we’re in denial over that, too. Serious denial. A man go Humbert-Humberting around in America, he’ll find himself thrown into the volcano, a sacrifice to appease the gods who’ve blighted humanity with all these nasty, unwanted, upsetting transgenerational cravings. The morality police’ll tar a romantically smitten fool like you with the same wire brush they use, justifiably, on the sicksacks and twisttops who actually prey on children and injure ’em out of a psychotic need to exercise power over somebody weaker than their own weak selves. The smut sniffers from the victimization industry are also into exercising power, remember, and drawing fair and intelligent distinctions has never been one of their long suits. Some of ’em, sad to say, are only seeking revenge for hurtful things that happened to them as children—but, then, the same could be said of the child molesters. Two sides of the same unlucky coin. At any rate, we got us a climate where normal men are scared to admit, even in the mirror, that they occasionally get bit by the lust bug whilst gandering at a junior miss. And I reckon society’ll go right on lying about it until the day it reaches enlightenment.” In one swift gulp, he finished off his beer. “ ‘Course, as long as it keeps lying to itself about itself, there ain’t much chance of it ever becoming enlightened. Anyhow. Don’t do it, Swit. That’s my advice. For a dozen good reasons, don’t do it.”
When Bobby stood up and stretched, Switters said, “That was quite a speech, pal. Thanks. I’ll chew every bolus of it many times I’m sure, and I’ll carefully consider your counsel. But . . .”
“But?”
“But you haven’t met Suzy.”
“No, and I don’t want to, neither. ‘Cause every word I said, though true, was hypocritical to the core. If it was me in your place and she was willing, and I thought she knew what she was doing, I’d be in her pants quicker than she could bring ’em home from The Gap. But I’m white trash from Hondo and don’t have the morals of a flea.”
Like chip dip with a short shelf life, the imported Scandinavian sunshine had commenced to degenerate, reverting to the cod paste from which it was synthesized. Scud blew by close to the surface of the sound like dank puffballs of bacterial fuzz, and the men could almost taste mildew in the air. The atmosphere was leaden and thin simultaneously, as if composed of some new element that defied known laws of atomic weight and could be properly breathed only by lifelong residents of the Pacific Northwest. Feathery and innocuous on one hand, sodden and ill-willed on the other, it was the meteorological equivalent of Pat Boone singing heavy metal.
Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle’s weather, and not merely because of its ambivalence. He liked its subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive. It was all those things and more—but it was never vivid.
The vivid excesses from which he recoiled in nature Switters found irresistible in language. Bobby’s pointed rhetoric, the platitudinousness of its content notwithstanding (that teenage girls were sexual beings and society didn’t like it wasn’t exactly news), had left Switters lightly hypnotized. It was Bobby who broke the spell by abruptly asking, “You worried about how little Suzy’s gonna react to finding your ol’ butt stuck in a chair? Meals on wheels? Not the most virile of images, I wouldn’t reckon.”
“What? Oh. No. No.” Switters smiled confidently. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”
“Heh! So I keep hearing. Sounds like a slogan from a recruiting poster.” The voice was not Bobby’s but Maestra’s. She was standing on the threshold of the French doors, which she had managed to open undetected. How long she’d been there, how much she’d overheard, how an octogenarian widow with a walking stick had sneaked up on a couple of swashbucklers from the Central Intelligence Agency were questions of immediate concern. “What does a woman have to do to gain some attention around this place?”
“Dreadful sorry, ma’am,” said Bobby, in his most courtly manner. “We’ve been pining away for your companionship but assumed you were enjoying a soothing respite from the likes of us two polecats.”
“I was, indeed,” she said, “until it reached the stage where I felt the two polecats were ignoring me.”
“Never,” Bobby assured her. “Impossible. Say, how’d you like to take a little spin?”
“A spin? Me? You mean on your motorcycle?”
Switters jumped in. “Not a good idea. It’ll be dark before you know it.” He was right about that. It was not yet five o’clock, but in Seattle in November, the diurnal house band played very short sets.
“Let’s ride!” said Maestra, waving her left arm in the air until its bracelets rang out like an Afro-Cuban rhythm section in a bus wreck. “Unless Herr Alzheimer is playing tricks on me, I’ve got an old leather jacket in the hall closet.”
There was no stopping them. She even refused to wear a helmet, not wishing to look like a wimp next to Bobby, who consistently violated the helmet law on the grounds that his head was his own affair, cowlick and all. With some misgiving, Switters saw them off, then wheeled into the living room and parked below the Matisse. The big blue nude rose like a mountain range, an azure Appalachia of loaves, humps, and knobs, a topographical maquette constructed from huckleberry jelly, a curvaceous cobalt upland where clumps of wild asters clung precariously to the hillsides and the bluebirds all sipped curaçao. Matisse’s nude was nude but not really nake
d, which is to say, though she was beyond shame or embarrassment, she was far from brazen. Her purpose was not to titillate but to inspire awe at the infinite blueness of our finite world.
In her way, she was more innocent than Suzy, wiser than Maestra; a woman such as Switters had never known nor would ever know—or so he thought—and as such, perfectly suited to preside over his musings of the moment.
Bobby is correct, he mused. To deny that young girls were throbbing hives of sexual honey was to be both sexist and ageist. On the other hand, to steal samples of that honey or dupe them out of it, or to view them as only hives or even as primarily hives was an equal or perhaps greater wrong. The big blue nude seemed to nod in agreement. Taboos, however, were not good, either. Taboos were superstitions with fangs on them, and if not transcended, they punctured the brain and drained the spirit. A taboo was a crystallized knot of societal fear and must be unraveled, cut through, or smashed if a people were to set themselves free. Ancient Greeks had a concept they called “eating the taboo,” and the agorhi sect in India took a similar approach. As a path to liberation, these golden Greeks and holy Hindus would deliberately break any and all of their culture’s prevailing taboos in order to loosen their hold, destroy their power. It was an active, somewhat radical method of triumphing over fear by confronting that which frightened: embracing it, dancing with it, absorbing it, and moving past it. It was a casting out of demons.
Wouldn’t it be to his betterment and, perhaps, to society’s as well, to go on down to Sacramento and, in one way or another, stare that taboo in the eye? Wouldn’t it? Or was this merely some elaborate Swittersesque rationalization? (The big blue nude gave nary a sign.)