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

  It’s entirely possible, however, that Switters was merely exhibiting the tics that can show up in a spirited intelligence when it can no longer count on, as an outlet, periodic meetings of the C.R.A.F.T. Club.

  Switters was raised in Northern California, Colorado, and Texas, but whenever his mother’s domestic life went topsy-turvy, as it seemed intermittently to do, he’d been sent for months at a time to Seattle, and it was in Seattle that he once again took refuge. It could not be said that during his youthful asylums under Maestra’s roof she had ever mothered him, tending always to treat him as friend and equal, and she definitely wasn’t going to mother him now. In fact, once he broke down and informed her of his predicament and the queer Amazonian incidents (he omitted the part about eating her Sailor Boy) that had rather directly occasioned it, it became plain that he could not remain in her house.

  Accepting no blame for having set events in play—guilt, in her opinion, being one of the most useless human emotions—Maestra chided him repeatedly for what she termed his “disappointing display of ignorance and superstition.”

  Whacking her cane on floor and furniture until she set up an ominous rhythmic resonance evocative of the timpani in Greek tragedy, she accused him of a reaction worthy of primitive cave-bear worshipers or, worse (because they ought to know better), evangelical Christians. “You go down there and encourage Suzy to accept as fact the tall tales of dogma-crazed underage ignorant Portuguese hillbillies. . . .”

  “I only encouraged her to fully investigate that thing that she found most compelling in life. Isn’t that—”

  “I was appalled when I heard you were aiding and abetting her dabblings in such harmful nonsense. Appalled. What I didn’t know was that you yourself were in the dimwitted thrall of something even more ridiculous, more destructive. In all of my eighty-plus years I’ve never. . . . As far as I’m concerned, this millennium business is wholly bogus, but there must be something in the air that would cause you, of all people, to surrender your spirit, to wreck your career, to turn yourself into a craven invalid. . . .”

  “Fierce invalid,” he corrected her.

  “I guess I thought you were one of the last of the torchbearers, but as it’s turned out, sad to say, you couldn’t strike a match in an elevator.”

  Stung, he asked, “Do you want me to stand, then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Knowing what you know about Smithe, the anthropologist, what happened to him, do you want me to get up and walk? Because I’ll do it. Right now. Right this second. Just say the word.” He was already half out of the chair.

  Maestra couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She stalked off, only to return ten minutes later to chide him for passively accepting his dismissal from the CIA without even requesting a hearing. “At the very least, you could have gotten a mental disability pension. As screwy as you’ve turned out, they still owe you something. Many times you gambled your life for them.”

  “Never.”

  “You did!”

  “No. I may have gambled my life, but it wasn’t for them. It was for—something else.”

  “What? Precisely.”

  “Precision doesn’t enter into it.”

  “Heh!”

  He wasn’t kidding, though, nor being unnecessarily evasive. Switters had conducted his professional life in much the same way as he made love to a woman: wholeheartedly, romantically, poetically, in a frenzy of longing for the unattainable, the unknown; ladling onto himself—and his partner or his mission—that mysteriously generated concentrate of exhilaration that he sometimes referred to as his syrup of wahoo, a kind of emotional extract produced by the simultaneous boiling down of beauty, risk, wildness, and mirth. Delusional or not, it was hardly a matter of precision.

  When Switters took a room in an old building adjacent to the Pike Place Market (he’d considered moving into the Snoqualmie cabin, but there was already heavy snowfall in the mountains), both Maestra and Bobby Case quizzed him about what he would do there. “For the time being, my aim is to keep the oxygen from leaking out of my life,” he replied, an answer neither they nor he found satisfactory. So, he hinted that he might be embarking upon a scholastic bender.

  Assisting Suzy with her term paper had dusted and oiled creaky academic reflexes just enough to convince him that the dissertation that stood between him and a Ph.D. degree—he’d long ago completed the course work—would not be all that painfully difficult to write. “How would you feel about calling me Dr. Switters?” he asked. “Hell, I’d probably get mixed up and call you Dr. Seuss,” said Bobby. “You’re just lucky I don’t call you Baby Dumpling,” said Maestra.

  Joining them briefly at Thanksgiving, Bobby listened politely to Switters rant about the future of the word in cyberculture. “From the time of the invention of the alphabet, if not before, all technologies have originated in language, but in cyberspace, we don’t see or hear information so much as we feel it. Technology may at last be outstripping language, not merely leaving the nest but killing the mother, if you will. You know, we don’t really see darkness, or even light, we feel neurologically their effect on surrounding surfaces. The binary digital system—Brother One and Sister Zero—that makes computers possible is a kind of light/dark relationship to begin with, and when you start to factor in the electron rather than the word as the primary information link between the brain and the external world . . .”

  And so on and so forth. Bobby got the idea that Switters didn’t believe that language was doomed per se but, rather, was about to be transformed, much as it had been by the invention of the Phoenician alphabet; liberated, as it had been by the invention of the Greek alphabet; and then celebrated, as it had been by the advent of the Roman; yet suspected that he, nevertheless, felt protective of words, the stranger, more archaic the better, perceiving them as keys to some lost treasure. All very interesting, basically, but Switters, once he got going, was inclined to scoot off on tangents, to drive in the ditch. For example: “Why, our cosmology is a binary system, as well. God equals one, Satan, zero. Or is it the other way around? Whichever, we use that pair of digits only—eschewing numbers two through nine and the endless combinations thereof—to compute the meaning of life and our ultimate destiny. Ah, but in the beginning was the word. Before the division, before—”

  “Yep, podner, you’ll churn yourself a damn fine thesis outta that butterfat, I’m sure, but what ought to be sizzling on your front burner is a strategy for getting yourself back on your feet, and I don’t necessarily mean financially. Pass the peas.”

  “Amen to that!” chimed in Maestra. “Have a drop more gravy, Captain Case. Sorry it isn’t red-eye, but the caterer’s led a sheltered life and didn’t have a clue.”

  After dessert, as the two men smoked cigars in the living room, watched over by the Matisse nude, herself as blue as smoke, Bobby broached the subject of Suzy. “Forget cyberspace for a minute. You’ve been quieter than a Stealth potato about what went on in Sacramento. Come on. Did you deflower the ‘wholesome little animal,’ or did I manage to talk you out of it?”

  “Talked myself out of it, I’m afraid. With my forked tongue.”

  “Lordy, Lord. And who said talk is cheap?”

  “Some inarticulate man of action, I imagine; the strong, silent type who other males admire but who women secretly find a dupe or a dope.” He expelled a dancing doughnut of smoke. Like every smoke ring ever blown—like smoke, in general—it bounced in the air like the bastard baby of chemistry and cartooning. “I’m unsure how or if it applies in this particular situation, but the poet, Andrei Codrescu, once wrote that ‘Physical intimacy is only a device for opening the floodgates of what really matters: words.’ “

  Bobby looked skeptical. “Sounds like sublimation to me. Anyhow, I thought the verbiage was supposed to start the ball rolling. In the fucking beginning was the fucking word.”

  “So the Good Book informs us. What it neglects to tell us, and for which omission I can never forgive it, is which came
first, the word for chicken or the word for egg.”

  Bobby couldn’t make it down for Christmas—his little clandestine U2 unit was on some kind of alert—but he telephoned Maestra’s manse on Christmas Eve, and once he’d stuffed the old woman’s goose with flattery, got on the line with Switters, surmising from their conversation that the latter had cooled a bit toward the prospect of writing a dissertation, although he could and would, if given a chance, still get wound up over its thematic potentialities.

  “The role of the computer in literature is limited to grunt work and janitorial services. Makes research easier and editing faster without making either of them any better. Where the computer does appear to foster genuine innovation and advancement is in graphics: photographic reproduction, design, animation, et cetera. Amazing development in those fields. But to what end?”

  “More interesting TV commercials.”

  “Exactement! Marketing. Merchandising. Increasingly sophisticated, increasingly seductive. And sure, it’s just a flashy modern version of the age-old bread-and-circuses brand of bondage—except that today the bakery’s a multinational and the circus follows us home. Well, culture has always been driven to some degree by the marketplace. Always. It’s just that nowadays the marketplace, having invaded every nook and cranny of our private lives, is completely supplanting culture; the marketplace has become our culture. Nevertheless—”

  “Yeah,” put in Bobby, “and wild ol’ boys like you and me may turn out to be one of the last lines of defense against corporate totalitarianism and unhappy shit like that. That’s why it’s important that you . . . I know for a fact that the company would reinstate you if you’d—”

  “Did I tell you Mayflower sent a pair of grim-faced pickle-packers out to debrief me? Right after Thanksgiving. Cornered me in my room, six o’clock in the morning; damned unsporting of them, me being groggy from the toils and impairments of the evening prior. Still, they had rather a thick time of it before I allowed them to take back some of their toys. I managed to keep my laptop, my Beretta, and my faithful crocodile, although the pistol remains an issue, and there’s reason to believe they’ve put a Joe on my tail.”

  “That could be fun.”

  “Perhaps. But all that’s irrelevant. What I was getting at a minute ago is that the real show, as usual, is taking place behind the tent, and neither the hawkers nor the ringmasters are hip to it. Forget the graphic-art gymnastics. What’s really happening in cyberculture is that language isn’t contracting, it’s expanding. Expanding. Moving outside of the body. Beyond the tongue and the larynx, beyond the occipital lobe and the hippocampus, beyond the pen and the page, beyond the screen and the printer, even. Out into the universe. Bonding with, saturating, or even usurping physical reality. Let me explain.”

  “Ut! Swit? Whoa. Give me a rain check on that if you don’t mind. All this brainstorming of yours is costing me MCI’s holiday rates—and costing you what’s left of your marbles, I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, if you’re not planning to write your damn thesis, why? . . . The main thing is, you’re still in that feeble-foot Ferrari, son, and it’s been seven or eight weeks now. Jesus! You got to deal with this problem, bring it to an end, whatever it takes. If that involves tripping back down to the Amazon, so be it. You, me, either or both of us. Will you please just lock in on that target? Direct your fire toward getting well, getting free? Jesus!”

  There was no immediate response, and in the absence of dialogue, the men could hear MCI’s holiday meter running. Eventually Switters said, “Remember the story that monk told us?”

  “Which monk? The one who hid us from the Burmese border patrol?”

  “No, not him. The one we had tea with in Saigon. The—”

  “You still won’t call it Ho Chi Minh City.”

  “I refuse. Although I certainly mean no disrespect to the brave and honorable Uncle Ho. . . .”

  “Betrayed, slandered, pushed into a corner . . .”

  “By that ice-hearted, lizard-brained, sanctimonious Christian bully boy . . .

  “John Foster Dulles!” the two men snarled in contemptuous harmony. Then, also in unison, they spat into the mouthpieces of their respective phones.

  “I heard that!” cried Maestra, who, to the best of Switters’s knowledge, had been engrossed in e-gab in a hackers chat room, a kind of on-line cybercryptic Christmas party. “Disgusting lout! Clean it off. Now.”

  Separately they each obeyed, chuckling softly as they wiped, the one with coat sleeve, the other with bandanna; and then Switters returned to the Saigon monk. “Remember? He told us about a great spiritual master who was asked what it was like being enlightened all the time. And the master answered, ‘Oh, it’s just like ordinary, everyday life. Except that you’re two inches above the ground.’ “

  “Yeah,” said Bobby. “I remember that.”

  “Well, it occurred to me a week or so ago that that’s where I’m at. In this wheelchair, my feet are almost exactly two inches off the ground.”

  “Aw, come on. It ain’t nowhere near the same thing.”

  “No, but maybe it could be. Maybe that was even ol’ Pyramid Head’s point. So to speak. He was oblivious to wheelchairs, presumably, but, still, maybe . . . In any event, I’m being forced to survey the world from a new perspective—you’d be astonished the difference two inches can make—and I’m loath to relinquish the vantage point quite yet. There may be other angles, other takes, whole phyllo pastries of existence I’ve yet to explore from this sacred height. So, patience, pal. Let me play it out for a while. Let me discover what it is that I’ve become: synthetic cripple or synthetic bodhisattva.” He paused. “Merry Christmas, Bobby.”

  From the Alaskan end of the connection, there floated a huge sigh. “Merry Christmas, Swit. Here’s wishing you a sleighload of eggnogged virgins in mistletoe underwear.”

  Switters did, indeed, maintain his vantage point. Throughout the long, wet winter he maintained it, his “starship in hover mode,” as he put it, orbiting the earth from a height of two inches.

  For several weeks in November and December, he had, every morning, propelled his chair eastward on Pike Street and south on Fourth Avenue to the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library, where he sought to supplement his on-line research toward a dissertation that was to be entitled, “Speaking in Things, Thinking With Light,” but near Christmas those academic forays dwindled, and by the first of the year he had abandoned both wood pulp and electron for a different kind of research.

  Like some beggar or street performer, he would dock the wheelchair beneath the aged arcades of the labyrinthine Pike Place Market, and there, in the grotto light, protected from the rains that pounded the cobblestones and hissed beneath the tires of delivery trucks, he’d turn a keen eye on whiskered parsnip and hairless apple, and bathe himself in the multitudes.

  The old market, worn half away by dampness and fingerprints, sweat drops and shoe heels, pigeon claws and vegetable crates; soiled by butcher seepage, sequined with salmon scales, smelling of roses, raw prawns, and urine; blessedly freed for the winter from the demanding entertain-me-for-nothing! gawkings of out-of-town tourists, the market bustled now with fishmongers and Vietnamese farmers, florists and fruit vendors, famous chefs and food-smart housewives, gourmets and runaways, flunkies and junkies, coffee brewers and balloon benders, office workers and shopgirls and winos of all races; with pensioners, predators, panhandlers, and prostitutes, and (to complete the p’s) political polemists, punks, potters, puppeteers, poets, and policemen; with musicians, jugglers, fire-eaters (dry days only), tyro magicians, and lingering loafers such as he seemed to be.

  Or did he? None of the market regulars, legitimate or illegitimate, were quite able to label him or find a reason for his daily presence among them. Just as shoppers would take one look at his stationary wheelchair and glance around automatically for a tin cup and accordion or the equivalents thereof, so denizens searched at greater length though equally in vain for some clue to his raison
d’être. Occasionally, he tapped away at a laptop computer, but mostly, day after day, week after week, he merely sat there, observing the surrounding cavalcade or gazing into the rain. Rumors spread that he was an undercover cop, but when there was no increase in arrests, when it was noticed that he was periodically harassed by market security guards (usually for stationing himself in one spot for too many hours or days in a row), and when he took to carving tiny boats out of busted crate scraps, rigging them with lettuce leaf sails and launching them in rainswept gutters, that particular suspicion gradually faded.

  Still, nobody was prepared to write him off as another lingering loafer: his presence was too strong, his demeanor too cool. While he never flashed wads of currency or sported gold jewelry, he dressed in well-cut suits over fine T-shirts and was wont to drape a black cashmere topcoat theatrically, rather like an opera cape, about his broad shoulders. He kept a cell phone in his saddlebag but spoke on it infrequently (Maestra preferred e-mail, the Sacramento contingent was incommunicado, and by February Bobby Case had been transferred to Okinawa), giving no indication when he did converse that any sort of business was being conducted. Reticent though hardly bashful, Switters had affixed to the back of his chair a neatly lettered sign that read I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT JESUS OR DISEASES, this being necessitated by the countless well-meaning busybodies who were convinced that their New Age herbalist or their Sunday School Savior could provide succor if not remedy to whatever misfortune had denied his powers of perambulation. Preservation of wahoo demanded that they be discouraged.

  There were those, chiefly women, who did talk to him, however. They couldn’t seem to resist. Never in his life had Switters been quite so handsome. He’d let his hair grow long so that it framed his face, with its storybook of scars, in a manner that made it all the more intriguing. Enhanced by the moist climate, a predominantly vegetarian diet, and the liberty to do with his hours what he pleased, his complexion had the rich glow of a Renaissance oil, and his eyes were like jets of green energy. When he spoke, it was in grand syllables, moderated and warmed by a loose hint of drawl. He projected the air, falsely or not, of both a learned man and a rogue, innately exhibitionist yet deeply secretive, a powerful figure who habitually thumbed his nose at power—and thus might lead one, were one to fall under his spell, off in directions opposite those that one had been conditioned to recognize as prudent, profitable, or holy. To all but a missing link, then, he was an attraction.