Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“No, no, no,” said Switters, shaking his head, forcing a big smile and trying to appear as genial as the toastmaster at a booster club prayer breakfast. He raised his arms in the universal peacemaker gesture and inquired conciliatorily, though in bad Spanish, what the trouble might be. This precipitated a dueling barrage of rapid-fire Campa-Spanish that sounded like stormy-night static on Radio Babel. It took a while, but eventually details of the dispute emerged, aided considerably by the fact that when cornered, the mestizo turned out to speak a surprisingly excellent brand of English.

Evidently, two weeks earlier, Inti had given Fer-de-lance (in order to enhance his reputation in one way or another, the mestizo had assumed the name of a deadly Amazon pit viper) a case of Lima’s finest pisco in exchange for a baby ocelot. The animal could be expected to fetch a high price in Pucallpa. Later upon the very evening that Switters had hired Inti, the Indian had been caught trying to peddle the ocelot on the fringe of Pucallpa’s semilegal parrot market. A game warden cited him for violating one of Peru’s new wildlife protection laws and confiscated the cub, but Inti informed him that he was heading again into the upstream bush the following dawn and promised to release the cat in the forest near where it had been captured, if he could have it back. After much discussion, the warden agreed. A bottle of pisco sealed the bargain.

That would explain, Switters thought, the potbellied guy in the shabby brown uniform who stood on the dock with folded arms and saw us off that morning. I wondered about that gentleman.

What Inti had done instead, however, was to return the little ocelot to Fer-de-lance (for the first time Switters now noticed a lidded, jiggling basket off to one side) and demand his pisco back. Fer-de-lance was having none of that, if for no other reason than that the bulk of the brandy had already met its brandy fate, which was to say, it had been sucked into that black hole that yawns at the gates of human yearning.

Switters finally settled the matter by convincing the strange mestizo to return a single bottle of pisco to reward Inti for his trouble and save his face, while he, Switters, would assume custody of the ocelot. The idea wasn’t to smuggle the cub home for Suzy, although that thought crossed his mind, but to release it on his way to the colpa to free the parrot. Ah yes. The Switters Pet Liberation Service.

That concluded, he stepped over to the gently rocking basket and stooped to lift its lid, intending to ascertain that the cub was not overheating in there, wondering, at the same time, if it might grow up with some animal memory of Suzy’s amateur brassiere. The instant he touched the woven top, however, there was a rude cry, and Fer-de-lance seized his arm, gripping it in fingers as strong as steel pincers.

“Shit,” Switters muttered. “I should’ve known it wasn’t going to be that easy.” He tried to relax his muscles and clear his mind, as he’d been trained to do in martial arts. “Here goes my glad morning. Here goes my nice fresh suit.” Then, in one liquid motion, he sprang to his feet, whirled, pak saoed Fer-de-lance’s hand away from his arm, and unleashed a punch.

The punch was not as fast as it might have been (he was as far out of practice as he was out of shape), and before it could land, an amazingly agile Inti blocked it. Inti then grabbed Switters’s right arm, and Fer-de-lance reestablished his steely claim on the left one. Solicitously, they turned Switters around. The basket, upended in the action, lay on its side—and from it there slowly slithered, flexing and reflexing, an anvil-headed snake as black and glistening as evil itself, death rays fairly shooting from its slitty chartreuse eyes.

The crowd cleared. Inti pulled Switters away. He pointed toward a second basket that sat in the shadow of a thatched overhang a few yards distant. He commenced to snort, hiss, and stomp, much as he had when Switters had been startled by the spider. “Yeah, I get the picture,” Switters grumbled. “And I suppose a pathological sense of humor is better than no sense of humor.” By the time he looked around, Fer-de-lance had somehow steered the viper back into its container.

“Okay, pal, your sleazy business deals have wasted a good half hour and nearly got me snake-bit. Let’s get this circus on the road. Where the hell’s our tour guide to the parrot spa?” Naturally, he had to rephrase the question. When he made his query intelligible to Inti, the skipper—ocelot basket (the correct basket) in his arms, pisco bottle stuck in his waistband like a pistola—assured him that his juvenile playmates had been sent to procure the finest guide available and would be showing up with that esteemed colpa connoisseur at any moment.

“Good. It’s getting late. And it’s getting hot.”

Indeed, though it was not yet midmorning, the sun was looking down on them like the bad eye of a billy goat, jaundiced and shot with blood; and beneath its baleful glare, every living cell in every living thing seemed to slump like a Dalí watch. Switters felt his protoplasm turning into dry-cleaning fluid, and his suit, which soon enough would need a good cleaning, was glued to his body like a poster to a wall. The load of perspiration seemed to double his weight.

Breathing slowly, shallowly, as if the steamy air might choke him, he lagged several feet behind Inti while they traversed the marketplace. They hadn’t gotten far before he became aware of another commotion of sorts. This one was occurring around Sailor’s cage.

The pyramid cage was surrounded by a group of male Indians, five or six in number. Switters identified them as Indians not so much by their painted faces (geometrically arranged dabs of berry pulp), their features (long, flaring noses, chiseled cheekbones, sorrowful dark eyes), or their clothing (thorn-ripped cotton shorts and not much else) as by their haircuts.

Among the forest tribes of South America, countless languages were spoken, countless differing customs practiced. The one thing virtually all of them had in common was the unisex pageboy hairdo. It was as if in dim antiquity, back before time had really got its motor going, some primordial deity—the Great God Buster Brown, perhaps—had swept through the immense Amazonian woodlands with a clay bowl and a dull knife and administered to every early mortal the same bad coif. Hardly a unifying element—tribes that traditionally attacked each other on sight sported identical bangs—it nevertheless had persisted and prevailed. What Gaia the Hairdresser hath styled, let no man shear asunder.

Mixed blood South Americans tended to style their locks according to European fashion, allying in that manner with their countrymen of pure Spanish or Portuguese ancestry. In Lima, though, Switters had observed that certain of the youngish blancos—Hector Sumac and that girl, Gloria, at the club, for example—had begun to wear their hair in refined, upscale versions of the Indian crop. Switters wondered if there was a standardized Amazonian name for the style, if it had a different name in each tribal language or if it was something so taken for granted that it had no name at all other than each tribe’s word for hair. Momentarily, he was tempted to ask Inti what he called his haircut, but on the off chance that the boatman might answer “Arthur,” as George Harrison had responded to the same question in A Hard Day’s Night, he held his tongue. There was some trouble even a troubleshooter didn’t go looking for.

Little or no trouble, it turned out, was brewing at the beer stall. The group of Indians wasn’t angry or rowdy, it was simply intrigued for some reason by Sailor Boy, excited just enough so that its members had transcended their usual reserve and were milling about his cage, pointing scarred brown fingers and stopping passersby to question them, or so it seemed, about the parrot inside. That was a bit bewildering because Sailor, while a handsome bird, even in advanced maturity, was by no means a rare or exceptional specimen. And just bringing a pet parrot to this part of the world was probably akin to bringing a Miller Lite to Bavaria.

“They shopping for antiques or something? The warranty on this cracker-burner expired years ago.” Switters asked Inti, as best he could, what the attraction was, but Inti didn’t know nor could he find out in any appreciable detail, for although Inti and the Boquichicos bunch both spoke varieties of Campa, the dialects lacked sufficient vocabulary in common to permit any but the most rudimentary exchange. And since Inti and Switters didn’t have a lot of words in common, either, the most Switters could determine was that the Indians weren’t actually interested in Sailor Boy, they were interested in his cage.

“Perfect,” said Switters. “Can you inform your country cousins that this unique, custom-built aviary is about to be vacated in the next couple of hours and I’m prepared to make them a real sweet deal. What do they have to trade? A diamond bracelet, maybe?” Aware that rough diamonds were occasionally found in the gravel riverbeds thereabouts, he was thinking of Maestra.

The three-way language barrier proved insurmountable, however, and though the Indians’ curiosity about Sailor’s portable prison not only persisted but intensified now that its owner had appeared, Switters’s interest flagged, and he began looking about for signs of the Pucallpa boys and the colpa guide. “They must be getting that guide from a mail-order catalogue,” he complained, fanning himself with his hat.

When they did finally appear, the lads were accompanied not by a local tracker but by R. Potney Smithe.

“Hallo again,” called the anthropologist brightly. Vapors of gin preceded him. “The news about town is that you’re in requirement of a chap to lead you to the parrot wallow.”

“Is that a problem?”

Smithe chuckled. “Hardly, old man. The trailhead’s just behind the church over there. A straight shot, more or less, all the way. Follows the river. Unless you’re achingly keen on contributing to the indigenous economy, you really shouldn’t be wanting a guide. I’d be happy to tag along, though, if you feel the need for companionship.”

“Ain’t no shortage of that,” said Switters, gesturing to indicate the captain and crew of the Virgin as well as the contingent of local Indians.

“I see.” When Smithe acknowledged the Indians around the birdcage, they closed in and buttonholed him, speaking respectfully, although all at once. To Switters’s surprise, the Englishman spoke back to them in their own language, and for a few minutes they carried on a conversation, often looking deliberately, meaningfully, from the parrot cage to the jungle and back again.

Smithe turned to Switters. “Blokes have a fascination with this bloody cage.”

“Obviously. Why?”

Smithe pulled thoughtfully at first one of his fleshy cheeks and then the other. His jowls glistened in the heat and humidity like burst melons. “Symbolism,” he said. “Homoimagistic identification or some such rot. Never mind that. It’s simple, really. This is only the second, um, pyramid shape the Nacanaca have ever seen.”

“The first one must have been a doozy.”

“Quite.” Nodding his big head, Smithe smiled mysteriously. “Assuming that doozy can be construed to mean ‘impressive’ or ‘outstanding,’ it was—and is—rather a doozy.”

Briefly Switters entertained a vision of some lost pyramid, a ruin of ancient architecture hidden in the jungle out there. It would have had to have been Incan, though, and he knew that Incan pyramids bore but a passing resemblance to the Egyptian structures after which Sailor’s cage was modeled. He scowled at the anthropologist, as if demanding that he continue, and Smithe appeared about to oblige when a sudden squawked command caused everyone within earshot to act for a split second as if they were shaking invisible martinis.

“Peeple of zee wurl, relax!” is what they heard. Just like that. Loud. Out of nowhere.

“Bloody hell!” Smithe swore.

“Aheee!” exclaimed Inti.

“Send in the clowns,” muttered Switters, for reasons that were not entirely clear.

Although intimately accustomed to raucous bird cries, the Nacanaca had jumped more comically than any of them. When they recovered, they asked Smithe what the “magic” parrot had said, for they were convinced it had made a pronouncement, quite likely with supernatural implications. Smithe conferred with Switters, who replied, “You heard it right, Potney. The ol’ green featherduster has bade us chill out, calm down, and lighten up; which, if you can forgive the parade of conflicting prepositions, is as sage a piece of advice as we’re likely to get in this life—especially from an erstwhile housepet.”

When Smithe succeeded in conveying the essence of Sailor’s favorite saying, the Nacanaca’s fascination seemed to escalate. They jabbered to Smithe and among themselves, going on at such length that Switters lost patience and broke in to announce that he was leaving at once for the clay lick. He motioned for one of the crew to carry the cage, since Inti was toting the ocelot and he, himself, was going to be occupied with taping atmospheric footage on the camcorder. Maestra might as well get a good show out of this.

Before the little safari could successfully embark, however, Potney Smithe halted it. “I say, Switters. I say. . . .” But he didn’t say. He stammered indistinctly, searching for the correct wordage. He had the coloration of a conch shell and the bulk of a bear, so that a fanciful person could imagine him the offspring of a mermaid and a panda. “I say. I have something, I may have something, of consequence to impart.”

“Then impart or depart,” said Switters. “It’s hotter than the soles of Dante’s loafers out here.” Immediately he regretted the remark, for he heard himself starting to sound like one of the petty mopers who wasted untold priceless moments of their brief stay on this planet complaining about its weather. Unless it was about to cause you bodily harm, rot your rhubarb on the stalk, or carry off your children, weather ought either to be celebrated or ignored, he felt, one or the other; although at times such as this, when it was steaming one’s brain like a Chinese dumpling, it failed to inspire much in the way of celebration, while not thinking about it was even more difficult than not thinking about . . . Suzy.

Switters softened his tone. “I read somewhere that each second, four-point-three pounds of sunlight hit the earth. That figure strikes me as kind of low. What about you, Potney?” He mopped his brow. “I mean, I realize that sunlight is, well, light, but don’t you suppose they meant four-point-three tons?”

Smithe smiled indulgently and wagged his cigarette. “You aren’t exactly dressed for trekking in the torrid zone, old boy; now are you?”

“Why, that depends on—”

“Although I must say, the boots are sensible.” He glanced at the chèvresque sky. “It’s going to be raining soon.”

Switters also glanced skyward. It didn’t look like rain to him. He’d bet his bottom dollar it wasn’t going to rain. “So what’s your story, Pot? My little operation here is falling way behind schedule.”

“You have your errand to run.”

“That I do. You’ve hit the nail on the head.”

Smithe cleared his throat vigorously, sending droplets of sweat flying off his Adam’s apple. “A Yank in a business suit ‘running an errand’ in the Peruvian bush. A bit west of here, one would automatically think ‘cocaine,’ but there’s precious little if any coca refined in the immediate vicinity, and the mineral wealth is negligible as well. Yes. Um. If it’s exotic birds you’re after . . .”

“Listen, pal . . .”

“None of my bleeding business, is it? No. None. However, if your errand at the colpa is such that it might endure a nominal delay, well, there’s been a development.” Switters tried to interrupt, but Smithe waved him off. “These Nacanaca blokes, you see, would like to borrow your parrot for a bit. They want to take it—and its cage, obviously—into the jungle a ways. Alarmed, are you? Of course you are. But you see, they’ll bring it back. They only want to show it to a Kandakandero chap. A most remarkable chap, I assure you. The Nacanaca believe that this great Kandakandero witchman will be sufficiently impressed to grant you an audience.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Thanks but no thanks. My social calendar is filled to the brim right now. Next time I’m in town, perhaps.” He looked to Inti. “Let’s round ’em up and head ’em out.”

“Oh, righto. Absolutely spot on.” Smithe had gone from pink to crimson. “I’ve boiled my pudding in this bleeding hole for five bleeding months, petitioning, pleading, flattering, bribing, doing everything short of dropping on all fours and cavorting like a Staffordshire bull terrier to win another interview with End of Time, and you come along on your bleeding errand, oblivious, unmindful, not caring a fiddler’s fuck, and fall into it, just bloody stumble into it, roses and whistles; and, of course, it’s not your cup of tea, it means nothing divided by zero to a bloke like you, you’re wanting none of it. Well, brilliant, that’s brilliant. Just my lot, isn’t it? My brilliant bleeding lot.”

Switters regarded him with astonishment. “Easy,” he cautioned. “Easy, pal. Heed the counsel of our Sailor Boy over there. Relax. You’re acting like I’m some sort of spoilsport, and I don’t have an L.A.P.D. clue what sport I’m spoiling. I’m only—”

“Oh, it’s not your fault. Really. Sorry about that. It’s just my bloody—”

“Stop whining, Potney. Whining’s unattractive, even when your whine sounds like Kenneth Branagh eating frozen strawberries with a silver fork. Just tell me specifically what’s on your burner. What’s this ‘end of time’ stuff? ‘Interviewing the end of time’? Sun got to you? Sun and gin? Mad dogs and Englishmen syndrome?”

Gradually Smithe was returning to his natural hue. A weariness moved into his smooth, shiny face like a retired midwestern farmer moving into a flamingo beach hotel. He shrugged his ursine shoulders and flicked, halfheartedly, his cigarette into the bug-gnawed weeds. “Never mind.” He sighed. “Load of flapdoodle, that.”

“Flapdoodle?!” Switters grinned incredulously, and with a kind of sarcastic delight.

“Yes. Bosh. Nonsense,” explained Smithe. His tone was defensive.

“I know what flapdoodle means. I just wasn’t aware that anybody under the age of ninety-five still used the term. Even in Merry Olde.”

“Don’t mock.”

“So, flapdoodle, is it? Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I happen to have a soft spot for flapdoodle. And if you toss in a pinch of the old codswallop or balderdash, why, you could get me really enthralled.”

“Don’t mock.”

“Not mocking, Pot. Maybe we should find a patch of shade someplace and talk this over.”

“If you’re serious.”

Switters was humoring the ethnographer, catering to his agitation, but at the same time he was a wee bit intrigued, he couldn’t help himself. “Flapdoodle,” he practically sang, as they made their way to the covered side entrance of the nearby infirmary. “Makes the world go ‘round.”

The Boquichicos infirmary’s side entrance functioned, somewhat arbitrarily, as an emergency entrance. Bodies emptying from machete wounds or inflating from snakebite were admitted through it. The front or main entrance was reserved for those with aches, coughs, fevers, or one or more of the thirty or so parasites that could bore, burrow, squirm, swim, or wriggle into the human organism in a place such as this, and that contributed substantially to the region’s reputation for vivid superfluity. (A time was approaching when there would be an argument over exactly which one of those entrances, side or front, was the proper one through which to admit an immobilized Switters, but that unpleasant quandary was still a few days away.)

A short path of flagstones led, from nowhere in particular, to the side door. Above the walkway was a narrow, thatched roof, supported by whitewashed poles. It was beneath that roof that Switters and Smithe took refuge, at first from the sun and, no more than five minutes later, from the rain; for scarcely had Smithe commenced to expound upon the Nacanaca, the Kandakandero chap, and the request to borrow Maestra’s parrot, than a few guppy-sized waterdrops began to dash themselves against the dusty earth or splat with a timid thump against the platterlike leaves of thick green plants. Quickly there was a population explosion such as was entirely appropriate in a Catholic country, and the progenitor drops multiplied and geometrized into a blinding, deafening horde.

At the onset of the torrent, Switters pulled a scrap of cocktail napkin from his pocket, wrote upon it, I.O.U. my bottom dollar, and handed it matter-of-factly to Potney, who blinked at the message, folded it absentmindedly in a big rosy fist, raised his voice against the downpour, and went on with his narration.

On the pretext of keeping Sailor Boy dry, Inti had joined the two white men under the roof. The Virgin crew and the Nacanacan delegation remained out in the rain, which had grown so dense it turned them into silver silhouettes, though they stood but a dozen yards away. The Indians seemed oblivious to the soaking they were getting, and Smithe, who admittedly had the more comfortable position, was virtually oblivious to the weather, as well. “Celebrate it or ignore it,” Switters had maintained, and now he found himself surprised and somewhat shamed that others so easily practiced what he preached.

That, then, was the setting for Smithe’s impartation, an unusual if not outright bizarre account, which shall be summarized in the paragraphs that follow; summarized because to re-create it, to reproduce it verbatim, isn’t merely unnecessary, it could be construed as an abuse of both the reader’s patience and posterior. That such abuse can sometimes be rewarding—consider Finnegans Wake or the church-pew ass-numbing that leads to genital excitation—is beside the point. Or ought to be.

R. Potney Smithe first came to Boquichicos in 1992. His aim had been to conduct ethnographic fieldwork among the Nacanaca, a wild tribe that had been “pacified” by Peruvian government anthropologists in the mid-1980s as a precautionary measure for the new town that authorities were about to establish, and then semi-civilized by contact with that town and its imported values. The Nacanaca were a transitional people, no longer feral but not quite tame, and were in danger of abandoning, forgetting, or being robbed of their traditional manners and ways. Christian missionaries were doing all they could, naturally, to assist in that dispossession. Smithe’s purpose was to catalogue as many of the old customs and beliefs as possible before they disappeared. It was fulfilling work.

Alas, even while he immersed himself up to his skimpy beige eyebrows in Nacanacan culture, or what was left of it, he felt the hot point of his interest slowly, unintentionally, even unhappily, shifting to another tribe, a people with whom he had no direct communication; who, indeed, he’d never glimpsed except as shadows gliding silently among other shadows in the forest, a phantom race whose magic and indomitability held a great influence over the Nacanaca and, eventually, over Potney, himself. Kandakandero.

The principal Nacanaca village was a mile east of Boquichicos, on the opposite side of the river. It was on high ground, close to good fishing holes. However, its chácara—its garden—was located across the stream on the Boquichicos side, but several miles deeper into the jungle. Oddly enough, in an environment so relentlessly profuse in vegetation, good garden plots were few and far between. The jungle topsoil was as thin as varnish, and although immense trees had learned how to utilize it to staggering advantage, cassava, gourds, peppers, and other cultivated crops were there akin to orphaned children, whose thin gruel was watered down a bit more each year until it no longer provided the sustenance necessary for life. Biological and/or geological accidents sometimes produced rare pockets of fecundity, however, and such was the case with the Nacanacan chácara. It was quite possibly the largest, most perennially fertile garden patch in the Peruvian Amazon.

Some said this chácara had once “belonged” to the Kandakandero or, at least, that they had tended it for generations, only to abandon it when oil exploration and an influx of outsiders caused them to fade ever farther into the forest: the Kandakandero had not suffered Boquichicos gladly. Others claimed that the chácara had always been cultivated by Nacanaca and that the fiercer Kandakandero simply forced the Nacanaca to share its bounty, as if exacting tribute. In any event, Smithe knew from firsthand experience that once each month, on the new moon, a delegation of Kandakandero braves would show up at the garden to have their baskets filled with produce by compliant Nacanaca.

“Whether charity or extortion, I wouldn’t know,” said Smithe, “but I do know they come only at night, when there is little moon, and that there’s a kind of ‘way station’ a few miles farther into the bush, a lodge where they remain overnight or occasionally longer in order to perform certain rituals having to do with the newly acquired produce. Nacanaca elders often participate in those ceremonies as invited guests, and finally, I, myself, after two solid years of jungle diplomacy. . . . Worth the bother? Well, it’s a show that would strike any Christian as dreadfully malodorous, to be sure; but I’d already developed a tolerance for pagan proclivities; some such immunity is required in my profession. Yes. Um. What separates these jejune jollifications from others I’ve witnessed, either in person or on film, is that they’re presided over by the Kandakandero’s witchman, their shaman: a most remarkable chap.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” said Switters. “That’s the buzz. And what, pray tell, is so damned remarkable about him?”

Smithe didn’t answer right away. He stared for a while at the rippling wallpaper of rain, and when at last he spoke, he could barely be heard above its din. “It’s his head, you see.”

“Did you say ‘head’? What about his head?”

“Its shape.” The Englishman abruptly, inexplicably, beamed. “His head,” he said, louder now, almost triumphantly, “his head is a pyramid.”

Switters had been around the block. He had even, one might say, been around the block within the block within the block within the block (depending upon his or her own experience, the reader will or will not know what this suggests). Aware that the world was a very weird place, he was no more prone to automatically scoff at unusual information than he was disposed to unquestioning acceptance. (The narrow, no-nonsense skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.) Nevertheless, Switters’s open-mindedness was sorely tested by Potney’s report, especially when the anthropologist insisted that the head he was describing did not merely suggest some vague outline of a pyramid, that it was neither a variation of hydrocephalus nor a particularly pronounced example of Down’s syndrome, but actually was a pyramid (which was to say, a quadrilateral mass having smooth, steeply sloping sides meeting at a pointed apex), and in every other way except its shape, constituted a healthy, functioning human noggin.

“Entirely literal, old boy, I almost regret to say. Wretchedly literal.” Smithe paused to light a cigarette, sending a plump pillow of smoke off to be drilled into feathery oblivion by the numberless bullets of the rain. “Yes. But if you knew your Peruvian ethnology and whatnot, you’d know that this chap’s pyramid head is not completely without precedent. Not in the high Andes, at any rate.”

Whereupon Smithe informed Switters of the occasional practice among certain Andean Indians of strapping boards to the soft heads of infants, molding them over time into cones that mirrored the contours of the volcanos that loomed on their horizons and that they worshiped as gods. Such sculpting of the skull—literally re-creating man in gods’ image—was common enough to have been well documented, and while contemporary Kandakandero had no physical contact whatsoever with malformed Andean volcano-worshipers, one could not rule out an interchange in centuries past. Stories, moreover, had wings. Also, and Smithe would speak more of this later, the Kandakandero seemed to have the ability to access information, events, images, et cetera from great distances, a notion that failed to shock Switters because the CIA had once experimented with a similar psychic technique (under the term remote viewing), and several of the angels had become quite adept at it before opposition from irate Christian hillbillies in Congress had shut the project down.

There was doubt in Potney’s mind, however, that End of Time’s pyramid head was a copycat creation. At least, not entirely so. “I suspect DDT played a part in it. At the beginning.”

“DDT? In the Amazon?”

“Oh my, yes. You Yanks mightn’t fling your poison about at home any longer, but that jolly well hasn’t stopped you from shipping it abroad. Especially to the unsuspecting undeveloped. Peru reeks of it. Even back here, I’m afraid.”

“Ain’t no weevils fattening they little selves on Nacanaca vegetables?”

“Wouldn’t think so, although the chácara’s entomological interlopers aren’t the primary target, nor are malarial mosquitoes. DDT arrives here from Pucallpa in five-gallon drums. The government issues it to the Nacanaca, who trade it to the Ka’daks for hides and potions, or else the Ka’daks simply bully it from them. Whatever. Both tribes use it for fishing.”

Smithe described a scene in which Indians pour five gallons of pesticide into a small river, just above a rapids or a waterfall, then stroll downstream to effortlessly scoop killed fish out of the eddies.

DDT as trade-good fish poison was finding its way into the jungle years before Boquichicos was settled, and congenital deformity was thought to have increased as a result, though there was no scientific proof of it. Smithe’s theory was that End of Time had come into the world slightly mutated, due to maternal consumption of contaminated fish. The Kandakandero had taken his affliction as a sign of divine favor and a portent of supernatural abilities, and immediately consecrated him to witchwork. Before he began his active apprenticeship, while he was still a baby, the local shaman had placed his pointy little head in a series of progressively larger mahogany presses (Switters thought of that old-fashioned pressed tennis racket of his, heavy and wooden, that Suzy, with her modern lightweight graphite number, had made such fun of), deliberately and dramatically accentuating its pyramidal tendency.

It was only a hypothesis. It could have been something altogether different, altogether unimaginable. What did seem conclusive, however, was that by the time End of Time was a teenager, he had ousted his people’s reigning shaman and assumed the man’s duties. And now, at age twenty-five or thereabouts, he was regarded (by that handful of souls aware of his existence) as either the most feared and mysterious member of the most feared and mysterious tribe in that part of South America or as an addled medical oddity cashing in on the small-change benefits of primitive superstition.

If Switters’s brow resembled the coils in an electric heater, it wasn’t so much due to lingering doubt over the veracity of Smithe’s story as to his effort to remember what his grandmother had told him about pyramid power. According to Maestra, and she had it on good authority, there was something about the configuration, the dimensional relationships of a pyramid’s angles, the way it crystallized in static form the essence of dynamic geometry, that caused it to focus, laserlike, an electromagnetic or other atmospheric force (perhaps that energy the Chinese called chi), concentrating it in a relatively small, prescribed area. Switters recalled something about razor blades being sharpened and fruit kept from spoiling by pyramid-focused rays. That, come to think of it, was the rationale behind Sailor’s customized cage. He supposed that if a pyramid really could hone steel and preserve peaches, a pyramid-shaped head might have a pretty entertaining effect on the brain inside it—and it would probably be no great exaggeration to describe as “most remarkable,” a “chap” with such a brain.

“So,” said Switters, “these Nacanaca boys believe their ferocious cousins would get a kick out of Sailor’s cage because it’s shaped like the head of their grand boohoo?”

Smithe nodded. “Something like that, yes. Far be it from me to speak for the atavistic mind.” He paused to inhale and exhale a blue-tinted wad of smoke. “There is a bit more to it. When your bird blurted out that number about people needing to relax—clever turn, that: your tutelage?—it struck a chord. This End of Time chap, he has some novel ideas. A philosophy, one might be tempted to call it. Something beyond the usual mumbo jumbo, at any rate. Relaxation, at least in the Nacanaca understanding of the concept, fits rather neatly with it, I suppose. So, you see, our blokes here have concluded that End of Time must have a supernatural connection with this cage and its occupant, and while that’s a load of bosh, I daresay he would be impressed. It’s likely he’d grant you an audience, which would provide you with scrapbook fodder of the most exotic order, and me with the possibility of riding in on your coattails.”

“You’ve socialized with him previously?”

“Yes. Three years ago. At the way station, for thirty-six hours. Bloody bugger really put me through it. Can’t imagine why I’d want to go back—except that it’s, well, haunted me ever since. And there’s the chance I might turn it into something. Original yet academically rigorous. That first encounter went rather awry, I’m afraid. Crossed the line. Um. I’m no Carlos Castaneda.”

Switters grinned. “Of course you aren’t.” You’re one of those people, he thought, who want to go to Heaven without dying. Cowardice in the name of objectivity is fairly characteristic of academics, especially in Merry Olde. But he didn’t wish to get into that. Instead, he inquired as to the nature of the living pyramid’s so-called novel ideas. Considering the young shaman’s name—an inexact translation by Smithe and Fer-de-lance, it turned out, of a virtually unpronounceable Kandakandero word—he guessed his notions must have something to do with eschatology, with apocalypticism, with time.

“Oh, there may be a bubble of that in the keg. I didn’t bung into it. Not my end of the field, you see. Not that. Nor the other, either, honestly, though it may be yours. Our chap, you see, is rather obsessed with . . . with gaiety.”

Gaiety? Potney Smithe’s explanation was a rickety trellis of sober anthropological observations, lathed in the fine mill of British understatement, but rattled by occasional gusts of alcoholic verbosity, and, of course, splintered here and there by cracks from Switters. Once again, we shall attempt summation.

Kandakandero had always referred to themselves as “the Real People.” Theirs was ethnocentrism in its unadulterated form. Other tribes, other races were not merely deemed to be inferior humans, they were relegated in the Ka’dak mind to the status of animals or ghosts. Then End of Time came along. It’s very true, he told his clan, that we are superior to other Indians because we have stronger magic and purer ways. As for white men, they are so helpless and stupid they could not survive in the forest for a single moon. Yet the white man can do wondrous things that we cannot.

Fly, for example. For decades, air traffic between Lima and Belém or to and from Europe had passed over that area of the Peruvian jungle roamed by the seminomadic Ka’daks, and more recently, small planes out of Pucallpa had been buzzing around. White men also had shiny boxes that they attached to the sterns of their canoes to make them swim faster than dolphins, and they possessed weapons so powerful and accurate they reduced hunting and warfare to child’s play. In Boquichicos they had motionless boxes that churned out more music than a tribe could make, other boxes that cooked meat and yucca without a spark of fire. (The Ka’daks were well informed about what transpired in Boquichicos, though whether they spied on the town from the forest, accessed it psychically, or simply relied on Nacanaca gossip, Smithe wasn’t prepared to say.) End of Time recognized that white men were a threat to his people’s habitat, that eventually these pale weaklings with their noisy magic would dominate the forest world and all within it, including the heretofore invincible Ka’daks. White men were the new Real People, the spirits obviously were favoring them. Why?

Over and over again, End of Time drank his potions, snorted his snuffs, entered his trances, rubbed his portable pyramid. He questioned sundry Nacanaca and once sat for five days in a treetop observing, undetected, goings-on in Boquichicos. What was it about these men (aside from a hideous complexion that no god could possibly find pleasing) that made them so different from the older and once wiser Kandakandero? (No fool, End of Time could distinguish between superficial and fundamental differences.) Roughly speaking, they ate, drank, smoked, and slept the same. They shat, pissed, and fucked the same. So what was the white man’s secret?

Finally, one day, it hit him like a blow dart. The big secret was laughter.

Amazonian Indians, in general, tended to be somber, and the Ka’daks were especially severe. Kandakandero did not laugh. They did not even smile. Moreover, they had never laughed or smiled. The very concept was alien to them. Smithe suggested that for “the Real People,” life simply might be too “real”: too terrible, too short, too arduous, too . . . vivid. Whatever the reason, you might as realistically expect a Ka’dak to shout “E5mc²” as to chuckle. No giggle had ever, in all of history, chased its tail around one of their campfires, no smirk had ever cracked their war paint, no guffaw had ever taken up where a belch left off, no titter or tee-hee had scratched for them its crystal fleas. The roar of civilized laughter might strike them as ridiculous, but it wouldn’t strike them as funny. The Ka’daks didn’t know from funny.

In a radical break with both instinct and inclination, End of Time tried to teach himself to smile. He practiced alone, monitoring his progress in a reflecting pool. The first time he smiled for his gathered clansmen, he left them so astonished, so awestruck that half fell, trembling, to their knees, and the rest ran away and hid in the bushes. When he commenced to experiment with laughing, nobody was able to sleep for months. And when he insisted that others learn the art of grinning and chortling, the whole tribe nearly had a nervous breakdown.

The shaman persevered, however, even as it occurred to him that his glee was hollow, mechanical, and contrived. He sensed that an attitude adjustment must be required, that the perpetually piercing level of intensity that characterized the Kandakandero might need to be softened, toned down. (Real People of the world, relax!) Around the occasion of Potney Smithe’s visit, End of Time was just coming to the realization that white men didn’t laugh as a chore or on schedule or to please the gods, that the mystical hee-haw was not self-induced but had to be provoked; that some external happenstance, frequently invisible, aroused laughter in them.

At their initial meeting, with Fer-de-lance as interpreter, Smithe labored to help the medicine man comprehend the concept of humor. “Nothing approaching the subtler moods of irony, naturally, but the more direct, earthy approach of juvenile mockery. Of course, much of juvenile humor is sexual and scatological, and to the Ka’dak mind there’s nothing the least bit funny about bodily functions. Their taboos are of a different order. You might as well ask them to snigger at the sky.”

Still, Smithe felt, End of Time made some progress in the area of lightheartedness, though he doubted there was any such thing as a joke comprehensible to him or his fellows. “The same could be said of the religiously fundamental and the politically doctrinaire,” piped in Switters.

In repayment for Smithe’s having assisted him in his uphill pursuit of gaiety, the misshapen shaman offered to meet with him again the following day, and this next time Smithe could ask the questions. Moreover, Smithe would be allowed to actually look at him, face-to-face: during their first encounter, the witchman had concealed himself behind a woven grass screen. Not surprisingly, there was a catch. Before Smithe could be permitted to gaze upon the fabled pyramid head, the impure Englishman would have to prove himself worthy to a collection of guides, overlords, supervisors, kibitzers, and hecklers from the Other Side.

“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.

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.

“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 trust 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.”

Smithe looked him over with active bemusement. The Englishman seemed incapable of judging when Switters was speaking earnestly and when he was merely being flippant. (The truth of the matter was, Switters could not always judge that, himself.)

In no way, however, did Smithe’s confusion lessen his gratitude. He thanked Switters over and over for interceding on his behalf. Then, abruptly he stubbed out his cigarette on a blackened post and said, “It’s barely noon. If we set out at once, I daresay we could reach Boquichicos by nightfall. What do you say, old boy? Shall we get cracking? Brisk march will do wonders for your condition. You can impart further detail over dinner at the hotel. My treat. Dinner.”

“The haute cuisine of Boquichicos is a lovely prospect,” said Switters, but he made no move to extricate himself from the hammock. Rather, he lay there looking troubled. He plowed his fingers through his badly tangled curls. He ran his tongue over his palate, tasting the bitter film left by parrot goulash and yopo vomit. He had to admit that he could do with a bit of bodily maintenance. “I can’t . . . uh . . . End of Time said. . . . There’s this. . . . Listen, I’ve been thinking that I might ask the Nacanaca studs to carry me back. In the hammock. Like a hunting trophy. A roll-up. Sedan chair sort of thing.”

“Really, Switters! How imperial.” Smithe laughed, but he, too, suddenly looked troubled, as if he had a premonition that things were about to go bad in a dramatic manner. “Are you that short on stamina?”

“No, but . . .”

“Then buck up, old boy. Show us some of the heralded Yankee spunk.”

Switters propped himself up on one elbow but stirred no further. The hammock swung gently, to and fro. “This is absolutely silly, I’m aware of that, but . . .”

“Do go on.”

“I’m under, I guess, a kind of taboo.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

Switters sighed, and for a second he looked less anxious than sheepish. “Well, End of Time told me, right before he left, that I had to pay a price for having been shown the secrets of the cosmos. At first I thought he wanted money, like almost everybody else on this pathological planet, and I objected because I’ve got barely enough cash to pay my hotel bill and my river crew, and am counting on Mr. Plastic to take care of me back in Lima. But that wasn’t the sort of price he had in mind.”

“No?”

“No. He said that henceforth I must never allow my feet to touch the ground. I can stand on top of things, as I understood it, but I can’t stand on the floor or the earth. And if I ever do, if my feet touch the ground, I will instantly fall over dead.”

“The bleeding bugger.”

“Yeah. So what do you make of it? He’s playing with my head, right? I mean, it’s silly, ridiculous.”

“Oh, without question. Quite silly. Load of bosh.”

“I was hoping you’d concur. As an experienced anthropologist, you must have come across this kind of thing before. I know, for example, that West Africa is crawling with curses and taboos—but there’re also a lot of credible witnesses who swear that they’re real, they’ve seen them work. That’s why I was inclined to err on the side of caution, to be perfectly honest.” He cloned the sheepish smile.

“Righto,” said Smithe. He paused, as if pondering. “Fascinating, though. There’s a quite similar prohibition in Irish folklore. Should a mortal ever stumble upon a fairy hill and be allowed to fraternize with the fairies, watch their dances and so forth, then the chap is warned that his feet may never thereafter touch the earth, under penalty of death. Evans-Wentz wrote of this, as I recall. Stories abound of pixilated Irishmen who, out of fear, spent the remainder of their lives on horseback.”

“Superstition, of course?”

“Of course. The Irish.”

“Flapdoodle?”

“Don’t rag me. I’ve been told more than once that my manner of speech is a trifle old-fashioned. Blame it on my school. Eleanor does. But you’re quite right. Flapdoodle. As a matter of fact, End of Time, that scalawag, placed a comparable taboo on me.”

“No kidding?” For the first time in that conversation, Switters looked relieved. “The same taboo as my own?”

“Uh, no, not precisely, though promising identical consequences.”

“And you’re alive and ambulating. That bodes well for me.” When Smithe didn’t respond, Switters asked, “Doesn’t it?”

“Um.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Oh, it should. It should. Yes.”

For reasons not entirely clear, Switters felt his heart sinking. He made an effort to nail Potney with his infamous glare. “Let’s have it, pal.”

“Sorry?”

“Your taboo, goddamn it! Let’s have it.”

Smithe’s wan smile was even more sheepish than Switters’s own. “A bit off the bean, I’m afraid.” He shuffled his flip-flops.

“Never mind the fucking bean!” Although still basically on his back, he managed to look menacing.

“If you must know,” said Smithe, clearing his throat, “and there’s little reason why you shouldn’t, End of Time warned me that as penalty for having journeyed with him to so-called secret places, I would face instant death—in much the mode you, yourself, described—were I ever to touch another man’s penis.”

Switters didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He lay there, mute, listening as the creak of the hammock twine blended with the rustling of jungle foliage on all sides of them.

“Rubbish, obviously,” said Smithe, trying to sound blasé. “One must contend with a sometimes maddening lack of rational—”

“You’ve tested it?” Switters interrupted.

“When dealing with the primitive mind—”

“So, you’ve tested it?”

“Why, no, no,” Smithe almost sputtered. “Naturally, I haven’t actually put it to the test. That’s silly.”

“But you’re supposed to be a scientist. Were you afraid to test it?”

“Fear has had nothing to do with it. I might have tested it, probably would have, but, well, you know, the nature of the thing involved.”

“You mean the penis thing?”

“Of course, I do. I jolly well do mean that. What do you take me for? I’m a married man. Christ!”

“Easy, big fellow. No inference intended. But you’ll agree, will you not, that scientists must occasionally undertake experiments they find personally distasteful? You speak of rationality, yet how can you for a damn second rationally contend that this taboo is rubbish when you haven’t subjected it to experiment?”

Smithe snorted.

“You’ve got to test it, pal. For your sake as well as my own—and I can’t deny I have a stake in this. In the outcome, I mean.”

“You’re not suggesting? . . . Surely.”

“Hey, it’s not my cup of tee-hee, either. I’m as straight as you are. Probably straighter. From what I hear, your lads in the fancy schools of Merry Olde can get pretty chummy with one another when the lights are low.”

“Of all the biased—”

“Okay, forget I said that. It’s no big deal one way or the other. What’s the big deal? Women don’t have this problem. They’re more evolved.” He paused. “R. Potney Smithe. What’s the R for?”

“I fail to see . . .”

“What’s the R for?”

“Reginald.”

“Reginald. Okay. You very easily could have gone by Reggie. Couldn’t you have? Reggie Smithe. A moniker mundane by any standard. But, no, you elected to be called Potney. A fairly brave choice there, pal. I admire you for it. I’m serious. I mean it. Says something about your character. And here you are in this jungle juju joint when you could have been snapping petits fours with the vicar of Kidderminster or some damn such. You’ve got guts.” (Switters spoke in the abstract, of course, since the image of guts as an actual physical mass was seldom permitted to invade his consciousness.)

“I fail to see . . .”

“Come on, Pot. Let’s get it over with.”

Smithe glanced around him, as if looking for support, but the long, narrow, platformed room was empty except for the two of them.

“Just a touch. One brief touch, that’s it. You needn’t grab hold of anything. I’d object if you did. Strenuously.”

Smithe’s hide, at all times richly hued, looked now as if it had been rolled in paprika. He seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. “Down there,” he said, nodding his teddy bear head in the direction of the firepit and the Nacanaca. “They could easily notice. . . .”

“Not if you hurry. And so what if they did? Do you honestly believe anybody in this part of the world would be scandalized? We’re in South America!”

With that, Switters unzipped the fly of his bedraggled linen trousers. The scratchy snickersnee swoosh produced by the swift separation of metal teeth was a sound more ominous to both men than any hiss or shriek or howl that might emanate from the unknown forest. Briefly, each of them froze, as if paralyzed by stun rays from an advanced technology.

Then, Smithe turned toward the hammock, a look of grim determination on his face. “Bloody good, then,” he said. Childishly awkward in his flip-flops and quasimilitaristic tan tropical togs, he began to advance. “You’re right. Let’s be done with it.”

“Uh,” said Switters, hurriedly, “uh, now if you have any reason to suppose there’s something to this taboo, that it might actually—”

“No, no.” Smithe paused. “Oh, if a bloke were to accept such superstitious nonsense on faith, it’s quite possible that he would be psychologically susceptible to whatever end the perpetrator of the malediction might have planted in his unsophisticated mind. But no civilized, sensible—”

“Okay, but what if you secretly believe in it, believe in it subconsciously and don’t know that you believe?”

Smithe seemed not to hear. He was advancing again. Thus, wishing to avoid any clumsy, embarrassing, last-minute fumbling, Switters freed his penis from its confinement within the folds of cheerfully patterned boxer shorts and pulled it out into the open. Almost instantly, it commenced, of its own volition, to crane its neck and bob its head about, as if sniffing the air, sensing that something fun—something uplifting, even—might be in the offing. Oh, Christ Almighty, no! This can’t be happening! In a panicky effort to quell the unwanted alertness, the independent impetus toward active participation, Switters strained to think of the most repulsive, unsexy things he could mentally conjure. He thought of an overflowing cat box and buckets of offal, thought of gift shoppes, TV game shows, and the time George Bush had addressed the employees at Langley. Just as he squeezed his eyes shut, the better to picture these anti-aphrodisiacs, R. Potney Smithe extended a forefinger and jabbed Switters’s half-erect member the way a shy but righteously purposeful Jehovah’s Witness might press an agnostic’s doorbell. Switters felt an electric jolt, although later he conceded that he might only have imagined it.

Smithe took a couple of steps backward. All of the ruddiness drained from his features, and he commenced to pull and pick at his shirtfront, as if involved in floccillation. Then he swayed. Pivoted to the right. And toppled onto the scorched and pitted floor.

For quite a while—it may have been as long as five minutes—Switters swung quietly in the hammock, staring at the heap on the floor, searching for signs of life; signs, more precisely, that Smithe was, as the Brit himself would have put it, ragging him, putting him on, pushing to an extreme his occasional dry fondness for jest.

At that point a figure ascended the wobbly ladder, and Fer-de-lance climbed onto the platform. The aspiring witchman glided noiselessly across the room, like one of the creatures for whom he seemed to have such affinity, and looking, in snakeskin cape and Ray-Ban sunglasses, like a Hollywood Boulevard vampire. He knelt beside Smithe’s form.

“Muy muerto,” Fer-de-lance whispered. “Muy muerto.” He glanced over his shoulder at Switters, who was struggling to inconspicuously fasten his fly. “This mister is very, very dead,” said he.

Part 2

Every taboo is holy.

—Eskimo saying

Except for one shortish but memorable visit to Sacramento, another to Langley, Virginia, Switters spent the next six months in Seattle. It was the strangest period of his life.

It was stranger than his cloak-and-dagger days in and around Kuwait, stranger than his strangest nights of pleasure in the brothels of Southeast Asia, stranger than the annual Bloomsday literary banquets at the C.R.A.F.T. Club of Bangkok (though of these he couldn’t remember a fucking thing); stranger, even, than nine hours of modern poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Well and good, but surely, one must ask, was there nothing about that half year, passed largely idle, in Seattle that was not positively humdrum when compared to the calamitous craziness he’d recently undergone in South America or the beatific bumfuzzlements he was soon to undergo in Syria? Yes, as far as Switters was concerned, the Seattle sojourn would always be the stranger of the experiences or, at least, the period when his equanimity was most rigorously challenged. And he was, after all, the final authority on that sojourn, although others were unquestionably involved. These included Maestra, Suzy, and Bad Bobby Case, as well as an assistant deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency called Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald; and, indirectly, from afar, the Kandakandero Indian known, perhaps erroneously, as End of Time. (Fer-de-lance had concluded that the shaman’s name could be more accurately translated to mean End of Future, or more explicitly yet, Today Is Tomorrow. Accent on the verb. Today Is Tomorrow.)

The oddness of those months back in the U.S. could be attributed not merely to the major problems implicit in adjusting to life in a wheelchair but also to his efforts to come to terms with the usher—the Ka’dak witchman or Switters, himself—who had assigned him to that mobile yet restrictive seat. Compounding those predicaments, naturally, were the reactions of others, mainly but not exclusively, the friends, relatives, and employers listed above.

During his first week back, he’d had to contend with no one but Maestra. To her, he’d provided only the most ambiguous explanation of his sudden confinement to a wheelchair, claiming that his disability was related to activities that he was not at liberty to discuss; the same activities, he said, that unfortunately had destroyed her camcorder along with its heartwarming record of Sailor Boy’s flight to freedom.

“Right,” said Maestra sarcastically, rolling, behind the huge circular lenses of her spectacles, a pair of bleary, beady eyes. “The old ‘for reasons of national security’ alibi. Heh! I’m a loyal American of long standing, but that doesn’t mean I’m so flag-addled I can’t recognize our favorite euphemism for ‘governmental hanky-panky swept under the rug.’ Anyway,” she continued, “there’s a place where men disabled in the line of duty can go to convalesce. It’s called Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. If you prefer to recuperate at Chez Maestra instead, you’d better be prepared to spill some beans.”

Switters put her off. “In a few days,” he promised. “I’ll be able to talk about it in a few days.” Thereafter, every time she attempted to bring up the subject or even, in passing, shot him an imploring glance, he’d wink, grin, and proclaim, “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”

Alas, Maestra was not the type to be charmed more than once or twice by a line from Rimbaud memorized in a long-ago poetry class, no matter how attractively delivered. Faced with her increasing impatience and growing suspicions—”I have to say, buddy boy, you look pretty healthy to me; that camcorder cost twelve hundred bucks, I’m privy to your wanting to milk Suzy’s aphid, and you neglected to bring me a bracelet”—Switters, already in a confounded state and not knowing what else to do, sent for Bobby Case.

“Switters! What the hell? What have you gone and done to yourself?”

The e-message Bobby received in Alaska had stated only that his friend needed urgently to see him and supplied a Seattle address. Having a couple of days off, Case hitched a ride aboard a military transport plane out of Fairbanks bound for McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma. Within twenty-four hours after reading his e-mail, he arrived, noisily, at Maestra’s door on a rented motorcycle.

“Bobby! Wow! Welcome. That was fast.”

“Naw, man. That was slower than snail snot. Must be losing my edge. But you?! What the hell? Fall down the stairs in a whorehouse?”

Switters checked Bobby’s black leather jacket for signs of moisture. “It’s quit drizzling, hasn’t it? Let’s go out on the side deck where we can talk privately—although even the deck could be bugged.”

“Company or offshore bug?”

“Maestra bug.”

“Really? Your granny doesn’t look like no ear artist, although she does appear to have a burr in her britches.”

“She rude to you when she let you in?”

“Nice as pie. I even got the impression she was kinda flirting with me.”

“That’s Maestra. An Aphrodite type right down to the finish line.”

“She took to me. It’s you she seems to have a problem with.”

“Well, she’ll have to stand in line with the rest. Come on. Follow me.”

“I’m right behind you, son. But what did she mean when she called you Mr. Worker Ant?”

“Never mind that.” He all but blushed. “It’s a pet name. Family thing.”

“Oh. Like when my uncles and aunts used to call me ‘little asshole.’ “

Demonstrating his growing expertise with the chair, Switters wheeled down the dim foyer, past the living room—pausing briefly to ascertain that the Matisse was still there—and through a formal dining room permanently lacquered with the unsophisticated fumes from takeout food. From the dining room, French doors led out onto a spacious deck with a sweeping view of the cold and busy sound named for Peter Puget. Next to a potted evergreen there was a Styrofoam chest, which he circled three times rapidly before coming to a halt beside it, facing the water.

“You’ve taken to that chair like a worm to tequila,” Bobby marveled. “How long’s it been your mode of transport?”

Switters patted the blue Naugahyde upholstered arms of the lightweight, foldable Invacare 9000 XT, pride of Elyria, Ohio. He patted its plastic-coated, chrome-plated hand rims (used to manually propel it), kicked with the side of his foot its pneumatic “flat-free” tires, squirmed his rump about on the “contour plus” cushion that topped the “drop hook solid folding” seat. How such a brand-new deluxe-model wheelchair had ended up in the Boquichicos infirmary, he didn’t know. Part of a foreign-aid package, presumably. He did know that he had failed to send it back with Inti as promised, and he felt a prickle of guilt over that omission, even though he’d wired the clinic a thousand dollars his second day back in the States.

“It’s flame resistant.”

“That’s handy.”

“And bacteria resistant.”

“Smart. Furniture on wheels, you don’t know where it’s been.”

“Oh, I keep a watchful eye.”

“And lock it up at night, I hope. Person can’t be too aseptic in this day and age.” In a characteristic gesture, Bobby tossed a pompadourlike tussock of inky hair out of his eyes while simultaneously patting down the cowlick that coiled like a busted bedspring farther back on his head. Switters had recently turned thirty-six (his birthday had passed unheralded—except by the migraine-makers—on a flight from Paris to New York), which meant that Bobby must have been at least approaching his thirty-third year, but he seemed, if anything, to have grown more boyish—Huck Finnish in stance, Tiger Woodsish in build—since Switters had seen him last, and also more foredoomed. Small wonder Maestra or any other woman would find him worth a flutter. “Fine piece of engineering, but you’d think they’d figure out a way to plumb the damn things.”

“To accommodate a wet bar or . . .”

“Naw,” Bobby went on, shaking his raven mane as if rejecting his previous thought, “that’d never work. But I’ll tell you, son, what’d throw my happy heart to the wolves if I was to have to park a bony Texas butt in one of these suckers every day is the trial and tribulation of just taking a whiz. I mean, don’t you have to off-load yourself onto a customized throne and wee-wee sitting down like you was queen of the May?”

“Such unlucky gentlemen do exist,” said Switters, “but behold the masculine ease with which I can perform the rite of the void.” In demonstration, he bolted boldly upright and stood on the footplate as if before a public urinal. “Of course, you have to make sure the brake is set, and balance your weight, or you could pitch face-first into the fixture.”

Bobby looked like a buffaloed rubbernecker at the Lazarus show. “You can stand?!”

Grinning, Switters hopped backward up onto the seat, where he then began to jog in place, raising his knees almost as high as the scarlet T-shirt he wore under his double-breasted navy pinstriped suit. The wheelchair shook. It teetered precariously. For an instant, he seemed to panic. He throttled the trot.

“What the? . . .” Bobby’s face was changing expressions faster than Clark Kent changed underwear. He went swiftly from astonishment to relief to annoyance to amusement to imagined comprehension. “Okay. Alrighty. I get it. Even a maniac like yourself wouldn’t go to all this trouble just to mock the afflicted or play a cruel joke on your ol’ podner. So’s I reckon you’re fixing to go deep cover, and you’ll be trying to convince some alleged bad guys somewhere that you’ve been crippled by the forces of imperialism. The CIA and Actors Studio: telling them apart has never been simple. Did you know Mata Hari’s real name was Gertrude? But hey! Anyway. I’m gladder than shit you’re not actually stoved in ‘cause I was hoping we could hit a dance club or two this evening.”

Switters reseated himself. “It’s not like that, Bobby,” he said quietly. “It’s not a cover. I really am confined to this contraption. Indefinitely, if not permanently.”

“Then what the? . . . You were bouncing around like a poot in a microwave.”

“Why don’t you take your bandanna, if you don’t mind, and dry off one of those patio chairs.” Switters lifted the lid of the Styrofoam cooler. There was a rattle of ice shards as he removed a pair of glistening bottles. Sing Ha. “For old times’ sake,” he said. “Only four of these in stock, I wasn’t expecting you so soon. But there’s a Thai restaurant a mile from here, and they deliver. Good. Have a seat. You’re not chilly, are you?”

“I live in Nome,” Bobby said. “Nome, Alaska. And in case your Langley-trained powers of observation have completely deserted you, I happen to be wearing my leathers. You’re the one liable to get cold.”

The sun had muscled through the oyster frappé for the first time in weeks, but a light breeze was blowing off the water, and it was raw around its edges. “The state I’m in, I’m impervious to climate. So make yourself comfortable. I’ve got a story to relate . . .”

“I should hope.”

“. . . and you’re going to find it harder to swallow than a cat fur omelet. It’s hard for me, too, so be patient, if patience is among your virtues . . .”

“You could fit all my virtues in Minnie Mouse’s belly button and still have room for Mickey’s tongue and their prenuptial agreement.”

“. . . because it’s going to take me some time, even to get started. Maybe while I’m gathering my wits, as the maître d’ used to say at the Algonquin Hotel, you could fill me in on what you’ve been up to.”

Noticing Switters’s untypical solemnity, Bobby said, “Sure. Take it slow if you need to. But you’ve got to tell me one thing up front. The question that’s burning a hole in my tortilla is . . . well, is or is not the affliction that’s landed you in this senior-citizen dune buggy the result of a sexually transmitted disease? I mean, I hate to be blunt, but if you’ve been bit by something of that nature two years after Bangkok, there’s a chance that I might . . .”

Switters had to laugh.

“Well, we were plowing the same fields, you know. Extracting ore from neighboring shafts. So to speak.”

The word relax was on the tip of Switters’s tongue when the memory of Sailor intervened. Instead, he said, “Not it at all. Nothing remotely in that category, I promise.” He removed a cell phone from the side pocket of the wheelchair and ordered a dozen Sing Has from the Green Papaya Café. Then, without waiting for Bobby to file his Alaska report, he began—first haltingly, bumblingly, then, gaining silver and fizz, dramatically, almost with heedless relish—to recount the events of the weeks just past.

The sun, as if wanting to listen in, as if there might be something new under it, after all, fought off the curdling stratocumulus and moved in closer. By the time Switters finished his hour-long account, the deck was awash in afternoon sunlight; mild, respectful, autumnal rays, bright enough but lacking any sear in their beam. The sea breeze persisted throughout, but so restrained, finally, it could give the impression that it, too, had been mesmerized by the tale.

If the sun was enticed and the breeze engrossed, Bobby Case was those things and more. The former Air Force officer was literally transfixed—whether with amazement, awe, disbelief, sympathy, or scorn, it was impossible to ascertain. Many minutes passed, however, during which he could not raise his beer to his lips. When at last he spoke, his voice was taut from the strain of trying to sound normal and unimpressed. “So, that ol’ boy? That limey? He really bought the farm?”

“Muy muerto.”

“Damn shame.”

“Yeah. Potney was a fine fellow. An aristocrat, I suspect, although the kind inclined to wear black business shoes and dress socks with Bermuda shorts.”

“Every country club in the state of Texas has got a few of them. And you believe the Indian’s curse killed him?”

“Well . . .” Switters, too, was making an effort to behave matter-of-factly. “I believe he chomped an apple he couldn’t—”

Bobby’s eyes narrowed. “An apple?” he asked archly.

“Yeah. Eve’s apple. The fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

“Oh? Thought for a second you were referring to the head of your—”

“Bobby! For Christ’s sake! No, no tooth marks on that fruit, which, anyway, I would’ve modestly described as a crab apple or a plum. Jesus, pal! He only jabbed it. What I’m saying is that Potney took a bite out of the old forbidden Winesap and could neither assimilate it nor eliminate it. A cruel dilemma. As Hesse said, ‘The magic theater is not for everyone.’ “

“Bought a ticket to a show his rigid background hadn’t prepared him to handle? But once seen, couldn’t forget? Alrighty. How, exactly, did that kill him?”

Switters shook his head silently, slowly.

“More to the damn point, you? You’re a horse of a different feather.”

Switters just kept shaking his head.

Some gulls screeched by, sounding, as usual, in a state of barely controlled hysteria. Wondering if his friend wasn’t close to being in the same condition, Bobby decided he ought to experiment with empathy. “If it was anybody but you, podner, I’d say you were haunting your own house. Like that uncle of mine in Jasper who still thinks Fidel Castro’s hiding under his rose bushes. Raggedy ass roses, too. Never prunes ’em right. But knowing you’re telling the truth, and after the crazy shit you saw down there, well, I’m trying to put myself in your place, and I have to say, if it was me who went through it and saw what you saw, I reckon I’d be lying on my back with my feet in the air like some upended June bug. At least, ‘til I figured it all out.”

Switters lit a Havana panatela, Cuban cigars being an occasional perk of CIA employment. On the out-puff (he never inhaled), he said, “Figuring it out is the rub.”

“Yep, and I don’t know if I can help you much with that end of it. For the time being, at least, I’m going to let you wrassle with the psychological aspects. As for me . . . we’re in agreement that you’ve got good reason to be keeping your tootsies off the pavement. You got no choice right now but to scoot around in that wheelchair. The first order of business is to find a way to get you out of it.”

“That would probably entail lifting the taboo.”

“There you go.” Bobby sucked on his beer bottle like a tot on a lollipop or a tout on a pencil. After a minute or two, he said, “We’re both company men. Even if I am just a contractual flyboy and you’re stuck below supergrader because of your personal proclivities. We’re still company. So let’s approach this problem like company. How would the geniuses back at the pickle factory deal with it?”

“Depends on the level of White House involvement.”

“You got that straight, son. President’s men the biggest damn cowboys on the planet, and we take the heat for ’em. Democrats bad as Republicans.”

“Worse, maybe.”

“Yep. That beloved JFK. More dirty tricks than a whore in a coal mine. By the time he supposedly ate acid and saw the evil truth about Vietnam, his karmic boomerang was already winging home to roost. Live by the cowboy, die by the cowboy, I reckon. But we digress. Now. The company. First thing, they’d dispatch some Joe to meet with that would-be giggle box of a shaman and buy him out. Bribe him to call off the bugaboo. Right?”

“Quite likely. But End of Time—or Today Is Tomorrow—has no use for money. In fact, I can’t imagine what you might possibly bribe him with.”

“Everybody has a price. ‘Cept for you and me. On second thought, ‘cept for you. I know all too well what mine’d be. But, alrighty, let’s say we can’t buy him off. Next thing, the company would send in some disinformation Joes, plant evidence, try to discredit him. Rile up the populace against him. Pressure him, blackmail him, get him run out of office.”

“Near as I can tell, except maybe for a noninfluential outsider named Fer-de-lance, he has no rivals. If he ever had any, I suspect he may have eaten them.”

Bobby burst out laughing.

“I’m not so sure that’s far-fetched. You find it amusing?”

“Nope, nope,” said Case. “I was just thinking about you eating granny’s parrot.” He grinned from sideburn to sideburn.

“Shhh,” Switters shushed him, glancing around furtively.

“Sorry. But we did sweep for bugs. Which in itself is pretty funny. Anyhow, if all else failed, company’d dispatch an operative to smack the witchman. If the cowboys had a hand in it, they would.”

“Well, they don’t. And in the Amazon forest? I’m not sure they could. They couldn’t even smack Castro. In seven attempts.”

“All they had to do was go to Jasper, spray Uncle Jerry’s roses.”

“Besides, who would do it?”

Bobby didn’t hesitate. “Me.”

“You must be cartooning!”

“Nope. Not if it came to that. Not if it was the only way to release you.”

Simultaneously touched and appalled, Switters asked, “You’d actually? . . .”

“If it came to that. As Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, it’s permissible to—”

“I know what Krishna is alleged to have said in the Gita: ‘If your cause is just,’ et cetera. And like the ‘eye for an eye’ crap Yahweh is alleged to have thundered in the Bible, it’s been twisted to excuse and justify every vile sort of opportunistic bloodletting. Anyway—and I sincerely appreciate your offer—the threat of death, or even death itself, is unlikely to produce the desired results. Today Is Tomorrow and his pals have a different slant on mortality than we so-called civilized types. The overly oxygenated who like to think all peoples are the same have never crossed paths with a Kandakandero.”

“Hell, they’ve never crossed paths with a Frenchman. One-worldism is just a disguised brand of xenophobia. Even your cousin Potney from cousinly Merry Olde laid a bodacious cultural difference or two on the table. Otherwise, you mighten not be in this mess. Now, as for getting you out of it . . . I see your point. Eliminating the laughing shaman wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the taboo.”

“Not unless he died in some arcane manner that you and I couldn’t even guess at.”

“Hmm.” Bobby filled his throat with Sing Ha. Switters followed suit. Out on Puget Sound, an aging freighter filled its stack with steam. The noise, long and mournful, set a neighbor’s dog to yowling a canine version of a country western tune, which in turn set off the gulls, those graceful but grabby scavengers who wouldn’t have hesitated to pick Hank Williams cleaner than a Cadillac full of agents and a courtroom full of ex-wives. Then, everything went quiet again, the sun let itself be bound and hooded by strato-terrorists, and Switters returned to shaking his head. As the ambience, sky and water alike, gradually turned a single shade of teal, Bobby slumped low in his patio chair, his battered boots propped on the ice chest. He appeared lost in thought.

Teal is an unfriendly color, and the air had an unfriendly feel. Chill, at last, found Switters’s bones. He tapped the toe of Bobby’s left boot with the toe of his own right sneaker. “Park Place, Illinois Avenue, and a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for your thoughts,” he said.

“Make that a Boardwalk hotel full of blondes and fried chicken and you got a deal.” He bolted upright and grinned his boyish hardpan grin. “I was thinking,” he said, “that wheelchair or no wheelchair, I’m taking you dancing tonight.”

They did go dancing. Even Switters danced, after a fashion, careening his Invacare 9000 around the floor of the Werewolf Club, more or less in time to the energetic rock of Electric Baby Moses, moving, more or less in concert, with one of the several young women Bobby had attracted to their table. Or, perhaps, Switters had attracted them on his own. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates,” he practically shouted at one point in the evening.

Even so, they taxied home alone. Alone, and more than meagerly intoxicated. So intoxicated, in fact, that an incautious Switters sang in the cab a medley of refrains from Broadway shows, included among them a seemingly poignant rendition of “Send in the Clowns.” Bobby, fortunately, thought his friend was merely waxing ironic—and to a certain extent irony was involved. The stiff-witted and academic seem not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the same instant; that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an affectionate glow in heart.

They awoke the next morning wound in the rusty anchor chains of hangover, but Maestra fixed them a delicious late breakfast of ham biscuits with red-eye gravy, surprising because they’d roused her noisily at 3 A.M., Switters lacking a key to the house, and because Maestra never had been what she contemptuously referred to as a “kitchen chicken.” Bobby told her she made the Galloping Gourmet look like he was stuck in cement and kissed her on the cheek, and although she waved him off as if he were some kind of hopeless lunatic, Switters could tell she was pleased.

Arriving on the side deck just as the mist was lifting (they’d paused on the way to admire the Matisse), Switters suggested a tuft of hair of the dog. “Nope,” countered Bobby, “nothing doing. First, we’re gonna sit. I have a sneaking suspicion you haven’t sat in a coon’s age.”

“However the hell long that is,” said Switters. “I don’t believe small arboreal carnivores are exactly famous for lavish longevity, not judging from the frequency with which they show up as road kill.”

“Mock the folk wisdom of your ancestors if you must, ain’t no concern of mine, but I can sense you haven’t been sitting, son; and while meditation wasn’t designed as therapy, it might do more for you than gravy does for biscuits—at this weird troubling time in your life.”

They sat.

They sat for nearly two hours, in the course of which Switters lost himself so that his essence passed into what some are wont to call, perhaps unrealistically, the Real Reality: that realm of consciousness beyond ego and ambition where mind becomes a silver minnow in a great electric lake of soul, and where the quarks and the gods pick up their mail on their way from nowhere to everywhere (or is it the other way around?).

Afterward, tranquilized and centered by the meditation, and enheartened by the previous evening’s coed recreation, Switters felt better than he had in a fortnight; felt so good that he came to an optimistic decision concerning his next course of action. His instinct, however, was not to share this with Bobby immediately. Instead, he focused on loosening the last remaining loops of hangover’s iron turban. “Young buck like you might not notice,” he said, decapping a beer, “but I find piper inflation to be on the rise.”

“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 naked, 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.)

At 6 P.M. he began to worry. At quarter past, he revved up the fret machine. It was darker than the clam beds of Styx out there, and a needle-nose rain had commenced to fall. Where could they be? Certainly, something had gone wrong. In her frail condition, Maestra might have lost her grip and fallen off. Bobby, hardly the most cautious of bikers, might have skidded them into a lumber truck. Or a driver, typically unmindful of motorcycles and further handicapped by the gloom and the rain, might have plowed into them or run them over a curb. There must have been an accident. What else would have delayed them? Switters dismissed any notion of hanky-panky. There were limits to Bobby’s gallantry. She was a grandmother, for God’s sake! She was older than salt.

He had just decided to give them ten more minutes before calling the police when the telephone burbled. A table was sideswiped and a floorlamp flattened on his way to the phone. Evidently he needed more practice in the Invacare 9000. He was not yet the starship commander he fancied himself to be.

“Bobby! What’s happened? Is she all right?”

“All right? Yeah, she’s fine—except for being stubborn as a frostbit fireplug. We’re having a big fight, to tell you the truth.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re at the video store. I’m dying to see Blade Runner again—you know as good as me it’s the best damn movie ever made—but your granny’s got her mind set on some fou-fou flick about the expatriate art scene in Paris in the twenties. Guys with big noses sitting around in sidewalk cafés arguing over whether Gertrude Stein weighs more than Ernest Hemingway, or some unhappy shit like that.”

“You must mean The Moderns. It’s a delicious film. You’d lick your chops over it. Why don’t you just rent them both?”

“Because, Solomon, in case you forgot, we agreed to play CD-ROM Monopoly with her later on, and that game takes longer than the lemonade line in Hell. I got to fly tomorrow night.”

“In that case,” said Switters, feeling like the vice president at a Senate deadlock, “I cast my deciding vote for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Now come on home.” He slammed down the receiver.

Bobby left the next morning. As he zipped himself into his leathers at the front door, he said, “We really didn’t dig very deep into your situation. We talked about how to break the curse or whatever it is—and I’m still ready and willing to waltz down to the Amazon and seize any operational opportunity that should arise, you say the word—but we never got into the significance of the thing. What it means, where it came from. Was it a well-thought-out decision, that particular taboo? Is it traditional to ban interlopers and visiting firemen from touching certain things, in your case the earth? Is earth-touching symbolic in some cryptic way, or was it arbitrary, just a matter of a wily ol’ jungle wiseguy having off-the-cuff sport with a city slicker? And how does it tie in with your yopo trip? What’d you see or learn on that trip that was so heavy or precious or privileged that you would have to pay for it by spending the rest of your life with your heels elevated? And just because some goofy limey bush professor keeled over from Kadockywocky juju, does that necessarily mean you would? Boy howdy! There’s a fieldful of stones we left unturned.”

“I’ve been flipping them like pancakes myself, and suppose I’ll keep at it unless the company creates a major distraction for me.”

Bobby chuckled. “I’d love to be a fly on the pickle factory ceiling when you report for duty in that hospital hotrod. At least travel for the disabled is easier nowadays. There a direct flight from Seattle to D.C.?”

“Probably, but I don’t book it. I fly into New York and take the train down, so that I never have to patronize an airport named for John Foster Dulles.” After saying “Dulles,” Switters immediately expectorated, and Bobby did likewise. In such aesthetic harmony was their dual expulsion of salivary projectiles that they could have represented the U.S. in synchronized spitting. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter that we didn’t spend this all too rare reunion dissecting and analyzing my peculiar state of affairs. There’ll be plenty of time to ponder End of Time, even if today is tomorrow. And there’re happenings in this life that simply don’t lend themselves to rational interpretation. To look at them logically can be to look at them wrongly. Logic can distort as well as clarify. What’s important is—well, my psyche was a pregnant mouse at a cat show when you arrived, I was in a fair amount of disarray, but you showed me a good time, gave me some laughs, got me relaxed. Thanks to you, pal, I can now approach my prospects with a relatively clear mind.”

“Clear enough to stay away from little Suzy?”

“Well . . .”

Bobby shook his head reproachfully. “I sure hope Hell has wheelchair access.”

“If not, I may have to settle for Paradise.” (In his cerebral data base, crammed as it was with etymological privity [some might say pedantry, but there was nothing the least bit trivial about those underpinnings of modern language that were by extension the underpinnings of modern consciousness], he knew the word paradise to be derived from Old Persian for “walled garden” or “enclosed orchard”—but the significance of this, while he was still many months removed from the Syrian oasis, obviously would not have occurred to him.) “Heaven or Hades, as long as Pee-wee Herman’s on the premises I’ll be content. Pee-wee may be becoming my idol.”

“I can appreciate that,” said Bobby, thinking of the video they had watched before Maestra bankrupted them both at Monopoly. “It’s the innocence.”

“It’s the joie de vivre.”

They embraced in the manner that had raised more than a few cowboy eyebrows. Bobby walked down the steps and mounted the Harley. “By the way,” he called, “you don’t have to sweat anymore about what to tell your granny. I talked to her last night on our ride. It’s all taken care of. She’s cool as an ice worm in snow melt.” He roared away.

Whatever story Bobby had fed Maestra, it proved effective. As Switters wheeled about her spacious house at top speed, slaloming through an obstacle course of furniture, skidding around corners—practicing, honing his skills—she smiled knowingly, approvingly, almost with a wink. If only Capt. Nut Case had given Suzy a similar briefing!

Alas, as Bobby had hinted it might, the wheelchair had a dampening effect on Suzy’s presumed and anticipated passions. When she came home from school (rather late, he thought) on Monday afternoon to find him chair-bound in his mother’s parlor, she emitted a sharp cry of dismay and approached him tentatively, with grave concern. “Had a minor mishap in South America,” he quipped, and she brightened. But when he, foolishly perhaps, confessed that his confinement might be long-term, if not permanent, her horrified frown reappeared.

Not that she was unsympathetic. Au contraire. From that moment on, she was solicitous and attentive nearly to a fault, but her ministrations were those of a nurse, not a nymph. His condition had awakened in her maternal and nurturing instincts, altogether admirable qualities in their place, but hardly the emotions for which he yearned. Although those big sea-squirt eyes of hers, poker chips in Neptune’s deep casino, still regarded him adoringly, the coquetry in them had given way to pity. Pity. Lust’s worst enemy.

There was something else. When on Tuesday, Suzy again was late from school, Switters inquired of his mother, Eunice, of her possible whereabouts. “Oh,” said Eunice, “she’s probably hanging out with Brian.”

“Who’s Brian?”

His mother smiled. “I think our little Suzy has a boyfriend.”

It took every Asian breathing technique he’d ever learned, and one or two he improvised for the occasion, to rescue his brain from the Tabasco-filled birdbath into whose crimson waters it had suddenly fallen. When the searing and flopping finally abated, he felt a measure of relief at the way things were turning out. Almost concurrently, he felt a disappointment so profound he thought he might weep. It was similar to the mixture of relief and disappointment a moth must feel at the extinguishing of a candle.

If he thought he was free of the exquisite torture of obsession, however, if he believed fate had dictated he lay that shining burden down, he was mistaken. When, at about six o’clock, she came down the hall to his room with a can of Pepsi and a plate of brownies, came in her school uniform (pleated blue skirt and loose white blouse), came with her tiny gold crucifix twinkling like an eastern star above the twin mosques of her breasts (my, how they’d grown! that old training bra couldn’t begin to corral them now), came with her round rump ticking like two casseroles in an oven, came with her smart smile and guileless gaze, he could sense the want spreading throughout his organism like a cotton-candy cancer, and his mania once more had the wind to its back.

Suzy kissed him on the mouth, but without tongue or duration. “Don’t eat all these brownies now, and spoil your dinner.”

“Did you bake them?” In his mind he licked the spoon, her fingers, knuckles, wrists, forearms. . . .

“Yeah, but, like, not from scratch.” She sat down on a hassock. “If you’re going to hang in your room like this, you ought, you know, to be in the bed.”

“No, I oughtn’t. But I’d be delighted to jump into bed if you’d jump in with me.”

She blushed, though only lightly. “Oh, Switters! You’re so-oo bad.”

“That isn’t bad, that’s good. Don’t they teach you anything at your penguin academy?”

“Next year, I’m transferring to public school. Catholic school . . . I mean, I love the religious training and stuff, but a lot of the rules are just so lame.” She closed her fingers around her throat to illustrate in some fashion the lameness of parochial regulations. “My dad doesn’t mind, ‘cause he got excommunicated for, you know, divorcing my mom and marrying your mom. Switters, has your mom been married lots of times?”

“Let’s put it this way: my mother’s on a first-name basis with the staff at several honeymoon hotels. I believe she may get a discount. Now, speaking of honeymoons, darling, don’t you think it’s time we started practicing for ours?” He inched the wheelchair closer to her hassock.

Giggling nervously, she shook her head. She had cut her hair and wore it now in a bob that, while better shaped and slightly longer, was not unlike a blonde version of the Amazon coif. The effect was somewhat childish, somewhat boyish. “You shouldn’t even talk like that. You being injured and stuff.”

“Nothing wrong with me that your pretty little sushi roll wouldn’t improve.”

“Switters! That’s not what your grandmother says.”

He blinked. “My grandmother? What did she say? When?”

“Last night. Remember when we were eating dinner and the phone rang? I ran to get it ‘cause I thought it might be Bri . . . like, this friend of mine, you know. Well, it was your grandma up in Seattle. She told me how delicate your condition is and that, like, if I should ever be tempted to, like, let you do anything romantic or nasty, I should bear in mind that it could kill you. ‘It’d probably be the death of him,’ she said. So, you see.”

Damn that Maestra! “That meddling old. . . . She’s lying through her teeth, and even her teeth are false.”

Suzy stood. “She’s just trying to protect you.”

“I don’t need protection. I’m sturdy as a Budweiser draft horse.”

“You are, are you? In that wheelchair? Hello?” She moved toward the door. “You behave yourself. I’ll come get you when dinner’s ready. We’re both just trying to take care of you, you know. I think your grandmother’s way cool.” Suzy blew him a quick kiss and left the room.

“She cheats at Monopoly!” he called after her. It was all he could think to say.

This is ridiculous. I know life, the way humans live it, is absurd more often than not, and I don’t particularly mind. I rather like the smell of absurdity in the morning. At the onset of a potentially dull day, a whiff of the genuinely ludicrous can be exhilarating. But this situation is too much. It’s too much for me. It’s stupid. I admit, I kind of enjoyed it at first, the sheer unexpected outlandishness of it, but now the novelty has definitely worn off, it’s become a prime-time drag, it’s drying up my syrup of wahoo.

I’m going to stand and walk away from this geriatric golf cart. I’m going to bound down the hall like an impala with a pack of hyenas on its butt and snatch Suzy up in my arms, which have toned up quite nicely, thank you, since I’ve been pushing these hand rims; I’m going to sweep her off her feet and chew the buttons right off her blouse, I don’t care if the whole family sees me do it. I can’t take any more of this. It’s silliness worthy of the U.S. Congress, it’s estúpido supremo.

Bracing the heels of his hands on the chair’s Naugahyde arms, Switters lifted himself off its seat, extending and bending, simultaneously, his right leg until the tip of his black sneaker was a mere centimeter or less above the oval rag rug, one of many such carpets that contributed to the Early American decor of the rambling suburban ranch house. R. Potney Smithe’s death was undoubtedly a result of the power of suggestion—a kind of extreme version of the tactics of Hollywood and Madison Avenue—and only the mentally weak are susceptible to such psychological manipulation. Hey, even if Today Is Tomorrow possesses some cause-and-effect magical faculty totally unfamiliar to science, its reach surely is geographically restricted, it can’t extend thousands of miles to north-central California.

He wiggled his toes until he could almost feel the molecular interaction of foot with floor. Yet he didn’t quite make contact. Suppose it’s real, the Kandakandero magic, suppose I touch this ugly rug and it strikes me dead: so what? I certainly can’t go on in this manner for the rest of my life. Under such a cloud. It’s oppressive. I’m a prisoner in an invisible jail. Worse, I’m an object of pity to the opposite sex. Rimbaud was wrong! I’m not putting up with it. Fuck your taboo and the snake it rode in on. I’m free! Kill me if you can, pal. Go ahead. I dare you.

Although he pressed down harder on the chair arms, however, although he raised his buttocks higher and waggled his toes faster, he remained a quarter centimeter from actual contact with the floor. Chickpeas of sweat popped out on his brow, arteries popped out in his eyeballs. His Adam’s apple turned into an Adam’s grapefruit, and the ringing in his ears sounded uncomfortably like the whine Potney Smithe emitted immediately before keeling over. Whew!

His biceps started to quiver—perhaps he had misjudged the extent to which they’d recently firmed up—and his right leg quivered, too. Yet, like a model threatened with loss of employment, he held the pose.

The thing about death, though, is that it eliminates so many options. At least, in terms of the personality game. As long as I’m alive, there’s always a chance that something extremely interesting will develop from all this. Who can guess where it might eventually lead or what I might learn from it? Doesn’t the infinite emerge from the fiasco? And any time I want to test it or bring it to resolution, that option is only two inches away. What’s the big hurry? There may be red-eye gravy for dinner.

And there may be other ways to woo the darling Suzy. Indeed, no sooner had he relaxed his posture and settled back into his seat, with a long breath and a frangible whimper, than he began to formulate . . . well, if not a cunning strategy at least a fresh approach. He would, he told himself, concentrate his energy upon assisting her with her term paper. In the process, he’d open the charm taps, let her see how vigorous and entertaining he could be, treat her to displays of pith and pluck that would gradually dispel any image she might have of him as sickly or incomplete. He’d turn her pity inside out, kick it off its ivory perch, feed it to the foxes of ecstasy, and, while he was at it, feed Brian baby to the pterodactyls of oblivion. And if that course went awry, if it backfired, if the fact that he was no longer pantingly petitioning for consensual copulation succeeded only in confirming to Suzy that his “injuries” had rendered him feeble and fruitless, then he would consider telling her the truth. All of it: Sailor Boy to penis poke.

He sighed again, massaged his arms, and, like a railyard dick chasing hobos off a flatcar, swept the beans of sweat from his brow.

After dinner, under the semiwatchful eye of his mother, her stepmother, Switters and Suzy huddled in the den to discuss her paper, the subject of which was to be Our Lady of Fatima. Since there was a gap in Switters’s erudition where this particular virgin was concerned, Suzy filled him in.

It seems that on May 13, 1917, three shepherd children from Fatima, Portugal, were visited (allegedly visited, though Suzy did not qualify it thusly) by a woman (Suzy said lady) in a white gown and veil while tending their sheep in the hills outside of the village. The children said that the woman—the vision of the woman—told them to return to that place on the thirteenth of each month until the following October, at which time she would reveal her identity. The kids complied, she dropped in on them briefly each month as promised, and on October 13, she spoke dramatically and at some length, disclosing, among other things, that she traveled under the name of the Lady of the Rosary. She bade the little sheepherders to recite the rosary every day and asked that a chapel be built in her honor. Switters suggested that this last smacked of raw egoism, but Suzy only frowned at him and went on.

Although the Roman Catholic Church never officially proclaimed the children’s rosary-touting visitor to be a reappearance on earth of the Virgin Mary, it authorized devotion to her in 1932, and had a shrine with a basilica erected at Fatima, to which thousands of pilgrims were still attracted each year. “Maybe that’s where I’ll take you on our honeymoon,” whispered Switters, and for a second he could have sworn he saw a flicker of excited expectation in her eyes.

The best was yet to come. At some point during the October visitation, the Fatima Lady issued to the children three sets of predictions and warnings, two of which she urged them to immediately make public. “Warnings! Predictions! This is more like it,” said Switters. “You be nice and listen,” said Suzy.

There wasn’t a great deal more to hear, as it turned out. Regarding the Fatima Lady’s prophecies, Suzy was short on detail. “Wars and big floods and, uh, famines and earthquakes and stuff.”

“That figures.” Switters nodded. “Death and destruction are a prophet’s bread and butter. Nobody ever grabbed much ink predicting bountiful harvests, lovely spring weather, or that a good time would be had by all. Even the Second Coming is billed as ‘Doomsday.’ “

“She said that some great war was going to end in the next year. That was nice. But that if people didn’t heed her words, another greater one would come along soon.”

“Those would have been World Wars One and Two.”

“Whatever. She was right, wasn’t she?” In the Early American rocker angled next to his wheelchair, Suzy maneuvered a bare shin beneath the other knee so that she was balanced, more or less, on one of her lean, tanned legs, a position that thrust her upper body slightly forward until he could feel her breath upon his neck. She smelled both clean and dirty, sour and sweet, like a child. The reverie of childhood—its seamless daydreams, its gamelife and toylife, its timeless aura of magic happiness—was there in her aroma. Whatever that little bastard Brian might be doing to her (or she to him), she still smelled like the punch line in a nursery rhyme. “She couldn’t be wrong,” Suzy continued. “She was Mother Mary.”

The precise logic of that declaration eluded Switters, but he thought he knew where it was coming from. Many human females, as they approached puberty, as the first hormonal waters—the precursor of the adolescent geyser—began to bubble up through their private earth, became enamored, to greater or lesser degrees, with horses and/or the Virgin Mary. Unlike human males, whose fixation on sports figures, explosions, horsepower, and vulgar comedy could muddle their minds into early middle age, and in hard cases, even beyond, the equine and Marian fantasies of healthy girls tended to wane and then peter out (so to speak) altogether once they became sexually active. The most cursory familiarity with Freudian psychology could explain the girlish preoccupation with horses; the infatuation with Mary, particularly on the part of non-Catholics, was more complicated, although he guessed it could be attributed to her status as Super Virgin: she conceived without coitus, gave birth without pain, commanded the affection and admiration of men without being corrupted by them; which was to say, she triumphed gloriously over the terrors, dangers, and uncertainties facing young females as they came “of age.” The fact that Mary broadcast a monstrously mixed message—motherhood is divine, sex a sin—could not be underestimated for the damage it was capable of inflicting on a developing psyche, but given the discrepant nature of reality, the myth of the Virgin Mother might be said also to provide basic training in the acceptance of life’s contradictions; and most girls did eventually escape her misogynistically generated web, though frequently secretly scarred.

That Suzy was bright and spunky, that she had an open heart and generous spirit, that she was physically attractive and therefore did not have to retreat into doctrine as a form of compensation, all indicated that she would soon outgrow Marianism. For the time being, however, especially as they prepared her term paper, he would accept it just as he accepted her limited vocabulary and imprecise speech. Hey, Mary might have been his own patron saint had not her innocence been commandeered as a front for a rapacious institution. He tried to picture what Mary (known then as Miriam or Mariamne) must have been like before she was hijacked and haloed by the patriarchs, back when she was Suzy’s age, a dusty-footed, chocolate-eyed Jewish filly, swelling with a fetus of suspect origin—but the Virgin that unexpectedly filled his mind’s eye was the Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters, a scruffy dory bearing him ever farther up a steaming jungle river toward a destiny almost too queer to comprehend.

He shook it off. “Very well, cupcake,” he said, “here’s what we must do. First, we’ll take the broad overall view. Research the subject generally but thoroughly. Then, we’ll narrow our focus down to something manageable and particular and original. For example, the significance of the number thirteen in the Fatima visitations. We’ll research that specific area with even greater thoroughness. Then we’ll organize our material, make an outline of the salient points we want to cover. After that, we’ll write a first draft. Submit it to ruthless scrutiny. Edit it to perfection. And bingo! Final draft. An A-plus paper. Scholarship to Stanford.”

“Wow! Hello? Sister Francis didn’t tell us all that. Sounds like a lot of work. Are you sure that’s how people write term papers?”

“Absolutely. Some novelists even write books that way. The more dronish ones.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “You’re the brain.”

“You’ve got a brain, too, and don’t forget it. If you develop it, it’ll be around to enrich your life long after your tits and ass have declared bankruptcy.”

“Switters!” His mother looked up from her fashion magazine and shook a crimson-nailed finger at him.

“It’s cool,” Suzy assured the older woman. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s, like, the smartest person anywhere.” She planted a vigorous kiss that very nearly slid off his cheek and onto his lips.

“I don’t know about that,” grumbled Eunice, although whether the source of her uncertainty was Switters’s intellect or Suzy’s kiss remained unclear.

Cranking up the search engine on the family computer, they commenced their investigation that very evening, discovering, to their mutual astonishment, twenty full pages of entries relating to Fatima. They failed to make a dent in the list, however, because when Suzy noticed that her Tweety Bird wristwatch read ten o’clock, she insisted that Switters go to bed. He protested energetically. “I was riding herd on these domesticated electrons before you were potty trained,” he said. “As much as I loathe computers, I can drive them all night long. I mean it. I’m good until dawn.”

“No, you’re not,” she responded. “You need lots of rest and stuff. I’m in charge here. I’m the nurse, and I’m going to take care of you, no matter what you say.” She switched off the computer. “We can, like, do this tomorrow.”

“All right, then, Nurse Ratchet. As long as you’ll come straight home from school.”

She frowned at this but agreed.

“Are you sure you can’t tell your own family what’s wrong with you?” his mother asked, not for the first time.

“He can’t,” snapped Suzy. “It’s a governmental secret.”

“That’s correct, Mother. And if you don’t quit prying, I’m going to suspect you of being in the pay of a foreign power. I’ll bet Sergi is putting you up to it.”

“Don’t you dare mention that name in this house,” she said, reddening. Sergi was one of her previous husbands.

Suzy pushed him out of the den. In the hall she asked, “Switters, there really is something the matter with you, isn’t there? It’s not some kind of, like, CIA trick?”

Oh, God! Here’s my chance. I can just give her the whole story and be done with it. But he didn’t. “It’s no trick, darling,” he said, agonizing as he said it.

“You promise you can’t stand up and walk?”

Come on. Tell her the truth. Or have you worked for the company so long you’re only comfortable when you’re lying? He clenched his fists. He bit his tongue. “I promise,” he said.

She rolled him into the bathroom. “Get ready for bed,” she ordered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Not being in the right frame of mind for prolonged maintenance, he was already in bed when she returned, bearing a glass of milk and a bowl of oatmeal cookies. Having had his sweet tooth shattered by a rifle butt in Kuwait, he’d left her earlier delivery of brownies virtually untouched on the bedside table, but she pretended not to notice.

Suzy smoothed his covers. Then, very gingerly, so as not to disturb his “injuries,” she lay down on top of him. “Here’s your good night kiss,” she said, but instead of one kiss there was a series, a staccato series, repeatedly stabbing, as it were, his mouth with the wet pink dagger of her little tongue.

Through the Early American patchwork quilt, through the floral patterned sheet, he could feel her rosy biological heat, a smokeless fire that enveloped the vestigial dollhouse and charred the residual mud pie; a soft, ancient, mindless burning emanating from a source oblivious to cultural conditioning; that neither knew nor cared that “civilized” girls no longer married at twelve, that unscrupulous older males might take advantage of its urgings, or that shrill neurotic voices might rage against it. Broiled by it, Switters centered himself and lay motionless, except to rest a cautious, non-probing, non-squeezing, rather avuncular hand lightly on her small, ripe rump.

“Tell me something about yourself,” she demanded.

“Okay. Shoot.”

“No, I mean, like, tell me something true about you that I don’t already know. A secret fact. That nobody else knows.”

He pondered this for a moment or two. Then he declared, “The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.”

For some reason, Suzy found this the most radical, outlandish, unexpected, and witty remark she’d ever heard. Giggling, and shaking her head in wonderment, she slipped carefully off him and moved to the door. “Gotta go now. Remember, if you need anything, just ring that little bell.”

He glanced at the quasi-antique copper bell on the table beside the milk glass but said nothing.

“You’re amazing,” she said. “I only wish that—” She broke off abruptly and left the room.

He lay awake most of the night, trying to finish her sentence for her.

The California State Library was located in Sacramento, appropriately enough since Sacramento was the capital of that state. Glamorous, greedy Los Angeles had its Hollywood sign; picturesque, kooky San Francisco had its Golden Gate Bridge; provincial, authoritarian Sacramento—in which the true pulse of America pumped a steadier beat—had its Capitol Mall. Within that mall, beneath the huge gold dome of the capitol building and at the end of a broad, tree-lined avenue, the state library sheltered its precious charge of books.

Although he anticipated—correctly, as it turned out—that the library would be home to a minimum of volumes pertaining to Our Lady of Fatima and that they must turn to the Internet for the bulk of their research, still he wanted Suzy to have the library experience, to undergo the sheer bookness of the place, to taste the “seepage,” as he put it: the information and beauty that tended to leak from shelves of books even when the books went unread.

“Virtual reality is nothing new,” he told her as she guided his chair up and down the rows of stacks. “Books, the ones worth reading, have always generated virtual reality. Of course, unless one can get past its cultural and sensorial levels, what is reality but virtual?”

Suzy was silent, but he imagined he could hear tiny luminous thought-worms chewing roadways in her half-green apple. DNA was certainly devious in that it ripened the body before the brain.

On the way back to the suburbs, feeling tome-toned and opus-pocused, Switters piloting his rented convertible, Suzy playing navigator, nurse, and tour guide, they debated whether the fact that Sacramento was noted for its manufacture of missiles, weapons systems, cake mixes, potato chips, and caskets did not qualify it as the quintessential American city. “Okay, but, like, Sacramento’s also called the Camellia Capital of the World,” she reminded him.

“A few weeks ago, I was in the Dead Dog Capital of the World. I have to say, camellias are an improvement.” Sensing that she was trying to form some connection in her mind between a place so vile it was renowned for dead dogs and his presumed wounds and injuries, he sought to restore a more poetic and, he hoped, romantic mood by reciting a Buson haiku:

“A camellia falls,

Spilling out rainwater

—from yesterday.”

“Could you pull off over there?” she immediately asked, pointing not to a motel as he at first thought but to a gas station. “I really have to use the bathroom.”

“Say toilet, would you, darling. I don’t believe bathing is one of the services Texaco provides.”

“Whatever.”

“No, it’s not unimportant. Intelligent speech is under pressure in our fair land and needs all the support it can get.”

He spent the five minutes that she was absent trying not to picture her camellia spilling out yesterday’s water.

She made him rest when they got home.

After dinner they went computerside and uncorked the Fatima jug. Quickly their cups runnethed over.

The children were Lucia, age ten, Francisco, nine, and Jacinta, seven. They were poor and completely uneducated. When they returned from the pastures that spring evening in 1917, they seemed to be entranced, almost in a state of ecstasy. Lucia ate her supper in blissful silence, and Francisco, too, was distracted and quiet, but little Jacinta was too young and excited to contain herself. The cat she let out of the bag, and which in time grew larger than a tiger, was that they had been visited on the northern slope of the Cova da Iria (where her uncle, Lucia’s father, leased pastureland) by a beautiful woman enveloped in blinding light. She appeared to them, following several flashes of lightning (it was a clear, sunny day) from a point some meters above their heads, in the top branches of a stubby tree. As Switters read aloud Lucia’s later description of the woman, her dazzling white tunic that gathered at the waist without benefit of belt or sash, her graceful hands folded prayerfully at her breast and wound round with a pearl-beaded rosary, her exquisitely refined features, the sadness and maternal concern that showed in her countenance, the loveliness that exceeded anything to which a bride might aspire, the light that she radiated (“clearer and brighter than a crystal cup filled with purest water penetrated by the most sparkling rays of the sun”), he noticed that Suzy herself was becoming enraptured. For any number of reasons, he thought, this is probably not a good sign.

He was tempted to suggest that they launch a botanical probe into the bush that the Lady had selected as her landing pad. In Portuguese, it was called carrasqueira, in English, holm oak. By any chance did it have psychotropic properties? Might the children have chewed its leaves or, perhaps, inadvertently inhaled its pollen? Alas, even were Suzy open to such an approach, Sister Francis would likely have a Sacred Heart attack, in which case an A-grade might be out of the question.

When, however, they learned that the Fatima children had twice in the previous year been visited by an angel, Switters couldn’t keep quiet. “No television, no radio, and they were illiterate. Kids sometimes have to provide their own entertainment. It was always Lucia, the eldest cousin, who saw these holy apparitions first, and it was with her that they spoke. Maybe little Lucia had an active imagination, a fantasy life fueled by Bible stories, the only extraordinary material to which she’d ever been exposed, and she pulled the younger kids into her fantasies, much the same way that Tom Sawyer pulled in Huckleberry Finn.”

Suzy protested. “I don’t know why you have to be so negative. Don’t you believe in miracles and stuff?”

“Well, I know from first-hand experience that the universe is a very woo-woo place, and that so-called consensual reality is not much more than the tip of the iceberg. But my credibility alarm starts to jangle a bit when the Virgin Mary shows up speaking flawless Portuguese and looking like a Roman Catholic Sunday School portrait instead of the Middle Eastern Jewish matron she was at the time of her death. If I remember it correctly, rosary beads weren’t introduced until more than a thousand years after Christ, so why—”

“Hello? God’s time isn’t the same as our time.”

She had him there. Certainly he wasn’t going to argue on the side of linear time, not after what he’d been through. Today was tomorrow, wasn’t it? Or, at least, the future leaked into the present on a fairly routine basis. The past, as well.

“Anyway, like, what about all the people who saw the sun dance in the sky and stuff? On October thirteenth. They weren’t Huckleberry Finns.”

“Hmmm,” hmmmed Switters. “That’s interesting in itself. Of the seventy thousand people who joined the children in the Cova da Iria pasture for the Lady’s farewell performance and prophecy session, roughly half claimed to have witnessed a meteorological light show of staggering proportions. The other half saw absolutely nothing. What does that tell us, darling? That fifty percent of humanity is susceptible to mass hallucination?”

“Or that fifty percent are pure enough to see God’s miracles and the rest are like you.”

“Fifty percent purity? Man, I wish the figure was even a fraction that high! As for me personally, I witness a divine miracle every time you enter the room.”

“Oh, Switters!”

When she tucked him in a short while later—he wasn’t tired, but he didn’t object—she loaded a full package of tongue into their good night kiss.

Asked in an interview in 1946 if the Lady of Fatima had revealed anything about the end of the world, Lucia (by then Sister Mary dos Dores, a lay nun) responded rather like a CIA officer with cowboyish leanings. “I cannot answer that question,” she said through tight lips. Lucia did not, as far as has been reported, add, “for reasons of national security.”

Whether or not the Lady had been forthcoming about a possible final curtain ringing down on the Homo sapiens revue—and none but Lucia had actually heard her prophecies—she was not exactly a bubble of optimism in regard to our planetary prospects. For example, that spectacular celestial cha-cha that thirty-five thousand people claimed to have observed, along with Lucia and her cousins, on October 13, 1917, was executed, she said, not by the sun but by a preview of a flaming comet, a fireball that according to the Lady (and disputed by astronomers everywhere) would return someday to dry up oceans, lakes, and rivers and shrivel a third of the earth’s vegetation. No, not precisely a planetary death sentence, but considerably more severe than a stiff fine and a hundred hours of community service.

If it was doom that intrigued them, however, the Fatima faithful got their money’s worth. The white-clad apparition predicted straightaway that a plague would fall upon the land soon after the Great War ended and that two of the shepherd children would be among its victims. In 1919, first Francisco, then Jacinta succumbed to the influenza epidemic that killed twenty million people in Europe and North America. The Lady had hit a chilling bull’s-eye with that one, and she was only slightly off center with her prophecy of approaching famine: almost on cue, a vine fungus spread through Europe, lasted more than three years, and left no grape unspoiled.

Her forecast in the second set of predictions that Russia would “spread its errors” throughout the world could probably also be considered a hit. Strongly disposed toward threats and scoldings—the Lady repeatedly warned that if people didn’t amend their lives, beg forgiveness, and run marathons on their rosary beads there was going to be hell to pay—she was particularly hard on Communists, obviously viewing Communism as something more amplitudinously evil than a mere inherently flawed economic system. Rather like John Foster Dulles, thought Switters, but he didn’t say as much for fear he might uncontrollably fire a saliva shot at the polished hardwood floor or the antique rag rug that lay upon it. Bobby would never have forgiven him if he hadn’t.

It was Thursday afternoon, and Suzy, a shade less reluctantly than the day before, had come straight home from school. The two of them were in the den, sorting through the printouts of their Internet research, concentrating, at Switters’s urging, on the Fatima predictions and warnings. Suzy had wanted to change into jeans and a sweatshirt, but at his request she remained attired in her school uniform. Whether his aim was to reduce temptation or to torture himself with it was probably debatable. In any event, he ceased counting her pleats long enough to wave a sheet of paper in the charged air that separated them. “This!” he exclaimed. “Right here. It’s the only tidbit of information we’ve uncovered in three days that could spike the punch at the teddy bears’ picnic.”

“Hello?”

“Right here.” The printout, which he now handed her, concerned Our Lady’s third and final prophecy. At the time of its delivery, the children would say nothing of this last prediction except that it was of great consequence and would bring joy to some and sorrow to others.

Around 1940, some twenty-three years after it was supposedly issued, the nun formerly known as Lucia Santos wrote down the secret prophecy and sealed it in an envelope with instructions that it be opened in 1960, or upon her death should she die earlier than that date. The envelope was locked in the office safe of the bishop of Leiria in Portugal, where Church sources said it remained until 1957, when Pope Pius XII had it brought, under tight security, to Rome. Pius was itching to rip it open, but Lucia was still alive. In fact, Lucia was still breathing in 1997, whereas Pius XII died in 1958 without ever satisfying his curiosity.

While the Church would neither confirm nor deny it, highly placed Vatican sources claimed that at some point in 1960, Pius’s successor, Pope John XXIII, did, finally, open the mystery envelope—and wept for three days over the “terrible news” it contained. Throughout the remainder of his life, John XXIII adamantly refused to discuss it with anyone, and the message was reputed to rest in a vault at the papal palace, unread by a soul save that sobbing pontiff nearly forty years in the past.

“Yeah,” said Suzy. “That’s pretty wild. But you know, how could I write about it when, like, I don’t know what it says.”

“We could speculate.”

“You mean? . . .”

“I mean, extrapolating from her two published predictions, we could try to guess the content of the final and missing one. Might be fun. What possible prognostication from a controversial source could set a modern pope to blubbering for three whole days?”

“But bring joy to some.”

“Exactly. Think about it.”

From the way Suzy screwed up her face, she was thinking hard about it. “You’re cute when you frown,” said Switters.

She seemed daunted, perplexed by her stepbrother’s proposal, and eventually she vetoed it. “No, I just want to tell the story. You know, tell about the children and Our Lady and all the stuff that happened. Even Sister Francis doesn’t know much about it. She said she didn’t. And the class is, like, clueless. It’s kind of a beautiful story, so I just want to write it down for everybody. Okay?”

Switters shrugged. “It’s your party. I’ll help you organize the material if you’d like, and you can take it from there.”

She lowered her eyes. “Switters? Are you disappointed?”

“Nein,” he lied. “Only thing that disappoints me is that the authorities haven’t locked you up somewhere. You’re too damn cute to be at large. You’re a public menace.”

“Switters.”

“I’ll bet your armpits taste like strawberry ice cream.”

She had just slid onto his lap and was tightening her tawny arms around his neck, her tongue muscles quivering like the hamstrings of a cheetah about to spring from its lair, when his mother made one of her periodic checks of the room. “Now, now, children,” Eunice admonished.

“Can’t I show my big brother some gratitude and affection?” Suzy asked. Her tone was defiant.

“You’ve been watching too much TV, young lady,” said Eunice, somewhat inexplicably.

Reddening, Suzy stood, about to defend herself, but Switters intervened. “Mother’s right,” he said calmly. From an end table within his reach, he snatched up a cast-iron ashtray, fashioned to resemble an Early American hearth skillet, and used it to gesture at the forty-inch Sony across the den. “There’s the problem right there,” he announced. “Does it not possess the power of a totem pole and the heart of a rat? Die, demon box, die!” With that, he hurled the ashtray at the TV, badly cracking its plastic casing and missing the screen (purposefully or not) by a fraction of an inch.

As the ashtray, a souvenir of Monticello, caromed with a loud clanking onto the floor, his mother emitted a sound midway between a gasp and a shriek, and Suzy regarded him as if he were the most astounding entity to grace the earth since Fatima, Portugal, 1917.

Choosing to skip the family dinner, Switters slipped away and drove over toward Rancho Cordova, where he knew there to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet with a drive-through service window. “I understand,” he said to the clean-cut, if acne-peppered, hobbledehoy who dispensed his order (he imagined him to look a lot like Brian), “that KFC still uses the colonel’s original frying recipe. Is that correct?”

“Uh, yes, sir, it is.”

“Eleven secret herbs and spices. So I’ve heard.”

“Yes, sir. I believe so.”

“Would you identify them for me, please?”

“Huh?”

“The eleven secret herbs and spices. Tell me what they are.”

Bewildered, the boy began blinking rather frenetically, as if during one of the lid closures, the customer and his cheeky red convertible might disappear.

“Don’t play dumb,” snarled Switters. “If you can’t come up with all eleven off the top of your head, nine or ten will do.”

The boy gathered his composure. “Uh, I’m sorry, sir. They’re our secret recipe. Would you please pull forward?”

“I’ll pay you forty dollars.” He wagged two bank notes in the pustulated face.

“No, sir,” said the boy, glancing over his shoulder with one of those half frightened, half irate I’m-going-to-send-for-the-manager expressions. “I don’t. . . . You’re gonna have to pull forward.”

“What if I told you I have your girlfriend in the trunk of this car?”

His eyes widening until it appeared his pimples might pop, the young man seemed as if he were about to shout or retreat or both, yet he did neither for the simple reason that Switters had fixed him so forcefully with his fierce, hypnotic gaze that he was all but paralyzed. “I-I don’t—” he stammered weakly. “I’m just a cashier. I don’t know nothing about the—the cooking side of it.”

“So, you won’t betray the colonel for love or money? Not even to spare your girlfriend’s life?” Switters abruptly relaxed his glare and lit up the boy with a smile that could paint a carousel. “Congratulations! You’ve done it, pal. You’ve passed the test.” He held out his hand, but the boy was too stunned to shake it. “I’m Operative, uh, Poe, Audubon Poe of the Central Intelligence Agency. As you’re doubtlessly aware, the CIA’s main responsibility these days is protecting America’s corporate interests, such as the colonel’s eleven cryptic herbs and spices, from insidious foreign competitors. You play an important role in this struggle, pal. So, well done! Your government’s proud of you, and I’m sure the colonel’d be proud of you, too—if the beloved old motherfucker weren’t as dead as the gravy you counterfeit gastronomes slop on his unsuspecting biscuits.”

Switters tossed the boy a twenty. “Take the night off,” he exhorted. “Badger some phrontifugic adult to buy you a six-pack. Domestic, of course. Sacramento is, indeed, the quintessential American city, and you are a genuine American hero!” He gunned the engine. “I’ll let your girlfriend out at the next rest stop!” he cried, and he squealed out of the KFC lot, laying down enough burnt rubber to blackface the cast of the Amos ’n’ Andy show for most of a season.

With a Cajun-style drumstick between his oft-abused but still pearly teeth, he headed back toward the west, roaring into one of those lurid orangeade sunsets that could qualify as nature’s revenge on Louis XIV.

Shortly before 10 P.M., as Switters sat propped up on the four-poster bed reading from Finnegans Wake, there was a soft knock at his door, and Suzy tiptoed in. “You missed dinner,” she said.

“I dined out. How are things?”

“Daddy’s been kind of gnarly. He wants to know why you, like, attacked his TV set.”

“Yes. Good question. I’ve been wondering about that myself. I suppose you could say that these past few days in suburbia have roused my imp from its slumber.”

“You mean,” she asked, half frowning, half grinning, “the Devil made you do it?”

“Well, no, darling, that’s not it at all. The Devil doesn’t make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn’t make us mean. Rather, when we’re mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world. But all that’s beside the point. I think probably the most truthful thing you can tell your daddy is that I attacked his TV set out of love of life.”

“Love of life,” Suzy whispered almost inaudibly, rolling the phrase around in her mouth and her mind, as if it were a concept so unfamiliar, so novel, it would take awhile to grasp it.

“What,” asked Switters, “did my mother have to say?”

“Oh, she said ‘Dumpling’s’—sometimes she calls you Dumpling—’Dumpling’s a man of mystery, just like his father.’ “ She watched an odd, ironic smile bend his lower lip like a bartender twisting a peel of lemon. “So, like, what did your father do?”

“He was a man of mystery.”

“ ‘Man of mystery,’ “ she repeated in a whisper, as though she were again ruminating on an exotic, esoteric but flavorful notion—and this time she watched the bedside reading lamp illuminate his spray of tiny scars, causing them to resemble a constellation projected on a planetarium ceiling. After a moment or two, she asked politely, “Uh, what’re you doing tomorrow?”

“For one thing, I thought I’d sift through the Fatima detritus and get your outline started for you.”

“Oh my God, Switters, you’re just so fine! I was really hoping you’d do that. Like, I can’t be here tomorrow. My dad’s taking your mom shopping again in San Francisco, and they, I guess, don’t want me to be home alone with you. So, I’m going with my girlfriend after school, and then Brian’s taking me to his football game.”

“Brian’s an athlete, is it?”

“No, he doesn’t play. He’s a cheerleader.”

Switters brightened. “A cheerleader. He doesn’t by any chance moonlight at Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

She moved her buttercup bangs in a negative rotation. “Uh, I’m gonna try to leave early. Like, after the first quarter. I think I can, you know, get a ride home. The parental unit won’t be back from San Francisco until ten o’clock. They told me.”

“But you’re leaving the game early and coming home?”

Lowering her filoplume lashes until they almost swept the blush from her cheeks, she said ever so gravely, “To be with you.” She slid awkwardly onto the bed beside him, kissed him briefly but wetly, removed one of his hands from the binding of Finnegans Wake, and placed it in the general vicinity of her crotch. “I want to get naked with you,” she said, blurting it out, softly but forcefully, like a jet of steam.

Switters swallowed hard, as though he were gulping down a goose egg. When his larynx stopped wobbling, he asked, “Are you sure?”

She nodded soberly. “I . . . think so. You’re my . . . my. . . . But I . . . I’ll be here if I can. I might not.”

The next day Switters had the house to himself. He stayed in bed until he heard the Mercedes sedan pull out of the three-car garage, heading for the boutiques of Maiden Lane. Then he breakfasted on peanut butter and soy bacon sandwiches, taking them out by the swimming pool to eat. The pool had been emptied for the season and covered with a blue plastic tarp that for a zip of an instant transported him back to Inti’s Virgin and the tattered canopy with which the dory had tried in vain to hold back the Amazon sun. In November, the Sacramento sun needed no such restraint, although it was certainly warmer there than in Seattle, and drier, as well. The golf course that bordered the stucco ranch house that Eunice had won in the marriage lottery was as green as Socrates’s last cocktail, but everything between it and the coastal range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east was so amber, dusty, flea-bitten, and buff it reminded him of the lion population in a second-rate zoo. It was visual cereal that, milkless, crunched in his eyes, and he realized that were he to strike out across those stubble fields where wheat and barley had recently been sheared, he’d be better off in a wheelchair than on foot. Even the steely soles of Inti’s feet would have been diced.

Done with breakfast, he decided to attempt meditation. It was never easy to commence—his internal river of thought and verbiage had a velocity that overflowed or crumbled Buddha’s dams—and on that morning it was particularly difficult to get started. Bobby had taught him not to wrench the valves, however, so he sat passively, neither fostering thought nor trying not to think, and gradually the flow subsided—except for one unstemmable trickle, and that trickle’s source was Suzy. After about an hour of that, he thought What the hell!, and gave it up. He hadn’t made it into the medulla of the medulla, but he’d gotten closer to the Void than airports are to most major cities; he’d glimpsed its invisible skyline, breathed its odorless smokes; and since it was eternal, knew it’d be there the next time he bought a ticket. Just not today. Today, for better or worse, was a day to think about Suzy.

There is something so sweet about a young girl’s sexual longings, he thought. There’s a sad and happy sweetness in them. Her longing was not for orgasmic release: that would come with the years. Her longing was not even for an amplification of the genital quaver that her body for some time would have been softly trilling; nor was it strictly a longing for love and affection: in fact, the more love and affection a girl was receiving from her family and friends, the less that was a part of it. As much as anything else, it was a longing for information. There was information about men; about being with men, alone, in dark places, that she sensed she must access in order to navigate the mysterious vastness of her life-to-be. Her subconscious mind was signaling to her that such information was essential to her very survival in the adult world, and her hormones, for reasons of their own, were augmenting those signals with a barrage of swelling itches and tingles. Implicit in most sexual yearning was a deep-seated desire to connect somehow with the mystery of being, but the yearning of the young was overlaid with a scary yet optimistic desire to solve the smaller (though they’d hardly seem small at the time) mysteries of the adult universe, a universe in which the penis seemed to cast a long shadow and the vagina formed a gateway to both shame and salvation. If the longing of many older women lacked that sweetness, it was because they already had gleaned the information for which young girls were so shyly desperate, and may have found it disappointing and unsatisfactory, particularly where men were concerned.

Switters went back indoors and rolled about the house for a while, maneuvering around utterly obsolete churns and spinning wheels and uncomfortable wooden rocking chairs. Were he ever offered a voyage in a time machine, Colonial America would be far down his list of preferred destinations, although he suspected that Jefferson, Franklin, and the lot would be worthy drinking companions, maybe even deserving of C.R.A.F.T. Club membership, which was not something one could say of a single governmental leader of the past hundred and fifty years.

In contrast to the harsh pragmatism of the Early American decor, the contents of his mother’s closets, which he examined now in some detail, were stylish and luxurious. Hanging there, bereft of the flesh whose silhouettes they mimicked, were soft, powdery pantsuits, slithery black cocktail dresses, and matte suede jackets trimmed with lamb, each flying an inconspicuous but haughty little flag emblazoned with an Italian name (Oscar de la Renta, Dolce & Gabbana) that he’d have recognized if he read Vogue or even Newsweek instead of Tricycle and Soldier of Fortune. Eunice did them justice, too, he had to admit, though he failed to find her, at fifty-seven, hair in a hennaed bun, face in a brittle tuck, to be as buzzy with allure as he remembered her mother, Maestra, to be at that age. Dwayne’s closet, which he also examined, was filled with goofy golfing garb and shiny suits Switters wouldn’t have worn to a Chiang Mai cockfight.

Gradually he made his way to the door of Suzy’s room, but although he went so far as to grasp the knob, he just could not allow himself to violate its sanctity. He’d never been that kind of spy. He sat there for a long time, however. Thinking.

Suzy doesn’t merely want to feel, she wants to know. She yearned to concretize the unsubstantial image of the “real” life that awaited her; to prepare herself, perhaps, for the transfiguration, the metamorphosis that would split her dreamy cocoon, discharging her, a wing-damp, unsure butterfly, into the leafy gardens of wifedom and motherhood. Well, would he not be the perfect teacher? He not only had the experience, he also had the devotion, the caring. If the male erection was the compass with which so many women, for better or worse, must get their bearings in the world, what finer instrument than his own? Why, if Amelia Earhart had had my peepee on board. . . . He recalled Bobby’s story of how, in olden times, the uncles had initiated—