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  Fierce Invalids

  Home From

  Hot Climates

  TOM ROBBINS

  BANTAM

  New York Toronto

  London Sydney

  Auckland

  table of contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Tom Robbins

  Praise for Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

  Copyright

  For Rip and Fleet and Capt. Kirk

  I want God, I want poetry,

  I want danger, I want freedom,

  I want goodness, I want sin.

  —Aldous Huxley

  part 1

  Sometimes naked

  Sometimes mad

  Now the scholar

  Now the fool

  Thus they appear on earth:

  The free men.

  —Hindu verse

  Lima, Peru

  October 1997

  The naked parrot looked like a human fetus spliced onto a kosher chicken. It was so old it had lost every single one of its feathers, even its pinfeathers, and its bumpy, jaundiced skin was latticed by a network of rubbery blue veins.

  “Pathological,” muttered Switters, meaning not simply the parrot but the whole scene, including the shrunken old woman in whose footsteps the bird doggedly followed as she moved about the darkened villa. The parrot’s scabrous claws made a dry, scraping noise as they fought for purchase on the terra-cotta floor tiles, and when, periodically, the creature lost its footing and skidded an inch or two, it issued a squawk so quavery and feeble that it sounded as if it were being petted by the Boston Strangler. Each time it squawked, the crone clucked, whether in sympathy or disapproval one could not tell, for she never turned to her devoted little companion but wandered aimlessly from one piece of ancient wooden furniture to another in her amorphous black dress.

  Switters feigned appreciation, but he was secretly repulsed, all the more so because Juan Carlos, who stood beside him on the patio, also spying in the widow’s windows, was beaming with pride and satisfaction. Switters slapped at the mosquitoes that perforated his torso and cursed every hair on that hand of Fate that had snatched him into South too-goddamn-vivid America.

  Boquichicos, Peru

  November 1997

  Attracted by the lamplight that seeped through the louvers, a mammoth moth beat against the shutters like a storm. Switters watched it with some fascination as he waited for the boys to bring his luggage up from the river. That moth was no butterfly, that was certain. It was a night animal, and it had a night animal’s mystery.

  Butterflies were delicate and gossamer, but this moth possessed strength and weight. Its heavy wings were powdered like the face of an old actress. Butterflies were presumed to be carefree, moths were slaves to a fiery obsession. Butterflies seemed innocuous, moths somehow . . . erotic. The dust of the moth was a sexual dust. The twitch of the moth was a sexual twitch. Suddenly Switters touched his throat and moaned. He moaned because it occurred to him how much the moth resembled a clitoris with wings.

  Vivid.

  There were grunts on the path behind him, and Inti emerged from the forest bearing, somewhat apprehensively, Switters’s crocodile-skin valise. In a moment the other two boys appeared with the rest of his gear. It was time to review accommodations in the Hotel Boquichicos. He dreaded what he might find behind its shuttered windows, its double-screened doors, but he motioned for the boys to follow him in. “Let’s go. This insect—” He nodded at the great moth that, fan though it might, was unable to stir the steaming green broth that in the Amazon often substitutes for air. “This insect is making me feel—” Switters hesitated to utter the word, even though he knew Inti could understand no more than a dozen simple syllables of English. “This insect is making me feel libidinous.”

  Central Syria

  May 1998

  Trekking toward Jebel al Qaz-az in a late spring rain, the nomads were soaked and nearly giddy. Behind them, at lower elevations, the grass was already yellowing and withering, fodder not for flocks but for wildfires; ahead, the mountain passes conceivably could still be obstructed by snow. Whatever anxieties the band maintained, however, were washed away by the downpour. In country such as this, hope’s other name was moisture.

  Even the sheep and goats seemed merry, lighter of hoof, although individual beasts paused from time to time to shake rainwater from their coats, vigorously, stiffly, causing them to look like self-conscious burlesque queens. Their leathery black muzzles, glistening with rain, were pointed—not so much by their drivers as by a migratory instinct older than humanity—toward distant pastures.

  Switters was one of four men—the khan, the khan’s eldest son, an experienced pathfinder, and himself—who traveled on horseback at the head of the procession. The rest were on foot. They had been on the move, dawn to dusk, for almost a week.

  About two miles back, prior to beginning their gradual ascent, they had passed a large compound, an oasis, undoubtedly, completely surrounded by a high mud wall. The boughs of orchard trees rose above the wall, and the scent of orange blossoms boosted to a higher power the already intoxicating smell of the rain. From inside the compound, Switters thought he heard the wild sugary shriek of girlish laughter. Several of the young men must have heard it, too, for they turned their heads to stare wistfully at the remote estate.

  The band pressed on. That is what nomads do. Forward the march. The burden and the bleating.

  Switters, however, could not get the mini-oasis out of his mind. Something about it—its mysterious walls, its lush vegetation, its auditory hint of young women splashing in the rain—had gripped his imagination with such steady pressure that eventually he announced to his hosts his intention to return and investigate the place. One might say they were shocked, except that his very presence among them was in and of itself so extraordinary that they were partially immune to further bewilderment.

  The khan shook his head, and his eldest son, who spoke passable English, objected, “Oh, sir, we must not turn back. The flocks—”

  Switters, who spoke passable Arabic, interrupted to explain that he meant to go alone.

  “But, sir,” said the eldest son, wringing his hands and screwing up his forehead until it looked like the rolled-back lid of a sardine can, “the horse. We have only these four, you see, and we—”

  “No, no, good buddy. Assure your papa I had no notion of galloping off with his fine nag. Now, he can let his next eldest son hop up and take a load off his tootsies.”

  “But, sir—”

  “I’ll just zip on back there in my starship. If you boys’ll be so good as to ready it for me.”

  The khan waved the procession to a halt. At that exact moment the rain stopped as well. Two of the tribesmen unfastened Switters’s chair from behind the saddle, unfolded it, placed it on a reasonably level patch, and set its brake. Then they helped him off the horse and lifted him gently into the seat. They strapped his croc-skin valise to the chair back and laid his computer, satellite telephone, and customized Beretta 9-mm pistol, each wrapped in a separate plastic garbage bag, on his lap.

  Elaborate farewells were exchanged, after which the nomads watched for many minutes in nothing short of awe as Switters, laboriously, precariously—but singing all the while—maneuvered the rickety, hand-operated wheelchair over the brutal rocks and
ensnaring sands of a landscape so harsh in its promise that a mere glimpse of it would propel a Romantic poet to therapy or a developer to gin.

  Slowly, he dissolved into the wilderness.

  He seemed to be singing “Send in the Clowns.”

  Vatican City

  May 1999

  The cardinal ordered Switters and his party to queue up single file. The garden path was narrow, he explained, and besides, it would be unseemly to approach His Holiness all in a bunch. Switters was to go first. If his weapon had not been confiscated at the last security checkpoint, he might have insisted on bringing up the rear, but now it didn’t matter.

  Because of his “disability,” Switters needn’t feel obliged to kneel upon reaching the throne, the cardinal had generously conceded. Switters wondered if, nevertheless, he would be expected to kiss the pope’s ring. Only way I’m smooching that ring, he thought, is if they paste a crumb of hashish on it, or else smear it with pussy juice or red-eye gravy.

  As he thought that, he was remembering an actress he used to know, who, in order to entice a tiny trained terrier to follow her around during a movie scene, had had to have scraps of raw calf’s liver stapled to the soles of her high-heeled shoes.

  Thinking of that terrier magnetized by meat-baited slippers reminded him then of the old bald parrot that had waddled after its mistress in a Lima suburb many months before—and for a moment Switters was back in Peru. That’s the way the mind works.

  That’s the way the mind works: the human brain is genetically disposed toward organization, yet if not tightly controlled, will link one imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest of pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regard for logic or chronological sequence.

  Now, it appears that this prose account has unintentionally begun in partial mimicry of the mind. Four scenes have occurred at four different locations at four separate times, some set apart by months or years. And while they do maintain chronological order and a connective element (Switters), and while the motif is a far cry from the kind of stream-of-consciousness technique that makes Finnegans Wake simultaneously the most realistic and the most unreadable book ever written (unreadable precisely because it is so realistic), still, alas, the preceding is probably not the way in which an effective narrative ought properly to unfold—not even in these days when the world is showing signs of awakening from its linear trance, its dangerously restrictive sense of itself as a historical vehicle chugging down a one-way street toward some preordained apocalyptic goal.

  Henceforth, this account shall gather itself at an acceptable starting point (every beginning in narration is somewhat arbitrary and the one that follows is no exception), from which it shall then move forward in a so-called timely fashion, shunning the wantonly tangential influence of the natural mind and stopping only occasionally to smell the adjectives or kick some ass.

  Since this new approach should render chapter headings (those that designate date and place) unnecessary, they will from now on be scratched. If the next chapter were to have a heading, however, it would read:

  Seattle

  October 1997

  It was on a mist-bearded Saturday morning, gray as a ghoul and cool as clam aspic, that Switters showed up at his grandmother’s house. En route from the airport, he had stopped by Pike Place Market, where he bought a bouquet of golden chrysanthemums, as well as a medium-sized pumpkin. Now, he was forced to juggle those items in order to free a hand with which to turn up his trench coat collar against the microdontic nipping of the drizzle. He had also purchased a capsule of XTC from a hipster fish merchant he knew, and as he walked from the rental car to the stately mansion, he managed to get it to his mouth and swallow it without benefit of liquid. It tasted like snapper.

  He punched the bell. After a brief interval, his grandmother’s voice crackled out of the speaker. “Who is it? What do you want? This had better be good.” The woman refused to keep a downstairs maid, although she was eighty-three years old and had the wherewithal.

  “It’s me. Switters.”

  “Who?”

  “Switters. Your favorite relation. Buzz me in, Maestra.”

  “Heh! ‘Favorite relation’ in your dreams, maybe. Do you come bearing gifts?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He heard the electronic loosening of the latch. “I’m advancing. Brace yourself, Maestra.”

  “Heh!”

  When Switters was less than a year old, his grandmother had stood before his highchair, her hands on her still glamorous hips. “You’re starting to jabber like a damn disk jockey,” she said. “Pretty soon you’ll be having a name for me, so I want to make this clear: you are not to insult me with one of those déclassé G words, like granny or grams or gramma or whatever, you understand; and if you ever call me nannie or nana or nonna—or moomaw or big mama or mawmaw—I’ll bust your cute little chops. I’m aware that it’s innate in the human infant to produce M sounds followed by soft vowels in response to maternalistic stimuli, so if you find it primally necessary to label me with something of that ilk, then let it be ‘maestra.’ Maestra. Okay? That’s the feminine form of the Italian word for ‘master’ or ‘teacher.’ I don’t know if I’ll ever teach you anything worthwhile, and I sure as hell don’t want to be anybody’s master, but at least maestra has got some dignity. Try saying it.”

  Little more than a year later, when he was two, the child had marched up to his grandmother, pinned her with his already fierce, hypnotic green eyes, planted his hands on his hips, and commanded, “Call me Switters.” Maestra had studied him for a while, had puzzled over his sudden identification with his none too illustrious surname, and finally nodded. “Very well,” she said. “Fair enough.”

  His mother continued to call him Baby Dumpling. But not for long.

  Maestra failed to greet him in the vestibule, so Switters wandered the ground floor searching for her. Nearly a year had passed since he’d been in the house, but it was as he remembered it: spare, elegant, and spotless (Maestra had a professional housecleaning service come in twice a week; her meals she ordered delivered from Chinese and pizza take-out joints), and a dramatic contrast to the dumps in which her offspring—and their offspring—had often resided. Maestra had done all right for herself. Above the living room fireplace was an Henri Matisse oil of a mountainous blue nude reclining, distorted limbs akimbo, on a jazzy patterned harem sofa. He was reasonably sure it was authentic.

  He found her in the library, perched at a computer. Much of the library was jammed with electronic equipment, twice the amount as on his last visit. Her collection of great books was now double- and triple-parked at one end of the room, while at the other end there were two computers, an array of modems, printers, and telephones, a forty-inch television set into which a stack of black boxes was jacked, a fax machine, and a helmet with goggles attached, which Switters took to be some type of virtual reality device.

  “Maestra! Surfing so early in the day?”

  “Less traffic this time of morning. Switters! Are you alone?”

  “Of course. Who’d I dare bring with me?”

  Punching off-line, she swiveled to face him. “Well, I did intercept an e-mail message in which you promised little Suzy you were gonna take her ‘all the way to grandma’s house.’ “ Her affectionate gaze hardened into a glare.

  Switters blushed so incandescently he could have hired out his face as a beer sign. It was one of those instances, rare in his life, when he was at a loss for words.

  “Perhaps that expression has some different connotation for you. Eh? Something I’m not hip to?” Her smile was ironic and a tad malicious. “After all, you’ve always exhibited the good taste not to refer to me as ‘grandma.’ “

  “Uh, er,” Switters stammered, “Suzy? Suzy’s in Sacramento, how in hell did you access her e-mail?”

  “Heh! Easy as pie. Child’s play. You of all people ought to know that.” The edges of her s
mile softened some. “All right, Switters. Come here. Kiss these wrinkly old cheeks. It’s a blessing to see you. A mixed blessing, but a blessing, nonetheless. Mmm. Boy. So what’d you bring me? Great, you know I’m crazy about mums. And a most fine pumpkin. Yes. Excellent damn pumpkin.” Her disappointment in the presents was ill concealed.

  From his jacket pocket, he fished a Bakelite bracelet, pinkish butterscotch in tone. “Found this in an antique shop in Paris. Guy claimed it belonged to Josephine Baker.”

  “Well, it’s mine now!” Maestra was immoderately fond of bracelets, often wearing as many as ten on each thin arm. “That’s so thoughtful of you, Switters. So sweet.” She paused, adding the bracelet to her jumble and admiring it there. “But don’t think this lets you off the hook, buddy boy. I don’t have to tell you what a wicked degenerate you are.”

  “Oh, tell me anyway. I never tire of hearing it. Puts a spring in my step.”

  “You are a wicked degenerate. A rascal, a wastrel, a pervert. . . . Don’t look so pleased with yourself. This business with little Suzy is not funny. It’s sick. What’s more, it’s criminally prosecutable. You’ve always been the most irresponsible—”

  “Now, now. How can you say that? I’m a dedicated, decorated public servant with a top-secret security clearance. Hardly the resumé of a slacker.”

  “I’m supposed to sleep better nights knowing the likes of you is guarding the henhouse? It amazes me you’ve lasted in that job.”

  “Over a decade now.”

  “It amazes me they ever recruited you in the first place.”

  “It was my firm jaw and air of tragic nobility.”

  “It was your academic record.” There was an irrepressible yeast of pride in her voice when she said, “The dean of students at Berkeley told me personally they’d never seen the likes of you when it came to cybernetics and linguistics. . . .”

  “Don’t forget modern poetry. I had nine hours of modern poetry.”