Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Read online

“Lunch,” he said. His tone was even, rational, devoid of any knuckle of bellicosity. “That’s what we call it in my country. L-U-N-C-H. Lunch. I’m fond of lunch. I am, in fact, a lunch aficionado. Give me liberty or give me lunch. Breakfast comes around too early in the day, and dinner can interfere with one’s plans for the evening, but lunch is right on the money, the only thing it interrupts is work.”

  His voice rose slightly. “I require lunch on a daily basis. I’m insured against non-lunch by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and Blue Cheese. Finicky? Not this luncher. I eat the fat, I eat the lean, and I lick the platter clean. Normally, I do shun the flesh of dead animals. Live animals, as well: bestiality is not a part of my colorful repertoire, although that is really none of your business. But in the dietary arena, pals, I have nothing to hide, and would at this juncture gladly masticate and ingest Spam-on-a-stick if you served some up. All I’m asking is that you serve something up, and speedily. I become grumpy when denied my noontide repast.”

  A hint of the histrionic now entered his delivery, and he pumped up the volume a decibel or two. “A hearty lunch is essential for growing bodies. Beyond that, it’s a many-splendored thing. Man does not live by deals alone. Lunch is beauty. Lunch is truth. The Rubenesque beauty of chocolate pudding soaking up cream. The truth embodied in the Brechtian dictum, ‘First feed the face.’ Butter the bread, boys! Split the elusive pea! Hop to it! Lunch justifies any morning and sedates the worst of afternoons. I would partake. I would partake.”

  Inti and the boys stared at him, to be sure, but their expressions were closer to indifference than curiosity or appreciation. Inti’s face, in particular, seemed glazed by those smooth sugars of inscrutability that are widely, if incorrectly, believed to flavor certain ethnic types. Frustrated that his rhetoric had inspired not a twitch of culinary action, Switters, stomach growling all the while, sat back down to reason things out.

  It could be coca leaves, he reasoned. A cud of coca was reputed to keep a Peruvian Indian chugging from dawn to dusk and kill his appetite for lunch in the process. Another reason, thought he, to eschew the toot tree. He had missed one lunch already in the past few days due to XTC. Coca was to dining what late-night television was to sex, and he was about to say as much, to no one in particular, when he noticed a stalk of midget bananas partially protruding from under a roll of tattered mosquito netting that lay alongside the provisions. Well, eureka, then!

  Tossing aside the netting, he reached for the bananas, only to yelp and jump backward in alarm as his fingers came within an inch of the ugliest spider he’d ever laid orbs on. Now that got a reaction from his stoic shipmates. Their faces contorted, their bare feet stamped, and they issued strange hissing sounds that must have been some Amazonian equivalent of laughter, persisting in such demonstration while he backed steadily away from the stalk and its inhabitant, a blondish creature that resembled, in size and hair-cover, an armpit with legs.

  It wasn’t a tarantula. Switters was familiar with tarantulas. No, this living emblem of evolutionary perversity wasn’t merely hairy, it was sprinkled with purple spots—an armpit with a rash—and its pupilless white eyes rolled about the brow of its cephalothorax like mothballs in a lapidary. Yes, and it was rearing back on its hindmost legs in a most unfriendly presentation.

  As Switters continued to retreat, finally reseating himself on his cardboard divan, the Indians continued to express amusement. Maybe I should open my own comedy club in Pucallpa, mused Switters. Call it Arachnophobia. Instead, he opened his valise. Rummaged among his shorts and socks and handkerchiefs. And fished out the automatic pistol.

  “Nothing personal,” he said, as he stood facing the stalk. “I respect all living things, and I’m aware that to you, I, myself, must appear a monstrosity. But you’ve got my goddamn bananas, pal, and this is the law of the jungle!”

  With that, he fired off about a dozen ear-splitting rounds, blowing bits of spider and banana all over the bow. “Anyone for fruit salad?” he asked politely.

  Indeed, when the smoke cleared there wasn’t much left of the bunch. Green shreds, yellow dollops, hairy confetti. Digging around in the organic debris, he did, however, find four and a half survivors. The half-banana, he presented to Sailor. The remainder he calmly peeled and devoured, one after the other, smiling with humble satisfaction.

  “Now,” he said to the Indians, who had become very still and very respectful (even the ocelot looked upon him with awe when it finally came out of hiding), “how about a soupçon of after-lunch conversation? It’s my opinion—expressed before the C.R.A.F.T. membership in Bangkok on February 18, 1993, and reiterated here for your consideration—that the syntactic word-clusters in Finnegans Wake aren’t sentences in the usual sense, but rather are intermediate states in a radiating nexus of pan-linguistic interactions, corresponding to—”

  He broke off abruptly and did not continue. There were two reasons for this:

  (1) Despite experiencing an acute craving for some intellectual stimulation, even if he had to supply it himself—and from Maestra he’d inherited a tendency to become periodically enraptured with the wheeze of his own verbal bagpipes—it did not long escape his notice that his monologue was not merely masturbatory but condescending.

  (2) He couldn’t remember a fucking thing.

  About that time the rain came.

  A rank of ample black clouds had been double-parked along the western horizon like limousines at a mobster’s funeral. Rather suddenly now, they wheeled away from the long green curb and congregated overhead, where, like overweight yet still athletic Harlem Globetrotters, they bobbed and weaved, passing lightning bolts trickily among themselves while the wind whistled “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

  Then they merged into one sky-filling duffel bag, which unzipped itself and dumped its contents: trillions of raindrops as big as butter beans and as warm as blood. His protective canopy notwithstanding, Switters thought he might drown.

  In twenty minutes or less, the downpour was over. It took the boys twice that long, using Inti’s cooking pots, to bail out the boat.

  If, during the interval in which it was obscured from view, the sun had seized the opportunity to do something un-sunlike, there was no lingering evidence. The sun was pretty much in the same position as where they’d left it a deluge ago, and it rapidly resumed wilting them with its nuclear halitosis. The sun, however, might generate radiation until it was red in the face, might stoke its furnace until it reached twenty million degrees Fahrenheit, it still could not begin to demoisturize the Amazon. Switters wouldn’t be truly dry again until he was back in Lima, and even there he would find himself dampened—from the exertion of muscling a wheelchair.

  That night, after a surprisingly delicious dinner of corn and beans, Switters slept in the Virgin. She had been beached on a sandbar. The sand would have made a softer mattress, but it was subject to visitation by reptiles. There was even worry that a myopic or excessively lonely bull crocodile might try to mate with his valise.

  The stars were as big and bright as brass doorknobs, and so numerous they jostled one another for twinkle space. Because the mosquito population was equally dense, Switters spent the night rolled up in his netting like a pharaonic burrito, a crash-test mummy who couldn’t see the stars for his wrapping. Visual deprivation was compensated for by auditory glut. From the sewing-machine motors of cicadas to the beer-hall bellows of various amphibians, from the tin-toy clicks and chirps and whirs of countless insects to the weight-room grunts of wild pigs, from the sweet melodic outbursts of nocturnal birds (Mozarts with short attention spans) to the honks and whoops and howls of God knows what, a rackety tsunami of biological rumpus rolled out of the jungle and over the river, which stirred its own sulky boudoirish murmur into the mix.

  An additional sonic contribution was made by Inti and his crew, who, following dinner, took a bottle of pisco, threadbare blankets, and the banana-splattered mosquito netting and disappeared into the bush. Off and on for hours, the younger boys issued loud, prim
itive cries, as if Inti were beating them out there. Or . . . or . . . or something else. Something South American.

  (As opposed to, say, Utahan. Recently, a Mormon gentleman in Utah had been shocked silly by the discovery that his wife was actually a man. They had been married three years and five months. It was an oversight that never would have occurred in South America, where the prevailing Catholic ethic seemed to stimulate rather than suppress vividity.)

  When at dawn Inti gently shook him awake, Switters was surprised that he’d been sleeping, and even more amazed that he felt reasonably rested. As Inti helped with the unwinding, Switters emerged from the swathes of netting like a butterfly escaping its cocoon. “Free at last, oh, free at last!” he exulted, hopping onto the sandbar, where he danced a little jig. The Indians regarded him with a mixture of fondness and fear.

  Throughout bathing and breakfast, the air around them was torn by the chattering, shrieking of monkeys, and as the darkness faded Switters could see parrots in the treetops, parrots in the air, parrots and more parrots. Keenly alert, in a heightened state of awareness, Sailor was bouncing up and down on his perch.

  “Hmmm. You know something, pal? I could spring you right here, couldn’t I? We’re seventy miles from Pucallpa, the jungle’s starting to jungle in earnest, you’ve got cousins by the dozen out there. I could open your door, record your exit for posterity, and get my poor South Americaed butt back to somewhere cool and clean and crispy. You’d be happy, Maestra’d probably be happy, and God knows I’d be happy. Shall we go for it? What do you say?”

  Sailor didn’t say anything, and in the end Switters resisted temptation. Why? No sound reason beyond the fact that Juan Carlos de Fausto had presented him with a harebrained scheme, and for harebrained schemes Switters was known to have something of an affection.

  Inti pointed to the orange frown of sun that was grumpily forcing itself above the distant Andean foothills. Then he pointed directly overhead. He rubbed his belly and shook his bowl-cut. Switters got the message. “Okay,” he sighed. “No comida.”

  “Si, señor. No comida. Lo siento.” Inti was apologetic. Even a bit ashamed. Lunch was simply not a tradition aboard the Little Virgin. Ah, but there was a lunch substitute. Shyly, Inti held out his hand. In his palm was a folded packet of green leaves, about the size of a matchbook. Inti was extremely nervous, giving Switters the impression that the Indian had never offered coca to a white man before. Switters made it clear that he was honored, but he politely refused. He’d already decided that the next time he felt hunger trying to kick-start its motorcycle, he would still the shudders and silence the rumbles with meditation.

  He was out of practice, having meditated with increasing infrequency since he left Bangkok. He was also well aware that meditation was intended neither as a diversion nor a therapy. Indeed, if he could believe his teacher, ideal meditation had no practical application whatsoever. Sure, there were Westerners who practiced it as a relaxation technique, as a device for calming and centering themselves so that they might sell more stuff or fare better in office politics, but that was like using the Hope diamond to scratch grocery lists onto a bathroom mirror.

  “Meditation,” said his teacher, “hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ‘cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It’s then and exactly then that you’re sensing the true nature of the universe, you’re linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you’re content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there’s the only place to be.”

  Obviously Switters’s meditation teacher was no Thai monk or Himalayan sage. His guru, in fact, was a CIA pilot from Hondo, Texas, by the name of Bobby Case, known to some as Bad Bobby and to others as Nut Case. He was Switters’s bosom buddy. The U.S. ambassador to Thailand, who sported a bitchy wit, referred to the pair of them as the Flying Pedophilia Brothers, a nickname to which they both objected. When Switters complained that it was slanderous and unfair, Bobby said, “Damn straight it is. I don’t mind being called a pedophile, but your brother?!”

  As a CIA agent who “sat” (that is, meditated), Bobby Case wasn’t the rarity the uninformed might suppose. Thirty or forty years earlier, Langley had exposed a relatively large number of its field hands to meditation, yoga, parapsychology, and psychedelic drugs in a series of experiments to see if any or all of those alien potents and techniques might have military and/or intelligence applications. For example, could LSD be employed as a control mechanism, could meditation counteract the attempted brainwashing of a captured U.S. agent?

  The experiments backfired. Once the guinea pigs had their veils lifted, their blinders removed by their unexpected collisions with the true nature of existence, once they gazed, unencumbered by dogma or ego, into the still heart of that which of which there is no whicher, they couldn’t help but perceive the cowboys who bossed them, the Ivy League patricians who bossed their bosses, as ridiculous, and their mission as trivial, if not evil. Many left the company, some to enter ashrams or Asian monasteries. (One such defector wrote The Silent Mind, a premier book on the subject of sitting.) A few remained with Langley. They performed their duties much as before, but with compassion now, and in full consciousness. No longer “blowing smoke up their butts,” as Bobby Case described maya, the folly of living in a world of illusion. They continued to meditate. Sometimes they taught meditation to promising colleagues. Awareness was passed along, handed down. Thus was angelhood expanded, perpetuated.

  Bobby, who had been the recipient of an older agent’s wisdom, saw the angel in Switters the moment he met him. Not every angel meditated. Some even shunned drugs. The two things they all had in common were a cynical suspicion of politico-economic systems and a disdain for what passed for “patriotism” in the numbed noodles of the manipulated masses. Their blessing and their curse was that they actually believed in freedom—although Switters and Bad Bobby used to speculate that belief, itself, might be a form of bondage.

  Incidentally, this angel vs. cowboy business: didn’t it smack rather loudly of elitism? Probably. But that didn’t worry Switters. As a youth, he’d been assured by Don’t-Call-Me-Grandma Maestra that the instant elitism became a dirty word among Americans, any potential for a high culture to develop in their country was tomahawked in its cradle. She quoted Thomas Jefferson to the effect that, “There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent, and virtue.” Switters had pointed out that either way, aristocracy seemed to be a matter of luck. Maestra responded tartly, “Virtue is not something you can win in a goddamn lottery.” And, years later, Bobby had told him, “What shiftless folks call ‘luck,’ the wise ol’ boys recognized as karma.” Well, if the CIA angels were a true elite within a false elite, so much the better, true being presumably preferable to false. It didn’t really matter to Switters. What mattered was that he could taste a kind of intoxicating ambrosia in the perilous ambiguities of his vocation. Angelhood was his syrup of wahoo. It made his coconut tingle.

  In any event, that day on the vivid South American river, Switters stripped down to his shorts. They were boxer shorts, and except for the fact that they were patterned with little cartoon chipmunks, they weren’t much different from what Inti and the boys were wearing. He sat with crossed legs, his hands resting palms upward on his shins. Maestra, his lifelong influence, didn’t know the first thing about meditation, while ol’ Nut Case, his inspiration in that area, would have chided him for sitting so pragmatically, so purposefully, using zazen as a surrogate tuna sandwich. “Hellfire,” Bobby would have snorted, “that’s worse than drinking good whiskey for medicinal purposes, or some unhappy shit like that.” Switters didn
’t care. He straightened his back, lined up his nose with his navel, cast down his gaze, and regulated his breathing; not tarrying, for it was only a trial: taking the damp and dirty folds of cardboard that would serve as his zabuton on a test drive, so to speak. Everything clicked, in a clickless way. He was ready. When all echoes of breakfast faded and his gastric chamber orchestra struck up the overture to lunch, he would lower himself obliviously into the formless flux.

  What he hadn’t counted on were the demons.

  The demons came in the form of flies. Black flies—which, technically, are gnats. Simulium vittatum. The bantam spawn of Beelzebub. There must have been an overnight hatch of the tiny vampires, for suddenly they were as thick as shoppers, thirsty as frat rats, persistent as pitchmen. Switters swatted furiously, but he was simply outnumbered. No matter how many he squashed, there was always another wave, piercing his flesh, siphoning his plasma.

  One of the Indians gave him a thick yellowish root to rub over his body. Combining with his perspiration to form a paste, the root substantially reduced the pricks of pain and drainage of his vessels, but a dark gnat cumulus continued to circle his head, and every five seconds or so, an individual demon would spin off from the swarm to kamikaze into his mouth, an eye, up one of his nostrils.

  The attack continued for hours. Meditation was out of the question. Concentration, meditation’s diametric opposite, was likewise impaired.

  At approximately the same time that the black flies descended, the river narrowed. Perhaps there was a connection. Up to that point, the Ucayali had been so wide Switters felt as if they were on a lake or a waveless bronze bay. Now, he could have thrown a banana from midstream and hit either shore. Or, he could have were he in shape. He was barely thirty-six, and his biceps were losing their luster. He’d tried to shame himself into logging some gym time, but any way you sliced it, working out was maintenance and maintenance was a bore.