Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

like a pyramid. “Well, what do you know?” he mumbled, though it was hardly unusual that the Kandakandero had kept the thing. Then, he noticed that the birdcage wasn’t empty. There was something inside.

It was another pyramid.

A pyramid the size of a soccer ball.

A pyramid crowned with parrot feathers.

A pyramid with a human face.

The accompanying note, on Hotel Boquichicos stationery, was in Bobby’s incongruously elegant script.

I knew you wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it—so take a good look. Take two looks and call me in the morning.

Don’t worry, podner, I didn’t smack him. It wasn’t necessary. They say a big snake got him. Forty-foot anaconda or some unhappy shit like that.

It’s wild down here, ain’t it? Man! No wonder you believed that curse. My guide is the new head shaman and he is one radical dude. Says he knows you. I’m bringing him back to the States with me, which ought to be a lark and a half. I’ll fill you in soon. Meanwhile, have yourself a nice long walk. You’ve earned it.

In the photograph, the warriors were all grinning in razzle-dazzle unison, like the cast of a minstrel show.

Switters borrowed the nurse’s penlight and examined the head in the birdcage. It was also smiling. It looked . . . relaxed.

The floor had felt strange at first: alien, almost threatening. Gradually, however, it became increasingly hospitable. Beneath his bare feet, the waxed linoleum turned into an orgy. He went from walking like Neil Armstrong to walking like Krishna. Both cool and warm, smooth and wavy, the floor felt like fruit skin. It felt like lettuce. Something invisible and pleasurable oozed up between his toes. Up and down the hallway he padded, slapping the floor with his soles to experience the floorness of it. Every now and then, when he was out of sight of the nurses’ station, he did a little monkey dance. “I’m going to jump out the window and dance on grass,” he told Domino. She reminded him that he was five stories up.

For much of the day, Domino walked with him, listening to him rant about large snakes, the World Serpent, the healing python of Apollo, the wiggly staff of Hermes, and so on; how, in his opinion, the Serpent hadn’t seduced Eve into tasting the apple of forbidden knowledge, rather, the Serpent was the apple: watching the Serpent shed its skin and be reborn, Eve was introduced to the prospect of immortality; observing the Serpent on its forays underground, Eve was led to suspect that there was more to life than met the eye, that there were other, deeper, levels; a reality beneath the surface of reality, an unconscious mind. Hadn’t the metaphoric Serpent in Domino’s own little Eden, once it was viewed from a wider angle, blown open the gates—and angered the authorities? As for why serpent power killed Today Is Tomorrow, however, he had barely a clue. Supreme knowledge is supremely dangerous, ultimate mysteries remain ultimately mysterious. Beware the delusional rationalist who argues otherwise.

The walking was delicious, and the ranting was pretty good, too. He walked and ranted, ranted and walked, interrupted only by lunch and by Masked Beauty, who stopped in to squeeze his hand and say adieu. The abbess, Mustang Sally, and Pippi were returning to Syria that evening. She hoped to see him there again someday. She looked handsome in her new summer habit. The scar on her nose had darkened, he noticed. It was now the exact same shade of blue in which Matisse had immortalized her naked body in 1943.

Later, drained by the walking, and in bed early, Switters lay fantasizing future scenarios. Bobby Case was bringing Fer-de-lance to the Northern Hemisphere. To the white man’s world. Fer-de-lance, with all his ancient magic and contemporary awareness; a half-breed in every sense of the word; equipped—linguistically, epistemologically, and physically—to flourish in more than one reality. Suppose Fer-de-lance were to throw in with them? With Switters, Bobby, Audubon Poe, and Skeeter Washington (who’d recently lost a hand defusing a land mine in Eritrea, but was said to play a hot five-finger-and-nub piano); with B. G. Woo and Dickie Dare and some other operatives and ex-operatives whom he ought not to name? Maybe even Domino would come aboard: hadn’t she expressed a weakness for the idea of a purist elite? Suppose the lot of them were to combine forces? To organize. Sort of.

They probably wouldn’t name it, this new organization of theirs. Cult of the Great Snake would be presumptuous and far-fetched; and he was getting pretty tired of angels, as Hollywood, gullible Christers, and New Age loopy-doodles had combined to give them a trite, fairy-godfather image. Most definitely, the group would not have a creed. Unless it was something modest and non-doctrinaire, such as, “The house is on fire, but you can’t beat our view.”

They wouldn’t even believe, especially, in their mission; not in any fervent way. If they believed too adamantly, then sooner or later they would be tempted to lie to protect those beliefs. It was a small step from lying to defend one’s beliefs to killing to defend them.

Hey, they might not be fully cognizant of the nature of their mission. They’d contemplate it, to be sure, and argue over it, but it would be dynamic, a work in progress, ever subject to change. Only the weak and the dull of the world knew where they were going, and it was rarely worth the trip.

They’d use Poe’s yacht, maybe, and Sol Glissant’s funding. But they’d be more aggressive than Poe had been. Poe was treating the symptoms. They would attack the disease. They would fuck with the fuckers. Sabotage: physical, electronic, and psychic sabotage. Monkey wrenches. Computer viruses. Psychedelic alterations. Ridicule. Japes. Spells. Enchantments. Dadaisms. Reinformation. Meditational smart bombs. On the side, they might deface a few advertisements. Vandalize some golf courses.

Mostly, however, they’d follow Fer-de-lance’s lead. See what he had up his snakeskin sleeve. See if he really was destined to bring Today Is Tomorrow’s message into an unsuspecting new century. Determine if Our Blessed Lady of Fatima, in her role as feminine principle, employing her archaic code, had actually rematerialized to alert her children to a hard and wonderful truth about to stream in a helix of light and shadow from the direction of a pyramid.

Not quite asleep, not wholly awake, Switters was lying there fantasizing about all that when the cell phone suddenly beeped. “This had better be good,” he growled into the mouthpiece.

Maestra actually wept at the sound of his voice. She quickly recovered, however, and proceeded to tell him how inconsiderate he was, and what a buffoon; no, something worse than a buffoon, because he was brilliant and therefore had no right to behave buffoonishly. He was also a pervert. She ordered him to come to her the instant they let him out of that “squalid Italian hospital,” and never mind the bracelets: her arms were getting too damn scrawny to support them anymore.

Then, Suzy got on the line. Got on the phone with that double-tongued little voice of hers, her consonants straight-backed with the most demure sincerity, her vowels all lopsided with hormones. Suzy told him she loved him and wanted to be with him forever, in the way he used to talk about back when she was just a spank girl. She’d be eighteen in less than a year and could do as she pleased.

“You know, I had sex last summer, Switters, and now I’m so sorry. I’m devastated. Not because they got mad and sent me to Seattle, but because you weren’t the first. You know? Well, I’ve been praying to Mother Mary that she’ll restore my virginity. So that I can give it to you. Honestly. I really am praying for that. I know it’s goofy, but miracles can happen, can’t they?”

“They can, darling. They happen all the time.”

There has got to be a way to have both of them, he thought. Domino and Suzy, too. He spent the entire night devising one delectable and improbable scheme after another, refusing to accept that the fates might force him to choose one or the other. He loved them both. He wanted them both. It was only natural. He was Switters.

Early the next morning, he checked himself out of the hospital, and he and Mr. Plastic flew to Bangkok. To clear the coconut. To mull matters over.

There was a temple by the river, where he meditated every day. Nights, there were the girls of Patpong. Bless them. Bless every slink and wisp of them. There were refreshing, if timid, beers. Food so spicy it’d run a motor. A little stick now and then.