Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

him with awe when it finally came out of hiding), “how about a soupcon 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, primitive 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, senor. 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