Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

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.

At any rate, there was a strong sense of riverness, now, and that much was good. Rivers were the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men’s dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could. Rivers had transported entire cultures, absorbed the tears of vanquished races, and propelled those foams that would impregnate future realms. Everywhere dammed and defiled, they cast modern man’s witless reflection back at him—and went on singing the world’s inexhaustible song.

Switters guessed that they had left the Ucayali and entered the Abujao. Inti confirmed that they were on a secondary river, but Abujao was not a name he recognized.

The last signs of cattle ranching had petered out. The forest, thick, wet, and green, vine-snarled and leaf- tented, towered to nearly two hundred feet, walling them in on both sides. An impenetrable curtain, menacing, unrelieved, the jungle vibrated in the breezeless heat, dripped in the cloying humidity, and except for flights of parrots and the occasional flash of flower—a cascade of leopard-spotted orchids, a treeful of red blossoms as big as basketballs—grew quickly monotonous.

The river, on the other hand, was agurgle with antics. In exhibitions of reverse surfing, flying fish and freshwater dolphins leapt from the water to catch brief rides on shafts of sunlight. Then, putting a spin on that feat, cormorants, wings folded like a high-diver’s arms, would plunge beak-first into the water, presumably, since they rarely speared a fish, for nothing but cormorant kicks. On benches of gravel, heavy-lidded caimans did Robert Mitchum imitations, seeming at once slow and sinister and stoned. Cabbage-green turtles that must have each weighed as much as a wheelbarrow load of cabbages slid off of and onto mud banks and rocks, while frogs of various hues and sizes plopped on every side like fugitives from mutant haiku. (“Too damn vivid,” Basho might have complained in seventeenth-century Japanese.) Around a bend, three tapirs, the mystery beast from Kubrick’s 2001, waded the stream. According to Juan Carlos, most of Peru’s tapirs had been killed off by hunters, depriving the animal of its right to inhabit the world and depriving the world of living proof of what would result were a racehorse to be mated with Porky Pig.

Because low water had exposed many rocks that in the rainy season would be well submerged, Inti was forced into almost constant maneuvering, and the Little Virgin could no longer average her customary six knots per hour. The slower pace, combined with the Abujao’s more abundant attractions, afforded Switters the opportunity for an unusual riverine interface. Despite his distaste for the incessant teeming that characterized tropical South America, he was by no means insensitive to natural wonders, and he felt he ought somehow to take advantage of this opportunity. There was a fly in the ointment, however. Simulium vittatum.

His attentive powers were blunted by the persistent need to throw wild punches at the proboscises of the diminutive Durante-esque devils—and to fend off larger, unidentifiable insects who kept trying to crash the party. In the entomological kingdom, the quest for lunch was ongoing. Switters could empathize.

No comida.

No concentracion.

And meditacion was out of the question.

The next morning, when Inti and the boys returned from the bush with their second empty pisco bottle and facefuls of sheepish expression, Switters held out his hand.

“Gimme coca,” he said.

Externally, day two on the olive Abujao mirrored day one. For thirteen more lunchless hours, they zigzagged among mossy boulders and through sopping streamers of feverish heat, attended by squadrons of black flies that refused to quit them until a late afternoon downpour literally drowned the biting bugs in midair.

Internally, the furniture had been rearranged. Switters was booming with vim. Impervious to hunger, he was possessed of such a quantity of unvented vigor that he longed to leap into the river and race the boat to Boquichicos. This he could not do, due to caimans, spiny catfish, the odd swimming viper, and the fact that he’d put his silk suit back on in order to expose less of his flesh to those South American things that would feed upon it.

Energized yet strangely at peace, he reclined on his rapidly moldering cardboard couch, his face, hands, and