Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

generations, only to abandon it when oil exploration and an influx of outsiders caused them to fade ever farther into the forest: the Kandakandero had not suffered Boquichicos gladly. Others claimed that the chacara had always been cultivated by Nacanaca and that the fiercer Kandakandero simply forced the Nacanaca to share its bounty, as if exacting tribute. In any event, Smithe knew from firsthand experience that once each month, on the new moon, a delegation of Kandakandero braves would show up at the garden to have their baskets filled with produce by compliant Nacanaca.

“Whether charity or extortion, I wouldn’t know,” said Smithe, “but I do know they come only at night, when there is little moon, and that there’s a kind of ‘way station’ a few miles farther into the bush, a lodge where they remain overnight or occasionally longer in order to perform certain rituals having to do with the newly acquired produce. Nacanaca elders often participate in those ceremonies as invited guests, and finally, I, myself, after two solid years of jungle diplomacy. . . . Worth the bother? Well, it’s a show that would strike any Christian as dreadfully malodorous, to be sure; but I’d already developed a tolerance for pagan proclivities; some such immunity is required in my profession. Yes. Um. What separates these jejune jollifications from others I’ve witnessed, either in person or on film, is that they’re presided over by the Kandakandero’s witchman, their shaman: a most remarkable chap.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” said Switters. “That’s the buzz. And what, pray tell, is so damned remarkable about him?”

Smithe didn’t answer right away. He stared for a while at the rippling wallpaper of rain, and when at last he spoke, he could barely be heard above its din. “It’s his head, you see.”

“Did you say ‘head’? What about his head?”

“Its shape.” The Englishman abruptly, inexplicably, beamed. “His head,” he said, louder now, almost triumphantly, “his head is a pyramid.”

Switters had been around the block. He had even, one might say, been around the block within the block within the block within the block (depending upon his or her own experience, the reader will or will not know what this suggests). Aware that the world was a very weird place, he was no more prone to automatically scoff at unusual information than he was disposed to unquestioning acceptance. (The narrow, no-nonsense skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.) Nevertheless, Switters’s open-mindedness was sorely tested by Potney’s report, especially when the anthropologist insisted that the head he was describing did not merely suggest some vague outline of a pyramid, that it was neither a variation of hydrocephalus nor a particularly pronounced example of Down’s syndrome, but actually was a pyramid (which was to say, a quadrilateral mass having smooth, steeply sloping sides meeting at a pointed apex), and in every other way except its shape, constituted a healthy, functioning human noggin.

“Entirely literal, old boy, I almost regret to say. Wretchedly literal.” Smithe paused to light a cigarette, sending a plump pillow of smoke off to be drilled into feathery oblivion by the numberless bullets of the rain. “Yes. But if you knew your Peruvian ethnology and whatnot, you’d know that this chap’s pyramid head is not completely without precedent. Not in the high Andes, at any rate.”

Whereupon Smithe informed Switters of the occasional practice among certain Andean Indians of strapping boards to the soft heads of infants, molding them over time into cones that mirrored the contours of the volcanos that loomed on their horizons and that they worshiped as gods. Such sculpting of the skull—literally re-creating man in gods’ image—was common enough to have been well documented, and while contemporary Kandakandero had no physical contact whatsoever with malformed Andean volcano-worshipers, one could not rule out an interchange in centuries past. Stories, moreover, had wings. Also, and Smithe would speak more of this later, the Kandakandero seemed to have the ability to access information, events, images, et cetera from great distances, a notion that failed to shock Switters because the CIA had once experimented with a similar psychic technique (under the term remote viewing), and several of the angels had become quite adept at it before opposition from irate Christian hillbillies in Congress had shut the project down.

There was doubt in Potney’s mind, however, that End of Time’s pyramid head was a copycat creation. At least, not entirely so. “I suspect DDT played a part in it. At the beginning.”

“DDT? In the Amazon?”

“Oh my, yes. You Yanks mightn’t fling your poison about at home any longer, but that jolly well hasn’t stopped you from shipping it abroad. Especially to the unsuspecting undeveloped. Peru reeks of it. Even back here, I’m afraid.”

“Ain’t no weevils fattening they little selves on Nacanaca vegetables?”

“Wouldn’t think so, although the chacara’s entomological interlopers aren’t the primary target, nor are malarial mosquitoes. DDT arrives here from Pucallpa in five-gallon drums. The government issues it to the Nacanaca, who trade it to the Ka’daks for hides and potions, or else the Ka’daks simply bully it from them. Whatever. Both tribes use it for fishing.”

Smithe described a scene in which Indians pour five gallons of pesticide into a small river, just above a rapids or a waterfall, then stroll downstream to effortlessly scoop killed fish out of the eddies.

DDT as trade-good fish poison was finding its way into the jungle years before Boquichicos was settled, and congenital deformity was thought to have increased as a result, though there was no scientific proof of it. Smithe’s theory was that End of Time had come into the world slightly mutated, due to maternal consumption of contaminated fish. The Kandakandero had taken his affliction as a sign of divine favor and a portent of supernatural abilities, and immediately consecrated him to witchwork. Before he began his active apprenticeship, while he was still a baby, the local shaman had placed his pointy little head in a series of progressively larger mahogany presses (Switters thought of that old-fashioned pressed tennis racket of his, heavy and wooden, that Suzy, with her modern lightweight graphite number, had made such fun of), deliberately and dramatically accentuating its pyramidal tendency.

It was only a hypothesis. It could have been something altogether different, altogether unimaginable. What did seem conclusive, however, was that by the time End of Time was a teenager, he had ousted his people’s reigning shaman and assumed the man’s duties. And now, at age twenty-five or thereabouts, he was regarded (by that handful of souls aware of his existence) as either the most feared and mysterious member of the most feared and mysterious tribe in that part of South America or as an addled medical oddity cashing in on the small-change benefits of primitive superstition.

If Switters’s brow resembled the coils in an electric heater, it wasn’t so much due to lingering doubt over the veracity of Smithe’s story as to his effort to remember what his grandmother had told him about pyramid power. According to Maestra, and she had it on good authority, there was something about the configuration, the dimensional relationships of a pyramid’s angles, the way it crystallized in static form the essence of dynamic geometry, that caused it to focus, laserlike, an electromagnetic or other atmospheric force (perhaps that energy the Chinese called chi), concentrating it in a relatively small, prescribed area. Switters recalled something about razor blades being sharpened and fruit kept from spoiling by pyramid-focused rays. That, come to think of it, was the rationale behind Sailor’s customized cage. He supposed that if a pyramid really could hone steel and preserve peaches, a pyramid-shaped head might have a pretty entertaining effect on the brain inside it—and it would probably be no great exaggeration to describe as “most remarkable,” a “chap” with such a brain.

“So,” said Switters, “these Nacanaca boys believe their ferocious cousins would get a kick out of Sailor’s cage because it’s shaped like the head of their grand boohoo?”

Smithe nodded. “Something like that, yes. Far be it from me to speak for the atavistic mind.” He paused to inhale and exhale a blue-tinted wad of smoke. “There is a bit more to it. When your bird blurted out that number about people needing to relax—clever turn, that: your tutelage?—it struck a chord. This End of Time chap, he has some novel ideas. A philosophy, one might be tempted to call it. Something beyond the usual mumbo jumbo, at any rate. Relaxation, at least in the Nacanaca understanding of the concept, fits rather neatly with it, I suppose. So, you see, our blokes here have concluded that End of Time must have a supernatural connection with this cage and its occupant, and while that’s a load of bosh, I daresay he would be impressed. It’s likely he’d grant you an audience, which would provide you with scrapbook fodder of the most exotic order, and me with the possibility of riding in on your coattails.”

“You’ve socialized with him previously?”

“Yes. Three years ago. At the way station, for thirty-six hours. Bloody bugger really put me through it. Can’t imagine why I’d want to go back—except that it’s, well, haunted me ever since. And