Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

there’s the chance I might turn it into something. Original yet academically rigorous. That first encounter went rather awry, I’m afraid. Crossed the line. Um. I’m no Carlos Castaneda.”

Switters grinned. “Of course you aren’t.” You’re one of those people, he thought, who want to go to Heaven without dying. Cowardice in the name of objectivity is fairly characteristic of academics, especially in Merry Olde. But he didn’t wish to get into that. Instead, he inquired as to the nature of the living pyramid’s so-called novel ideas. Considering the young shaman’s name—an inexact translation by Smithe and Fer-de-lance, it turned out, of a virtually unpronounceable Kandakandero word—he guessed his notions must have something to do with eschatology, with apocalypticism, with time.

“Oh, there may be a bubble of that in the keg. I didn’t bung into it. Not my end of the field, you see. Not that. Nor the other, either, honestly, though it may be yours. Our chap, you see, is rather obsessed with . . . with gaiety.”

Gaiety? Potney Smithe’s explanation was a rickety trellis of sober anthropological observations, lathed in the fine mill of British understatement, but rattled by occasional gusts of alcoholic verbosity, and, of course, splintered here and there by cracks from Switters. Once again, we shall attempt summation.

Kandakandero had always referred to themselves as “the Real People.” Theirs was ethnocentrism in its unadulterated form. Other tribes, other races were not merely deemed to be inferior humans, they were relegated in the Ka’dak mind to the status of animals or ghosts. Then End of Time came along. It’s very true, he told his clan, that we are superior to other Indians because we have stronger magic and purer ways. As for white men, they are so helpless and stupid they could not survive in the forest for a single moon. Yet the white man can do wondrous things that we cannot.

Fly, for example. For decades, air traffic between Lima and Belem or to and from Europe had passed over that area of the Peruvian jungle roamed by the seminomadic Ka’daks, and more recently, small planes out of Pucallpa had been buzzing around. White men also had shiny boxes that they attached to the sterns of their canoes to make them swim faster than dolphins, and they possessed weapons so powerful and accurate they reduced hunting and warfare to child’s play. In Boquichicos they had motionless boxes that churned out more music than a tribe could make, other boxes that cooked meat and yucca without a spark of fire. (The Ka’daks were well informed about what transpired in Boquichicos, though whether they spied on the town from the forest, accessed it psychically, or simply relied on Nacanaca gossip, Smithe wasn’t prepared to say.) End of Time recognized that white men were a threat to his people’s habitat, that eventually these pale weaklings with their noisy magic would dominate the forest world and all within it, including the heretofore invincible Ka’daks. White men were the new Real People, the spirits obviously were favoring them. Why?

Over and over again, End of Time drank his potions, snorted his snuffs, entered his trances, rubbed his portable pyramid. He questioned sundry Nacanaca and once sat for five days in a treetop observing, undetected, goings-on in Boquichicos. What was it about these men (aside from a hideous complexion that no god could possibly find pleasing) that made them so different from the older and once wiser Kandakandero? (No fool, End of Time could distinguish between superficial and fundamental differences.) Roughly speaking, they ate, drank, smoked, and slept the same. They shat, pissed, and fucked the same. So what was the white man’s secret?

Finally, one day, it hit him like a blow dart. The big secret was laughter.

Amazonian Indians, in general, tended to be somber, and the Ka’daks were especially severe. Kandakandero did not laugh. They did not even smile. Moreover, they had never laughed or smiled. The very concept was alien to them. Smithe suggested that for “the Real People,” life simply might be too “real”: too terrible, too short, too arduous, too . . . vivid. Whatever the reason, you might as realistically expect a Ka’dak to shout “E5mc²” as to chuckle. No giggle had ever, in all of history, chased its tail around one of their campfires, no smirk had ever cracked their war paint, no guffaw had ever taken up where a belch left off, no titter or tee-hee had scratched for them its crystal fleas. The roar of civilized laughter might strike them as ridiculous, but it wouldn’t strike them as funny. The Ka’daks didn’t know from funny.

In a radical break with both instinct and inclination, End of Time tried to teach himself to smile. He practiced alone, monitoring his progress in a reflecting pool. The first time he smiled for his gathered clansmen, he left them so astonished, so awestruck that half fell, trembling, to their knees, and the rest ran away and hid in the bushes. When he commenced to experiment with laughing, nobody was able to sleep for months. And when he insisted that others learn the art of grinning and chortling, the whole tribe nearly had a nervous breakdown.

The shaman persevered, however, even as it occurred to him that his glee was hollow, mechanical, and contrived. He sensed that an attitude adjustment must be required, that the perpetually piercing level of intensity that characterized the Kandakandero might need to be softened, toned down. (Real People of the world, relax!) Around the occasion of Potney Smithe’s visit, End of Time was just coming to the realization that white men didn’t laugh as a chore or on schedule or to please the gods, that the mystical hee-haw was not self-induced but had to be provoked; that some external happenstance, frequently invisible, aroused laughter in them.

At their initial meeting, with Fer-de-lance as interpreter, Smithe labored to help the medicine man comprehend the concept of humor. “Nothing approaching the subtler moods of irony, naturally, but the more direct, earthy approach of juvenile mockery. Of course, much of juvenile humor is sexual and scatological, and to the Ka’dak mind there’s nothing the least bit funny about bodily functions. Their taboos are of a different order. You might as well ask them to snigger at the sky.”

Still, Smithe felt, End of Time made some progress in the area of lightheartedness, though he doubted there was any such thing as a joke comprehensible to him or his fellows. “The same could be said of the religiously fundamental and the politically doctrinaire,” piped in Switters.

In repayment for Smithe’s having assisted him in his uphill pursuit of gaiety, the misshapen shaman offered to meet with him again the following day, and this next time Smithe could ask the questions. Moreover, Smithe would be allowed to actually look at him, face-to-face: during their first encounter, the witchman had concealed himself behind a woven grass screen. Not surprisingly, there was a catch. Before Smithe could be permitted to gaze upon the fabled pyramid head, the impure Englishman would have to prove himself worthy to a collection of guides, overlords, supervisors, kibitzers, and hecklers from the Other Side.

“I was recklessly unscientific, but it was a lapse I believed I could turn to good account. Um. I knew a thing or two about Amazonian hallucinogens, yage, ayahuasca and the lot, but my objective knowledge fell lamentably short of the subjective experience. Oh, Christ, yes!”

“Pot! You modest old fox. Congratulations. You’re a Castaneda, after all.”

Reddening and sputtering, the anthropologist seemed to swallow a bellyful of smoke. “No, no, far from it. I sampled the sorcerer’s wares, but I didn’t sign on for an apprenticeship. Nothing of the sort. I’m prepared to admit that I may previously have been suffering an unjustifiable complacency concerning the limits of reality, but that territory of . . . of terrors and senseless beauty is not any countryside I long to tramp. As it was, I indulged in behavior of which my colleagues strongly disapprove, and, in the end, I defeated my own purpose.”

“How so?”

It had been an extended ordeal of vomit and hallucination, a long night spent surfing alternating waves of horror and ecstasy—and in the shaky morning when End of Time had finally showed himself, pyramid head and all, Smithe (less overwhelmed by the sight of that capitate curiosity than he might normally have been) found himself somehow disinclined, even unable, to interrogate the medicine man along the lines that he had so carefully prepared. “I was a disgrace to my profession,” Smithe contended. “I asked all the wrong questions.”

“What sort of things did you ask?”

“Never mind. Cosmological questions, you might call them. Issues that swam to the surface as I was being dashed about on that yopo ocean. Load of bosh, really.”

And that was all he would say.

Five months prior to Switters’s arrival, Smithe had returned to Boquichicos at his own expense, hoping to get another crack at the phenomenally pated Indian. Repeatedly rebuffed—End of Time refused to encourage an atmosphere of familiarity with any outsider—Smithe now dumped his eggs in Switters’s basket. Should the Yank be granted an audience, maybe, just maybe, Smithe might tag along; and if not, then at the very least, Switters could put in a word on his behalf. Both his university and his wife were vexed with him, but he couldn’t turn back. Not just yet. He gave indications of being, over End of Time, in a rough equivalent of the amorous stupor that Switters was in over Suzy. Thus, out of empathy as much as curiosity, and against that paralyzer, that strangler of enlightened