progress known as “better judgment,” Switters consented to let a ragtag gaggle of Nacanaca carry off Sailor Boy into the jungle.
It was still raining, but halfheartedly now, and in a matter of minutes a hard shock of sunshine would blast their eyes and zap newly formed mud flows into charcoal dust and solar cement. They stepped out from under the infirmary awning. A straggler, a solitary traveler, the last and final raindrop of the morning—unapologetically tardy, even arrogant, as if on an independent mission its meekly conforming confederates could not possibly appreciate or understand—landed on the back of Switters’s neck and rolled languidly, defiantly down his spine. He took it as an omen, though of what he was not precisely clear.
There had been a new moon on the previous evening, and both Smithe and the Nacanaca held the opinion that End of Time would still be at the way station, the ceremonial lodge. As they watched the Indians scamper onto the forest trail with the pyramid cage and its somewhat bewildered occupant, Smithe rubbed his hammy paws together and said, “Smashing! A smashing turn of events. One dares to nourish one’s hopes, whether vainly or not one will soon enough find out. It would take the likes of you or me the better part of a day to huff and puff our way to that squalid lodge, but these blokes can cover the distance in a couple of hours. They’ll be back by dusk, I’ll wager. By the way, old man, what’s the meaning of this I.O.U. you’ve thrust upon my person?”
Leaving R. Potney Smithe to his customary stool in the hotel bar, Switters climbed to his room, where he activated his computer in satellite mode. It was guilt and little else—guilt over the strange turn he’d permitted the parrot assignment to take—that prompted him to want to e-mail Maestra. Alas, he couldn’t think of what he might say to her. Certainly not the truth. Awaiting inspiration, he checked his own mailbox, the personal not the official one. There were three messages there, the first from his grandmother, herself.
> How come no progress report? Shouldn’t you be
> home by now? I have a gut feeling you’re up to no
> good. The museum’s director of acquisitions came by
> today to see our Matisse and nearly peed his pants.
> Word to the wise, buddy.
> Get in touch.
The second message was from Bobby Case, apparently still in Alaska, piloting the spy plane known as the U2 and a more recent version called the TR1.
> The 49th state is a harsh environment for salty dogs. Girls too
> old, too grungy, or their daddies too well armed. Company
> continues to ignore my requests for transfer. O whither, O dither.
> I must be demented but I miss you, podner. Trust you’re up to no
> good.
> Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronnton
> nerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoor
> denenthurnuk!
That last was the only real news in the message, implying as it did that Bobby had now gotten as far as the fourth sentence in
E-missive No. 3 proved to be from—be still, dear pulse!—none other than the baby-fatted skeleton in his closet, the hormonal soprano in his choir stall, the lollipop Lorelei on his river rock, the moon over his barnyard, the puss up his tree, the baba-toohoohoo-denenthurnuk! of his heart. And it read:
> Don’t forget you promised to help me with my term
> paper. Jesus loves you.
> Suzy
A libido torpedo? Not by any means. Some men, true enough, would have been discouraged by Suzy’s note, devoid as it was of the faintest blush of romantic undertone, but its very simplicity and pragmatic directness, its very
Likewise amplified were his misgivings about having permitted a befuddled anthropologist to entangle him in some highly unpromising business involving a deformed witch doctor. If only he had discharged his duty as planned, had delivered Sailor to a suitable retirement community and taped the procedure as the parrot crossed the threshold of geriatric autonomy, he might, in a few hours, be making his way homeward to skittish teases, furtive squeezes, and who could guess how much more. Moans of inflamed appetite were interspersed with moans of regret.
In contrast to so many of his contemporaries, however, Switters failed to find in prolonged lamentation an appealing form of recreation. It wasn’t so much that Switters was above self-indulgence but, rather, that he preferred to indulge himself in merrier ways. Thus, in not much more time than it took a gecko to circle the walls of his room, disappearing finally into the rust-streaked, concrete shower stall, he had willfully relieved himself of the burden of remorse (by simply refusing to shoulder it:
He lay, naked and perspiring, upon his bed, watching an inactive ceiling fan use electricity deprivation as an excuse not to knock its brains out against the heavy air of the room; and, with a calmer mind, he conceded that it might well be for the better that he was delaying his reappearance in Sacramento, although in temporarily substituting a visit to the Kandakandero for a visit to his mother’s, he suspected that he was merely choosing the frying pan ahead of the fire. He smiled at this, as if recognizing in himself a familiar trait, a lifelong willingness to take risks in order to experiment with a different set of circumstances; and when he caught himself smiling, he tried to visualize what the smiling lessons of the wild Ka’daks must look like.
If End of Time’s thesis, that civilized man’s powers were attributable to laughter, failed to strike Switters as unduly outlandish, it was probably because it was not so far removed from a favorite idea of Maestra’s: her theory of the missing link.
“What is it,” Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, “that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it’s exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism—as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons—Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.
“Now,” she’d gone on to say, “since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human.
In his grandmother’s opinion, the missing link of scientific lore was neither extinct nor rare. “There’re more of them, in fact, than there are of us, and since they actually seem to be multiplying, Darwin’s theory of evolution is obviously wrong.” Maestra’s stand was that missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority.
“That could be problematic,” Switters had said, straining, at the age of twenty, to absorb this rant, “because only people who, you know,
