Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

to inhabit a pool a few miles from there. Fer-de-lance frequently went looking for it, though his intent—to capture it, kill it, or commune with it—had never been disclosed.

“Has Senor Switters been sleeping long?” Forgetting himself, he asked this in Spanish, then rephrased it in Nacanacan.

Before either Indian could reply, there came a grunt from the hammock. The device commenced ever so slightly to swing. “Meaningless question, Pot,” said Switters. His voice was relaxed, and so thick with sleep he could barely be understood. He yawned. He stretched. The hammock pitched, as if upon a gentle tide. “You know as well as I that duration is naught but an illusion around this here juju parlor.” He yawned again.

“An end to time, you mean?”

“There’s that, for damn sure. Although Fer-de-lance is of the opinion that you two may have mistranslated our witchman’s name.”

“Oh?” said Smithe.

Switters didn’t elaborate. Instead, he yawned yet again and rubbed his eyes. “Whatever his name is, he’s some piece of work.”

“Unique.”

“The most misused word in the English language, unique, but I believe you’ve employed it immaculately. The dude is genuinely one of a kind. Even without his medicines.”

“He gave you ayahuasca?”

“Yeah, and something extra in the bargain. Some kind of powder he blew up my nose with a reed.”

“A wild turkey bone, actually. But long and hollow, in that respect like a reed.”

“Okay. As an ethnographer, you’d know such things. But, Jesus . . . ! I’m no stranger to mind-altering substances, Potney—keep that under your hat if you don’t mind—but the stuff your man dispenses takes the cake, the pie, the strudel, the whole damn patisserie. Whew! Baby! It just keeps peeling away layers, one after the other, for hours.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, deep meditation can do that, too, except in meditation, what’s peeling away are your own thought patterns. Worries, anxieties, cliches, bright ideas, ambitions, plans, mental and emotional hangups, all that half- conscious brain litter. You strip the layers away, one by one, until the images grow fainter and fainter and the noise grows quieter and quieter, and bing! you arrive at the core, which is naked emptiness, a kind of exhilarating vacuum. But this shit! Each layer is a separate dimension, a new world. They’re like landscapes, you travel around inside them. And you’re not alone in there, they’re occupied.”

Smithe nodded. “Did you . . . ? The bulbs?”

“Bulbs. Yeah. That’s a good name for them. Shiny copper-colored bulbs. Orbiting the earth. Called themselves masters, overlords.”

“Most disquieting. Told me they’re in charge of absolutely everything. Run the show.”

“Me, too. Afterward, I asked End of Time about it. He off-loaded one of those wicked homemade grins he’s been working on and shrugged, ‘Oh, they always say that.’ Made it sound like they were just big blowhards.”

“Boasting.”

“Yeah. Mind-fuckers. But who . . . ? Or what . . . ?” Switters fell silent.

“Raises a great many questions, but they’re devilishly difficult to formulate.”

“Hard to talk about. The whole experience.”

“Quite.” Smithe produced a silver monogrammed case, from which he withdrew a cigarette. “Impossible to put into words.”

“I know what you’re saying. But it isn’t because words are inadequate. I won’t go that far.”

“Certain things words can’t convey.”

“Oh, but they can. Because those things you’re referring to are . . . well, if they’re not actually made of words or derived from words, at least inhabit words: language is the solution in which they’re suspended. Even love ultimately requires a linguistic base.”

“All concepts are basically verbal concepts? Now that you mention it, I have heard that theory advanced.” Smithe spoke disinterestedly and at the same time anxiously. He hadn’t muddied and bloodied himself bushwhacking his way to the lodge in order to sit around arguing semiotics. Only genteel breeding was preventing him from interrupting Switters with an irritated bellow: Tell me about End of Time!

“Even if most of our best words have been trivialized, corrupted, eviscerated by the merchandisers, by the marketeers, by the. . . .” Switters broke off. He could feel a rant coming on, but was too tired and, although his outward manner scarcely betrayed it, too shaken to go through with it.

Smithe seized the chance. “Now, tell me about—”

“The point is—” Like James Brown, spent, limp, reeling to the microphone for just one more whoop, Switters momentarily revived himself. “Words can still handle anything we can throw at them, including the kitchen sink. Finnegans Wake proved that, if nothing else. It’s a matter of usage. If a house is off- plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks.”

“Um.”

“Our words are up to the job. It’s our syntax that’s limiting.”

“And what’s so wrong with our syntax?”

“Well, in the first place, it’s too abstract.”

“And in the second place?”

“It’s too concrete.”

In the silence that greeted his pronouncement, Switters snuggled down in the hammock and shut his eyes.

Switters rested for about ten minutes, during which time the Nacanacas descended the ladder and laid some yucca to roast in the embers of the firepit, while Smithe, in agitation, paced the floorboards. When at last Switters reopened what Suzy called his “big-bad-wolf eyes,” Smithe strode immediately to his side. “I say, was that a Broadway show tune you were humming just now?”

Caught off guard, Switters nearly let the Cats out of the bag. “That was . . . no, couldn’t have been. Probably some—some riff from, uh, Zappa or else the, uh, Grateful Dead,” he stammered, preserving a secret he shared not even with Bobby Case. “Speaking of which, End of Time—if we’re going to persist in calling him that—would make the consummate Deadhead, don’t you think? Skull shaped like an Egyptian tomb. Take one of those turkey bones and blow Jerry Garcia’s ashes up his nostrils.”

Potney Smithe’s musical leanings listed sharply in the direction of Vivaldi, but he was grateful (if not yet dead) to find conversation returning to the Kandakandero shaman. “I’ve not been stimulated overmuch by what I’ve heard so far. Do tell me what happened when you turned up night before last to join your bird. What was said?”

A great deal had been said, much of it, no doubt, lost in translation, but essentially, as Switters related it, his encounter with End of Time was not greatly dissimilar to Smithe’s. The shaman received him from behind a screen, a barrier that could not, however, conceal his delight with the pyramid cage or its occupant. Sailor Boy, for his part, was talking up a storm. Or was he? The customary admonishment, “Peeple of zee wurl, relax!” squawked from behind the screen at thirty-second intervals, and though the message hadn’t varied from the familiar in either content or tone, its frequency of transmission was something radically new. Later, Switters realized that the squawks could have been issuing from End of Time himself, Amazonian Indians being famously adept at mimicking bird calls. Perhaps they took turns, even: a man and parrot duet.

“We yakked all night—that Fer-de-lance is a whiz with nuances and complexities—jabbering about the pitfalls of morbidity, about levity versus gravity, struggle versus play, me mostly mouthing other people’s ideas, but your curandero man contributing some fairly engaging wrinkles of his own. He said, for example, that in order for his people to withstand the assault of the white man, they must fashion shields out of laughter. He means that literally, I think. Speaks of laughter as if it were a force, a physical force or natural phenomenon. And within the realm of laughter, he says, light and darkness merge, no longer existing as separate or distinct conditions. A people who could live in that realm would be free of all of life’s dualities. The white man can’t do the trick because he lacks the Kandakandero knowledge of the different levels of reality, and so far the Ka’daks can’t do it because they lack the buoyancy of the white man’s humor. The person who successfully combined the two would move through the world as a ‘shadow of light.’ Can you picture a shadow of light? A person in whom the