Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“A spin? Me? You mean on your motorcycle?”

Switters jumped in. “Not a good idea. It’ll be dark before you know it.” He was right about that. It was not yet five o’clock, but in Seattle in November, the diurnal house band played very short sets.

“Let’s ride!” said Maestra, waving her left arm in the air until its bracelets rang out like an Afro-Cuban rhythm section in a bus wreck. “Unless Herr Alzheimer is playing tricks on me, I’ve got an old leather jacket in the hall closet.”

There was no stopping them. She even refused to wear a helmet, not wishing to look like a wimp next to Bobby, who consistently violated the helmet law on the grounds that his head was his own affair, cowlick and all. With some misgiving, Switters saw them off, then wheeled into the living room and parked below the Matisse. The big blue nude rose like a mountain range, an azure Appalachia of loaves, humps, and knobs, a topographical maquette constructed from huckleberry jelly, a curvaceous cobalt upland where clumps of wild asters clung precariously to the hillsides and the bluebirds all sipped curacao. Matisse’s nude was nude but not really naked, which is to say, though she was beyond shame or embarrassment, she was far from brazen. Her purpose was not to titillate but to inspire awe at the infinite blueness of our finite world.

In her way, she was more innocent than Suzy, wiser than Maestra; a woman such as Switters had never known nor would ever know—or so he thought—and as such, perfectly suited to preside over his musings of the moment.

Bobby is correct, he mused. To deny that young girls were throbbing hives of sexual honey was to be both sexist and ageist. On the other hand, to steal samples of that honey or dupe them out of it, or to view them as only hives or even as primarily hives was an equal or perhaps greater wrong. The big blue nude seemed to nod in agreement. Taboos, however, were not good, either. Taboos were superstitions with fangs on them, and if not transcended, they punctured the brain and drained the spirit. A taboo was a crystallized knot of societal fear and must be unraveled, cut through, or smashed if a people were to set themselves free. Ancient Greeks had a concept they called “eating the taboo,” and the agorhi sect in India took a similar approach. As a path to liberation, these golden Greeks and holy Hindus would deliberately break any and all of their culture’s prevailing taboos in order to loosen their hold, destroy their power. It was an active, somewhat radical method of triumphing over fear by confronting that which frightened: embracing it, dancing with it, absorbing it, and moving past it. It was a casting out of demons.

Wouldn’t it be to his betterment and, perhaps, to society’s as well, to go on down to Sacramento and, in one way or another, stare that taboo in the eye? Wouldn’t it? Or was this merely some elaborate Swittersesque rationalization? (The big blue nude gave nary a sign.)

At 6 P.M. he began to worry. At quarter past, he revved up the fret machine. It was darker than the clam beds of Styx out there, and a needle-nose rain had commenced to fall. Where could they be? Certainly, something had gone wrong. In her frail condition, Maestra might have lost her grip and fallen off. Bobby, hardly the most cautious of bikers, might have skidded them into a lumber truck. Or a driver, typically unmindful of motorcycles and further handicapped by the gloom and the rain, might have plowed into them or run them over a curb. There must have been an accident. What else would have delayed them? Switters dismissed any notion of hanky-panky. There were limits to Bobby’s gallantry. She was a grandmother, for God’s sake! She was older than salt.

He had just decided to give them ten more minutes before calling the police when the telephone burbled. A table was sideswiped and a floorlamp flattened on his way to the phone. Evidently he needed more practice in the Invacare 9000. He was not yet the starship commander he fancied himself to be.

“Bobby! What’s happened? Is she all right?”

“All right? Yeah, she’s fine—except for being stubborn as a frostbit fireplug. We’re having a big fight, to tell you the truth.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re at the video store. I’m dying to see Blade Runner again—you know as good as me it’s the best damn movie ever made—but your granny’s got her mind set on some fou-fou flick about the expatriate art scene in Paris in the twenties. Guys with big noses sitting around in sidewalk cafes arguing over whether Gertrude Stein weighs more than Ernest Hemingway, or some unhappy shit like that.”

“You must mean The Moderns. It’s a delicious film. You’d lick your chops over it. Why don’t you just rent them both?”

“Because, Solomon, in case you forgot, we agreed to play CD-ROM Monopoly with her later on, and that game takes longer than the lemonade line in Hell. I got to fly tomorrow night.”

“In that case,” said Switters, feeling like the vice president at a Senate deadlock, “I cast my deciding vote for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Now come on home.” He slammed down the receiver.

Bobby left the next morning. As he zipped himself into his leathers at the front door, he said, “We really didn’t dig very deep into your situation. We talked about how to break the curse or whatever it is—and I’m still ready and willing to waltz down to the Amazon and seize any operational opportunity that should arise, you say the word—but we never got into the significance of the thing. What it means, where it came from. Was it a well-thought-out decision, that particular taboo? Is it traditional to ban interlopers and visiting firemen from touching certain things, in your case the earth? Is earth-touching symbolic in some cryptic way, or was it arbitrary, just a matter of a wily ol’ jungle wiseguy having off-the-cuff sport with a city slicker? And how does it tie in with your yopo trip? What’d you see or learn on that trip that was so heavy or precious or privileged that you would have to pay for it by spending the rest of your life with your heels elevated? And just because some goofy limey bush professor keeled over from Kadockywocky juju, does that necessarily mean you would? Boy howdy! There’s a fieldful of stones we left unturned.”

“I’ve been flipping them like pancakes myself, and suppose I’ll keep at it unless the company creates a major distraction for me.”

Bobby chuckled. “I’d love to be a fly on the pickle factory ceiling when you report for duty in that hospital hotrod. At least travel for the disabled is easier nowadays. There a direct flight from Seattle to D.C.?”

“Probably, but I don’t book it. I fly into New York and take the train down, so that I never have to patronize an airport named for John Foster Dulles.” After saying “Dulles,” Switters immediately expectorated, and Bobby did likewise. In such aesthetic harmony was their dual expulsion of salivary projectiles that they could have represented the U.S. in synchronized spitting. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter that we didn’t spend this all too rare reunion dissecting and analyzing my peculiar state of affairs. There’ll be plenty of time to ponder End of Time, even if today is tomorrow. And there’re happenings in this life that simply don’t lend themselves to rational interpretation. To look at them logically can be to look at them wrongly. Logic can distort as well as clarify. What’s important is—well, my psyche was a pregnant mouse at a cat show when you arrived, I was in a fair amount of disarray, but you showed me a good time, gave me some laughs, got me relaxed. Thanks to you, pal, I can now approach my prospects with a relatively clear mind.”

“Clear enough to stay away from little Suzy?”

“Well . . .”

Bobby shook his head reproachfully. “I sure hope Hell has wheelchair access.”

“If not, I may have to settle for Paradise.” (In his cerebral data base, crammed as it was with etymological privity [some might say pedantry, but there was nothing the least bit trivial about those underpinnings of modern language that were by extension the underpinnings of modern consciousness], he knew the word paradise to be derived from Old Persian for “walled garden” or “enclosed orchard”—but the significance of this, while he was still many months removed from the Syrian oasis, obviously would not have occurred to him.) “Heaven or Hades, as long as Pee-wee Herman’s on the premises I’ll be content. Pee-wee may be becoming my idol.”

“I can appreciate that,” said Bobby, thinking of the video they had watched before Maestra bankrupted them both at Monopoly. “It’s the innocence.”

“It’s the joie de vivre.”

They embraced in the manner that had raised more than a few cowboy eyebrows. Bobby walked down the steps and mounted the Harley. “By the way,” he called, “you don’t have to sweat anymore about what to tell your granny. I talked to her last night on our ride. It’s all taken care of. She’s cool as an ice worm in snow melt.” He