Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“No problem, pal. Most American men secretly hate women and love golf. I love women and hate golf.”

“Yes, you are a man apart, aren’t you? Well then. The committee meets Friday. Check in with me on, uh, Monday, and you’ll be advised of your status. Should we decide on suspension or dismissal, you obviously have the right to appeal. I should caution you, however, that the Civil Service Commission is quite reluctant to interfere in internal matters of the CIA.”

Doing his best to pop a wheelie, though only half succeeding, Switters spun and followed Joolie out. Before the door closed behind him, he called over his shoulder: “I’ll give your regards to Audubon Poe.” He could have sworn he heard Mayflower sputter.

“Joolie, would it be considered sexual harassment if I—”

“Don’t even think about it,” warned Joolie. But like a miser making a night deposit at an inner city bank, she leaned over with a kind of fearful glee and planted a peck perilously close to his pucker.

Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?

That night he hit the bars in D.C.’s hotel district, wishing he were in Patpong as he zigzagged from one to another, slicing through knots of pedestrians like Alexander’s sword, turning away at the door when he found a lounge to have a pianist in residence, for fear that, provoked by booze, he might erupt in song at the first tinkling rendition of a Broadway standard. Years earlier, he’d contemplated having a device surgically implanted in his throat to prevent any such musical indiscretion under the quickening of drink, and had gone so far as to contact a certain Hungarian clinic, only to have its administrator suggest he see a psychiatrist instead.

Bar patrons were swift to move aside for him, showing him the guilty, condescending respect reserved for the disabled. At Spin Doctor’s, he was invited to wheel his chair up to a table occupied by five government workers: two male, three female, under thirty, reasonably attractive. After a round or two, he was entertaining them with an abridged, shaman-free account of taking his grandmother’s parrot to the Amazon to reunite it with its origins. They seemed enthralled, but midway through his narration one of the men interrupted him to describe the difficulties he was experiencing trying to housebreak his new puppy, and soon all of them were telling their favorite dumb, boring pet stories. Raising his voice above the rest, Switters announced solemnly, “This morning, I received proof positive that my tabby cat is the reincarnation of a Las Vegas crime lord.” The table fell silent, and once more all ears were his. He merely looked them over, however, removed his hand from the baby fat of the feminine knee to his right (a hard-won concession), finished off his tequila jackhammer, then sped recklessly to the door. Jesus, he thought as he rolled out onto the street, I might just as well have sung “Memories.”

The next day he slept late, not surprisingly, and upon rising began quite mindlessly to pack. It was almost as if he were being directed by his welled unconscious, a wholly intuitive impulse that he did not think to challenge until he had cleaned out his closets. It was evening before he received confirmation that his intuition had been on the money. E-mail arrived from Bobby Case claiming that the angel grapevine was abuzz with rumors that Switters was about to be sacked.

Bobby offered assistance, hinting that he had enough embarrassing dirt on company activities to make Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald a reluctant ally for life. Switters replied that he would think it over. Bobby e-mailed back, “Okay, think, but don’t forget to sit.”

So, over the weekend he sat. And he got stoned. And he thought some. And when on Monday morning Joolie telephoned to inform him he was in trouble—Mayflower wanted him in on Tuesday for a daylong debriefing session—he could actually sound nonchalant, though some of it was faked. Impressed, Joolie confessed in a tremulous whisper (fully aware that she was being recorded) that she wished she could have known him better.

“Yes,” agreed Switters, “I can picture the two of us sharing a gypsy cave above a deserted beach with nothing on but the shortwave radio, a shaft of sunlight visually activating the coppery coils around your . . .” Joolie, a true redhead, hung up for fear she might swoon.

Switters then called a real estate agency and put his condo on the market. He had very little equity in the property, but any amount he might realize would help. He wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, but the fact that he was about to disobey orders by refusing to be debriefed would end up costing him his severance pay.

Too antsy to wait for a train, he took that very night a red-eye flight (sans gravy) to Seattle by way of Los Angeles, greatly annoying the D.C. taxi driver when, after announcing Dulles as his destination, he spat on the floor of the cab.

Undoubtedly, there are those who would be inclined to sneer at Switters, judging him in word and deed to have proven himself immature, frivolous, or even zany (to employ that stale adjective—from the Italian, zanni, a would-be or untalented clown—that the leaden are so fond of applying to characters less stodgy and predictable than they or their friends). The psychoanalytically disposed, on the other hand, might detect in his behavior, particularly as described in recent pages, a classic, arguably heroic, example of despair refusing to take itself seriously. Well, maybe.

Sigmund Freud once wrote that “Wit is the denial of suffering,” meaning not that the witty, the playful among us, deny that suffering exists—in varying degrees, everyone suffers—but rather that they deny suffering power over their lives, deny it prominence, use jocularity to keep it in its place. Freud may have been right. Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control (and fleece) its members by insisting they take its symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.

It’s entirely possible, however, that Switters was merely exhibiting the tics that can show up in a spirited intelligence when it can no longer count on, as an outlet, periodic meetings of the C.R.A.F.T. Club.

Switters was raised in Northern California, Colorado, and Texas, but whenever his mother’s domestic life went topsy-turvy, as it seemed intermittently to do, he’d been sent for months at a time to Seattle, and it was in Seattle that he once again took refuge. It could not be said that during his youthful asylums under Maestra’s roof she had ever mothered him, tending always to treat him as friend and equal, and she definitely wasn’t going to mother him now. In fact, once he broke down and informed her of his predicament and the queer Amazonian incidents (he omitted the part about eating her Sailor Boy) that had rather directly occasioned it, it became plain that he could not remain in her house.

Accepting no blame for having set events in play—guilt, in her opinion, being one of the most useless human emotions—Maestra chided him repeatedly for what she termed his “disappointing display of ignorance and superstition.”

Whacking her cane on floor and furniture until she set up an ominous rhythmic resonance evocative of the timpani in Greek tragedy, she accused him of a reaction worthy of primitive cave-bear worshipers or, worse (because they ought to know better), evangelical Christians. “You go down there and encourage Suzy to accept as fact the tall tales of dogma-crazed underage ignorant Portuguese hillbillies. . . .”

“I only encouraged her to fully investigate that thing that she found most compelling in life. Isn’t that—”

“I was appalled when I heard you were aiding and abetting her dabblings in such harmful nonsense. Appalled. What I didn’t know was that you yourself were in the dimwitted thrall of something even more ridiculous, more destructive. In all of my eighty-plus years I’ve never. . . . As far as I’m concerned, this millennium business is wholly bogus, but there must be something in the air that would cause you, of all people, to surrender your spirit, to wreck your career, to turn yourself into a craven invalid. . . .”

“Fierce invalid,” he corrected her.

“I guess I thought you were one of the last of the torchbearers, but as it’s turned out, sad to say, you couldn’t strike a match in an elevator.”

Stung, he asked, “Do you want me to stand, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Knowing what you know about Smithe, the anthropologist, what happened to him, do you want me to get up and walk? Because I’ll do it. Right now. Right this second. Just say the word.” He was already half out of the chair.

Maestra couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She stalked off, only to return ten minutes later to chide him for passively accepting his dismissal from the CIA without even requesting a hearing. “At the very least, you could have gotten a mental disability pension. As screwy as you’ve turned out, they still owe you something. Many times you gambled your life for them.”

“Never.”