Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“You did!”

“No. I may have gambled my life, but it wasn’t for them. It was for—something else.”

“What? Precisely.”

“Precision doesn’t enter into it.”

“Heh!”

He wasn’t kidding, though, nor being unnecessarily evasive. Switters had conducted his professional life in much the same way as he made love to a woman: wholeheartedly, romantically, poetically, in a frenzy of longing for the unattainable, the unknown; ladling onto himself—and his partner or his mission—that mysteriously generated concentrate of exhilaration that he sometimes referred to as his syrup of wahoo, a kind of emotional extract produced by the simultaneous boiling down of beauty, risk, wildness, and mirth. Delusional or not, it was hardly a matter of precision.

When Switters took a room in an old building adjacent to the Pike Place Market (he’d considered moving into the Snoqualmie cabin, but there was already heavy snowfall in the mountains), both Maestra and Bobby Case quizzed him about what he would do there. “For the time being, my aim is to keep the oxygen from leaking out of my life,” he replied, an answer neither they nor he found satisfactory. So, he hinted that he might be embarking upon a scholastic bender.

Assisting Suzy with her term paper had dusted and oiled creaky academic reflexes just enough to convince him that the dissertation that stood between him and a Ph.D. degree—he’d long ago completed the course work— would not be all that painfully difficult to write. “How would you feel about calling me Dr. Switters?” he asked. “Hell, I’d probably get mixed up and call you Dr. Seuss,” said Bobby. “You’re just lucky I don’t call you Baby Dumpling,” said Maestra.

Joining them briefly at Thanksgiving, Bobby listened politely to Switters rant about the future of the word in cyberculture. “From the time of the invention of the alphabet, if not before, all technologies have originated in language, but in cyberspace, we don’t see or hear information so much as we feel it. Technology may at last be outstripping language, not merely leaving the nest but killing the mother, if you will. You know, we don’t really see darkness, or even light, we feel neurologically their effect on surrounding surfaces. The binary digital system—Brother One and Sister Zero—that makes computers possible is a kind of light/dark relationship to begin with, and when you start to factor in the electron rather than the word as the primary information link between the brain and the external world . . .”

And so on and so forth. Bobby got the idea that Switters didn’t believe that language was doomed per se but, rather, was about to be transformed, much as it had been by the invention of the Phoenician alphabet; liberated, as it had been by the invention of the Greek alphabet; and then celebrated, as it had been by the advent of the Roman; yet suspected that he, nevertheless, felt protective of words, the stranger, more archaic the better, perceiving them as keys to some lost treasure. All very interesting, basically, but Switters, once he got going, was inclined to scoot off on tangents, to drive in the ditch. For example: “Why, our cosmology is a binary system, as well. God equals one, Satan, zero. Or is it the other way around? Whichever, we use that pair of digits only—eschewing numbers two through nine and the endless combinations thereof—to compute the meaning of life and our ultimate destiny. Ah, but in the beginning was the word. Before the division, before—”

“Yep, podner, you’ll churn yourself a damn fine thesis outta that butterfat, I’m sure, but what ought to be sizzling on your front burner is a strategy for getting yourself back on your feet, and I don’t necessarily mean financially. Pass the peas.”

“Amen to that!” chimed in Maestra. “Have a drop more gravy, Captain Case. Sorry it isn’t red-eye, but the caterer’s led a sheltered life and didn’t have a clue.”

After dessert, as the two men smoked cigars in the living room, watched over by the Matisse nude, herself as blue as smoke, Bobby broached the subject of Suzy. “Forget cyberspace for a minute. You’ve been quieter than a Stealth potato about what went on in Sacramento. Come on. Did you deflower the ‘wholesome little animal,’ or did I manage to talk you out of it?”

“Talked myself out of it, I’m afraid. With my forked tongue.”

“Lordy, Lord. And who said talk is cheap?”

“Some inarticulate man of action, I imagine; the strong, silent type who other males admire but who women secretly find a dupe or a dope.” He expelled a dancing doughnut of smoke. Like every smoke ring ever blown—like smoke, in general—it bounced in the air like the bastard baby of chemistry and cartooning. “I’m unsure how or if it applies in this particular situation, but the poet, Andrei Codrescu, once wrote that ‘Physical intimacy is only a device for opening the floodgates of what really matters: words.’ “

Bobby looked skeptical. “Sounds like sublimation to me. Anyhow, I thought the verbiage was supposed to start the ball rolling. In the fucking beginning was the fucking word.”

“So the Good Book informs us. What it neglects to tell us, and for which omission I can never forgive it, is which came first, the word for chicken or the word for egg.”

Bobby couldn’t make it down for Christmas—his little clandestine U2 unit was on some kind of alert—but he telephoned Maestra’s manse on Christmas Eve, and once he’d stuffed the old woman’s goose with flattery, got on the line with Switters, surmising from their conversation that the latter had cooled a bit toward the prospect of writing a dissertation, although he could and would, if given a chance, still get wound up over its thematic potentialities.

“The role of the computer in literature is limited to grunt work and janitorial services. Makes research easier and editing faster without making either of them any better. Where the computer does appear to foster genuine innovation and advancement is in graphics: photographic reproduction, design, animation, et cetera. Amazing development in those fields. But to what end?”

“More interesting TV commercials.”

“Exactement! Marketing. Merchandising. Increasingly sophisticated, increasingly seductive. And sure, it’s just a flashy modern version of the age-old bread-and-circuses brand of bondage—except that today the bakery’s a multinational and the circus follows us home. Well, culture has always been driven to some degree by the marketplace. Always. It’s just that nowadays the marketplace, having invaded every nook and cranny of our private lives, is completely supplanting culture; the marketplace has become our culture. Nevertheless—”

“Yeah,” put in Bobby, “and wild ol’ boys like you and me may turn out to be one of the last lines of defense against corporate totalitarianism and unhappy shit like that. That’s why it’s important that you . . . I know for a fact that the company would reinstate you if you’d—”

“Did I tell you Mayflower sent a pair of grim-faced pickle-packers out to debrief me? Right after Thanksgiving. Cornered me in my room, six o’clock in the morning; damned unsporting of them, me being groggy from the toils and impairments of the evening prior. Still, they had rather a thick time of it before I allowed them to take back some of their toys. I managed to keep my laptop, my Beretta, and my faithful crocodile, although the pistol remains an issue, and there’s reason to believe they’ve put a Joe on my tail.”

“That could be fun.”

“Perhaps. But all that’s irrelevant. What I was getting at a minute ago is that the real show, as usual, is taking place behind the tent, and neither the hawkers nor the ringmasters are hip to it. Forget the graphic-art gymnastics. What’s really happening in cyberculture is that language isn’t contracting, it’s expanding. Expanding. Moving outside of the body. Beyond the tongue and the larynx, beyond the occipital lobe and the hippocampus, beyond the pen and the page, beyond the screen and the printer, even. Out into the universe. Bonding with, saturating, or even usurping physical reality. Let me explain.”

“Ut! Swit? Whoa. Give me a rain check on that if you don’t mind. All this brainstorming of yours is costing me MCI’s holiday rates—and costing you what’s left of your marbles, I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, if you’re not planning to write your damn thesis, why? . . . The main thing is, you’re still in that feeble-foot Ferrari, son, and it’s been seven or eight weeks now. Jesus! You got to deal with this problem, bring it to an end, whatever it takes. If that involves tripping back down to the Amazon, so be it. You, me, either or both of us. Will you please just lock in on that target? Direct your fire toward getting well, getting free? Jesus!”

There was no immediate response, and in the absence of dialogue, the men could hear MCI’s holiday meter running. Eventually Switters said, “Remember the story that monk told us?”

“Which monk? The one who hid us from the Burmese border patrol?”