“No, not him. The one we had tea with in Saigon. The—”
“You still won’t call it Ho Chi Minh City.”
“I refuse. Although I certainly mean no disrespect to the brave and honorable Uncle Ho. . . .”
“Betrayed, slandered, pushed into a corner . . .”
“By that ice-hearted, lizard-brained, sanctimonious Christian bully boy . . .
“John Foster Dulles!” the two men snarled in contemptuous harmony. Then, also in unison, they spat into the mouthpieces of their respective phones.
“I heard that!” cried Maestra, who, to the best of Switters’s knowledge, had been engrossed in e-gab in a hackers chat room, a kind of on-line cybercryptic Christmas party. “Disgusting lout! Clean it off. Now.”
Separately they each obeyed, chuckling softly as they wiped, the one with coat sleeve, the other with bandanna; and then Switters returned to the Saigon monk. “Remember? He told us about a great spiritual master who was asked what it was like being enlightened all the time. And the master answered, ‘Oh, it’s just like ordinary, everyday life. Except that you’re two inches above the ground.’ “
“Yeah,” said Bobby. “I remember that.”
“Well, it occurred to me a week or so ago that that’s where I’m at. In this wheelchair, my feet are almost exactly two inches off the ground.”
“Aw, come on. It ain’t nowhere near the same thing.”
“No, but maybe it
From the Alaskan end of the connection, there floated a huge sigh. “Merry Christmas, Swit. Here’s wishing you a sleighload of eggnogged virgins in mistletoe underwear.”
Switters did, indeed, maintain his vantage point. Throughout the long, wet winter he maintained it, his “starship in hover mode,” as he put it, orbiting the earth from a height of two inches.
For several weeks in November and December, he had, every morning, propelled his chair eastward on Pike Street and south on Fourth Avenue to the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library, where he sought to supplement his on-line research toward a dissertation that was to be entitled, “Speaking in Things, Thinking With Light,” but near Christmas those academic forays dwindled, and by the first of the year he had abandoned both wood pulp and electron for a different kind of research.
Like some beggar or street performer, he would dock the wheelchair beneath the aged arcades of the labyrinthine Pike Place Market, and there, in the grotto light, protected from the rains that pounded the cobblestones and hissed beneath the tires of delivery trucks, he’d turn a keen eye on whiskered parsnip and hairless apple, and bathe himself in the multitudes.
The old market, worn half away by dampness and fingerprints, sweat drops and shoe heels, pigeon claws and vegetable crates; soiled by butcher seepage, sequined with salmon scales, smelling of roses, raw prawns, and urine; blessedly freed for the winter from the demanding
Or did he? None of the market regulars, legitimate or illegitimate, were quite able to label him or find a reason for his daily presence among them. Just as shoppers would take one look at his stationary wheelchair and glance around automatically for a tin cup and accordion or the equivalents thereof, so denizens searched at greater length though equally in vain for some clue to his raison d’etre. Occasionally, he tapped away at a laptop computer, but mostly, day after day, week after week, he merely sat there, observing the surrounding cavalcade or gazing into the rain. Rumors spread that he was an undercover cop, but when there was no increase in arrests, when it was noticed that he was periodically harassed by market security guards (usually for stationing himself in one spot for too many hours or days in a row), and when he took to carving tiny boats out of busted crate scraps, rigging them with lettuce leaf sails and launching them in rainswept gutters, that particular suspicion gradually faded.
Still, nobody was prepared to write him off as another lingering loafer: his presence was too strong, his demeanor too cool. While he never flashed wads of currency or sported gold jewelry, he dressed in well-cut suits over fine T-shirts and was wont to drape a black cashmere topcoat theatrically, rather like an opera cape, about his broad shoulders. He kept a cell phone in his saddlebag but spoke on it infrequently (Maestra preferred e-mail, the Sacramento contingent was incommunicado, and by February Bobby Case had been transferred to Okinawa), giving no indication when he did converse that any sort of business was being conducted. Reticent though hardly bashful, Switters had affixed to the back of his chair a neatly lettered sign that read I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT JESUS OR DISEASES, this being necessitated by the countless well-meaning busybodies who were convinced that their New Age herbalist or their Sunday School Savior could provide succor if not remedy to whatever misfortune had denied his powers of perambulation. Preservation of wahoo demanded that they be discouraged.
There were those, chiefly women, who did talk to him, however. They couldn’t seem to resist. Never in his life had Switters been quite so handsome. He’d let his hair grow long so that it framed his face, with its storybook of scars, in a manner that made it all the more intriguing. Enhanced by the moist climate, a predominantly vegetarian diet, and the liberty to do with his hours what he pleased, his complexion had the rich glow of a Renaissance oil, and his eyes were like jets of green energy. When he spoke, it was in grand syllables, moderated and warmed by a loose hint of drawl. He projected the air, falsely or not, of both a learned man and a rogue, innately exhibitionist yet deeply secretive, a powerful figure who habitually thumbed his nose at power—and thus might lead one, were one to fall under his spell, off in directions opposite those that one had been conditioned to recognize as prudent, profitable, or holy. To all but a missing link, then, he was an attraction.
Margaret, with the fresh baked piroshki she was fetching back to her desk at the law firm; Melissa, the Microsoft widow, with a basket of Gorgonzola and winter pears bound for suburbia; Dev, whose breasts in her cheap, fuzzy sweater were as heavy as the cabbages she sold in her stall; they and others, different and similar, would kneel hesitantly beside his chair, kneeling so they would be at eye level with him and so they would not be overheard, and say, with varying degrees of embarrassment, “I see you here a lot.”
“Yes,” he’d reply. “I’ve been watching you, too,” and though that was not always the truth, the little lie didn’t trouble his conscience, not even when he sensed a vibration travel down a spine to settle with an almost audible pang in a clitoris.
“What are you? No, I mean who are you? What do you do?”
“I’m Switters, friend of both God and the Devil.” Then, getting an uncertain reception, “Taker of the stepless step.” Then, “Two-inch astronaut.”
That usually stopped them. Lightly dumbfounded, the woman would give him a long, perplexed though hardly rankled look, and as shyly and sweetly as she had knelt, she’d rise, muttering “Have a nice day” or “Stay dry” or some other genial inanity, and walk away, seldom without a wistful glance over her shoulder as she paused at the cobblestones to unfurl her umbrella. Not infrequently, he’d spot one of them in the market again and exchange with her one of those futilely desirous smiles that are like domestic postage on a letter to a foreign destination. Did they approach him a second time? None save for Dev, who was much too undereducated and overburdened to be fazed by cryptic epigrams and non sequiturs; and who eventually followed him to his room, where, against his better judgment, she gladdened him unmercifully. Evidently he gladdened her, too, for afterward she claimed she needed a wheelchair more than he.
And she returned. Twice or thrice a week. Usually early in the morning, while her brothers were stocking the produce stand she would operate until dusk. When she unhooked her bra, it was like a farmer unloading a cart, and when she pulled down her panties, Switters thought he was back up the Amazon. Dev had meaty lips, chapped red cheeks, and walnut-shell eyelids beneath a prominent dark brow, and was as wide of hip as she was thin of guile. A strapping Eastern Orthodox milkmaid of Slavic descent, pretty in a coarse, uncultivated way, she was uncomplicated and honest in mind and emotion, complex and pungent in bodily aroma. She was always out of his room by five
