Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

brussels sprouts, and the occasional yeasty horse turd; streams drizzled with cloud water, tea, lemonade, soup, screwtop wine, and drool (avian, equine, and human), in addition to a half-hundred varieties of coffee; streams dredged clean by municipal workers every night only to be collaged the next day with lurid organic detritus shed by activities within the Pike, the belly and heart of Seattle—into those cobble-bottomed streams the girls commenced to shove brigs, brigantines, barks, frigates, and clipper ships: vessels meant not for sport but for cargo or battle. It was as if, having despaired of exceeding his vulgar Virgins in speed and endurance, they sought to overwhelm them with scope, intricacy, and grace.

Indeed, they were works of marvel, those nautical midgets, especially when the clipper ship decks were stacked with lumber, rum barrels, hogsheads, cotton bales, or sacks of grain; when the frigates were outfitted with cannon and beaked figureheads for ramming an enemy. Races were interrupted, delayed, or canceled altogether due to outbreaks of naval warfare. As the fighting raged around it—”Fuck the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”—a lumpish Switters Virgin, flying a crude Jolly Roger, would go careening by in awkward audacity and lurch its way (providing it didn’t run aground on a half-submerged bagel) to the storm drain at the end of the street. Pretending to ignore him, the Art Girls made plans for a reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar, deciding it might be a more interesting and authentic engagement if the warships were manned.

“Fruit flies,” suggested Luna, one of the more innovative of the girls. “We could rub grape pulp and stuff on the decks and in the rigging, and next thing you know we’ll have a crew.”

“Hello?” countered Brie, who was Luna’s heated rival in the talent department. “Did you happen to notice that it’s winter? There aren’t any fruit flies out.”

“Are, too. There’s always a flock of ’em flitting around that rosy-cheeked brunette who works in the stall over there.”

“Yeah,” agreed Twila. “Even when she walks down the street.”

“You mean Dev?” asked Switters innocently. As one, to a woman, each of the girls swung like a beacon to face him, their eyes narrowed with suspicion, or rather, some psychic knowledge well beyond suspicion, a daunting display of feminine intuition in full efflorescence. He actually blushed.

When they’d had enough of broiling his marrow under their sarcastic smirks, they returned to preparations for Trafalgar. “Are we going to have critters aboard or not?”

“Darlings, please!” pleaded Switters, reclaiming his pallor. “Critters? Rarely has a linguistic corruption stunk so excrementally of willful hayseediness. It’s the sort of ill-bred mispronunciation associated with barnyard sodomites and greeting-card wits, even exceeding in declasse offensiveness the use of shrooms when mushrooms is the word intended.”

“Life is offensive. Get used to it.” They had him there.

“Bet Dev says shrooms.” There, too.

Being as fundamentally nonviolent as they were artistically restless, the girls soon lost their taste for naval warfare. One day, to everyone’s delight, a lowly garbage scow appeared in place of a windjammer, and the next day somebody launched an ark. These were followed by fishing trawlers, tugboats, barges, rafts, kayaks, houseboats, tankers, and ocean liners. And, as any art historian could have predicted, there eventually bloomed a period of stylistic mannerism, of art for art’s sake. The girls began to bring in boats that bore little or no resemblance to boats: impressionistic boats, expressionistic boats, Cubistic boats, boats more closely resembling swivel chairs, toupees, bowling trophies, or poodle dogs than anything that ever plied the seas; boats that wouldn’t steer correctly and in some cases wouldn’t even float. Anti-boats. Suicides. Sinkers. Bangladesh ferry service. Then, Luna stopped the show with a miniature Christ who walked on water. Everyone was stunned, but two days later, during which time she’d neither eaten nor slept, Brie unveiled a Christ who not only walked on water but also towed skis. Apparently, the end was near.

Their little regattas had been attracting an increasing number of kibitzers, so it was hardly a surprise when a writer for the Post-Intelligencer mentioned them in her column. “Regrettable,” bemoaned Switters. “Any day now we can expect the novelty-greedy snouts of TV cameras to come sniffing at our pleasures.”

A product of their culture, the Art Girls could neither share nor understand his objection. An aversion to media exposure was as incomprehensible to them as would have been in earlier times an aversion to the favors of a king or the blessings of the Church.

There might have developed a quarrel, but (naturally enough, since it was well into April) the rains stopped. The sky went blue on them, the sun bounded on stage like a cut-rate comedian who doubled as his own spotlight, and within a day the market streets and gutters were as dry as rye. And dry they remained. With the dawning of spring, moreover, it dawned on the girls that their school year was drawing to a close, final exams were imminent, portfolios must be readied for grading; and, so, with a chirpy panic, they turned their full attention to the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs that for months they’d been ignoring, to the faculty’s supreme bewilderment, in favor of maritime models and nautical whirligigs.

On their rare forays into the market now, they did, singularly or in pairs, seek out Switters, always with just a trace of dreaminess in their perky hellos and good-byes. “What are you doing with yourself these days?” they’d inquire, implying that his life must be dreary without them.

“The house is on fire,” he’d answer merrily. “I’m looking out the second-story window. In my case, that happens to be two inches above the ground. Perfect!”

Whereas in the past it had been an unspoken rule that no prying was permitted, now they’d ask, “But what are you doing here in the market? What did you do before? You know, like before?”

“Oh, I gave up a proctology practice to go live in the Ural Mountains. Or did I give up a urology practice to go work for Procter and Gamble? Hmm?”

“You can’t remember whether you were a proctologist or a urologist?”

“Alas. All I know is that if you could sit on it, I was interested in it.”

At least half the girls made it clear, largely through body language, that anything they sat on could be his for the asking. Yet, he did not ask. He was, in some oblique fashion, paying off a debt to Suzy, who, he kept reminding himself, was but three or four years their junior, and for whose sake he seemed to feel he owed more than a modicum of retribution. He lusted maniacally for the Art Girls, of course, and, in all frankness, might never have let remorse over Suzy stand in the way of getting to know them more intimately had not his sunrise visits from Dev been so carnally extracting.

It was spring. There was no mistaking it. The air had become like cotton candy, spun not from sugar but the sex glands of meadowlarks and dry white wine. In the Pike Place Market, green sprouts popped up between the cobblestones. When he ventured out of a morning, freshly if resentfully groomed, yet bearing Dev’s funky signature like a laundry mark on a shirt, Switters left his topcoat at home.

Pale sunlight warmed the “starship,” the “second-story window,” the “throne of enlightenment” from whose eminence he kept watch on the world. Because spring brought with it, as it does each year, quiet spasms of longing that may be interpreted as sad, he found himself thinking of the sad-faced little mercado down in Boquichicos, so woefully wanting in goods and goods-buyers compared to the overstuffed market in which he parked his “one-man tilt-a-whirl.” And because in the high stalls (including Dev’s), oranges, onions, potatoes, and so forth were stacked in pyramid piles, he was repeatedly reminded of the shaman of the Kandakandero. Was it around Today Is Tomorrow’s cranial apex that Sailor Boy’s plumage had come to rest? And what of Fer-de-lance? The boy was out of vivid South America, but vivid South America was not quite out of the boy.

Bereft of Art Girl yachting parties, Switters again had lots of time to think, and while he thought often of Suzy and what he might have done to protect their relationship, thought of the CIA and what he might have done to preserve his job, he focused his thinking on his South American affliction, specifically on the question raised by Bobby Case, to wit: What had he been shown by the witchman’s ayahuasca, his yopo, that was so privileged and precious that he’d be expected to pay for it by spending the rest of his life with his feet off the ground?

Was his predicament in any way a distant echo of Adam and Eve’s? Had he, with a chit supplied by a creepy trickster, bought lunch at the Tree of Knowledge Bar & Grill, where only the cosmic elite were supposed to eat? If so, what forbidden information, exactly, had he ingested? That every daisy, sparrow, and minnow on the planet had an identity just as strong as his own? That all flesh was slowed-down light and physical reality a weird dance of electrified nothingness? That at a certain level of consciousness, death ceased to become a relevant issue? As did time? Today is tomorrow? Okay. But hadn’t he known those things all along?