Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

was becoming almost South American in its vividity; and second, if Maestra was staring the pale dog in its ciphers, Switters was already under its paws. With his unemployment benefits about to expire and his unsold condo facing foreclosure, he’d been steeling himself to approach Maestra for a loan. Now . . .

A lawyer’s going to be weekending in my sylvan cabin whilst, in the glow of my beloved Matisse, some ruthless corporate raider will be plotting the hostile takeover of a pharmaceutical firm noted for the manufacture of mood-elevating laxatives. Along with appropriate details and his concern about his grandmother, Switters e-mailed the preceding to Bobby Case. When Bobby failed to respond right away, Switters figured he must be off flying a hazardous recon mission over North Korea (for, presumably, that’s what his new assignment entailed) or else up to his knees in Okinawan pussy (Bad Bob was ecstatic to be in Asia again, boy howdy!).

In about twelve hours, however, the e-bell rang. Damn! Why do those yellow-bellied fates always gang up on the elderly? How is she?

In the mind and the body, where it counts, Maestra’s doing remarkably well, Switters answered, although, for the moment, her voice is unsettlingly reminiscent of her dear departed parrot. Financially, Sailor Boy may be the better off of the two. I had no idea. Turns out she’s been donating large sums of cash to organizations whose names and objectives are not well known.

Probably CIA fronts, every one of them, Bobby tapped. But that Matisse, which a drifter like you never deserved in the first place, ought to bring in millions.

Yes, millions. If it doesn’t set off an alarm. Not only is its authenticity likely to be challenged, there’s a possibility it could be stolen property. Maestra’s first husband acquired it under somewhat foggy circumstances. In any event, I’m living by the temporary graces of Mr. Plastic and in dire need of gainful employment. I have to keep Maestra out of the nursing home, should it come to that, keep her in her own house with her wicked computers. Also, I’ve decided to go back and confront Today Is Tomorrow in the autumn. One year should just about suffice for two-inch enlightenment. Wouldn’t want to overdo it. Wear out my welcome in Nirvana.

Now you’re talking, son! I’ll get back to you if I have any bright ideas. Meanwhile, give the old hacker my affection and admiration.

The very next day, Bobby was on-line with an intriguing proposal.

If you’re able and willing to travel, You Know Who has got a speck of work for an ex-operative with your particular experience. April 30. Hotel Gul. Antalya, Turkey. Sit in the lobby and look innocuous—can you manage that?—until you hear somebody say, “Fuck the Dallas Cowboys.” Pay: low. Risk: high. But you won’t turn it down because the thrills are practically unlimited, and I know you’re aching to get back in the game.

Was he? Aching (from the Old High German ach!, an exclamation of pain) to get back in the game (from the Indo-European base gwhemb, “to leap merrily,” as in gambol)? Certainly, he had always looked upon his activities, official and unofficial, in the geo-political arena as a game: a combination of rugby, chess, and liar’s poker, with a little Russian roulette mixed in for good measure. While there were no conclusive victories to be had in that game beyond simple survival, a player scored whenever his acts of subversion thwarted or even delayed the coalescing of power in any single camp. In a sense, one won by making it difficult for others to win or, at least, to grow fat on the fruits of their triumph.

Six months in a wheelchair, however, had altered his overview slightly if significantly. When one was living two inches off the ground, one remained close enough to the earth to experience its tug, share its rhythms, recognize it as home, and not go floating off into some ethereal ozone where one behaved as if one’s physical body was excess baggage and one’s brain a weather balloon. On the other hand, one had just enough loft so that one glided above the frantic strivings and petty discontents that preoccupied the earthbound, circumnavigating those dreary miasmas that threatened to bleach their hearts a single shade of gray. In short, one could be keenly interested in worldly matters yet remain serenely detached from their outcome.

Switters, if the truth be told, was as enthusiastic about geopolitical monkey-wrenching as he’d ever been, but now, two inches removed, was no more attached to the end results than he’d been to the outcome of the rain- gutter boat races against the Art Girls. (Were he inclined—and he decidedly was not—he probably could have drawn several parallels between his passage through life and the careening of his unlikely little boats through the market’s littery channels.) In fact, he’d reached the conclusion that the inertia of the masses and the corruption of their manipulators had become so ingrained, so immense, that nothing short of a literal miracle could effect a happy ending to humanity’s planetary occupancy, let alone the kind of game in which he played upon that slanted field. And yet, it was a game absolutely worth playing. For its own sake. For the wahoo that was in it. For the chance that it would enlarge one’s soul.

So, perhaps he wasn’t exactly aching to resume play, but he mustn’t have been averse to it, for he wasted no time in twisting Mr. Plastic’s arm until the card blubbered like a cornered snitch, surrendering a one-way ticket to Istanbul for Switters and a heavy silver bracelet in a Northwest Indian raven motif for Maestra. In one of the market’s dimmer cul-de-sacs, he enjoyed a furtive farewell straddle from a drawers-down Dev, while yards away at her deserted stall, consumers edged across the narrow line of civilized restraint that separated shopping from looting, cleaning out the first of the season’s Mexican strawberries. Switters reimbursed her from his undernourished wallet in order to keep her brothers from slapping her around. Then, he was off to meet, for the very first time, the archangel—

“Audubon Poe.” The flannel-shirted, Mariners-capped man who spoke the name had been standing on the

Pike Street

curb poring over a bus schedule all the while that Switters was sliding into a taxi, folding his chair, and dragging it in beside him. He was a youngish, nerdy yet nimble Caucasian, not unlike Hector Sumac of Lima, Peru. As the cabbie signaled to pull into traffic, the stranger had suddenly thrust his face in the taxi window, uttered Poe’s name, frowned one of those obligatorily disapproving frowns that is actually a smile with its pants on backward, and shook his head. “You know he’s an arms runner,” he said, making it sound more like a piece of hot gossip than an accusation or a warning. And just as quickly he was gone.

“Airport,” said Switters.

“Where you fly today, sir?” asked the driver.

“Turkey.”

“Ah? Turkey. Long way. Vacation there?”

“Run arms there,” Switters replied matter-of-factly, wondering where that Joe had come from and what the hell Bobby had gotten him into.

Part 3

Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to God and there’s always a chance that a folly will.

—Erasmus

The land spread out before him like a pizza. Its topography was flat, its texture rough, its temperature hot, its hue reddish yellow, studded with pepperoni-colored rocks; and, at the moment, it glistened as if drizzled with olive oil. Water was absorbed slowly, very slowly, by the arid hardpan and tended to trickle toward any depression. Were the ground conscious, it would savor this unexpected rainwater, for it would see not another drop of moisture for a good seven months.

Behind him, where he’d separated from the band of Shammar Bedouins, the baked “cheese” bubbled up in low hills that grew progressively steeper until, farther west, they became a full-fledged mountain range with snowy peaks. Eastward, however, the “pizza” was unrelieved. This was the great Syrian desert that stretched into Iraq and Jordan and Israel and all the way across Arabia, and was the threshing floor upon which the human soul had been flailed free from the chaff of its long ripening, only to be ossified and shriveled by a degeneration into dogma of the very ideas that had nurtured it and winnowed it loose, in the endless granary of the desert, from its dark animal husk. Man’s physical self evolved in the sea, and to the rhythms of the oceans our salty blood and waves of breath still moved, but it was here on the burning sands of the Middle East, where Switters now paused to rest, that the spiritual self emerged. There had been nothing to distract it.

Switters was left almost giddy by the realization that not only was he alone, he was also unseen. By anyone