Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

America’s a bouncy country whereas the Swedes ain’t got that much bounce to ’em, you know—but I fail to detect where they be a hell of a lot of difference between the terms ‘colored people’ and ‘people of color.’ Or between ‘Afro-American’ and ‘African-American,’ far as that goes.”

“The distinctions are subtle, all right,” Switters admitted. “Too subtle for the rational mind. Only the political mind can grasp them. I suspect there’s a bid for empowerment behind it all, the power going to whoever seizes the right to coin the names. In a reality made of language, the people who get to name things have psychological ownership of those things. Couples name their pets and children, Madison Avenue names the products that dominate our desires, theologians name the deities that dominate our spirit—’Yahweh’ changed to ‘Jehovah’ changed to plain ol’ generic ‘God’—kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they’ve successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King’s life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we’re like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control. Or maybe not.”

“Verbal wolf urine?” inquired Audubon Poe incredulously. He had tucked a polka-dotted ascot into the throat of his denim work shirt, accentuating the dapperness that seemed to originate from his hair. “Anna, you must promise me you’ll never marry a man who uses phrases that picturesque.”

Anna giggled in a manner that suggested she thought it might be good fun to marry just such a man. Switters averted his eyes, while Poe smiled ruefully and returned the conversation to the CIA. “You say the company has changed. For better, you think, or for worse?”

“It may be too soon to tell. About the company and about the world in general.” Before Switters could say more—if, indeed, he had any intention of continuing—a crewman approached and whispered something in Poe’s ear.

“Blow coming up,” Poe announced when the sailor departed. “Radio reports there could be seven- to eight- foot swells throughout the night. Switters, I’m afraid we’re going to have to dump you earlier than planned. There’re likely to be Turks up and about, though they turn in early in these parts, but we can’t wait until tomorrow night, as we’ve got a drop to make off of Somalia next week that we don’t dare miss. Innocent lives at stake and so forth. If you’ll just get your gear together . . .”

“Happily,” said Switters, and he meant it, although it’s debatable whether he would attribute his glee to the prospect of action or to the fact that he was about to escape without making a fool of himself—or worse—over Anna.

In any case, he had waved good-bye to the girl from a safe distance, shook the manicured hand that had nearly punched the breath out of the Central Intelligence Agency, and allowed the crew to lower him, his luggage, his chair, and the burlap sacks containing two thousand gas masks into a rubber raft. Skeeter Washington manned the oars (a motor might have attracted attention) and manned them well. The wind was already escalating, and between the darkened yacht and the rocky shore there was considerable chop, but Skeeter slid over the crests and attacked the troughs as if mastering a difficult composition by Thelonius Monk. Indeed, he was humming as he rowed.

“What’s that tune, Skeeter?”

“Huh? Oh, that? Just something new I been working on. I thinking about calling it ‘Slida,’ thanks to you, man. Americans won’t know what that mean nohow and the Swedes be broadminded about such matters. If my record company in Stockholm don’t dig the reference, guess I could call it—what was your Japanese word for it?—’Chitsu’? Unless you got a better one.”

The raft pitched to one side and caromed off a rock. Switters had to wipe spray from his eyes. “Well, you likely would want to avoid the Welsh. In Wales, they say, llawes goch.”

“Say what? You jiving me? That be ugly, man. Why, I wouldn’t go near nothing with a name like that.”

“A rose by any name would smell as sweet,” Switters reminded him, then dug his left heel under the tubing to keep from being jolted overboard. They were entering the surf now, and despite Skeeter’s skillful maneuvering, the raft was lurching violently. “Vietnamese is worse. In Vietnam they call it lo torcung am dao or lo torcung am ba, depending on whether a baby is coming out of it or a man is going in.”

“And what about when it’s not in use?”

Switters shrugged. He started to suggest that the Vietnamese term was so long that simply speaking it might constitute foreplay. However, he would have had to yell to make himself heard above the roar of breakers, and as they were then less than thirty yards from the beach, yelling was probably not a wise idea.

“I assume you got the Turkish in you repertoire, ja?” he thought he heard Skeeter say right before they slipped sideways again and a wave broke over them. (Good thing his computer and pistol were in plastic bags.) If he remembered correctly, the Turkish term for the vagina was dolyolu, but with the coast guard or a Jonah cult possibly nearby, he wasn’t about to shout that into the gap-toothed chaw of the rock-biting waves.

The oasis didn’t seem to be getting any closer. For a moment, he seriously considered that it might be a mirage, a faux tableau created by too much heat rising from too much sand into too much sky. True, the nomads had seen it, as well, but to Bedouins a mirage would have its own tangibility. Could it have been a shared hallucination, like the Virgin Mary’s dancing fireball at Fatima? Well, whatever, it was all his now.

He was no longer singing. He still had the urge to sing, he had the wahoo in him—the hint of anxiety only boosted it, and its level had rarely been higher—but the exertion of propelling the chair robbed him of the breath to sing. Surrounded on all sides by an immense silence, the only sound he heard beyond his own shallow gasps was sand crackling beneath his wheels and thorny weeds brushing against the spokes like a tone-deaf witch trying to pluck a banjo.

That a person’s elation seemed to be tightly bound to his or her unencumbrance was a detail generally overlooked by psychologists (not surprisingly, since psychologists tended to skirt the subject of elation altogether, except when describing symptomatic behavior at the manic extreme of bipolar personality disorder), but Switters’s high spirits could be primarily attributed to the fact that he was . . . well, the word footloose did not really apply, not literally, considering his perambulatory injunction, but at large, certainly, at liberty, exempt, burdened neither with possessions nor duties; free in a wild, wide-open land, where he was consciously going against the flow (of reason, not of nature), deliberately choosing the short straw, flaunting the rule of “safety first” (surely one of the most unromantic phrases in the English language). However, it also had not failed to energize his coconut that the operation in Iraq had gone so swimmingly.

The hardest part of the mission had been the landing on Jonah’s riviera. Once Skeeter had succeeded in beaching the rubber raft and helping him into his chair—a tricky, time-consuming task due to the surf, the rocks, and Switters’s inability to disembark on his own or otherwise assist—it had been a piece of cake. They had stowed the gas masks in the ruins of an old stone net shed, where Skeeter rested while Switters got out of his soaked yeast-colored linen suit and into a dry, navy blue, pin-striped, double-breasted number of a sort that was not uncommon in Turkey. They talked briefly, shook hands (Switters imagined he could feel a current of pent-up music in Skeeter’s fingers), and parted, Skeeter to buck the waves back to the yacht, Switters to trundle the four kilometers into the town of Samanda(breve)gi, where, in a compound next to the marketplace, he had come upon a small contingent of Kurds.

Kurds belonged in The Guinness Book of World Records on at least two counts: they were the largest ethnic minority on earth without an independent homeland, and they had been double-crossed and betrayed by more foreign powers than any other people in history. For this last reason alone, Switters had expected it would take days if not weeks to win their confidence. The United States, after all, had been among the nations to use them as pawns. After that one night, however, spent smoking (cheap cigars provided by Switters), drinking (arrack, a date-based liquor furnished by the Kurds), and discussing (poetry and philosophy, in Arabic) around their headman’s hearth, he had felt comfortable enough to confide in them, and they had agreed to participate, to the extent that they could, in his humanitarian escapade.

Because Iraq’s border with Turkey was deeply troubled where Kurds were concerned, and abristle with Turkish troops, Switters thought it best to try to enter from Syria. His new friends agreed. If he would buy the petrol, a couple of their restless young men would drive him and his gas masks (they demanded thirty masks for themselves, though they resided far from the threatened region) across southeastern Turkey in one of their rickety