Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“Yes. The old B and B. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“You realized from the start that bribery alone wouldn’t work.”

“Materialism is one of the few vices you don’t subscribe to. Yet, deep down, even you have a pitty-pat sense of self-survival.”

He made a final effort to escape his fate. “Perhaps this hasn’t occurred to you, Maestra, not being a traveler, but a person can’t just take live animals in and out of foreign countries. Most countries have strict quarantine laws regarding pets. I’ll wager Peru—”

“Switters! You’re a CIA agent, for Christ’s sake! Surely you have ways of getting any manner of restricted items through the tightest of customs. You told me once it was like diplomatic immunity, only better.”

Defeated, he slumped further in his chair. In that position, he was at eye level with the pumpkin, and he imagined he could detect its seeds spiraling inside of it like stars in a galaxy or bees in a hive.

Conspicuously pleased with herself, Maestra strutted over, bracelets clattering, and gently poked his neck with her cane. “Sit up straight, boy. Do you want to be Quasimodo when you grow up?” From somewhere in her richly brocaded kimono, she produced a thrice-folded sheet of crumpled pink paper. “All this blackmail and bribery has given me an appetite. Let’s do lunch.” She slapped the cheap brochure and a cordless phone onto the table between him and the pumpkin. “There’s a new Thai restaurant opened in the Magnolia shopping area. Why don’t you order for us? Five years in Bangkok should’ve given you a modicum of expertise.”

He ought to be hungry (except for a pint of Redhook ale at Pike Place Market, he’d had no breakfast) just as he ought to be furious with Maestra, yet thanks to the XTC, he was neither. “Like sedated spacemen conserving their energy for the unimaginable encounters ahead, the pumpkin seeds lie suspended in their reticulum of slime.” Those were the very words he whispered, but luckily she paid them no heed, having already moved to the pyramid to speak to the parrot. Unlike those old women who coo baby-talk to their birds, Maestra spoke to Sailor exactly as she spoke to everyone else, which is to say, with language that was fairly formal and occasionally flowery, a self-amused, ironic eloquence that to some degree, though he might deny it, had influenced Switters’s own manner of speech. (As for the parrot, on those rare occasions when it spoke at all, it would utter but a single sentence, and it was always the same. “Peeple of zee wurl, relax,” is what it would say, as if giving sage advice in a raspy Spanish accent.)

Seeing no route around it, and aiming to please, he studied the menu and picked up the phone. As he requested such dishes as tom kah pug and pak tud tak, names that routinely sounded like a harelip pleading for a package of thumbtacks, the tricky tonalities of Thai didn’t faze him. The waiter, in fact, mistook him for a fellow countryman, until Switters explained that despite his immaculate accent, he could not actually speak that tongue that in all probability had been invented by the ancient Asian ancestors of Elmer Fudd.

In less than thirty minutes, cartons of aromatic food were clustered, steaming, on the library table. Wafts of lemongrass, chili paste, and coconut milk enlivened the technologized old room.

After about five torrid forkfuls of pla lard prik, Maestra dozed off in her swivel chair and slept for hours.

Switters didn’t eat a bite, but danced alone in front of the CD player until deep in the dark afternoon.

The next morning he flew to Peru. Alaska Airlines to Los Angeles, then the 1:00 P.M. LAN-Chile flight to Lima, which stopped in Mexico City barely long enough for him to telephone a maverick philology professor he knew there.

Once he had gotten the parrot secured in the pressurized portion of the cargo hold that airlines set aside for passengers’ pets, the departure passed smoothly. That was fortunate because the effects of the XTC had left him moderately fatigued. Settled into a business-class seat with a Bloody Mary on his tray, he began to feel consoled, if not actually buoyant, about the demands of the immediate future. In all honesty, he had to admit that the mission forced upon him by his crafty grandmother was a good deal less boring, potentially, than the mickey mouse assignment he’d been handed by Langley. Which was not to say it would be anything beyond an inconvenience, but it had the virtue, at least, of being an out-of-the-ordinary inconvenience, a kind of dead- cat bounce. A couple of extra days in South America wasn’t exactly going to poison all the tadpoles in his drainage ditch. He would endure.

Yes, unquestionably, he would get through a sticky, buggy, rainy, much-too-vivid side trip to the Amazon jungle. The in-flight movie, however, was another matter.

It was one of those so-called action suspense pictures in which the primary suspense was the uncertainty as to whether there would be ninety seconds or a full two minutes between one massive explosion and the next. In those films the sky was seldom blue for long. Black billows, orange flame, and polychromatic geysers of flying debris filled the screen at irregular intervals, while on the soundtrack the crack, roar, and shatter of battered matter was as common as music, although not quite so common as gunfire and wailing. Both Maestra and Suzy sometimes watched such movies because they imagined that this was what his life must be like in the Central Intelligence Agency. Silly girls.

Switters endured a half hour of it before ripping off his headset, quaffing his drink, and turning to the passenger in the next seat, a tall, wiry, sharp-featured Latino in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit. “Tell me, amigo,” said Switters in a voice just loud enough to penetrate the fellow’s earphones, “do you know why boom- boom movies are so popular? Do you know why young males, especially, love, simply love, to see things blown apart?”

The man stared blankly at Switters. He lifted his headset, but on one side only. “It’s freedom,” said Switters brightly. “Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.”

The Latino smiled, but it was not a friendly smile; it was, in fact, the sort of quasi-smile one observes on small dogs in the backseats of parked cars just before they begin to bark hysterically and try to chew their way through the window glass. Perhaps he doesn’t understand, thought Switters.

“Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. Comprende? People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That’s why they relish the boom-boom cinema. On a symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps.”

Feeling loquacious now, Switters might have gone on to offer his theory on suicide bombers, to wit: Islamic terrorist groups were successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the young men got to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public property to smithereens. Exhilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a light socket, volunteers would be few and far between. “Incidentally,” he might have added, “are you aware that there’s no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.” He said none of this, however, because the Latino had begun to grind his teeth at him. Yes, it’s an odd concept, grinding one’s teeth at another, but that’s unmistakably what the fellow was doing: grinding them audibly, too, and so forcefully that his bushy black mustache bucked and rolled as if it were a theme-park ride for thrill-seeking tamale crumbs, leaving Switters with no choice but to pierce the grinder with what some people have described as his “fierce, hypnotic green eyes.” He stared at the grinder so fiercely, if not hypnotically, that he gradually ceased to grind, swallowed hard, turned away, and avoided Switters’s gaze for the rest of the journey.

Aside from that, the flight was uneventful.

He arrived at Jorge Chavez International at two o’clock Monday morning with a dull, dry headache. He was subject to moderate migraines, for which air travel was a definite trigger. Reading intelligence reports concerning Peruvian guerrilla activity while drinking Bloody Marys hadn’t helped. The pain behind his eyes escalated as he went through the rigmarole of getting Sailor Boy cleared by customs. Had he not been carrying papers stating, falsely of course, that he was temporarily attached to the United States embassy, he might have been there until Christmas. Sometimes Langley was capable of marvelous efficiency.

Carrying the shrouded parrot cage in his right hand, he used the left to steer a luggage cart through clusters of surly men who wore brown uniforms and shouldered automatic rifles. These were the Policia de Turismo. Their