Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

They gave him an evil feeling. He was aware that while few people kept jackals as pets because of their odor, the animals were easily tamed. Conceivably, some party could have trained the jackals to skulk around outside the compound walls. A bug could have been concealed in the fur of one or both of them, a listening device that would record any voice within fifty yards spoken above a whisper. Vatican security might neither possess equipment that sophisticated nor a mentality that ingenious or perverse, but the black-bag tekkies at the pickle factory were capable of that and more. Much more.

If Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald had been interested enough in him to have him tailed in Seattle, he quite likely had had his name put on satellite. That meant that anytime anyone typed the name Switters into an on-line computer or spoke the name Switters into a telephone—anywhere in the world—it would be recorded and pinpointed geographically and chronologically, by one of the covert satellites that the company had had put in orbit around the planet.

As he considered that possibility, sitting there beneath a granary of stars that were not all stars, he was struck by the thought that the giant bulbs, the shiny black and copper pods that he’d seen circling the globe when his consciousness was massively enlarged by yopo and ayahuasca; the bulbs that called themselves our overlords and boasted that they ran the show; the pods that the shaman dismissed as a bunch of big blowhards . . . well, what if the master bulbs were just a more evolved generation of intelligence satellites? The fact that Amazonian Indians had apparently been familiar with them for decades, if not centuries, meant little in a realm where the past was today and today was tomorrow: the connectedness of electronic technology and primal mythology seemed not only plausible but inevitable when one accepted the scientific theory and mystical principle of the interpenetration of realities. Wasn’t advanced cybernetics a hell of a lot closer to meditative and psychedelic states than to the meat- and-potatoes commerce of everyday life?

“Hey! Where have you gone?” Domino shook him, though rather timidly, for he still clasped the weapon that she now called his “hisser.”

Switters cleared his thoughts. He decided not to share his concerns about the jackals. It was probably silly, anyway. So far, there had been no inkling that the company was involved in or even interested in this dispute over the Fatima prophecy. Sure, the Vatican and the CIA sometimes cooperated—after all, they both believed they had a huge stake in controlling human behavior and maintaining the status quo—but, more than likely, the Church would prefer to keep the Fatima fracas under its own steeple. He reminded himself that it was easy to grow paranoid in the desert. The absence of shadows caused the mind to invent them. History had proven this a hundred times over in a landscape where one man’s mirage was another man’s divine revelation.

No, he couldn’t permit himself to start hallucinating company spooks with obedience-school jackals. One thing he knew for certain, however, was that Scanlani and his bosses were going to be infuriated when the Pachomians refused their offer. That meant he wasn’t going to be leaving Syria anytime soon. And in the skeleton- dry wind, he could hear the rift widening between him and three of the four human beings he cared about most.

When, in the fortnight following Christmas, he had failed to show up in Seattle, Maestra had e-mailed him and Bobby had phoned. Their frustration with him was almost explosive. Then, about a week later, an e-mail had arrived from Suzy. The first two communiques had been anticipated, but Suzy’s caught him off guard, and while its tone was very different, it was no less affecting.

When you were just a sprout, wrote his grandmother, I advised you never to trust anybody who didn’t have secrets. Even though it’s sound advice, I could kick myself for impressing it so firmly on your soft little brain. I’ve created a damn monster. Maestra wanted him home, wanted him out of that wheelchair or off of “those crazy damn sticks,” and if her requests weren’t promptly honored, she wanted a detailed explanation of why they were not. His clandestine ways had become intolerable. She intimated that she was on her last breath and if he was to see her alive, he’d better not tarry. He was fairly sure the deathbed bit was an act, and he wrote back to remind her that she’d also taught him that guilt was a useless emotion. It didn’t prevent him from worrying, however, especially when, undoubtedly piqued by his flip attitude and lack of candor, she’d not written back.

As for Bobby, he’d practically shouted into the phone. “Where the hell are you, podner?! Are you still there?”

“You mean here? I’m afraid so.”

“With her?”

“Not necessarily.”

“What, then?”

After a pause, Switters had answered, “Not your need to know.” There was a modicum of sweet revenge in that reply, but any pleasure he took from it was short-lived. Well aware that Switters was working neither for the company nor Audubon Poe, Case was not, as he put it, “buying one Texas ounce of that ‘need-to-know’ horseshit.”

Dehydrating Okinawan rice paddies with the heat of his frustration, Bobby said that he’d always considered Switters a cut above the other loose cannons, jumping beans, jackrabbits, flakes, wild cards, and hot potatoes with whom, due to his own shortcomings as a responsible citizen, he’d been doomed to associate, but he, Switters, had turned out to be the worst of the lot. “It come upon me one night in Bangkok, actually, that if you didn’t back offen that fucking James Joyce, it was one day gonna drive you over the lip—and now it’s went and done it.”

Bobby said he had leave coming up and he was going to use it to take matters in his own hands. He threatened to blow into Syria like a twister out of Hondo. Switters had half believed him. But Bobby hadn’t appeared. Neither had he e-mailed or called.

The letter from his stepsister arrived later in January, arrived soundlessly, spectrally, no wood fibers to give it substance, no ink to ferry its essence to the eyes the way blood ferries oxygen to the brain; arrived as a standardized arrangement of backlit glyphs upon a cold glass panel; unscented with Suzy’s perfume, unlicked by her wet tongue, devoid not merely of tearstains but of pizza or lipstick traces; an aseptic transmission whose ephemerality was all the more pronounced due to the fact that his computer was programmed to trash-can after six hours any and all messages for reasons of security (that contemptible word!). With a quaint old low-tech pencil, Switters had copied it onto the flyleaf of Finnegans Wake (talk about your stained paper: wine, beer, cigar ash, soy sauce, fish sauce, gravy, blood, unspeakable and indefinable vegetable-animal-and- mineral deposits, the kind of splotches that might enliven the bedsheets of a Third World beach motel). He reread it once a week. No more, no less.

Hi,

Guess you weren’t expecting to hear from me after so long a time, huh? There’s a whole lot I’ve been wanting to talk to you about and I’d been saving it until I saw you again. Everyone was so disappointed when you didn’t come home at New Years. This really isn’t your home though is it? And I know you have a good reason for doing whatever it is you’re doing now. And Switters I also understand that you must have had good reasons for behaving how you did in Sacramento. I’m very very sorry I tripped out that night. I should of trusted you more instead of thinking you were a big liar or had gone crazy or something. I guess I was just confused. I was such a baby back then, such a child. I think about what a spank girl I was back then and it’s like I want to hurl my breakfast or something. I can’t believe it was only a little over a year ago! I’m 17 now, as you ought to know, and a lot has changed with me. Time is a funny thing isn’t it? A planet made out of rock and water takes a few turns in space or whatever and suddenly you’re a different person than you were before. It’s a weird system if you ask me. Anyway I’m here in Seattle now and enjoying the rain. Ha ha. There’s some pretty cool kids at my new school but Maestra won’t let me hang with them much. She’s really great though, and when I get bummed she plays me old blues records and stuff. Reads to me out of Shakespeare who I totally love! I don’t want to bore you with my life but this socked-in morning finds me in a whirl of questions bubbling up from the unseen below or from somewhere over the rainbow maybe. You’re way far the wisest man I’ve ever known and you could always make anything in life seem not just okay but funny and grand. You did hit on me a lot but I know it came from a place of passion and love and I know you’re a person with deep feelings that you hide behind your crazy antics and I also know that you’d protect me with your life from anything or anybody that ever tried to hurt me. Now that I’m older and more “experienced” you would find me a horse of a different color as they say. Please forgive me for being such a clueless brat in the past. And please keep a little bit of me in your heart. There’s a piece of you in mine and it grows as I grow.

I miss you,