Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  At their initial meeting, with Fer-de-lance as interpreter, Smithe labored to help the medicine man comprehend the concept of humor. “Nothing approaching the subtler moods of irony, naturally, but the more direct, earthy approach of juvenile mockery. Of course, much of juvenile humor is sexual and scatological, and to the Ka’dak mind there’s nothing the least bit funny about bodily functions. Their taboos are of a different order. You might as well ask them to snigger at the sky.”

  Still, Smithe felt, End of Time made some progress in the area of lightheartedness, though he doubted there was any such thing as a joke comprehensible to him or his fellows. “The same could be said of the religiously fundamental and the politically doctrinaire,” piped in Switters.

  In repayment for Smithe’s having assisted him in his uphill pursuit of gaiety, the misshapen shaman offered to meet with him again the following day, and this next time Smithe could ask the questions. Moreover, Smithe would be allowed to actually look at him, face-to-face: during their first encounter, the witchman had concealed himself behind a woven grass screen. Not surprisingly, there was a catch. Before Smithe could be permitted to gaze upon the fabled pyramid head, the impure Englishman would have to prove himself worthy to a collection of guides, overlords, supervisors, kibitzers, and hecklers from the Other Side.

  “I was recklessly unscientific, but it was a lapse I believed I could turn to good account. Um. I knew a thing or two about Amazonian hallucinogens, yage, ayahuasca and the lot, but my objective knowledge fell lamentably short of the subjective experience. Oh, Christ, yes!”

  “Pot! You modest old fox. Congratulations. You’re a Castaneda, after all.”

  Reddening and sputtering, the anthropologist seemed to swallow a bellyful of smoke. “No, no, far from it. I sampled the sorcerer’s wares, but I didn’t sign on for an apprenticeship. Nothing of the sort. I’m prepared to admit that I may previously have been suffering an unjustifiable complacency concerning the limits of reality, but that territory of . . . of terrors and senseless beauty is not any countryside I long to tramp. As it was, I indulged in behavior of which my colleagues strongly disapprove, and, in the end, I defeated my own purpose.”

  “How so?”

  It had been an extended ordeal of vomit and hallucination, a long night spent surfing alternating waves of horror and ecstasy—and in the shaky morning when End of Time had finally showed himself, pyramid head and all, Smithe (less overwhelmed by the sight of that capitate curiosity than he might normally have been) found himself somehow disinclined, even unable, to interrogate the medicine man along the lines that he had so carefully prepared. “I was a disgrace to my profession,” Smithe contended. “I asked all the wrong questions.”

  “What sort of things did you ask?”

  “Never mind. Cosmological questions, you might call them. Issues that swam to the surface as I was being dashed about on that yopo ocean. Load of bosh, really.”

  And that was all he would say.

  Five months prior to Switters’s arrival, Smithe had returned to Boquichicos at his own expense, hoping to get another crack at the phenomenally pated Indian. Repeatedly rebuffed—End of Time refused to encourage an atmosphere of familiarity with any outsider—Smithe now dumped his eggs in Switters’s basket. Should the Yank be granted an audience, maybe, just maybe, Smithe might tag along; and if not, then at the very least, Switters could put in a word on his behalf. Both his university and his wife were vexed with him, but he couldn’t turn back. Not just yet. He gave indications of being, over End of Time, in a rough equivalent of the amorous stupor that Switters was in over Suzy. Thus, out of empathy as much as curiosity, and against that paralyzer, that strangler of enlightened progress known as “better judgment,” Switters consented to let a ragtag gaggle of Nacanaca carry off Sailor Boy into the jungle.

  It was still raining, but halfheartedly now, and in a matter of minutes a hard shock of sunshine would blast their eyes and zap newly formed mud flows into charcoal dust and solar cement. They stepped out from under the infirmary awning. A straggler, a solitary traveler, the last and final raindrop of the morning—unapologetically tardy, even arrogant, as if on an independent mission its meekly conforming confederates could not possibly appreciate or understand—landed on the back of Switters’s neck and rolled languidly, defiantly down his spine. He took it as an omen, though of what he was not precisely clear.

  There had been a new moon on the previous evening, and both Smithe and the Nacanaca held the opinion that End of Time would still be at the way station, the ceremonial lodge. As they watched the Indians scamper onto the forest trail with the pyramid cage and its somewhat bewildered occupant, Smithe rubbed his hammy paws together and said, “Smashing! A smashing turn of events. One dares to nourish one’s hopes, whether vainly or not one will soon enough find out. It would take the likes of you or me the better part of a day to huff and puff our way to that squalid lodge, but these blokes can cover the distance in a couple of hours. They’ll be back by dusk, I’ll wager. By the way, old man, what’s the meaning of this I.O.U. you’ve thrust upon my person?”

  Leaving R. Potney Smithe to his customary stool in the hotel bar, Switters climbed to his room, where he activated his computer in satellite mode. It was guilt and little else—guilt over the strange turn he’d permitted the parrot assignment to take—that prompted him to want to e-mail Maestra. Alas, he couldn’t think of what he might say to her. Certainly not the truth. Awaiting inspiration, he checked his own mailbox, the personal not the official one. There were three messages there, the first from his grandmother, herself.

  > How come no progress report? Shouldn’t you be

  > home by now? I have a gut feeling you’re up to no

  > good. The museum’s director of acquisitions came by

  > today to see our Matisse and nearly peed his pants.

  > Word to the wise, buddy.

  > Get in touch.

  The second message was from Bobby Case, apparently still in Alaska, piloting the spy plane known as the U2 and a more recent version called the TR1.

  > The 49th state is a harsh environment for salty dogs. Girls too

  > old, too grungy, or their daddies too well armed. Company

  > continues to ignore my requests for transfer. O whither, O dither.

  > I must be demented but I miss you, podner. Trust you’re up to no

  > good.

  > Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronnton

  > nerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoor

  > denenthurnuk!

  That last was the only real news in the message, implying as it did that Bobby had now gotten as far as the fourth sentence in Finnegans Wake. He deserved a congratulatory note on his headway—provided, of course, he hadn’t skipped.

  E-missive No. 3 proved to be from—be still, dear pulse!—none other than the baby-fatted skeleton in his closet, the hormonal soprano in his choir stall, the lollipop Lorelei on his river rock, the moon over his barnyard, the puss up his tree, the baba-toohoohoo-denenthurnuk! of his heart. And it read:

  > Don’t forget you promised to help me with my term

  > paper. Jesus loves you.

  > Suzy

  A libido torpedo? Not by any means. Some men, true enough, would have been discouraged by Suzy’s note, devoid as it was of the faintest blush of romantic undertone, but its very simplicity and pragmatic directness, its very chasteness, if you will, served only to amplify Switters’s ardor. Suddenly dizzy with desire, he toppled onto the bed and commenced to moan.

  Likewise amplified were his misgivings about having permitted a befuddled anthropologist to entangle him in some highly unpromising business involving a deformed witch doctor. If only he had discharged his duty as planned, had delivered Sailor to a suitable retirement community and taped the procedure as the parrot crossed the threshold of geriatric autonomy, he might, in a few hours, be making his way homeward to skittish teases, furtive squeezes, and who could guess how much more. Moans of inflamed a
ppetite were interspersed with moans of regret.

  In contrast to so many of his contemporaries, however, Switters failed to find in prolonged lamentation an appealing form of recreation. It wasn’t so much that Switters was above self-indulgence but, rather, that he preferred to indulge himself in merrier ways. Thus, in not much more time than it took a gecko to circle the walls of his room, disappearing finally into the rust-streaked, concrete shower stall, he had willfully relieved himself of the burden of remorse (by simply refusing to shoulder it: people of the world, relax), and shortly thereafter, lightened his erotic load, as well (by means that shall not here be discussed).

  He lay, naked and perspiring, upon his bed, watching an inactive ceiling fan use electricity deprivation as an excuse not to knock its brains out against the heavy air of the room; and, with a calmer mind, he conceded that it might well be for the better that he was delaying his reappearance in Sacramento, although in temporarily substituting a visit to the Kandakandero for a visit to his mother’s, he suspected that he was merely choosing the frying pan ahead of the fire. He smiled at this, as if recognizing in himself a familiar trait, a lifelong willingness to take risks in order to experiment with a different set of circumstances; and when he caught himself smiling, he tried to visualize what the smiling lessons of the wild Ka’daks must look like.

  If End of Time’s thesis, that civilized man’s powers were attributable to laughter, failed to strike Switters as unduly outlandish, it was probably because it was not so far removed from a favorite idea of Maestra’s: her theory of the missing link.

  “What is it,” Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, “that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it’s exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism—as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons—Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.

  “Now,” she’d gone on to say, “since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce? And in those cases where the defining qualities are virtually nonexistent, well, what we have are entities that are north of the animal kingdom but south of humanity, they fall somewhere in between, they’re our missing links.”

  In his grandmother’s opinion, the missing link of scientific lore was neither extinct nor rare. “There’re more of them, in fact, than there are of us, and since they actually seem to be multiplying, Darwin’s theory of evolution is obviously wrong.” Maestra’s stand was that missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority.

  “That could be problematic,” Switters had said, straining, at the age of twenty, to absorb this rant, “because only people who, you know, lack those six qualities seem to ever run for any sort of office.”

  Maestra thoroughly agreed, although she was undecided whether it was because full-fledged humans simply had more interesting things to do with their lives than marinate them in the torpid waters of the public trough or if it was because only missing links, in the reassuring blandness of their banality, could expect to attract the votes of a missing link majority. In any event, of the six qualities that distinguished the human from the subhuman, both grandmother and grandson agreed that Imagination and Humor were probably the most crucial.

  The finer points of their reasoning were vague to him now. There was something, to be sure, about how only those with imagination could envision improvements and only those with a sense of humor could savor a good laugh when those improvements backfired or turned to crap. The idea of focusing on the laugh itself—on the grounds that of all our different expressions of beingness, only laughter was pure enough, complex enough, free enough, endowed with enough mystery of meaning, to accurately reflect the soul—surely did not occur to them. But now Switters could see that while it was extremely unlikely that End of Time would ever be able to differentiate between, say, wise laughter and the yuks of jackasses braying at refinements they were too coarse to comprehend, the young shaman, nevertheless, might have stumbled on to something. Wondering what Maestra would make of it all, and thinking, though not for the first time, how in the CIA, the terms cowboy and missing link could easily be interchangeable, he fell asleep.

  He was awakened about three hours later by a politely urgent rapping at his door. Employing his Panama hat as a fig leaf, he cracked the door to find R. Potney Smithe, breathing hard from the two flights of stairs and bubbling over with gin and news.

  Word had reached Boquichicos—whether by drumbeat, smoke signal, or telepathy, Smithe couldn’t discern—that the Nacanaca delegation was already on its way back from the way station. It had left the parrot and its cage behind. Switters voiced alarm, but Smithe brushed aside his protests.

  “End of Time will see you,” Smithe announced. “The bloody bugger won’t see me, but he’ll see you. I say, old boy, you look enormously ornamental in that hat. Um. Yes. In relation to the matter at hand, however, you’d best get clothed. He’s sent for you. He wants to see you tonight.”

  And so it came to pass that at approximately four o’clock on that sultry November afternoon, Switters walked into the jungle. He was wearing his last clean white suit (Potney could not persuade him otherwise) and a tie-dyed T-shirt (Potney agreed that the Ka’daks might take to its variegated colors). This garb was accessorized with rubber boots, Panama hat, and a belt of khaki webbing, into which, hidden by the jacket, the Beretta had been handily stuck. Completing the ensemble was a day pack (Potney lent it) containing dry socks, a flashlight, mosquito root, salt tablets, migraine tablets, drinking water, a notebook, pencils, the camcorder, matches, and a snake-bite kit. “And would you fancy a tin of biscuits?” Potney had asked as they stuffed the little rucksack, but Switters could not entertain the notion of a biscuit unadorned by red-eye gravy.

  In addition to the five tireless Indians who would lead and escort him, he was accompanied by Fer-de-lance. The product of a Nacanaca mother and a Spanish petroleum geologist, Fer-de-lance (then called Pedro) had been removed by Jesuit missionaries at the age of nine from the Nacanaca village where he was born and taken to Lima to be educated. The Jesuits had been correct in their assessment of the boy’s intelligence. Their mistake, perhaps, was in exposing such native keenness to too much uncensored information, for in college, he began to seriously question the Catholic faith, eventually dropping out of classes to join the Sendero Luminoso. Gradually he had become disenchanted with leftist dogmatism, as well, and returned to Boquichicos to reconnect with his roots.

  “That’s often a false path, too,” muttered Switters, referring to a contemporary U.S. penchant for tracking down one’s ethnic identity and then binding oneself to its trappings and traditions, no matter how irrelevant, rather than, say, liberating and transforming oneself by inventing an entirely fresh identity. Nevertheless, he welcomed Fer-de-lance—animal trader and aspiring shaman—for his linguistic abilities: English, Spanish, Nacanacan, and even Kandakanderoan. “He should make an ideal interpreter for me,” said Switters, “as long as he doesn’t get sidetracked by any damn snakes.”

  The plan was for Smithe to hike in as far as the chácara on the following day. From the garden plot, where Smithe had Nacanacan acquaintances, they would return together to Boquichicos, unless Switters was able to convince End of Time to grant the Englishman another interview.

  “You will take good notes, won’t you?” Smithe almost pleaded. “In the event he continues to reject me. I must have something to show for this folly, besides a possible sacking and a probable divorce.” Sincerely, yet with a degree of embarrassment, as if it were comportment upon which his peers might frown, he commenced to pump Switters’s hand. �
�Can’t thank you enough, old boy. Can’t thank you enough.”

  “Forget it, pal. Errands ‘r’ me. Just make sure my Pucallpa mariners don’t weigh anchor without me. I’m needed Stateside on the double, help a young friend with her homework.”

  With that, Switters turned and strode into the rain forest, vanishing almost immediately in a sea of titanic trees, a jumpy mosaic of light and shadow, a tunnel of filtered sunshine and violet penumbras, a funhouse with dripping green walls and slippery linoleum, a leaf-happy music hall set vibrating by sudden unpredictable animal soloists and steadily thrumming insect choirs. He quickly became a minor figure in a dense, tattered tapestry that was shagged with Shavian whiskers of moss, loosely stitched with long, loopy threads of vine, and fluttered by spirits and unseen Indian sentinels; while here, there, and sometimes everywhere this rank, spooky tableau visually popped with blubber-lipped frogs, festive sparks of bird flitter, and orchids the size of boxing gloves; with monkey shines, butterfly stunts, phosphors, fruits, belted white worms that resembled the severed fingers of the Michelin tire man, and lumps of suspect nougat that could be toad or toadstool, either one. Yes, and as if layering on yet another dimension, this whole scene seemed scented by syrupy petal pies and bubbling ponds of decaying plant muck, a nose-puzzling mixture of contradictory aromas (floral to fecal) perfectly befitting an environment where cure-all juices coursed alongside poisonous saps, where the gorgeous and the marvelous repeatedly alternated with the hideous and the dire, where brimming Life and pertinacious Death held hands at the chlorophyll cinema; where Heaven and Hell intermingled as they did at no other place on earth, except, perhaps, in the daily emotions of poor fools in love.