Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (31 page)

Switters stiffened his legs and
dropped his arms to bring the bouncing to a halt, but the springs continued to
contract and expand in a gradually diminishing action that sent him stumbling
and staggering about on the bed, largely out of control.

Suzy’s mouth was agape, the
expression on her face one of shock, disbelief, and horror. Abruptly she turned
and fled.

“This was a joke!” he yelled after
her. “I’ve got other music! I’ve got . . . Frank Zappa!”
Shit! She’s
probably never heard of Zappa.
“I’ve got . . . I’ve got Big Mama Thornton!”
Sixteen, living in suburban Sacramento, would she even know Big Mama?
“The Mekons! There we go! Mekons? Suzy!”

Then, perched on the edge of the bed
like a stone cherub urinating into a fish pond, it occurred to him that music
wasn’t the issue.

Switters came within a muscle
contraction of jumping down and running after her. He was a survivalist to the
marrow, however, and instinct tempered his panic long enough for him to
transfer his body into the wheelchair before setting off in pursuit.

Through the closed door of her room,
he could hear her weeping.

Again and again, his mouth formed her
name, but the sound stuck in his throat like a fake Santa in a crooked chimney.

For a full five minutes, he sat
there, listening to her sob. Then he trundled slowly back to his room, packed
his things, and left the house. At Executive Field he spent the night sitting
up in the Invacare 9000, occasionally dozing, mostly not. For a fee of
thirty-five dollars, Southwest Airlines allowed him to reschedule his departure
date from Sunday to Saturday, and he boarded an early morning flight to
Seattle.

When, three days later, Switters
arrived back on the East Coast, a migraine arrived with him. A headache
likewise had ambushed him between Sacramento and Seattle, sending him to bed
for forty-eight hours and minimalizing his contact with Maestra. It wasn’t
until he was leaving her house that he thought to give her the bracelet of
linked silver camellias he’d bought for her at the Sacramento airport. Maestra
had been preoccupied, herself, attempting to break into the computer files of
an art appraiser whom she suspected of deliberately undervaluing her Matisse.
Intuitively, she’d steered clear of the topic of Suzy.

The cross-country migraine was
neither milder nor more severe than the short-distance one. In both cases,
there was the sense that in the space behind his eyes a porcupine and a lobster
were fighting to the death in front of a strobe light.

At some juncture on the train ride
from New York to Washington, one or the other of the prickly creatures
prevailed and a neuro-optic gaffer switched off the strobe. Switters was
feeling reasonably normal when the skyline of the nation’s capital came into
view. At the sight of the Washington Monument, wahooish bubbles formed in his
spinal fluid. The excitement, needless to say, owed nothing to the monument
itself, it having even less of a connection to him than to the dead statesman
it was meant to honor. Aside from the fact that it was tall and white, what did
the structure evoke of George Washington, the soldier, President, or man? On
the other hand, since Jefferson described his colleague’s mind as “being little
aided by invention or imagination,” perhaps the blandness of the monument was
entirely fitting—and besides, what symbol would a designer have erected in its
place: a surveyor’s transit, a hatchet, a set of clacking dentures?

To Switters, the monument signaled
that he was back on the job, and that was the reason for his tingling. Back on
what
job was another matter. He knew only that, armed with privileged credentials, he
had reentered the maw of the beast, the power-puckered omphalos upon which all
angelic mischief must sooner or later come to bear, the city where winning was
absolutely everything.

And only the winners were lost?

That night he slept in his own bed.
Such a cozy, comforting phrase: “in his own bed.” Like many such sentiments,
however, it was fallacious. True, he owned the bed and, under mortgage, the
apartment in which it was situated, but in the two years since he’d acquired
those things, he’d slept in them fewer than forty times.

Because he was born on the cusp
between Cancer and Leo—which is to say, drawn on one side to the hermit’s cave,
on the other to centerstage—he both craved the familiarity of a private,
personal, domestic space and loathed the idea of being fettered by permanence
or possession. At least, astrologers would attribute the ambivalence to his
natal location. Someone else might point out that it was simply an acute
microcosmic reflection of the fundamental nature of the universe.

The apartment was sparsely furnished.
Except for some of the suits and Tshirts, the few articles in it (including
refrigerated food items in states of degeneration that brought to mind the
special effects in Mexican horror films) had been purchased at least two years
prior.

The more advertising he saw, the less
he wanted to buy?

Depending upon their level of . . .
what?—fear? alienation? vested interest? humanity?—people looked at the new
headquarters building of the Central Intelligence Agency from varying psychological
perspectives. Switters’s perspective was fairly neutral. He was, by Bobby
Case’s definition, a “neutral angel.”

Switters was even neutral about
angels. Biblical angels, that is. On the rare occasion when he considered the
subject, he was inclined to compare angels to bats. He could scarcely think of
one without the other. It seemed perfectly obvious. They were two sides of the
same coin, were they not? One winged anthropomorph the alter image of the
other.

White and radiant, the heavenly angel
represented goodness. Dark and cunning, the nocturnal bat was associated with
evil. Yet, was it really that simplistic?

Bats, in actuality, were sweet
tempered, harmless (less than 1 percent rabid) little mammals who aided
humankind by devouring immense amounts of insects and pollinating more plants
and trees in the rain forest than bees and birds together. Angels, conversely,
often appeared as wrathful avengers, delivering stern messages, wrestling with
prophets, evicting tenants, brandishing flaming swords. Their “pollination” was
restricted to begetting children on astonished mortal women. Which would you
rather meet in a midnight alley?

Angels had their worth, however.
Creatures of wonder, they bore the ancient marvelous into the modern mundane.
Skeptics who howled at the very mention of ghosts, space aliens, or crop
circles (not to mention greenhouse gases) were not so quick to scoff at angels.
According to a Gallup poll, more than half of all Americans believed in angels.
Thus did the supernatural still influence the rational world.

Women tended to be afraid of bats.
Even Maestra. As near as could be determined, it was not a subconscious fear of
pollination, some sowing of bad seed. Women, rather, were afraid that bats
might become entangled in their hair. Ah, but St. Paul had decreed that women’s
heads be covered in church “because of the angels.” In Paul’s era, words for
angel
and
demon
were interchangeable, and there was a species of angel/demon
that was said to be attracted to women’s hair. Angels in hair. Bats in hair.
Once again, distinctions were not as crisp as they might have superficially
appeared. At some point, then, angels and bats must converge. There, as in
mathematical space, the coin would have only one side. But what point was that?
Where or when was it that light and darkness combined? End of Time—or, rather,
Today Is Tomorrow—might have answered: “In laughter.”

Within the CIA, the opposite of the
neutral
angel was the cowboy. Cowboys believed themselves on the side of light (which
they identified exclusively with goodness), but because they insisted on
light’s absolute dominion over darkness—and would stop at no dark deed to
insure that domination—they ended up transforming light into darkness. It was
strictly a transformation, though, not a merger. Laughter never entered the
equation.

Thus, when critics looked at the CIA
headquarters and saw evil, they were not entirely mistaken. What they failed to
see, however, was what Switters (now climbing clumsily out of a taxi in front
of the building) almost always saw: a factory unexcelled at manufacturing the
very monkey wrenches that might be tossed into its own machinery.

After being cleared through a series
of checkpoints, Switters eventually arrived at the offices of Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald,
assistant deputy director of operations. It was 10
A
.
M.
Joolie,
Fitzgerald’s redheaded secretary, with whom Switters had enjoyed an ongoing
flirtation of some years’ standing, frowned speculatively at the wheelchair but
did not inquire about it. One does not prosper at Langley by being nosy.

As for Fitzgerald himself, he
pretended at first not even to notice. Mayflower, as he signed his memos and
preferred to be addressed, never showed surprise at anything. A display of
surprise would have been a breach of sophistication, a violation of ingrained
principles.

“You’re right on time,” said
Mayflower, when he’d shut the door behind them.

“That’s only natural,” said Switters,
who had blown Joolie a kiss as he disappeared into the inner office. “I’m an
operative, not a lawyer, a Hollywood agent, or a self-important bureaucrat.”

If Mayflower took offense, his face
did not reveal it. Perhaps he was accustomed to Switters, expected him by now
to deport himself with cool effectiveness under certain field conditions, but
at other times to wax florid, audacious, rascally. In any event, he stared
silently, inexpressively, at his subordinate for quite a few seconds, stared
through steel-rimmed spectacles whose assiduously polished lenses gleamed as
brightly as his bald spot. Actually, it was a bit more than a spot. At
fifty-five, Mayflower had just about enough left of his iron-gray hair to bewig
a small doll. Chemotherapy Barbie. Steel glasses, iron hair, granite jaw,
golden voice, and a mind like weapons-grade plutonium. To Switters, the deputy
director seemed less animal than mineral.

It was Switters who finally broke the
silence. “Errand boy,” he said, “not operative. Sorry if I overstated my
position.”

Mayflower’s thin lips twitched but
stopped short of a smile. “Is the wheelchair a prop to dramatize some point?”
he asked.

“Minor mishap in South America.”

“Really? Nothing to do with our
fellow Sumac, I hope?”

“Nein. To do with End of Time. Or,
rather, Today Is Tomorrow.”

Mayflower stared at him some more.
Switters stared at the wall behind the desk. In many government offices, an
official of Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s rank might have displayed a Groton
pennant and framed diplomas from Princeton and Yale (all part of Mayflower’s
background), but at CIA, relics of personal history were discouraged. Not so
much as a photograph of wife, child, or dog graced the desk. There was,
however, on one wall, a signed eight-by-ten glossy of Barbara Bush. The former
first lady wore a turquoise dress in the photo, and Switters compared her image
unfavorably—and, no doubt, unfairly—to Matisse’s big blue nude.

“Have you ever wondered, Switters,
why I’ve run you personally, rather than put you under the direction of, say,
Brewster or Saltonstall?”

“Because Saltonstall’s a dickhead and
Brewster’s a tiddlypoop. Either would have cramped my style.”

“I’m flattered that you think I
don’t. You’re aware, of course, that I officially disapprove of your
sans
gêne
approach to both the company’s affairs and your own. At the same time,
however, you fascinate me. There are things about you I admittedly find
intriguing. For example, there’s a rumor you can refer to a woman’s genitals in
fifty languages.”

“Seventy-one, actually.”

“Mmm? And are there some words for .
. . for that organ that you favor above others?”

“Oh, I like most all of them, even
the Dutch. There’s a Somali term, though, that only females are allowed to
utter. It reeks of mystery and secret beauty.”

“And that word is? . . .”

“Sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not your need to know.”

Although Mayflower smiled bleakly and
maintained an air of metallic cordiality, he buzzed Joolie and told her not to
bother with bringing in coffee. He cleared his throat quietly, with formality.
“I wanted to outline a possible next assignment, but first we’d better discuss
your . . . your, ah, condition.” He gestured at the wheelchair. “What’s the
story?”

And Switters told him.

Switters told him. An abbreviated
version, not a third as long as the one Bobby Case received, but a truthful
account, nonetheless. And Mayflower’s reaction? Incredulity, primarily. But
also anxiety, barely concealed anger, and a flicker of disgust. When he spoke,
his golden tones burned with frost. “Unless you can assure me that this is some
silly prank—even if it isn’t—I’m placing you on suspension. The committee will
decide whether or not it’s with pay.”

“I’m short on funds.”

“Not my department.”