Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (33 page)

Whacking her cane on floor and
furniture until she set up an ominous rhythmic resonance evocative of the
timpani in Greek tragedy, she accused him of a reaction worthy of primitive
cave-bear worshipers or, worse (because they ought to know better), evangelical
Christians. “You go down there and encourage Suzy to accept as fact the tall
tales of dogma-crazed underage ignorant Portuguese hillbillies. . . .”

“I only encouraged her to fully
investigate that thing that she found most compelling in life. Isn’t that—”

“I was appalled when I heard you were
aiding and abetting her dabblings in such harmful nonsense. Appalled. What I
didn’t know was that you yourself were in the dimwitted thrall of something
even more ridiculous, more destructive. In all of my eighty-plus years I’ve never.
. . . As far as I’m concerned, this millennium business is wholly bogus, but
there must be
something
in the air that would cause you, of all people,
to surrender your spirit, to wreck your career, to turn yourself into a craven
invalid. . . .”

“
Fierce
invalid,” he corrected
her.

“I guess I thought you were one of
the last of the torchbearers, but as it’s turned out, sad to say, you couldn’t
strike a match in an elevator.”

Stung, he asked, “Do you want me to
stand, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Knowing what you know about Smithe,
the anthropologist, what happened to him, do you want me to get up and walk?
Because I’ll do it. Right now. Right this second. Just say the word.” He was
already half out of the chair.

Maestra couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She stalked
off, only to return ten minutes later to chide him for passively accepting his
dismissal from the CIA without even requesting a hearing. “At the very least,
you could have gotten a mental disability pension. As screwy as you’ve turned
out, they still owe you something. Many times you gambled your life for them.”

“Never.”

“You did!”

“No. I may have gambled my life, but
it wasn’t for them. It was for—something else.”

“What? Precisely.”

“Precision doesn’t enter into it.”

“Heh!”

He wasn’t kidding, though, nor being
unnecessarily evasive. Switters had conducted his professional life in much the
same way as he made love to a woman: wholeheartedly, romantically, poetically,
in a frenzy of longing for the unattainable, the unknown; ladling onto
himself—and his partner or his mission—that mysteriously generated concentrate
of exhilaration that he sometimes referred to as his syrup of wahoo, a kind of
emotional extract produced by the simultaneous boiling down of beauty, risk,
wildness, and mirth. Delusional or not, it was hardly a matter of precision.

When Switters took a room in an old
building adjacent to the Pike Place Market (he’d considered moving into the
Snoqualmie cabin, but there was already heavy snowfall in the mountains), both
Maestra and Bobby Case quizzed him about what he would do there. “For the time
being, my aim is to keep the oxygen from leaking out of my life,” he replied,
an answer neither they nor he found satisfactory. So, he hinted that he might
be embarking upon a scholastic bender.

Assisting Suzy with her term paper
had dusted and oiled creaky academic reflexes just enough to convince him that
the dissertation that stood between him and a Ph.D. degree—he’d long ago
completed the course work—would not be all that painfully difficult to write.
“How would you feel about calling me Dr. Switters?” he asked. “Hell, I’d
probably get mixed up and call you Dr. Seuss,” said Bobby. “You’re just lucky I
don’t call you Baby Dumpling,” said Maestra.

Joining them briefly at Thanksgiving,
Bobby listened politely to Switters rant about the future of the word in
cyberculture. “From the time of the invention of the alphabet, if not before,
all technologies have originated in language, but in cyberspace, we don’t see
or hear information so much as we
feel
it. Technology may at last be
outstripping language, not merely leaving the nest but killing the mother, if
you will. You know, we don’t really see darkness, or even light, we feel
neurologically their effect on surrounding surfaces. The binary digital
system—Brother One and Sister Zero—that makes computers possible is a kind of
light/dark relationship to begin with, and when you start to factor in the
electron rather than the word as the primary information link between the brain
and the external world . . .”

And so on and so forth. Bobby got the
idea that Switters didn’t believe that language was doomed per se but, rather,
was about to be transformed, much as it had been by the invention of the
Phoenician alphabet; liberated, as it had been by the invention of the Greek
alphabet; and then celebrated, as it had been by the advent of the Roman; yet
suspected that he, nevertheless, felt protective of words, the stranger, more
archaic the better, perceiving them as keys to some lost treasure. All very
interesting, basically, but Switters, once he got going, was inclined to scoot
off on tangents, to drive in the ditch. For example: “Why, our cosmology is a
binary system, as well. God equals one, Satan, zero. Or is it the other way
around? Whichever, we use that pair of digits only—eschewing numbers two
through nine and the endless combinations thereof—to compute the meaning of
life and our ultimate destiny. Ah, but in the beginning was the word. Before
the division, before—”

“Yep, podner, you’ll churn yourself a
damn fine thesis outta that butterfat, I’m sure, but what ought to be sizzling
on your front burner is a strategy for getting yourself back on your feet, and
I don’t necessarily mean financially. Pass the peas.”

“Amen to that!” chimed in Maestra.
“Have a drop more gravy, Captain Case. Sorry it isn’t red-eye, but the
caterer’s led a sheltered life and didn’t have a clue.”

After dessert, as the two men smoked
cigars in the living room, watched over by the Matisse nude, herself as blue as
smoke, Bobby broached the subject of Suzy. “Forget cyberspace for a minute.
You’ve been quieter than a Stealth potato about what went on in Sacramento.
Come on. Did you deflower the ‘wholesome little animal,’ or did I manage to
talk you out of it?”

“Talked myself out of it, I’m afraid.
With my forked tongue.”

“Lordy, Lord. And who said talk is
cheap?”

“Some inarticulate man of action, I
imagine; the strong, silent type who other males admire but who women secretly
find a dupe or a dope.” He expelled a dancing doughnut of smoke. Like every
smoke ring ever blown—like smoke, in general—it bounced in the air like the
bastard baby of chemistry and cartooning. “I’m unsure how or if it applies in
this particular situation, but the poet, Andrei Codrescu, once wrote that
‘Physical intimacy is only a device for opening the floodgates of what really
matters: words.’ “

Bobby looked skeptical. “Sounds like
sublimation to me. Anyhow, I thought the verbiage was supposed to
start
the ball rolling. In the fucking beginning was the fucking word.”

“So the Good Book informs us. What it
neglects to tell us, and for which omission I can never forgive it, is which
came first, the word for
chicken
or the word for
egg.”

Bobby couldn’t make it down for
Christmas—his little clandestine U2 unit was on some kind of alert—but he
telephoned Maestra’s manse on Christmas Eve, and once he’d stuffed the old
woman’s goose with flattery, got on the line with Switters, surmising from
their conversation that the latter had cooled a bit toward the prospect of
writing a dissertation, although he could and would, if given a chance, still
get wound up over its thematic potentialities.

“The role of the computer in
literature is limited to grunt work and janitorial services. Makes research easier
and editing faster without making either of them any better. Where the computer
does appear to foster genuine innovation and advancement is in graphics:
photographic reproduction, design, animation, et cetera. Amazing development in
those fields. But to what end?”

“More interesting TV commercials.”

“
Exactement!
Marketing.
Merchandising. Increasingly sophisticated, increasingly seductive. And sure,
it’s just a flashy modern version of the age-old bread-and-circuses brand of
bondage—except that today the bakery’s a multinational and the circus follows
us home. Well, culture has always been driven to some degree by the
marketplace. Always. It’s just that nowadays the marketplace, having invaded
every nook and cranny of our private lives, is completely supplanting culture;
the marketplace has
become
our culture. Nevertheless—”

“Yeah,” put in Bobby, “and wild ol’
boys like you and me may turn out to be one of the last lines of defense
against corporate totalitarianism and unhappy shit like that. That’s why it’s
important that you . . . I know for a fact that the company would reinstate you
if you’d—”

“Did I tell you Mayflower sent a pair
of grim-faced pickle-packers out to debrief me? Right after Thanksgiving.
Cornered me in my room, six o’clock in the morning; damned unsporting of them,
me being groggy from the toils and impairments of the evening prior. Still,
they had rather a thick time of it before I allowed them to take back some of
their toys. I managed to keep my laptop, my Beretta, and my faithful crocodile,
although the pistol remains an issue, and there’s reason to believe they’ve put
a Joe on my tail.”

“That could be fun.”

“Perhaps. But all that’s irrelevant.
What I was getting at a minute ago is that the real show, as usual, is taking
place behind the tent, and neither the hawkers nor the ringmasters are hip to
it. Forget the graphic-art gymnastics. What’s really happening in cyberculture
is that language isn’t contracting, it’s expanding. Expanding. Moving outside
of the body. Beyond the tongue and the larynx, beyond the occipital lobe and
the hippocampus, beyond the pen and the page, beyond the screen and the
printer, even. Out into the universe. Bonding with, saturating, or even
usurping physical reality. Let me explain.”

“Ut! Swit? Whoa. Give me a rain check
on that if you don’t mind. All this brainstorming of yours is costing me MCI’s
holiday rates—and costing you what’s left of your marbles, I wouldn’t be
surprised. I mean, if you’re not planning to write your damn thesis, why? . . .
The main thing is, you’re still in that feeble-foot Ferrari, son, and it’s been
seven or eight weeks now. Jesus! You got to deal with this problem, bring it to
an end, whatever it takes. If that involves tripping back down to the Amazon,
so be it. You, me, either or both of us. Will you please just lock in on that
target? Direct your fire toward getting well, getting free? Jesus!”

There was no immediate response, and
in the absence of dialogue, the men could hear MCI’s holiday meter running.
Eventually Switters said, “Remember the story that monk told us?”

“Which monk? The one who hid us from
the Burmese border patrol?”

“No, not him. The one we had tea with
in Saigon. The—”

“You still won’t call it Ho Chi Minh
City.”

“I refuse. Although I certainly mean
no disrespect to the brave and honorable Uncle Ho. . . .”

“Betrayed, slandered, pushed into a
corner . . .”

“By that ice-hearted, lizard-brained,
sanctimonious Christian bully boy . . .

“John Foster Dulles!” the two men
snarled in contemptuous harmony. Then, also in unison, they spat into the
mouthpieces of their respective phones.

“I heard that!” cried Maestra, who,
to the best of Switters’s knowledge, had been engrossed in e-gab in a hackers
chat room, a kind of on-line cybercryptic Christmas party. “Disgusting lout!
Clean it off. Now.”

Separately they each obeyed,
chuckling softly as they wiped, the one with coat sleeve, the other with
bandanna; and then Switters returned to the Saigon monk. “Remember? He told us
about a great spiritual master who was asked what it was like being enlightened
all the time. And the master answered, ‘Oh, it’s just like ordinary, everyday
life. Except that you’re two inches above the ground.’ “

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “I remember
that.”

“Well, it occurred to me a week or so
ago that that’s where I’m at. In this wheelchair, my feet are almost exactly
two inches off the ground.”

“Aw, come on. It ain’t nowhere near
the same thing.”

“No, but maybe it
could
be.
Maybe that was even ol’ Pyramid Head’s point. So to speak. He was oblivious to
wheelchairs, presumably, but, still, maybe . . . In any event, I’m being forced
to survey the world from a new perspective—you’d be astonished the difference
two inches can make—and I’m loath to relinquish the vantage point quite yet.
There may be other angles, other takes, whole phyllo pastries of existence I’ve
yet to explore from this sacred height. So, patience, pal. Let me play it out
for a while. Let me discover what it is that I’ve become: synthetic cripple or
synthetic bodhisattva.” He paused. “Merry Christmas, Bobby.”

From the Alaskan end of the
connection, there floated a huge sigh. “Merry Christmas, Swit. Here’s wishing
you a sleighload of eggnogged virgins in mistletoe underwear.”

Switters did, indeed, maintain his
vantage point. Throughout the long, wet winter he maintained it, his “starship
in hover mode,” as he put it, orbiting the earth from a height of two inches.