Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (34 page)

For several weeks in November and
December, he had, every morning, propelled his chair eastward on Pike Street
and south on Fourth Avenue to the downtown branch of the Seattle Public
Library, where he sought to supplement his on-line research toward a
dissertation that was to be entitled, “Speaking in Things, Thinking With
Light,” but near Christmas those academic forays dwindled, and by the first of
the year he had abandoned both wood pulp and electron for a different kind of
research.

Like some beggar or street performer,
he would dock the wheelchair beneath the aged arcades of the labyrinthine Pike
Place Market, and there, in the grotto light, protected from the rains that
pounded the cobblestones and hissed beneath the tires of delivery trucks, he’d
turn a keen eye on whiskered parsnip and hairless apple, and bathe himself in
the multitudes.

The old market, worn half away by
dampness and fingerprints, sweat drops and shoe heels, pigeon claws and
vegetable crates; soiled by butcher seepage, sequined with salmon scales,
smelling of roses, raw prawns, and urine; blessedly freed for the winter from
the demanding
entertainme-for-nothing!
gawkings of out-of-town
tourists, the market bustled now with fishmongers and Vietnamese farmers,
florists and fruit vendors, famous chefs and food-smart housewives, gourmets
and runaways, flunkies and junkies, coffee brewers and balloon benders, office
workers and shopgirls and winos of all races; with pensioners, predators,
panhandlers, and prostitutes, and (to complete the p’s) political polemists,
punks, potters, puppeteers, poets, and policemen; with musicians, jugglers,
fire-eaters (dry days only), tyro magicians, and lingering loafers such as he
seemed to be.

Or did he? None of the market
regulars, legitimate or illegitimate, were quite able to label him or find a
reason for his daily presence among them. Just as shoppers would take one look
at his stationary wheelchair and glance around automatically for a tin cup and
accordion or the equivalents thereof, so denizens searched at greater length
though equally in vain for some clue to his raison d’être. Occasionally, he
tapped away at a laptop computer, but mostly, day after day, week after week,
he merely sat there, observing the surrounding cavalcade or gazing into the
rain. Rumors spread that he was an undercover cop, but when there was no
increase in arrests, when it was noticed that he was periodically harassed by
market security guards (usually for stationing himself in one spot for too many
hours or days in a row), and when he took to carving tiny boats out of busted
crate scraps, rigging them with lettuce leaf sails and launching them in
rainswept gutters, that particular suspicion gradually faded.

Still, nobody was prepared to write
him off as another lingering loafer: his presence was too strong, his demeanor
too cool. While he never flashed wads of currency or sported gold jewelry, he
dressed in well-cut suits over fine Tshirts and was wont to drape a black
cashmere topcoat theatrically, rather like an opera cape, about his broad
shoulders. He kept a cell phone in his saddlebag but spoke on it infrequently
(Maestra preferred e-mail, the Sacramento contingent was incommunicado, and by
February Bobby Case had been transferred to Okinawa), giving no indication when
he did converse that any sort of business was being conducted. Reticent though
hardly bashful, Switters had affixed to the back of his chair a neatly lettered
sign that read I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT JESUS OR DISEASES, this being
necessitated by the countless well-meaning busybodies who were convinced that
their New Age herbalist or their Sunday School Savior could provide succor if
not remedy to whatever misfortune had denied his powers of perambulation.
Preservation of wahoo demanded that they be discouraged.

There were those, chiefly women, who
did talk to him, however. They couldn’t seem to resist. Never in his life had
Switters been quite so handsome. He’d let his hair grow long so that it framed
his face, with its storybook of scars, in a manner that made it all the more
intriguing. Enhanced by the moist climate, a predominantly vegetarian diet, and
the liberty to do with his hours what he pleased, his complexion had the rich
glow of a Renaissance oil, and his eyes were like jets of green energy. When he
spoke, it was in grand syllables, moderated and warmed by a loose hint of
drawl. He projected the air, falsely or not, of both a learned man and a rogue,
innately exhibitionist yet deeply secretive, a powerful figure who habitually
thumbed his nose at power—and thus might lead one, were one to fall under his
spell, off in directions opposite those that one had been conditioned to
recognize as prudent, profitable, or holy. To all but a missing link, then, he
was an attraction.

Margaret, with the fresh baked
piroshki she was fetching back to her desk at the law firm; Melissa, the
Microsoft widow, with a basket of Gorgonzola and winter pears bound for
suburbia; Dev, whose breasts in her cheap, fuzzy sweater were as heavy as the
cabbages she sold in her stall; they and others, different and similar, would
kneel hesitantly beside his chair, kneeling so they would be at eye level with
him and so they would not be overheard, and say, with varying degrees of
embarrassment, “I see you here a lot.”

“Yes,” he’d reply. “I’ve been
watching you, too,” and though that was not always the truth, the little lie
didn’t trouble his conscience, not even when he sensed a vibration travel down
a spine to settle with an almost audible pang in a clitoris.

“What are you? No, I mean who are
you? What do you do?”

“I’m Switters, friend of both God and
the Devil.” Then, getting an uncertain reception, “Taker of the stepless step.”
Then, “Two-inch astronaut.”

That usually stopped them. Lightly
dumbfounded, the woman would give him a long, perplexed though hardly rankled
look, and as shyly and sweetly as she had knelt, she’d rise, muttering “Have a
nice day” or “Stay dry” or some other genial inanity, and walk away, seldom
without a wistful glance over her shoulder as she paused at the cobblestones to
unfurl her umbrella. Not infrequently, he’d spot one of them in the market
again and exchange with her one of those futilely desirous smiles that are like
domestic postage on a letter to a foreign destination. Did they approach him a
second time? None save for Dev, who was much too undereducated and overburdened
to be fazed by cryptic epigrams and non sequiturs; and who eventually followed
him to his room, where, against his better judgment, she gladdened him
unmercifully. Evidently he gladdened her, too, for afterward she claimed she
needed a wheelchair more than he.

And she returned. Twice or thrice a
week. Usually early in the morning, while her brothers were stocking the
produce stand she would operate until dusk. When she unhooked her bra, it was
like a farmer unloading a cart, and when she pulled down her panties, Switters
thought he was back up the Amazon. Dev had meaty lips, chapped red cheeks, and
walnut-shell eyelids beneath a prominent dark brow, and was as wide of hip as
she was thin of guile. A strapping Eastern Orthodox milkmaid of Slavic descent,
pretty in a coarse, uncultivated way, she was uncomplicated and honest in mind
and emotion, complex and pungent in bodily aroma. She was always out of his
room by five forty-five, but her musks hung around all day. Before long he was
putting her on with his clothing, tasting her in his bread and cigars.

Wallpaper curled and stayed curled,
windowpanes fogged and stayed fogged from Dev’s humidity. Dev’s cries spooked
ledge pigeons into flight, and these were urbanized birds accustomed to every
manner of human commotion. Dev’s pubic mound was like the hut of a shaman.
Fruit flies picnicked on her thighs.

They had virtually nothing in common,
nothing whatever to talk about, but she seemed without agenda beyond the
erotic, and, at twenty-nine (the oldest woman with whom he’d ever lain),
fatalistic and juggy, there was not one thing about her to remind him of Suzy.
Sometimes as he shook her—her vapors and her short hairs—out of his sheets, his
eyes almost teared with gratitude. He did come to see, in time, that she
perceived him as a dramatic figure of mystery and was as magnetized by that
aspect (real or fallacious) of his image as, say, Margaret or Melissa, but Dev
was content to rub up against the mystery, wisely feeling no compulsion to
probe or dispel it, which the others surely would have done. When he recognized
that about her, his appreciation deepened into affection, and he took to
awakening before five in cheery anticipation of her rapping—a coded knock he’d
taught her so as to know it was her soft self knocking rather than one of
Mayflower Fitzgerald’s bothersome cowboys.

O Dev, unreflective Dev, you are
the one who is the mystery. Despite the numerous clues, largely olfactory in
nature, you scatter in your wake.

If Dev was an O-ring that sealed
wahoo in his body, a gasket against the leaking of that emotional oxygen now in
shortened supply as a result of his sacking, his break with Suzy, and the
Kandakandero curse that precipitated those two events, so then were the Art
Girls. No Art Girls, either individually or collectively, ever visited his room,
and, in fact, not all of the Art Girls were girls, but their presence in the
Pike Place Market and in his acquaintanceship helped him to sail through that
strange season—literally as well as figuratively.

From his two-inch elevation, he’d
watched them filter into the market almost daily from the art school down on
Elliott Avenue, walking mostly in pairs, sometimes singularly or in threesomes,
but never en masse, although they were classmates and dressed as if siblings or
even clones: black berets, black turtleneck sweaters, pea coats on which were
pinned buttons bearing messages of rude social protest (one alluded to CIA
malfeasance and paid tribute to Audubon Poe), rings in earlobe, lip, and nose.
They carried sketchbooks, mainly, but also paintboxes, cameras, occasionally an
easel; and each according to her or his favored medium—pencil, ink, crayon,
watercolor, or film—would set about to depict her or his favored feature of the
market: people, produce, or architecture. They strove to be disconnected and
cool, but their vitality and curiosity were difficult to suppress. Try as they
might, the nearest they could come to the cynicism and ennui with which
somewhat older artists advertised their genius was to strike the odd hostile
pose or suck defiantly on cigarettes. Finding them charming, Switters flirted
openly with the Art Girls, even when they turned out to be boys, and though
they were too self-consciously hip to ever kneel by his chair, as did the
Margarets and the Melissas, they demonstrated through knowing expressions and
inclusive gestures their unpremeditated approval of him.

Approval was tested, shaken, and
finally cemented one January afternoon when a couple of them, representing at
least two genders, presented him with a photograph that the anatomically female
of the pair had snapped of him without, so she believed, his knowledge. After
briefly examining and complimenting the picture, Switters proceeded to give the
astonished young woman the date and time of day it had been taken, as well as prevailing
weather conditions before, during, and after the exposure, and a detailed
description of the candy bar her friend had been eating while she aimed the
telephoto lens—all routine for a company operative. Could she really think some
callow amateur, let alone one as cute as she, could photograph him from any
distance without being systematically registered and remembered?

To regain her composure, the girl
informed him that her faculty adviser had complained that the sign on the
wheelchair—prominent in the photo—might give offense to the religious and the
afflicted, prompting Switters to respond that he was certain the student
photographer had rejected that moralistic nudging toward self-censorship since
no artist worthy of the name gave a flying fuck whether or not any special
interest group—minuscule or multitudinous, benign or malicious—took offense at
their heartfelt creations. “Humanity is generally offensive,” he told her
happily. “Life’s an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those
who can’t tolerate offense ought to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe
those who demand financial compensation for offense ought to have it ended for
them.”

If he had overstated his position a
tad for the sake of shock value, it had worked: they retreated as though from a
fiery chili they’d assumed to be merely exotic pimiento. Indeed, but a philter
can blister the gums, and the most effective aphrodisiacs are often foul at
first taste. In a matter of days, the pair and its cohorts were friendlier than
ever, having debated his pronouncement vigorously and at length in classroom,
studio, and coffeehouse (few among them were yet of tavern age), concluding
that it made up in bravery and brio what it lacked in sensitivity, and that it
had been issued, moreover, in defense of their own aesthetic rights. Besides,
he had a
gorgeous
smile.

Where Switters and the Art Girls
truly connected, though, was in the gutter.

For weeks they’d watched with
ill-concealed fascination whenever he’d push one of his minute boats into a
current of streetside rainwater, often wielding a wilted dahlia stalk as a wand
to guide it past obstacles as it commenced its voyage into the unknown. Day by
day, berets cocked, the girls edged closer to the launchings. Once, one of them
returned a boat to him that she’d retrieved from the place it had finally run
aground. “It made it all the way to Virginia Street,” she said, dimples
enlarging in both diameter and depth. It was only a matter of time before they
started to make toy boats of their own.