part 1

Sometimes naked
Sometimes mad
Now the scholar
Now the fool
Thus they appear on earth:
The free men.

—Hindu verse

Lima, Peru
October 1997

The naked parrot looked like a human fetus spliced onto a kosher chicken. It was so old it had lost every single one of its feathers, even its pinfeathers, and its bumpy, jaundiced skin was latticed by a network of rubbery blue veins.

“Pathological,” muttered Switters, meaning not simply the parrot but the whole scene, including the shrunken old woman in whose footsteps the bird doggedly followed as she moved about the darkened villa. The parrot’s scabrous claws made a dry, scraping noise as they fought for purchase on the terra-cotta floor tiles, and when, periodically, the creature lost its footing and skidded an inch or two, it issued a squawk so quavery and feeble that it sounded as if it were being petted by the Boston Strangler. Each time it squawked, the crone clucked, whether in sympathy or disapproval one could not tell, for she never turned to her devoted little companion but wandered aimlessly from one piece of ancient wooden furniture to another in her amorphous black dress.

Switters feigned appreciation, but he was secretly repulsed, all the more so because Juan Carlos, who stood beside him on the patio, also spying in the widow’s windows, was beaming with pride and satisfaction. Switters slapped at the mosquitoes that perforated his torso and cursed every hair on that hand of Fate that had snatched him into South too-goddamn-vivid America.

Boquichicos, Peru
November 1997

Attracted by the lamplight that seeped through the louvers, a mammoth moth beat against the shutters like a storm. Switters watched it with some fascination as he waited for the boys to bring his luggage up from the river. That moth was no butterfly, that was certain. It was a night animal, and it had a night animal’s mystery.

Butterflies were delicate and gossamer, but this moth possessed strength and weight. Its heavy wings were powdered like the face of an old actress. Butterflies were presumed to be carefree, moths were slaves to a fiery obsession. Butterflies seemed innocuous, moths somehow . . . erotic. The dust of the moth was a sexual dust. The twitch of the moth was a sexual twitch. Suddenly Switters touched his throat and moaned. He moaned because it occurred to him how much the moth resembled a clitoris with wings.

Vivid.

There were grunts on the path behind him, and Inti emerged from the forest bearing, somewhat apprehensively, Switters’s crocodile-skin valise. In a moment the other two boys appeared with the rest of his gear. It was time to review accommodations in the Hotel Boquichicos. He dreaded what he might find behind its shuttered windows, its double-screened doors, but he motioned for the boys to follow him in. “Let’s go. This insect—” He nodded at the great moth that, fan though it might, was unable to stir the steaming green broth that in the Amazon often substitutes for air. “This insect is making me feel—” Switters hesitated to utter the word, even though he knew Inti could understand no more than a dozen simple syllables of English. “This insect is making me feel libidinous.”

Central Syria
May 1998

Trekking toward Jebel al Qaz-az in a late spring rain, the nomads were soaked and nearly giddy. Behind them, at lower elevations, the grass was already yellowing and withering, fodder not for flocks but for wildfires; ahead, the mountain passes conceivably could still be obstructed by snow. Whatever anxieties the band maintained, however, were washed away by the downpour. In country such as this, hope’s other name was moisture.

Even the sheep and goats seemed merry, lighter of hoof, although individual beasts paused from time to time to shake rainwater from their coats, vigorously, stiffly, causing them to look like self-conscious burlesque queens. Their leathery black muzzles, glistening with rain, were pointed—not so much by their drivers as by a migratory instinct older than humanity—toward distant pastures.

Switters was one of four men—the khan, the khan’s eldest son, an experienced pathfinder, and himself—who traveled on horseback at the head of the procession. The rest were on foot. They had been on the move, dawn to dusk, for almost a week.

About two miles back, prior to beginning their gradual ascent, they had passed a large compound, an oasis, undoubtedly, completely surrounded by a high mud wall. The boughs of orchard trees rose above the wall, and the scent of orange blossoms boosted to a higher power the already intoxicating smell of the rain. From inside the compound, Switters thought he heard the wild sugary shriek of girlish laughter. Several of the young men must have heard it, too, for they turned their heads to stare wistfully at the remote estate.

The band pressed on. That is what nomads do. Forward the march. The burden and the bleating.

Switters, however, could not get the mini-oasis out of his mind. Something about it—its mysterious walls, its lush vegetation, its auditory hint of young women splashing in the rain—had gripped his imagination with such steady pressure that eventually he announced to his hosts his intention to return and investigate the place. One might say they were shocked, except that his very presence among them was in and of itself so extraordinary that they were partially immune to further bewilderment.

The khan shook his head, and his eldest son, who spoke passable English, objected, “Oh, sir, we must not turn back. The flocks—”

Switters, who spoke passable Arabic, interrupted to explain that he meant to go alone.

“But, sir,” said the eldest son, wringing his hands and screwing up his forehead until it looked like the rolled-back lid of a sardine can, “the horse. We have only these four, you see, and we—”

“No, no, good buddy. Assure your papa I had no notion of galloping off with his fine nag. Now, he can let his next eldest son hop up and take a load off his tootsies.”

“But, sir—”

“I’ll just zip on back there in my starship. If you boys’ll be so good as to ready it for me.”

The khan waved the procession to a halt. At that exact moment the rain stopped as well. Two of the tribesmen unfastened Switters’s chair from behind the saddle, unfolded it, placed it on a reasonably level patch, and set its brake. Then they helped him off the horse and lifted him gently into the seat. They strapped his croc-skin valise to the chair back and laid his computer, satellite telephone, and customized Beretta 9-mm pistol, each wrapped in a separate plastic garbage bag, on his lap.

Elaborate farewells were exchanged, after which the nomads watched for many minutes in nothing short of awe as Switters, laboriously, precariously—but singing all the while—maneuvered the rickety, hand-operated wheelchair over the brutal rocks and ensnaring sands of a landscape so harsh in its promise that a mere glimpse of it would propel a Romantic poet to therapy or a developer to gin.

Slowly, he dissolved into the wilderness.

He seemed to be singing “Send in the Clowns.”

Vatican City
May 1999

The cardinal ordered Switters and his party to queue up single file. The garden path was narrow, he explained, and besides, it would be unseemly to approach His Holiness all in a bunch. Switters was to go first. If his weapon had not been confiscated at the last security checkpoint, he might have insisted on bringing up the rear, but now it didn’t matter.

Because of his “disability,” Switters needn’t feel obliged to kneel upon reaching the throne, the cardinal had generously conceded. Switters wondered if, nevertheless, he would be expected to kiss the pope’s ring. Only way I’m smooching that ring, he thought, is if they paste a crumb of hashish on it, or else smear it with pussy juice or red-eye gravy.

As he thought that, he was remembering an actress he used to know, who, in order to entice a tiny trained terrier to follow her around during a movie scene, had had to have scraps of raw calf’s liver stapled to the soles of her high-heeled shoes.

Thinking of that terrier magnetized by meat-baited slippers reminded him then of the old bald parrot that had waddled after its mistress in a Lima suburb many months before—and for a moment Switters was back in Peru. That’s the way the mind works.

That’s the way the mind works: the human brain is genetically disposed toward organization, yet if not tightly controlled, will link one imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest of pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regard for logic or chronological sequence.

Now, it appears that this prose account has unintentionally begun in partial mimicry of the mind. Four scenes have occurred at four different locations at four separate times, some set apart by months or years. And while they do maintain chronological order and a connective element (Switters), and while the motif is a far cry from the kind of stream-of-consciousness technique that makes Finnegans Wake simultaneously the most realistic and the most unreadable book ever written (unreadable precisely because it is so realistic), still, alas, the preceding is probably not the way in which an effective narrative ought properly to unfold—not even in these days when the world is showing signs of awakening from its linear trance, its dangerously restrictive sense of itself as a historical vehicle chugging down a one-way street toward some preordained apocalyptic goal.

Henceforth, this account shall gather itself at an acceptable starting point (every beginning in narration is somewhat arbitrary and the one that follows is no exception), from which it shall then move forward in a so-called timely fashion, shunning the wantonly tangential influence of the natural mind and stopping only occasionally to smell the adjectives or kick some ass.

Since this new approach should render chapter headings (those that designate date and place) unnecessary, they will from now on be scratched. If the next chapter were to have a heading, however, it would read:

Seattle
October 1997

It was on a mist-bearded Saturday morning, gray as a ghoul and cool as clam aspic, that Switters showed up at his grandmother’s house. En route from the airport, he had stopped by Pike Place Market, where he bought a bouquet of golden chrysanthemums, as well as a medium-sized pumpkin. Now, he was forced to juggle those items in order to free a hand with which to turn up his trench coat collar against the microdontic nipping of the drizzle. He had also purchased a capsule of XTC from a hipster fish merchant he knew, and as he walked from the rental car to the stately mansion, he managed to get it to his mouth and swallow it without benefit of liquid. It tasted like snapper.

He punched the bell. After a brief interval, his grandmother’s voice crackled out of the speaker. “Who is it? What do you want? This had better be good.” The woman refused to keep a downstairs maid, although she was eighty-three years old and had the wherewithal.

“It’s me. Switters.”

“Who?”

“Switters. Your favorite relation. Buzz me in, Maestra.”

“Heh! ‘Favorite relation’ in your dreams, maybe. Do you come bearing gifts?”

“Absolutely.”

He heard the electronic loosening of the latch. “I’m advancing. Brace yourself, Maestra.”

“Heh!”

When Switters was less than a year old, his grandmother had stood before his highchair, her hands on her still glamorous hips. “You’re starting to jabber like a damn disk jockey,” she said. “Pretty soon you’ll be having a name for me, so I want to make this clear: you are not to insult me with one of those déclassé G words, like granny or grams or gramma or whatever, you understand; and if you ever call me nannie or nana or nonna—or moomaw or big mama or mawmaw—I’ll bust your cute little chops. I’m aware that it’s innate in the human infant to produce M sounds followed by soft vowels in response to maternalistic stimuli, so if you find it primally necessary to label me with something of that ilk, then let it be ‘maestra.’ Maestra. Okay? That’s the feminine form of the Italian word for ‘master’ or ‘teacher.’ I don’t know if I’ll ever teach you anything worthwhile, and I sure as hell don’t want to be anybody’s master, but at least maestra has got some dignity. Try saying it.”

Little more than a year later, when he was two, the child had marched up to his grandmother, pinned her with his already fierce, hypnotic green eyes, planted his hands on his hips, and commanded, “Call me Switters.” Maestra had studied him for a while, had puzzled over his sudden identification with his none too illustrious surname, and finally nodded. “Very well,” she said. “Fair enough.”

His mother continued to call him Baby Dumpling. But not for long.

Maestra failed to greet him in the vestibule, so Switters wandered the ground floor searching for her. Nearly a year had passed since he’d been in the house, but it was as he remembered it: spare, elegant, and spotless (Maestra had a professional housecleaning service come in twice a week; her meals she ordered delivered from Chinese and pizza take-out joints), and a dramatic contrast to the dumps in which her offspring—and their offspring—had often resided. Maestra had done all right for herself. Above the living room fireplace was an Henri Matisse oil of a mountainous blue nude reclining, distorted limbs akimbo, on a jazzy patterned harem sofa. He was reasonably sure it was authentic.

He found her in the library, perched at a computer. Much of the library was jammed with electronic equipment, twice the amount as on his last visit. Her collection of great books was now double- and triple-parked at one end of the room, while at the other end there were two computers, an array of modems, printers, and telephones, a forty-inch television set into which a stack of black boxes was jacked, a fax machine, and a helmet with goggles attached, which Switters took to be some type of virtual reality device.

“Maestra! Surfing so early in the day?”

“Less traffic this time of morning. Switters! Are you alone?”

“Of course. Who’d I dare bring with me?”

Punching off-line, she swiveled to face him. “Well, I did intercept an e-mail message in which you promised little Suzy you were gonna take her ‘all the way to grandma’s house.’ “ Her affectionate gaze hardened into a glare.

Switters blushed so incandescently he could have hired out his face as a beer sign. It was one of those instances, rare in his life, when he was at a loss for words.

“Perhaps that expression has some different connotation for you. Eh? Something I’m not hip to?” Her smile was ironic and a tad malicious. “After all, you’ve always exhibited the good taste not to refer to me as ‘grandma.’ “

“Uh, er,” Switters stammered, “Suzy? Suzy’s in Sacramento, how in hell did you access her e-mail?”

“Heh! Easy as pie. Child’s play. You of all people ought to know that.” The edges of her smile softened some. “All right, Switters. Come here. Kiss these wrinkly old cheeks. It’s a blessing to see you. A mixed blessing, but a blessing, nonetheless. Mmm. Boy. So what’d you bring me? Great, you know I’m crazy about mums. And a most fine pumpkin. Yes. Excellent damn pumpkin.” Her disappointment in the presents was ill concealed.

From his jacket pocket, he fished a Bakelite bracelet, pinkish butterscotch in tone. “Found this in an antique shop in Paris. Guy claimed it belonged to Josephine Baker.”

“Well, it’s mine now!” Maestra was immoderately fond of bracelets, often wearing as many as ten on each thin arm. “That’s so thoughtful of you, Switters. So sweet.” She paused, adding the bracelet to her jumble and admiring it there. “But don’t think this lets you off the hook, buddy boy. I don’t have to tell you what a wicked degenerate you are.”

“Oh, tell me anyway. I never tire of hearing it. Puts a spring in my step.”

“You are a wicked degenerate. A rascal, a wastrel, a pervert. . . . Don’t look so pleased with yourself. This business with little Suzy is not funny. It’s sick. What’s more, it’s criminally prosecutable. You’ve always been the most irresponsible—”

“Now, now. How can you say that? I’m a dedicated, decorated public servant with a top-secret security clearance. Hardly the resumé of a slacker.”

“I’m supposed to sleep better nights knowing the likes of you is guarding the henhouse? It amazes me you’ve lasted in that job.”

“Over a decade now.”

“It amazes me they ever recruited you in the first place.”

“It was my firm jaw and air of tragic nobility.”

“It was your academic record.” There was an irrepressible yeast of pride in her voice when she said, “The dean of students at Berkeley told me personally they’d never seen the likes of you when it came to cybernetics and linguistics. . . .”

“Don’t forget modern poetry. I had nine hours of modern poetry.”

“He neglected to mention that. And the rugby fellow, that swarthy Englishman, he said you were the only American he’d ever coached who actually understood the game.”

“Nigel was just buttering you up. He was consumed with desire for you. You drove him wild.”

“Heh! Rubbish. I was a senior citizen even then. Rugby’s barbaric. Worse than football. But there’s no denying it, you hit the grade-point jackpot.”

“Genes, Maestra. Abilities I inherited from you.”

“Heh!” The old woman beamed in spite of herself. “You were clever, in some areas, but I’m still surprised they’d recruit you, considering your extracurricular activities and your weak moral fiber.”

“It’s government service, Maestra. Morality’s scarcely an issue.”

“You have a point there, unfortunately. So what monkey business has that agency of yours got your nose into now? What’re you up to? What’re you doing in Seattle? How long before you leave me?”

“Upon the rosy-fingered dawn.”

“Tomorrow? No!”

“I fly to South America first thing in the morning—but I’ll be back in a wink. Actually, I’m supposed to be starting a thirty-day leave, but the yard boss insisted I postpone it just long enough to dash down to Lima and back. Really, I’ll probably only be there overnight.”

He saw her eyes narrow behind her spectacles.

“Assassination?”

“I don’t do windows. You’ve been watching too much TV. Company recruited a very promising young dude down there, indigenous operative, fronted him a new Honda as a signing bonus, and now he’s backing out on the deal.”

“You’re going to terminate him with extreme prejudice.”

“Get real. I’m gonna lobby him, try to talk him into staying aboard.”

“Why you?”

“I guess because we have similar backgrounds. He earned a double master’s from the University of Miami. Computer science and languages.”

“No modern poetry?” She was needling him.

“Methinks not, Maestra. But I bet he can quote a line or two from Howl.”

“And what’ll you do on your vacation? May I expect another intrusion?”

“Absolutely. Another bangle, too. First thing when I get back. Uh, I was hoping you’d let me use the cabin up at Snoqualmie Pass for a week or two. I’ve sucked way too much cement this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees. Then I may hop over to Sacramento briefly, regale the family.”

“Including Suzy?”

“Uh, well, uh, Suzy quite possibly may be on the premises. I believe she’s going to school.”

“Of course she’s going to school! She’s a teenager!”

Maestra fell quiet and remained quiet for such a lengthy period that Switters wondered if she might have nodded off, as the elderly are wont to do. Either that or she was truly very angry. He cleared his throat. He cleared it again. Louder now.

“South America,” she said abruptly.

“Yes.”

“Nice.”

“Not nice. No. South America holds a minimum of charm for this buckaroo.”

“I suppose. The death squads, the poverty, the corruption, the destruction of nature.”

“Hmm, well, yes, there’s that.” He scratched himself, as if thinking of South America made him itch. “And then there’s the fact that it’s just too goddamn vivid.”

She regarded him quizzically, but when she spoke she asked not what he meant by “vivid” but to what country, exactly, was he traveling in South America?

“Peru.”

“Peru. Yes. That’s what I understood. Lima, Peru.”

There followed another long silence, but this time he could tell she wasn’t drifting in any geriatric ozone. Her eyes simultaneously narrowed and brightened until they looked like the apertures through which Tabasco droplets enter the world, and the zing zing zing of synaptic archery was very nearly audible.

“Jeez,” he muttered eventually, shaking his head. “If J. Robert Oppenheimer had thought that hard, he’d have invented video poker instead of the A-bomb.”

Maestra smiled sardonically. “Prove to me,” she said, “that chivalry can still eat lunch in this town.” With a rattle of bracelets, she extended both arms. “I need to be excused.”

Switters was taken aback at how light she was, how frail. Her body was a husk compared to the meaty pulp of her spirit and her voice. Yet once he had helped her to her feet, she left the room rather briskly, barely relying on the rustic mahogany cane that she seemed to sport mainly for effect. He heard her rat-a-tatting it along the banister posts as she climbed the stairs.

After tossing his trench coat over a modem (underneath, he wore a gray Irish tweed suit and a solid red T-shirt), he strolled to the library windows. Maestra’s house sat high on the bluffs of the Magnolia District, so called because a botanically challenged early explorer had mistaken its profusion of madrona trees for an unrelated species that graced more southerly climes. Magnolia’s cliffs overlooked the shipping lanes through which all manner of vessels, from warships to oil tankers to funky little salmon-snaggers, sailed from the Pacific to Seattle’s docks by way of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. Maestra’s second husband had been a sea captain and owner of tugboats, and he liked to keep an eye on the tides. On this drizzly day, the captain wouldn’t have seen very much. The sky and the water looked like separate panels of the same chalk-fogged blackboard. Nature had erased the diagrammed sentences and multiplication tables, leaving a view that was all pan and no orama.

Switters turned from the misty void and was instantly confronted with its opposite: namely, a well-defined object of lurid coloration. It was the pumpkin, only its orangeness had become so intense it seemed to be undergoing spontaneous combustion right there on the library table. Switters didn’t know whether to reach for a fire extinguisher or fall down and worship. The thing was blazing—and spinning, as well. At least, it appeared to be, for a minute or two. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Then he remembered.

He had forgotten about ingesting the XTC. It was starting to come on, and come on strong. Knowing that 150 milligrams of 3, 4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, to call it by its rightful name, would not produce hallucinations, he figured that his present-moment awareness must be substantially heightened. With that in mind, he pulled up a chair and sat directly facing the gourd. It was no longer afire, but it was very pretty and very friendly, and Switters felt compelled to caress its haptic contours.

“We search for the door in the side of the pumpkin,” he whispered, “but unlike Cinderella’s coach, it is drawn only by its own slow ripening.” (Where was this coming from?) “Distracted by the toothy glitter of corn, mice leave it to round, to orange: a globe of lost continents, a faceless head, its true identity known only to the Halloween knife and certain deputies of the pie police. O pumpkin, pregnant squaw bladder, hardiest of moons, scarecrow’s beachball, in the name of farmers’ daughters everywhere, remove your hood and—”

“Switters!” Maestra had entered the room behind him. “What the hell are you saying to that poor fruit? Is this what nine hours of modern poetry does to a man?”

“My queen. You have returned.”

“Christ, boy! I see the frost is off your pumpkin. Have you finally gone around the bend?”

He smiled at her sweetly. Shyly, he studied his white sneakers. “Maestra, would you mind putting on some music? I feel like dancing.”

“Never mind the damn music. Sailor Boy and I want your undivided attention.”

It was then that he noticed the parrot.

How his grandmother, in her fragility, had managed to fetch Sailor’s cage from her upstairs sitting room, Switters could not imagine. Although airily constructed of wicker and copper wire, it was spacious, as birdcages go, and probably none too light. Normally a skeptic, Maestra had become convinced that pyramids possessed the power to refresh and preserve organic tissue, whether of a plucked apple or a fully feathered bird, and inspired by an article on the subject in a reputable science magazine, she had long ago commissioned a craftsman to build her parrot a cage in the model of the Great Pyramid, although whether its geometric shape added to or subtracted from its total weight was something that had never been considered. Its impact on Sailor Boy’s health was likewise unproven, yet no observer could dispute the salubrious sheen of his plumage.

“I’m aware,” she said, “of your antipathy toward animals.”

“Why, that’s slander, Maestra. I cherish all God’s creatures, great and small.” It was the XTC talking. The XTC grinning.

“Okay, pets then. I have it on good authority, namely you yourself, that you don’t like pets. Why are you acting so goofy?”

He scratched his jaw in a pensive manner. “It’s cages I dislike. Cages and leashes and hobbles and halters. It’s the taming I dislike. I appreciate that a pet can be a comfort to one such as yourself, but domesticity shrinks the soul of a beast. If God had meant for animals to live indoors, he would have given them second mortgages.”

“It’s the wild kingdom that you fancy.”

“Well, sometimes nature has a tendency to go over the top, lay it on a bit thick with the creeping and crawling and sliming and hissing and stinging and ceaseless reproducing. But generally speaking, yes, my respect is for the thing that sniffs its prey instead of sniffing my crotch, the thing that shits in the elephant grass instead of shitting in a box in my kitchen.”

“Your phrasing is indelicate, but your meaning is clear. You prefer your creatures wild and free. That’s good. That’s very good.”

“Is it good, Maestra?” His expression was that of a proud child who has just been praised for some trivial if heartfelt achievement.

“Yes, it’s very damn good because it means that you’re philosophically disposed to undertake the little mission I’m about to assign you.”

Switters blinked. He was in a drug-induced neurologically based state of blissful benevolence, a state in which ego was softened, fear dissolved, and trust expanded, yet through it all he sensed that he was about to be conned.

It turned out that his grandmother wanted Switters to take Sailor the parrot with him to South America and release the bird in the jungle there. At her advanced age she faced the inevitable, and while its life expectancy was almost certainly greater than her own, the parrot, too, was no spring chicken. She wanted her pet to spend its remaining years flying free in the forest of its birth.

“But, but, uh,” Switters sputtered, “you’ve had Sailor for about as long as I can remember. . . .”

“Thirty-four, thirty-five years. And he was at least that old when I acquired him.”

“Sounds right. I’m thirty-six. So, why at this late date . . . ?”

“Don’t pretend to be a knucklehead. You know why. I’ve always assumed that he was leading a good life, but that may have been a chauvinistic presumption. I mean, he’s behind bars, isn’t he? You might recall that he used to be loose in the house, but in recent years he’s taken to ripping up the draperies with his beak and committing other disagreeable and destructive deeds. He’s undergone a personality change. You’re the one who’s claimed that all pets eventually become anthropomorphically neurotic. Correct? Anyway, I’ve had to keep him locked up. You have no idea how guilty I’ve felt. So it’s for my conscience as well as for his ‘shrunken soul’ that I want you to liberate him.”

“But, but I thought Sailor was from Brazil. He’s a Brazilian parrot. I’m going to Peru.”

“Quit speaking to me like I’m senile. Brazil, Peru—the Amazon jungle’s the Amazon jungle. Birds and beasts don’t recognize national boundaries. They have better sense.”

“Okay, but I’m not going to the Amazon jungle. I’m going to Lima.” His voice was fuzzy, and muffled by faux nonchalance. “Lima’s on the coast. There’s desert around it. It’s hundreds of kilometers from the Amazon.” He turned to face the cage. Sailor was tearing at a bunch of grapes, but his head was cocked to the side, with one shiny orb trained on Switters, as if he could detect the man’s abnormal state. “Sorry, ol’ birdy, ol’ pal, but if you expect to wing home to the emerald forest, you’re gonna have to redeem your frequent-flyer miles.”

Maestra was neither amused nor dissuaded. “Your tone disappoints me,” she said. The pupils of his aforementioned fierce, hypnotic green eyes were so dilated they looked like the burners on a dollhouse stove. She stared into them without trepidation. “A quick detour, that’s all I’m asking. It may widen the pinhole in your travel map, but you’re going to have to do it for me.”

“Oh, no. No, no. It wouldn’t be anywhere near quick enough for me. If I’m not out of South America within forty-eight hours, I will have forfeited all claim to future happiness. Can’t do it, Maestra. It’s an ordeal in the making, and it’s too much to ask.”

She clapped her age-spotted hands together with such a sharp pop that it caused the parrot to start and flutter. “Then I’m no longer asking. I’m insisting.”

Switters grinned. He loved the whole world at that moment, South America and a demanding old matriarch included, but he wasn’t going to let himself be manipulated. “You forget, I’m the only member of our family you’ve never been able to intimidate or control. That’s why you adore me. So, you might as well—”

“Heh! The reason I tolerate you, to the extent that I do tolerate you, is that you’re the only one of us left with any tricks in his bag. In this case, I’m afraid, those very tricks of yours are your undoing.” She paused briefly for the theater that was in it. “You see, buddy boy, I happen to have on file every e-mail mash note you’ve posted to Suzy in the past six months.”

“No, you don’t!” he blurted out confidently, but somehow he knew she wasn’t bluffing.

“Want to bet?” She went directly to the smaller and older of her two computers, the Mac Performa 6115, and within a few minutes had pulled up a text. “All right, this one is dated thirty, September. Ahem. It reads, and I quote, ‘I long to greet your delta like a rooster greets the dawn.’ “

“Oh, dearie me.” Blushing, he slumped in his chair and began to croon very softly, “Send in the Clowns.”

In the discussion that followed, the word blackmail fell many times from Switters’s lips. He said it without rancor, she responded without guilt.

“I can’t believe my own grandmother would stoop to blackmail.” He shook his dark blond curls. He was bemused.

“Nobody else will believe it, either. But they’ll have no choice but to believe the sordid evidence of Suzy’s e-mail. I ask you again: Do you want your mother and stepfather to read those messages? Want your superiors in Virginia to read them? Mull it over.”

“Blackmail most foul. No pun intended.”

“It’s for a good cause. Don’t take it so hard. And you know, I’ve been contemplating updating my will. The Sierra Club probably wouldn’t know what to do with the cabin at Snoqualmie, so I’m now considering, only considering, leaving it to you.”

“I . . .”

“Hush. Just listen. My Matisse that you’ve always been kind of gaga about? At present it’s destined for the Seattle Art Museum, but I might be persuaded to keep it in the family. If Sailor was sprung free and my heart was at peace.”

“Blackmail wasn’t sin enough. Now you’ve added bribery.”

“Yes. The old B and B. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“You realized from the start that bribery alone wouldn’t work.”

“Materialism is one of the few vices you don’t subscribe to. Yet, deep down, even you have a pitty-pat sense of self-survival.”

He made a final effort to escape his fate. “Perhaps this hasn’t occurred to you, Maestra, not being a traveler, but a person can’t just take live animals in and out of foreign countries. Most countries have strict quarantine laws regarding pets. I’ll wager Peru—”

“Switters! You’re a CIA agent, for Christ’s sake! Surely you have ways of getting any manner of restricted items through the tightest of customs. You told me once it was like diplomatic immunity, only better.”

Defeated, he slumped further in his chair. In that position, he was at eye level with the pumpkin, and he imagined he could detect its seeds spiraling inside of it like stars in a galaxy or bees in a hive.

Conspicuously pleased with herself, Maestra strutted over, bracelets clattering, and gently poked his neck with her cane. “Sit up straight, boy. Do you want to be Quasimodo when you grow up?” From somewhere in her richly brocaded kimono, she produced a thrice-folded sheet of crumpled pink paper. “All this blackmail and bribery has given me an appetite. Let’s do lunch.” She slapped the cheap brochure and a cordless phone onto the table between him and the pumpkin. “There’s a new Thai restaurant opened in the Magnolia shopping area. Why don’t you order for us? Five years in Bangkok should’ve given you a modicum of expertise.”

He ought to be hungry (except for a pint of Redhook ale at Pike Place Market, he’d had no breakfast) just as he ought to be furious with Maestra, yet thanks to the XTC, he was neither. “Like sedated spacemen conserving their energy for the unimaginable encounters ahead, the pumpkin seeds lie suspended in their reticulum of slime.” Those were the very words he whispered, but luckily she paid them no heed, having already moved to the pyramid to speak to the parrot. Unlike those old women who coo baby-talk to their birds, Maestra spoke to Sailor exactly as she spoke to everyone else, which is to say, with language that was fairly formal and occasionally flowery, a self-amused, ironic eloquence that to some degree, though he might deny it, had influenced Switters’s own manner of speech. (As for the parrot, on those rare occasions when it spoke at all, it would utter but a single sentence, and it was always the same. “Peeple of zee wurl, relax,” is what it would say, as if giving sage advice in a raspy Spanish accent.)

Seeing no route around it, and aiming to please, he studied the menu and picked up the phone. As he requested such dishes as tom kah pug and pak tud tak, names that routinely sounded like a harelip pleading for a package of thumbtacks, the tricky tonalities of Thai didn’t faze him. The waiter, in fact, mistook him for a fellow countryman, until Switters explained that despite his immaculate accent, he could not actually speak that tongue that in all probability had been invented by the ancient Asian ancestors of Elmer Fudd.

In less than thirty minutes, cartons of aromatic food were clustered, steaming, on the library table. Wafts of lemongrass, chili paste, and coconut milk enlivened the technologized old room.

After about five torrid forkfuls of pla lard prik, Maestra dozed off in her swivel chair and slept for hours.

Switters didn’t eat a bite, but danced alone in front of the CD player until deep in the dark afternoon.

The next morning he flew to Peru. Alaska Airlines to Los Angeles, then the 1:00 P.M. LAN-Chile flight to Lima, which stopped in Mexico City barely long enough for him to telephone a maverick philology professor he knew there.

Once he had gotten the parrot secured in the pressurized portion of the cargo hold that airlines set aside for passengers’ pets, the departure passed smoothly. That was fortunate because the effects of the XTC had left him moderately fatigued. Settled into a business-class seat with a Bloody Mary on his tray, he began to feel consoled, if not actually buoyant, about the demands of the immediate future. In all honesty, he had to admit that the mission forced upon him by his crafty grandmother was a good deal less boring, potentially, than the mickey mouse assignment he’d been handed by Langley. Which was not to say it would be anything beyond an inconvenience, but it had the virtue, at least, of being an out-of-the-ordinary inconvenience, a kind of dead-cat bounce. A couple of extra days in South America wasn’t exactly going to poison all the tadpoles in his drainage ditch. He would endure.

Yes, unquestionably, he would get through a sticky, buggy, rainy, much-too-vivid side trip to the Amazon jungle. The in-flight movie, however, was another matter.

It was one of those so-called action suspense pictures in which the primary suspense was the uncertainty as to whether there would be ninety seconds or a full two minutes between one massive explosion and the next. In those films the sky was seldom blue for long. Black billows, orange flame, and polychromatic geysers of flying debris filled the screen at irregular intervals, while on the soundtrack the crack, roar, and shatter of battered matter was as common as music, although not quite so common as gunfire and wailing. Both Maestra and Suzy sometimes watched such movies because they imagined that this was what his life must be like in the Central Intelligence Agency. Silly girls.

Switters endured a half hour of it before ripping off his headset, quaffing his drink, and turning to the passenger in the next seat, a tall, wiry, sharp-featured Latino in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit. “Tell me, amigo,” said Switters in a voice just loud enough to penetrate the fellow’s earphones, “do you know why boom-boom movies are so popular? Do you know why young males, especially, love, simply love, to see things blown apart?”

The man stared blankly at Switters. He lifted his headset, but on one side only. “It’s freedom,” said Switters brightly. “Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.”

The Latino smiled, but it was not a friendly smile; it was, in fact, the sort of quasi-smile one observes on small dogs in the backseats of parked cars just before they begin to bark hysterically and try to chew their way through the window glass. Perhaps he doesn’t understand, thought Switters.

“Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. Comprende? People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That’s why they relish the boom-boom cinema. On a symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps.”

Feeling loquacious now, Switters might have gone on to offer his theory on suicide bombers, to wit: Islamic terrorist groups were successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the young men got to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public property to smithereens. Exhilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a light socket, volunteers would be few and far between. “Incidentally,” he might have added, “are you aware that there’s no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.” He said none of this, however, because the Latino had begun to grind his teeth at him. Yes, it’s an odd concept, grinding one’s teeth at another, but that’s unmistakably what the fellow was doing: grinding them audibly, too, and so forcefully that his bushy black mustache bucked and rolled as if it were a theme-park ride for thrill-seeking tamale crumbs, leaving Switters with no choice but to pierce the grinder with what some people have described as his “fierce, hypnotic green eyes.” He stared at the grinder so fiercely, if not hypnotically, that he gradually ceased to grind, swallowed hard, turned away, and avoided Switters’s gaze for the rest of the journey.

Aside from that, the flight was uneventful.

He arrived at Jorge Chávez International at two o’clock Monday morning with a dull, dry headache. He was subject to moderate migraines, for which air travel was a definite trigger. Reading intelligence reports concerning Peruvian guerrilla activity while drinking Bloody Marys hadn’t helped. The pain behind his eyes escalated as he went through the rigmarole of getting Sailor Boy cleared by customs. Had he not been carrying papers stating, falsely of course, that he was temporarily attached to the United States embassy, he might have been there until Christmas. Sometimes Langley was capable of marvelous efficiency.

Carrying the shrouded parrot cage in his right hand, he used the left to steer a luggage cart through clusters of surly men who wore brown uniforms and shouldered automatic rifles. These were the Policía de Turismo. Their duty was to protect foreign tourists from the pickpockets, purse-snatchers, bag-slashers, muggers, con artists, bandits, and revolutionary thugs who were as thick in Lima as seeds in any pumpkin. On occasion, the police themselves were the problem. (During his last trip to South America, he’d been forced to shoot a policeman in Cartagena, Colombia, who tried to rob him at gunpoint. The man lived, but Switters still had nightmares about it, hearing in his dreams the unbelievably loud echo of his Beretta as he shot the man in the wrist to disarm him, and the screaming as Switters pulverized both of the scumbag’s kneecaps to insure that he would never again leap out at a victim from behind a badge. Switters believed that law enforcement officers who themselves broke laws should receive sentences twice as severe as civilians who committed the same crimes, for the criminal officer had not only betrayed a sacred public trust, he or she had also undermined the very concept of justice and fairness in the world. A crooked cop was every bit as much of a traitor as was a seller of national secrets, and should be punished accordingly.)

At the Gran Hotel Bolívar, there were even Policía de Turismo in the worn though still opulent lobby. Most were napping in faded overstuffed armchairs. One who was standing scowled suspiciously at Sailor’s cloth-covered pyramid, but he chose not to investigate and Switters registered with no more than the typical delay.

Without bothering to unpack, he popped an Ergomar pill for his headache and went straight to bed. It was four in the morning. The hour when Madame Angst knits large black sweaters, and blood sugar goes downstairs to putter around in the basement.

He awoke, groggy, at ten-thirty and opened the blinds just enough to illuminate the telephone. First, he called Hector Sumac, the reluctant recruit, and arranged to meet him for a late dinner. He’d keep his fingers crossed that Hector would actually show up. Then, he phoned Juan Carlos de Fausto, a guide recommended by the hotel desk clerk, and scheduled for midafternoon a tour of Lima’s more important cathedrals and churches. Switters was considering converting to Catholicism in order to please Suzy, who was devoutly religious. He’d make a terrible Catholic—he found organized religion in general to be little more than a collective whistling past the graveyard, with dangerous political undertones—but he enjoyed ritual, if it was pure enough, and certainly infiltration was a tactic not entirely unfamiliar to him.

Ritual he liked, but compulsory routine he hated. Thus, he resented every minute that he now had to surrender to showering, shampooing, shaving, and flossing and brushing his teeth. If mere men could devise self-defrosting refrigerators and self-cleaning ovens, why couldn’t nature, in all of its complex, inventive magnificence, have managed to come up with self-cleaning teeth? “There’s birth,” he grumbled, “there’s death, and in between there’s maintenance.”

Having said that, he went back to bed and slept for three more hours.

Before leaving on his tour, Switters contacted the housekeeping staff to warn them that there was a parrot in his room. Sailor was quite jet-lagged, so disoriented he wouldn’t eat, and it was unlikely he would cause any commotion, yet all it would take would be a screeching “Peeple of zee wurl, relax!” as an unsuspecting maid came through the door, and Switters could find himself in a situation similar to that experienced by his grandmother a dozen years ago.

At the time Maestra had had in her employ a normally competent servant named Hattie. One day, while Maestra was away at an all-day computer workshop sponsored by North Seattle Community College, Hattie added to her list of chores the cleaning of the pyramid birdcage. In the process, she scrubbed Sailor’s water dish, which, admittedly, was rather funky, with a popular household cleaning product that went by the brand name of Formula 409. Parrots, alas, are unusually sensitive to chemical odors. Perhaps it was the solvents in Formula 409, perhaps the 2-butoxyethanol, but when Sailor went to drink from his now immaculate dish, the lingering fumes, subtle though they were, overcame him, and he passed out cold.

Hattie thought he was dead. Desiring to spare her employer the trauma of dealing with a freshly deceased pet, she wrapped the comatose bird in newspaper and placed it in the trunk of her car. Leaving Maestra a sympathetic note, she then drove home to prepare an early supper for her semi-invalid father, after which she planned to dispose of the corpse. While Hattie was busy in the kitchen, her father hobbled out to the car, looking for something or other. When he opened the trunk, the parrot, now fully revived, flew out in his face, wings flapping furiously, and squawking like the mad conductor on the night train to Hell. The poor man had a heart attack from which he never fully recovered.

It took Maestra a day and a half to coax Sailor down from the fir tree in which he’d taken refuge, and as for Hattie, her reaction was that of the typical contemporary American: “I’m suffering. Therefore, somebody must owe me money. I’m hiring a lawyer.”

Eventually the judge dismissed Hattie’s suit as frivolous, but not before it had cost Maestra more than thirty grand in legal fees. She hadn’t had a servant since.

Because Switters lacked confidence in his Spanish—he was considerably more fluent in Arabic and Vietnamese—and because he wished to make certain that the hotel staff understood that the object of his concern was a parrot, he pulled from his jacket pocket a Polaroid snapshot that Maestra had taken, using the automatic timer, moments before he departed the house on Magnolia Bluff. To the maids struggling to comprehend, he pointed out the cage and its gaudy occupant. It was there in the snapshot. Switters on the left, Maestra in the middle, Sailor on the right.

Or, as Maestra had written in a wavering hand on the lower border of the photo: the Slacker, the Hacker, and the Polly-Wanna-Cracker.

Inspecting his reflection in a full-length, gold-framed mirror, one of several baroque ornaments whose bombastic tendencies were rendered meek by the dramatic stained-glass dome atop the lobby, Switters commented, “Don’t look like no slacker,” and if the truth be told, he probably didn’t. The saving grace of places such as Lima was that they afforded him an opportunity to wear white linen suits and Panama hats, which is precisely how he was attired at the moment. The suit bore the label of a famous designer, but for all of the pussy in Sacramento, he couldn’t have identified which one. It had a yellowish tinge, due to lack of proper maintenance.

Completing the ensemble was a T-shirt, solid black except for what at first glance appeared to be a tiny green shamrock above the left breast, but which on scrutiny proved to be the spiderlike emblem of the C.R.A.F.T. Club, a secretive society with branches in Hong Kong and Bangkok, whose members met periodically to imbibe strange beverages and discuss Finnegans Wake. When asked about it later, members would answer, “C.R.A.F.T.”—Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing—and for the most part, they wouldn’t be lying. Switters also wore black sneakers and chomped on a skinny black cigar that somewhat resembled an iguana turd. He liked the way he looked but knew better than to pretend it mattered.

With respect for fellow guests, if not the Policía de Turismo, he waited until he was outside before torching the cigar. No sooner had he expelled the first perfect smoke ring than he was approached by a stoop-shouldered, balding, middle-aged gentleman with kind eyes and a light dusting of mustache hairs above a sincere smile. The man introduced himself as “Juan Carlos de Fausto, English-speaking guide to all attractions and points of interest in this, the City of Kings.” Señor de Fausto was the person who, for thirty-five U.S. dollars, would give Switters a tour of Lima’s holy sites and who, free of charge, would give him advice that would indirectly, but severely and irrevocably, alter the course of his life.

From the Gran Hotel Bolívar, it was but a short walk along the Jirón de la Unión mall to the Plaza de Armas and Lima’s main cathedral. The notorious coastal fog had burned off, and the afternoon had turned unseasonably hot. The mall was sizzling. It was also teeming. A pickpocket stir-fry.

Juan Carlos, parting a surf of aggressive vendors, led Switters across the plaza and into the rather stark, dimly lit cathedral. He showed his client the coffin that held the remains of Francisco Pizarro, made sure he admired the intricately carved choir stalls, and described for him the earthquake that had flattened most of the building and disassembled Pizarro’s skeleton (knee bone no longer connected to the thigh bone) in 1746. One thing he neglected to explain was why Lima’s most important cathedral had no name. Silently, Switters christened it Santa Suzy de Sacramento.

On foot, they visited the other churches in the Centro: Iglesia de la Merced, Iglesia de Jesús Maria, Santuario de Santa Rosa de Lima, San Pedro, San Francisco, Santo Domingo, and Iglesia de las Nazarenas, edifices in which myriad generations had schemed to catch the eye of God with gold leaf, carved wood, and garish tiles. Vaulted ceilings strained to scuff their lofty beams on the doormat of Heaven, only to be yanked back to earth by the leaden weight of statuary and a sad geology of catacomb bones.

Later, Switters and Juan Carlos pushed through the swarming vendors—Indians in rainbow ponchos peddling pottery, mestizos in Chicago Bulls T-shirts hawking pirated cassette tapes—to the guide’s 1985 Oldsmobile, lovingly buffed but hopelessly battered, and drove to the Convento de los Descalzos, a sixteenth-century monastery with two lavish chapels; and to several outlying churches.

If cities were cheese, Lima would be Swiss on a waffle. Its avenues were moonscapes of potholes. After banging and bouncing over ubiquitous craters, as well as dodging traffic even more anarchistic than Bangkok’s, the two men found Lima’s religious buildings islands of peace. Glum, maybe, morbid, perhaps, but in contrast to the busted infrastructure, rackety commerce, and thievery-on-parade, nothing short of serene.

At one point during the tour, having observed that Switters never knelt nor genuflected and that he had to be frequently reminded to remove his hat and stub out his cigar, Juan Carlos could no longer restrain himself. “Señor Switter, I am suspecting that you are not being the Catholic fellow.”

“No. No, I’m not. Not yet. But I’m thinking about joining up.”

“Why? If you do not mind me asking.”

Switters pondered the question. “You might say,” he eventually replied, “that I have a special feeling for the virgin.”

Juan Carlos nodded. He seemed satisfied with the response. Naturally, there was no way he could have guessed that Switters was referring to his sixteen-year-old stepsister.

The sun dropped into the horizon line like a coin dropping into a slot. The ocean bit it to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. Twilight softened the city visually but did not hush it. If anything, Lima became more raucous, more crowded, more menacing with the coming dark. Switters kept his wallet in his front pants pocket, kept his Beretta in his belt. He belonged to that minority who had yet to accept the rip-off as an inescapable fact of modern life.

Their tour completed, the guide and his client stopped at a working-class bar for a glass of pisco. Who would have thought that the juice of the grape could be transformed into a substance so near to napalm?

“Heady, no?” exulted Juan Carlos.

“Quintessentially South American,” grumbled Switters.

In the course of conversation, Switters revealed to Juan Carlos his plan to repatriate Sailor Boy. For some reason, it struck the guide as a horrid idea. He warned his client that there was an unpublicized but widespread outbreak of cholera in the countryside and that the Marxist marauders known as Sendero Luminoso or “Shining Path,” thought to have been eradicated in 1992, had come back to life and revived their campaign to murder innocent tourists as a means of improving the lot of the Peruvian poor. The American explained that he’d been inoculated against cholera and that he’d had run-ins in other countries with self-styled “liberators of the people” and they didn’t scare him a bit. He said the latter in a whisper, however, well aware of the prevailing political climate in bars such as this one.

Juan Carlos countered that the cholera vaccine was only about 60 percent effective and that he hadn’t realized that a dealer in farm equipment led such an adventurous life. (Switters had passed himself off as an international sales representative for John Deere tractors.) Furthermore, he would bet Switters another glass of pisco—”Not on your life, pal”—that his grandmother was already in remorse over her decision to return her longtime pet to the wild, and that if Switters went through with such a rash exercise, he eventually would join his dear relation in profound and protracted regret. Juan Carlos was adamant about his sense of impending tragedy, and to convince his foolish client, he begged him to come along on a brief drive. Switters agreed, if only to avoid a second pisco.

They motored to the posh neighborhood of Miraflores, parked, slipped through a hedge, crossed an overgrown garden—stirring up in the process a bloodthirsty billow of bugs—and tiptoed onto a patio, from where they might peer through the windows of an elderly, distant relative of Juan Carlos. This scene, naked parrot, merciless mosquitoes and all, has already been described.

If the guide expected that a peepshow of a feeble widow and her feeble bird, blinking and stumbling toward the grave in each other’s company, expected that a stolen exhibition of enduring and everlasting owner-pet fidelity would melt his client’s heart and move said client to facilitate a joyous reunion between grandmother and ill-advisedly emancipated parrot, then he was mistaken.

However, the first thing Switters did when he got back to the hotel was to go on-line and check his box. An e-mail message from a repentant Maestra canceling her instructions and insisting that Sailor be returned to her care with all due haste? No, not surprisingly, there was nothing of the sort. Maestra would never be counted among those millions who permitted loneliness to compromise their principles, their judgment, their taste.

The single message on the screen was a coded one from the spookmeister at Langley, reminding Switters to “obey protocol” and inform the Lima station of his presence and intent in the city. Well, he’d think about it. The word obey, from the archaic French obéir and the earlier Latin obedire, meaning “to give ear,” entered the English language around 1250, the year in which the goose quill began to be used for writing—and to this day, should one give ear, one can detect the stiff scratch of the goose quill in its last syllable. For his part, Switters associated obey with oy vay, the Yiddish cry of woe or dismay, and while there was absolutely no etymological justification for it, it did provide a hint that obey was not the kind of word to make him glad.

“Sorry, pal,” Switters said to Sailor as the bird watched him apply calamine lotion to a galaxy of mosquito bites. “I’d love to spend some quality time with you, but duty calls.” No sooner did he exchange his C.R.A.F.T. Club T-shirt for a fresh one in solid violet, splash on some Jungle Desire cologne, and dilute the pisco aftertaste with a gargle of mouthwash than he was out the door.

A pothole-spelunking minicab carried him to a modest steakhouse in the Barranco, a district popular with students and bohemians. Hector Sumac was seated at table, sipping a North American beer.

“You dig the Yankee brewski?” asked Switters.

“This Bud’s for you,” answered Hector.

Thus was mutual identity established.

Hector Sumac proved to be a nerdy-looking fellow, pale for a Peruvian, with a shaggy pageboy haircut (Beatles, circa 1964) and those dinky little wire-rimmed spectacles commonly referred to as “granny glasses.” (Switters’s granny, by contrast, wore an outsized, owlishly round, horn-rimmed pair that made her look rather exactly like the late theatrical agent, Swifty Lazar.) Even sitting down, however, young Hector betrayed a fluid, athletic grace, and though he lacked bulk, he might be quick and tough enough, Switters thought, to give a good account of himself on the rugby field.

Switters ordered a Yankee beer as well, and the two men whipped up small talk, first about the unusually warm day and then about cybernetics. Hector was surprised—even impressed and amused—when Switters confessed that he used a computer only when it became unavoidable for efficiency’s sake.

“What interests me are the post-Newtonian, extrabiologic implications of a human species able to think and act using clusters of electrons: light, in other words. If the opening act of the evolutionary drama involved a descent from light into matter and language, then it only makes sense that in the closing act, so to speak, we reunite with our photonic progenitor. The role that language—the word—will play in our light-driven metamorphosis is the furry little question that cranks my squirrel cage. Say, didn’t the guinea pig originate in the Peruvian Andes?”

“But personally you do not boot up?”

“Sure I do, pal. E-mail’s a wonderful convenience—even when it’s goddamn hacked, but that’s another story. What I’m saying is I’m not gonna sit around for hours every day having nonorgasmic sex with a computer or a TV set. These machines will fuck the life right out of you if you give ’em half a chance.”

“I log on five or six hours a day,” admitted Hector somewhat sheepishly. “But I am always happy when I have the chance to read a good book.”

“Yeah? What do you read?”

“I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.”

“Good luck to you, pal. That’s a search these days.”

For the third time, an impatient waiter cruised up to their table. “This place is good for meat,” Hector said. “What is your favorite dish?”

Switters stared wistfully into space. “Spring lamb Roman Polanski,” he said.

“It is not on the menu, I am afraid.”

“Just as well. It’s an acquired taste.”

With gusto, Hector Sumac polished off a mixed grill of beef heart and kidney, a dish he had missed during his recent three years of scholarship in Miami. As for Switters, despite his professed hunger for baby lamb cakes, he was primarily a consumer of fish and vegetables, so he swam against the kitchen and ordered ceviche, picking warily at it, for, predictably, it was not the dewiest ceviche in town.

It was over dessert—fruited cornmeal pudding for each of them—that the two men got down to business. Having jumped to the conclusion that Hector had reneged on the arrangement with Langley due to late-blooming reservations about the CIA’s history of illegal interference in Latin American affairs, particularly, perhaps, its heinous behavior in Guatemala and El Salvador, not to mention Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, Switters had come armed with a response, an argument that would neither defend nor condemn Langley’s murderous hanky-panky but that would convince the recruit of the validity and necessity of his service. Ah, but when Hector explained his change of mind, his reason was of an entirely different tenor.

“Our federal administration is thoroughly corrupt . . .”

Yours and everybody else’s, thought Switters, but he didn’t wish to belabor the obvious.

“. . . and even though I now am employed in its Ministry of Communication, I cannot support it. On the other hand, the Sendero Luminoso is brutal and self-serving, so I cannot support revolution. Your—what is your soft name for it?”

“Company.”

“Yes. Right. Your ‘company’ has assured me that never would I be put in the position of betraying my people, my native land. . . .”

Heh! thought Switters, imitating, in his cranial echo chamber, Maestra’s ejaculation of incredulousness.

“. . . so I do not have the strong political objection to the surreptitious work for your ‘company.’ But, Agent Switter, I want very much to be completely honest in my dealing with you and your superiors, and the honest truth is, I, personally, could never fit in with your ‘company.’ I am of a different character.”

“What character’s that, pal?”

“Well,” said Hector, a tinge of reddening in his cheeks, susurration in his tone, “the shameful but honest truth is, what I am most interested in in life is sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

Thanks to various misunderstandings, rugby scrums, fender-benders, and occupational hazards, Switters was left with only eleven whole and healthy teeth. The inside of his mouth, in his opinion, so resembled a dental Stonehenge that he refrained from smiling broadly “for fear,” as he put it, “of attracting Druids.” Now, however, Hector’s guilty admission elicited a wide, open-mouthed grin that no amount of self-consciousness could censor—although much of what might have been revealed was obscured by pudding.

“Perfect,” he said. “That’s just perfect, Hector.”

The Peruvian was perplexed. “Please, what do you mean?”

“I mean that you’ll have a great deal in common with your new colleagues. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll are enormously popular in the CIA.”

“You are joking with me.”

“Not among the administrators, naturally, and not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best. You see, unlike the U.S. Forest Service or the Department of Energy, just to mention two of the worst, the CIA is not entirely an organization of bureaucratic meatballs.”

“But the ‘company’—the CIA, if I’m allowed to say that now—does not actually condone—”

“Officially, no. But there’s little it can do about it. Experienced recruiters understand completely what type of person makes the best operative or agent: a person who is very smart, educated, young, self-reliant, healthy, unencumbered, and relatively fearless. Well, a guy who’s smart, educated, young, self-reliant, healthy, unencumbered, and fearless is a guy who, chances are, is going to reserve a big place in his affections for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It goes with the territory. And it’s tolerated. Sure, from time to time there’re cowboys who slip through the net. . . .”

“Cowboys?”

“You know: flag-wavers and Bible-thumpers. Trigger-happy patriots. They’re the ones who create the international incidents, who’re always embarrassing the CIA and the United States and getting innocent people killed. Of course, they tend to win promotions because basically they’re the same kind of dour-faced, stiff-minded, suck-butt, kick-butt, buzz-cut, macho dickheads who oversee the company as political appointees, but anyone who truly understands the art and science of intelligence and counterintelligence will tell you that the cowboys mostly just get in the way. The gods dropped ’em in our midst to generate misery and gum up the works. You’re aware, are you not, Hector, that the gods are tireless fans of slapstick?”

It was Hector’s turn to smile. “You have a festive manner of speech, Agent Switter. If you are at all typical, and if you are not pulling my legs, I think I am going to enjoy very much my association with this CIA.”

“Atta boy.”

“And so, dinner is complete, yet the night is still ahead. Tell me, Agent Switter, do you like to dance?”

“Why, yes, I do. Just a couple of days ago, as a matter of fact, I danced for hours without a break.” He neglected to mention that he was alone at the time.

Hector Sumac’s drug of choice, at least for that October evening, was a clean, beige, relatively mild form of Andean cocaine. Switters wanted no part of it. “Thanks, pal, but I tend to avoid any substance that makes me feel smarter, stronger, or better looking than I know I actually am.” There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. Should he ever aspire to become voluntarily delusional, then good old-fashioned alcohol would do the job effectively and inexpensively, thank you, and without the dubious bonus of jaw-clenching jitters.

Nevertheless, Switters sat with Hector while he snorted a few lines. They sat in Hector’s ‘97 Honda. The vehicle was still immaculate, but if Lima didn’t hasten to allot a few billion nuevos soles to street repair—the tyranny of maintenance—it wouldn’t be long before Hector’s proud chariot would be shaken and beaten into a spring-sprung tumbleweed of automotive nerves. At present, however, it exuded that peachy, creamy, new-car aroma, and inhaling it, Switters was led to wonder if part of the appeal of young girls wasn’t the fact that they gave off the organic equivalent, the biological equivalent—okay, the genital equivalent—of a new-car smell.

When Hector was sufficiently tootered up, he ejected the Soundgarden cassette to which they’d been listening, and the two men walked the block and a half to the Club Ambos Mundos, arriving shortly before eleven o’clock. Five nights a week, the Ambos Mundos, like most clubs in Lima, featured live Creole music, but each Monday it was taken over by a hipster deejay who played the latest rock hits from the U.S. and Great Britain. Blue lights apulse, the place was rocking to Pearl Jam when they made their entrance.

Switters’s broad, tanned, big-boned face was at all times abuzz with an activity, a radiance, of randomly spaced scars, which, though delicate as sand shrimp and variable as snowflakes, created an impression of hard history; and which, when combined with the intensity in and around his emerald orbs, caused him to look potentially dangerous. That impression was offset, however, by the irrefutable sweetness of his smile, a smile that possessed the capacity to dazzle even when held in check to hide chipped teeth, which it usually was. (Since every time he had them fixed, it seemed his teeth just got abused again, he had made a vow to abstain from further dental work until his forty-fifth birthday.) So, perhaps dangerous is not quite the right word for his countenance. Maybe disconcerting or conflicted or unpredictable would be more accurate—although for some drab souls, unpredictable and dangerous are synonymous. At any rate, women did not find his appearance unintriguing, and when the muscular gringo stepped—jaunty, yet somehow dignified—through the door in his white suit and guarded smile, two or three bamboo-colored curls snailing out from under his Panama hat, there was a sudden quickening of more than one female pulse.

Over the next ninety minutes, Switters danced with an assortment of women, local and foreign, but by midnight—the hour when myth’s black cat pounces on time’s mechanical mouse—one in particular was in orbit around him. Her name was Gloria, she was Peruvian, and she was drinking too much too fast. Saucy and petite, Gloria wore her short hair in bangs, similar, in fact, to Hector; and her eyes were like chocolate-dipped cherry bombs with their fuses lit. In her mid-twenties, she was a tad old for his specialized taste, but when she pressed her pelvis against his during the slow dances, when she poked holes in his breath with a vodka-heated tongue, his body forgot about Suzy, and beer by beer, his mind followed suit.

He was experiencing a growing appetite for Gloriapussy, and he figured that her alcohol consumption was not dimming his prospects. Indeed, she had become so disheveled, wild-eyed, and flushed that she would have looked more at home in a tangle of sweat-soaked bedsheets than there on the crowded dance floor. Nevertheless, he was surprised when she whispered wetly in his ear, “I desire you to chew my nipples.”

Dancing away from her, he executed a twirl. When they came face-to-face again she said rather loudly and with a giggle, “I desire you to eat my breasts.”

Chew? Eat? Perhaps it was a language problem. Perhaps Gloria meant lick or suck or nibble—oral activities in which he might have been a willing participant—but lacked the English for it. “You have a festive manner of speaking,” he said, borrowing a line from Hector, and led her back to their table.

Hector sat across from them, an urbanized, dyed-blond Indian girl on his lap. He seemed alert and under control. Langley would approve. Switters felt the urge to talk shop with him, to impart, perhaps, Switters’s somewhat novel notion that the CIA was on the verge of evolving into a kind of autonomous secret society (a larger, better funded, better organized version of the C.R.A.F.T. Club), a reverse hierarchy whose fundamental function was to work behind the scenes to distract the powerful and covertly thwart their ambitions so that intelligence (true intelligence, which is always in the service of serenity, beauty, novelty, and mirth) might actually flourish in the world, and some shard of humanity’s primal innocence be preserved. Alas, the music was too loud, and Gloria was tugging at his sleeve.

“Yes, dear?”

“I desire you to fuck me in the culo.”

At first he thought she said “cooler,” and he had a vision of them entwined on the frosty, bloodstained cement of one of those refrigerated lockers, with waxy yellow and red sides of beef swinging from iron hooks all around them, their exhalations condensing the instant they panted or sighed so that they kissed through a mutually generated cloud and could not see each other’s faces.

“I desire you to fill up my ass,” she elaborated.

Well, he thought, that’s South America for you.

“With premium or regular?” he asked.

As Gloria giggled uncomprehendingly, he rose on an impulse, retrieved his hat, and gave Hector an affectionate squeeze of the shoulder.

“No! Please! You are not leaving?”

“Afraid so. It’s getting vivid in here, if you catch my drift. Good luck, pal. Ha sido estupenda. I’ll be in touch.”

As he headed for the exit, he called, “Order Gloria there a pot of coffee. And don’t forget to put it on your expense account. The company’s a mile-high Santa Claus with an elastic sack.”

On the taxi ride back to the Centro, he passed one of the cathedrals he had visited earlier that day. It was the one with the statue of the angel on its porch. Once while playing Ping-Pong with Suzy—one of the rare times he was left alone with her—he had asked her what language she thought the angels spoke. “Oh,” she answered, without missing a stroke, “probably the same one Jesus speaks.”

“The historical Jesus is believed to have spoken Aramaic. Of all the possible languages, why would the heavenly hosts choose to converse in a long-dead Semitic dialect from southwest Asia? Do you suppose.”

She looked so puzzled that he regretted at once having broached the subject. Suzy was a “babe in Christ,” as the Bible refers to them, and “babes in Christ” become quite unhappy when asked to actually think about their faith. “Whatever,” she said cryptically, and smashed a shot past his outstretched paddle.

“I guess it wouldn’t matter whether we could comprehend angel talk or not,” he conceded. “They’ve got those trumpets and flaming swords, and glow-in-the-dark accessories, they’d find a way to get their point across. I’m multilingual, so I’ve been told, but I spend a lot of time in countries where I can’t understand the language at all. And you know, Suzy, I’m coming to prefer it that way. It’s uplifting. When you go for a while without being able to understand a word of what anybody around you is saying, you start to forget what banal bores our blathering brethren be.”

Suzy found that highly amusing, and when they traded ends of the table for the next game, she allowed him a fleeting fondle—which, of course, assured her of victory in the match.

Incidentally, Switters and his friends lumped all CIA agents into one of two categories: cowboys or angels. They spoke the same language, the cowboys and the angels, but with different emphasis and to far different ends.

It was approaching 2 A.M. when he reached the Gran Hotel Bolívar, and the lobby was not surprisingly shadowy and quiet. No sooner had he walked in, however, than a figure shot from one of the overstuffed chairs and began walking toward him. His hand slid to the pistol in his belt.

The figure was stoop shouldered and a little gimpy.

“Señor Switter. Who do you find to buy your tractors at this late hour?”

“Why, Juan Carlos, I’ve been to midnight mass.” He shook hands with the guide. “Didn’t see you there. The priest was asking about you. He’s worried you aren’t getting enough rest.”

“Do not joke, señor. I could not rest for the thinking of your situation. You have changed your mind about breaking the heart of your dear grandmama?”

“No, my plans are firm. But don’t worry, pal. My grandmother’s tough as a plastic steak. And she’s adamant about giving that cracker-snapper its freedom.”

Juan Carlos looked as downcast as a busted flowerpot. “If you take it to Iquitos,” he said, “it will not be free for long.” The guide explained that despite its romantic reputation as an exotic jungle town and the capital of Amazonia, Iquitos had grown into a city of nearly four hundred thousand residents, and logging and farming were pushing the rain forest farther and farther from its streets. “You must go fifty kilometers from Iquitos in any direction to find the primary jungle, and even there your bird may not be safe. The parrot market in Iquitos is very big, señor, very extensive. Your grandmama’s friend will only be captured and put in another cage. Eventually, some stranger will buy it and take it away—perhaps to the U.S. again.”

Well, that would never do. And Juan Carlos went on to warn of cholera germs that were currently careening through Iquitos like a soccer mob. “Your inoculation, I fear, will offer only minimal—”

“Okay. I get the picture. Iquitos is gonna wrinkle my rompers, gonna squeak my cheese. So, what’s the alternative? I have the distinct feeling that there’s an option up your sleeve.”

“For your own safety, señor, and for the peace of mind of your grandmama.”

“I understand, Juan Carlos. You’re a good man.”

“I have taken the liberty to cancel Iquitos and arrange for you the noon flight to Pucallpa.”

“Pucallpa?!”

“Sí. Yes. It is the much more small city, and, guess what, do you know?—it is the more shorter flight from Lima.”

“That may be true, but from what I’ve heard, Pucallpa’s not exactly Judy Garlandville. And it hasn’t been kind to the forest, either.”

A couple of Policía de Turismo had stirred from their doze and were giving them the old law-enforcement stink-eye. Switters was hardly intimidated, but Juan Carlos nodded toward a space by the elevator, and the two men strolled over there to continue their talk more privately.

“Pucallpa is more rough but is also more gentle. Is that sounding crazy?”

“Not at all. Only the obtuse are unappreciative of paradox.”

“Yes, but you will not wish to remain in Pucallpa, for, you see, it is a city also and is also having a parrot market.”

Switters’s intention was to fly into a jungle town—Iquitos had been his original choice, but Pucallpa would do—and hire a vehicle to take Sailor and him to the edge of the forest for the release ceremony. He thought of it as a ceremony because Maestra had stuffed her camcorder into his crocodile-skin valise and insisted upon his videotaping the event. Now, Juan Carlos was telling him that the parrot wouldn’t be safe within miles of either city and, furthermore, that the outskirts of those jungle towns would not provide a scenic backdrop for Maestra’s viewing pleasure, being littered with oil drums, lengths of abandoned pipe, and the rusting remains of dead machinery.

“This is the ideal,” confided Juan Carlos. “You hire the boat in Pucallpa. Boat with the good motor. A boy named Inti has the good boat and a little English. This boat takes you up the Rio Ucayali. South is upriver. Before you reach Masisea, a tributary will branch off to the east. Is named Abujao, I think. These rivers in the Amazon basin are changing like the traffic lights, like the moon, like the currency. Inti will find it. If you come to Masisea you have come too far.”

“What am I looking for?”

“For the village named Boquichicos. On the Rio Abujao near the Brazil frontier. Boquichicos was one of the new towns founded by our government for the oil business, but they founded it with the strict environmental considerations. The oil business did not prosper, but the town, she is still there. Very small, very nice. Remote.”

“Yeah, I got the feeling you were talking serious boondocks. How remote? How long’s the dream cruise from Pucallpa?”

“Oh, is merely three days.”

“Three days?!”

“It is now at the end of the dry season. The rivers run low. So, maybe four days.”

“Four days? Each way? Forget it, pal. I don’t have that kind of time, and if I did I wouldn’t spend it up some damn creepy river.” Switters was about to lift his T-shirt to display the number of insect wounds he’d managed to suffer right there in metropolitan Lima, but a glance at the tourist cops made him think the better of it.

“Not for the happiness of a poor old woman who has so long sacrifice for you, who may soon be call to the side of Jesus . . .”

“Heh!”

“. . . not for to protect and reward the old loyal pet?” Juan Carlos went on to explain that what made Boquichicos special was its proximity—an hour’s walk—to a huge colpa or clay lick that was visited daily by hundreds of parrots and macaws. The guide could not imagine a more pleasurable or compatible retirement home for Sailor, and Switters had to admit that such a locale would provide video footage destined to win Maestra’s personal Oscar. She’d be ever grateful. Briefly, he entertained a vision of himself lying on a bearskin rug before the Snoqualmie cabin’s stone fireplace, the Matisse oil—now his own—pulsating like a blue chromosphere of massive meaty nudity above the mantel. (Dare he include Suzy in that cozy fantasy? Better not.)

“What about predators? You know, uh, ocelots, jaguars, big vivid serpents?”

“There are those, Señor Switter, and also the accurate arrows of the Kandakandero, these Indians who use the bright color feathers for to decorate their bodies. But with so many birds from to choose in the big, big forest, it would be like the odds of the national lottery.”

“Lots of birds, but only one well-fed white boy from downtown North America.”

Juan Carlos laughed. “Do not worry. The Kandakandero are the most shy tribe in all Amazonia. They will hide from you.”

“Yeah? Too bad. I might interest ’em in one of our John Deere chicken-pluckers. I’m certain it’ll do its job on toucans and macaws.”

“So, you will go?”

Switters shrugged. There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure, we can resist. But a knob that won’t turn, a door that sticks and never budges, is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from our tight hinges, deprived of any other chance in life to swing open into unnecessary risk and thus into enchantment.

Legend has it that Switters went into the Amazon wearing a cream silk suit, a Jerry Garcia bow tie, and a pair of white tennis shoes. To set the record straight, he wore a suit all right, he wore suits everywhere and saw no reason to make an exception for Amazonia; but his trouser legs were tucked into calf-high rubber boots, purchased for the occasion; while his one bow tie, leather, designed not by Garcia but by Eldridge Cleaver, and which he wore only to meetings and functions attended by aging FBI men who’d yet to forget or forgive Cleaver’s Black Panther Party, was in the drawer where he’d left it in Langley, Virginia.

To further straighten the record, he hadn’t, at that point, the slightest intention of putt-putting to Boquichicos in a riverboat. Once in Pucallpa, he’d simply hire an air taxi, fly in, release Sailor, fly out. It would dent his vacation funds but would definitely be worth every cent. With any luck, he’d be back in Lima the following morning. This he did not mention to Juan Carlos, being by nature and profession a secretive person, though it was unlikely the guide would have objected.

To the contrary, for all of his concern about the parrot and its mistress, Juan Carlos expressed equal concern for the safety and comfort of Switters. “I am happy, señor,” he said as they parted company in the hotel lobby, “that you have not the big enthusiasm for our jungle.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because of danger. No, it is not anymore like the Amazon you see at the cinema, not so wild and savage along the big rivers, not so many animals anymore, not the headhunters or cannibals. If you are staying on the river, walking the short walk into the colpa and returning the same route, then you will be perfectly safe. More safe than Lima, to be frank. But some Norteamericanos they want to leave the river, leave the trail, run into the forest like the movie star, like the Tarzan. Big mistake. Even today, the jungle she have a thousand ways to make you sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Juan Carlos, it’s not my scene,” Switters said sincerely, having no inkling of what lay in store for him.

In bed, he tried to pray because he thought it might connect him in some way to Suzy, but he wasn’t adept at it, being overly conscious of the language, perhaps; not wishing to bore whoever or whatever was on the receiving end with hackneyed phrases, yet wondering whether ornamentation and witticisms might be inappropriate or unwelcome. Before he could get a rhetorically satisfactory prayer on track, his mind wandered to Gloria—many of Lima’s women were cultured and sophisticated, as he suspected Gloria might be when she wasn’t rendered crude by excessive alcohol—and he experienced a pang of regret, in his heart and his groin, that he hadn’t fetched her there beside him. It was his own fault, of course, for being so finicky.

The irony of Switters was that while he loved life and tended to embrace it vigorously, he also could be not merely finicky but squeamish. For example, what else but squeamishness could account for his reluctance to accept the existence of his organs and entrails? Obviously, he knew he had innards, he was not an imbecile, but so repulsive did he find the idea that his handsome body might be stuffed like a holiday stocking with slippery, snaky coils of steaming guts; undulating meat tubes choked with vile green and yellow biles, vast colonies of bacteria, fetid gases, and gobs of partially digested foodstuffs, that he blocked the fact from his cognizance, preferring to pretend that his corporeal cavity—and that of any woman to whom he was romantically attracted—was powered not by throbbing hunks of slimy, blood-bathed tissue but by a sort of ball of mystic white light. At times he imagined that area between his esophagus and his anus to be occupied by a single shining jewel, a diamond the size of a coconut whose brightness rang in all four quadrants of his torso.

Really, Switters.

He was up by eight and on-line by nine. (In between, he packed, grudgingly committed acts of bodily maintenance, and ordered room service breakfasts: poached eggs and beer for himself, a fruit platter for Sailor.)

At the computer he dispatched an encoded report to the economic secretary at the U.S. embassy, who happened also to be Langley’s station chief in Lima. Switters’s report was entirely professional, devoid of literary japes or sarcastic references to the irony of an “economic secretary” being ultimately devoted to undermining the host economy, the Peruvian economy being a sickly system whose sole vitality, top to bottom, was generated by the very coca drug trade the CIA was commanded to help eradicate. To the chief, a cowboy through and through, Switters merely reported that the lost sheep had returned to the fold, adding, for what it was worth, that in his opinion Hector Sumac (he used his code name) probably could be relied upon to engage in second-level espionage and assist in enforcement operations, but that it might be wise to wait several years before permitting him to run any Joes of his own.

The line between cowboy and angel could be no wider than an alfalfa sprout—Switters, himself, occasionally zigzagged that line—and while Hector gave promise of impending angelhood, Switters was wary of the Latin temperament, suspecting it to be unnecessarily volatile, and thus was hesitant to trumpet too loudly on Hector’s behalf before the fellow proved to him that he actually had wings.

Duty accomplished, and still at his deluxe, state-of-the-art, military quality laptop, Switters set about the task of worming his way into Maestra’s home computer. A trifle rusty at such maneuvering, it took him the better part of an hour, but eventually he crashed her gates, jumped over the guard dogs, and landed in her files, where he proceeded to delete each and every one of the e-mail notes that she had hijacked from Suzy’s mailbox. Assuming that she hadn’t printed it or downloaded it onto a disk, and he was pretty confident she had not, written evidence of his heat for his young stepsister had now been swallowed by an uncaring, nonjudgmental ether.

In its place he left the following announcement: “Don’t fret, Maestra, I’m still escorting Sailor into the Great Green Hell for you—only now I’m doing it out of love.”

And mostly he meant it.

Pucallpa was the Dead Dog Capital of South America. Quite likely, it was the Dead Dog Capital of the world. If any other city lay claim to that title, its mayor and Chamber of Commerce were wisely silent on the subject. Pucallpa did not boast of it, either—but Switters had eyes, had nose. He recognized the Dead Dog Capital when he saw it and smelled it.

Smell alone, however, wouldn’t have tipped him off. There were so many noxious odors, organic and inorganic, in Pucallpa—spoiled fish, spoiled fruit, decaying vegetation, swamp gas, jungle rot, raw sewage, kerosene stoves, wood smoke, diesel fumes, pesticides, and the relentlessly belched mephitis of an oil refinery and a lumber mill—that, on an olfactory level, mere dead dogs could hardly hope to compete.

Still, they were there, on view, concentrated along the riverfront but also in midtown gutters, shanty yards, vacant lots, unpaved side streets, outside the single movie theater, and beside the airport tarmac. It might be fanciful to imagine many varieties: a dead poodle on one corner, a Saint Bernard locked in mammoth rigor mortis on the next, but, alas, the canine corpses of Pucallpa invariably were mongrels, mutts, and curs and, moreover, seemed mainly to come in two colors—solid white or solid black, with only the intermittent spot or two.

To Switters, who cared even less for domestic animals dead than alive, the question was, What was the cause of so much doggy mortality? In his halting Spanish, he posed the question to several residents of that on-again, off-again boom town, but never received more than a shrug. In boom towns one paid attention to those things that might make one rich and, failing at fortune, to those things that made one forget. Since there was neither profit nor diversion in dead dogs, only the vultures seemed to notice them. And for every dead dog, there was a full squadron of vultures. Pucallpa was the Vulture Capital of South America.

“This is a baneful burg,” Switters wailed to Sailor. “I don’t like to complain, you understand, whining being the least forgivable of man’s sins, but Pucallpa, Peru, is polluted, contaminated, decayed, rancid, rotten, sour, decomposed, moldy, mildewed, putrid, putrescent, corrupt, debauched, uncultured, and avaricious. It’s also hot, humid, and disturbingly vivid. Surely, a fine fowl like you is not remotely related to those hatchet-headed ghouls—no, don’t look up!—circling in that stinking brown sky. Sailor! Pal! We must get us out of here at once.”

Easier said than done. As Switters learned from a booking agent soon after completing a walking tour of the town, a contingent of resurgent Sendero Luminoso guerrillas had attacked the local airfield three days earlier, destroying or damaging nearly a dozen small planes. Only two air taxis were presently flying, and both were booked for weeks to come, ferrying engineers, bankers, and high-stake hustlers back and forth between Pucallpa and the projects in which they had interest.

Sorely distressed, Switters was pacing the broken pavement outside the booking office, sweating, swearing, barely resisting the urge to kick a power pole, a trash pile, or the odd dead dog, when, from inside the pyramid-shaped parrot cage that sat with his luggage, there came a voice, high as a falsetto though raspy as a pineapple. “Peeple of zee wurl, relax,” is what it said.

It was the first time the bird had spoken since leaving Seattle. Thirty minutes later, in an overpriced but blessedly air-conditioned hotel room, it spoke again—the same sentence, naturally—and while there are those who may find this silly, the words lifted Switters’s spirits.

The flight over the Andes, the poison air of Pucallpa, the brain-boiling heat and pore-flooding humidity had combined to give him a migraine; and the headache had combined with the disappointment over the unavailability of air taxis to make him depressed. Fortunately, when Sailor squawked his signature line, Switters was instantly reminded of something Maestra had said almost twenty years before: “All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.

“The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It’s about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn’t give a rat’s ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there’s a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which, if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.”

“Yeah, but, Maestra—”

“Don’t interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in turn, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing’ll go wrong and it’ll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it’s playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That’s why, Switters my dearest, every time you’ve shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I’ve played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me—you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but that none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.”

“But what about self-esteem?”

“Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.”

All the while that his grandmother was assuring him that he was merely a cosmic zit, she was also exhorting him never to accept the limitations that society would try to place on him. Contradictory? Not necessarily. It seemed to be her belief that one individual’s spirit could supersede, eclipse, and outsparkle the entire disco ball of history, but that if you magnified the pure spark of spirit through the puffy lens of ego, you risked burning a hole in your soul. Or something roughly similar.

In any case, Sailor Boy’s squawky refrain reminded Switters of Maestra’s counsel. He felt better at once, but to insure that he’d keep things in perspective, that he wouldn’t again tighten up or inflate his minor misfortunes, he opened a hidden waterproof, airtight pocket in his money belt and withdrew a marijuana cigarette. Then, with a tiny special key that was disguised as the stem in his wristwatch, he unlocked the lead-lined false bottom that Langley had had built into his reptilian valise and unwrapped an even more secret piece of contraband: a compilation of Broadway show tunes.

After inserting the clandestine disk into his all-purpose laptop and cranking up the volume, he lay back on the bed, lit the reefer, and sang along zestfully with each and every chorus of “Send in the Clowns.”

He found Inti down at the lagoon—the Laguna Pacacocha—where many Pucallpans moored their boats. Suppertime, Inti was aboard his vessel boiling a stew of fish and plantains on a brazier fashioned from palm oil tins. The boat was what was known on the Rio Ucayali as a “Johnson,” meaning that it was a flat-bottomed dory, about forty feet long with a five-foot beam and low gunnels, driven by a seven-horsepower Johnson outboard motor. A quarter of it, amidships, was shaded by a canopy supported on bamboo poles. The canopy had once been all thatch but was now augmented by a sheet of blue plastic.

Switters was seriously questioning Juan Carlos’s description of it as a “good boat” until he looked around at the other Johnsons in the lagoon and saw that most of them were even more dirty and battered than Inti’s. What sold him on it, however, was its name: Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters. Henceforth, we shall refer to it as she.

As for her captain, Inti was stocky, gap-toothed, bowl-cut, calmly pleasant if somewhat melancholy, and probably in his late twenties, though with Indians age can be difficult to judge. If Juan Carlos had slightly overstated the worthiness of the boat, he had wildly exaggerated the competence of Inti’s English. Nevertheless, with a verbal and gesticular amalgam of Spanish, English, facial expression, and hand signal, the two men agreed on a voyage to Boquichicos, embarking early the following morning.

So, thought Switters, as he strolled back to the city center in the cherry-cola monkey-buttocks tropical watch-dial dusk, I’ve got a date with a virgin, even if she does look like an old whore.

In the hotel bar, the talk was almost exclusively about the raid on the airfield. The men who drank there were capitalists, connected to oil or timber interests (gold prospectors, would-be cattle ranchers, and dealers in exotic birds drank in the less expensive bars, workers in cheaper bars yet, while drug merchants drank in private villas, soldiers and policemen in brothels, and Indians in the street), and corporate sentiments ran hotly against the Marxist raiders. Because he was privy to classified CIA files, Switters knew that any number of the atrocities attributed to the Sendero Luminoso actually had been committed by government forces. In no way did this exonerate the guerrillas, for plenty of innocent blood mittened their hands as well.

Power struggles disgusted Switters, and usually his contempt for the combatants was distributed equally on either side. At the onset it was easy to favor rebellion because the rebels usually were struggling legitimately against tyranny and oppression. It had become a grotesque cliché of modern history, however, that every rebel success embodied a duplication of establishment tactics, which meant that every rebellion, no matter how successful, was ultimately a failure in that it perpetuated rather than transcended the meanness of man, and in that those innocents who managed to survive its bombardments would later be strangled by its red tape. (Czechoslovakia’s “velvet” revolution, nonviolent and generous of spirit, was so far proving to be a notable exception.)

Where is Peru’s Václav Havel? Switters wondered, although he supposed he might as well have asked, Where is Peru’s Frank Zappa, where is its Finnegans Wake? He squashed any impulse to pose those questions to his fellows in the bar. He, in fact, refrained from making eye contact with others in the bar. It was part of his training, and though it was a part he regularly ignored, on that occasion he intuited it to be prudent. Quietly, he ordered another beer. As if unwilling to allow his mental focus to shift to fantasies of Suzy, however, he began to silently lecture an invisible audience on the sorrow and betrayal inherent in any insurrection led by the ambitious, the bloodthirsty, or the dull; but since none of the points he made were new to him, he soon grew bored and went up to bed.

In the hallway, around the corner from his room, he spotted a pair of calf-high rubber boots sitting outside a door as if waiting for a valet to give them a polish. They looked to be nearly new, and they looked to be his size. I could sure use those babies where I’m headed, he thought, but because he liked to fancy himself morally superior to both the appropriators in government and the appropriators seeking to overthrow government—he had, after all, just attended his own lecture—Switters left the equivalent of thirty dollars rolled up in a condom and knotted around the doorknob. He even uttered a polite “muchas gracias” under his breath.

Cigar soup. That’s how Switters would have described the river. Campbell’s broth of stogie. It was the color of cigar tobacco, it smelled like the butt of a cheap cheroot, and every now and then an actual cigarlike entity would break the oily sheen of its surface to glide among the citrus rinds, plastic cartons, and Inca Cola cans that dotted the waters. These small torpedoes were, of course, neither waterlogged double coronas jettisoned by a listing Cuban freighter nor a species of blind Amazon trout but, rather, a sampling of the ocherous projectiles fired into the river night and day from the fundaments of Pucallpa. “A regular turd de force,” muttered Switters, who was, characteristically, repulsed.

No sooner were they upward of Pucallpa than the pollution cleared, as if the city’s garbage and sewage were thronging to a hu-man filth festival somewhere downstream: Dead Dogs Welcome. Like all jungle rivers, the Ucayali was perpetually silty, though less so in the so-called “dry” season (as Switters was soon to learn, it still rained once or twice a day), and two hours out, he could see fish and turtles and, occasionally, the bottom, for the Rio Ucayali was not especially deep. It was wide, however; more than a mile wide in places. A flat, broad, meandering stream, it bent, coiled, and doubled back on itself again and again, causing its length to exceed, many times over, a straight line drawn from its source in the southern Andes to the place where it jumped in bed with River Amazon way up north at Iquitos. All in all, the Ucayali was as great or greater than the Mississippi. The fact that few North Americans had ever heard of it should not be shocking, since a survey conducted in 1991 revealed that 60 percent of U.S. citizens could not find New York City on a map.

The knowledge that he could have flown to Boquichicos and back in an active afternoon instead of chasing his tail in slow motion around the loops of a giant liquid pretzel might have fattened his resentment toward the insurgents, with their special talent (typical of such groups) for lowering their boom-boom upon inappropriate targets, but by then Switters was resigned to a magical mystery tour, going so far as to consider (influenced, perhaps, by his halfhearted flirtation with Catholicism) that it could be deserved punishment for a particular sin that he’d rather not ponder.

Undoubtedly the heat was a salient feature of that hypothetical retribution, offering as it did a foretaste of the afterlife steam-cleaning promised in certain quarters to the morally gritty. (Surely there would be humidity and plenty of it in Hell. Hard to imagine a condemned sinner saying cheerfully, “Well, yes, it’s two hundred and sixty degrees down here, but it’s a dry heat.”) Switters lounged upon a cardboard couch fashioned for him beneath the canopy, but though he was kept shaded, he was not kept cool. Off the gleaming surface of the river, heat bounced like vectors from a microwave oven, bounced right into the boat, shady spot and all. As the day progressed it grew hotter yet, and Switters could feel if not actually hear streams of sweat gushing down his legs and into his rubber boots. The following day he would travel as nearly naked as Inti and the crew. Or, he would until the black flies struck.

The gap-toothed skipper of the Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters sat in the stern, his hand on the tiller/throttle arm of the outboard motor, his eyes rolled so far back in his head he might have been inspecting his own brain. Spot anything interesting or unusual, Inti? Frontal lobe seems a tad distended from here.

In the bow were two other Indians, boys of about fourteen. Or twenty-four. During rainy season, when the Ucayali was more often than not at flood stage, there were limbs, stumps, logs, entire trees (branches, bird nests and all) in the water, not to mention sudden rapids, and whirlpools mammoth enough to swallow a Johnson and not spit it out until closing time. Now, however, with the river as sleepy and sullen as pupils in ninth-grade algebra, there wasn’t a whole lot to look out for—only rarely did the Virgin meet another boat—but the crew stood its watch anyway, practicing, maybe, for more lively excursions.

Lashed in the stern with Inti were several cans of gasoline, the proximity of which seemed to have no bearing on the captain’s practice of chain-smoking misshapen hand-rolled cigarettes. Up front with the crew were such items as fishing gear, machetes, a tin of palm oil, a brazier made from empty tins, a couple of pots (heavily blackened, as if for a culinary minstrel show), and woven food baskets containing corn, beans, and plantains. There also were three bottles of pisco, and as Switters looked from the booze to Inti and back again, a dark puff of worry scudded his inner sky. Likewise mildly troublesome was the manner in which one of the food baskets rocked and jiggled. Switters hoped that it contained nothing more vivid than a chicken or two.

Under the canopy surrounding his cardboard chaise longue, was Switters’s luggage, consisting of a king-sized garment bag and the croc valise, as well as his electronic equipment and Sailor’s unusual cage. There was also a roll of mosquito netting, in which, to his dismay, he thought he could detect holes broad enough to admit the prima donna mosquito of the entire world and most of her entourage.

When, an hour out of port, one of the boys lifted the lid of the rocking basket to disclose a baby ocelot, Switters forgot his concerns for a moment and begrudgingly gave legs to a smile.

Except for the outboard motor, pushing the Virgin upstream at about six knots per hour against a seasonally flaccid current, there was little or no sound on the river, so when a loud, extended, imploring rumble issued from Switters’s stomach, all aboard, including the ocelot cub and the parrot, cocked heads and took notice. “Lunch bell,” announced Switters hopefully, to no immediate effect.

Ostentatiously he rubbed his abdomen. “Comida?” he suggested simply, not wishing to wax pleonastic. Again, there was an absence of response.

Taking squinting measure of the sun’s position, he reckoned the time to be 11 A.M., and his customized watch confirmed it. That meant they had been underway for nearly six hours, without so much as a coffee break. Small wonder his colon was singing arias from tragic third-rate operas. Apparently, however, the Indians had a rule against lunching before high noon, and Switters, ever sensitive about being tagged a soft, coddled Yankee, was disinclined to breach it. He’d swallow his juices and wait.

In terms of distraction, the landscape didn’t bring a lot to the table. Along the east bank (the west side was too distant to examine), the jungle had long ago been cleared to make way for cattle ranches. Alas, the forest-born, rain-leached soil was too thin to sustain grass cover for more than a couple of years. When their pastures expired, the cattlemen cleared more jungle and moved on, leaving the failed meadows to bake in the tropic sun, where they hardened into wastelands so lifeless and ugly they would have caused T. S. Eliot to start over and perhaps shamed the Up With People people into revising their slogan—although human events in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Beverly Hills hadn’t done much to temper their enthusiasm for the species. He’d attempt to describe this scene to Suzy the next time she petitioned to be whisked to McDonald’s. (Arrggh! Neither Suzy nor McDonald’s—in both cases he favored the fish sandwich—was something he wanted to be reminded of at the moment.)

Now and then they would pass an operative ranch: a few acres of temporary pasture dotted with beef, a hastily built hacienda, and off to one side, a cluster of thatched huts where Indian workers lived. What would it be like to reside in such a place? Did anyone think of it as “home”? Homeless and houseless may not always be synonymous. Home, for example, wasn’t a word Switters often employed when referring to the apartment in northern Virginia where he closeted his numerous suits (his sole extravagance) and armoired his plenteous T-shirts (not a syllable of product promotion on any of them), which was understandable, considering he rarely slept or ate in the place. The CIA had hired him as an analyst, chaining him to a desk at Langley, but after his supervisors reviewed his rugby tapes they granted him his wish to dive into the derring-do tank: three years in Kuwait, during which time he made frequent phantom forays into Iraq, earning a decoration for an act of valor that he was sworn never to discuss; five years in Bangkok, during which time his off-duty activities, above and beyond the C.R.A.F.T. Club even, had so incensed the U.S. ambassador there that the envoy managed to get him transferred; two years now trotting the globe in a role the company called “troubleshooter,” but which to Switters’s mind was not much more than an international errand boy.

The nomadic life had its drawbacks, but Switters would be the first to cheerfully admit that it cut way down on maintenance. When he considered that he had not one blade of lawn to tonsure nor brick of patio to patch; when he considered that no overly friendly stranger had ever tried to sell him storm windows, aluminum siding, or a Watchtower magazine; when he considered all of the condo association meetings he’d avoided (thereby sparing his poor brain from being quibbled right down to the stem), he had little choice but to rejoice. And additional joy ensued when he realized that the sun must now be directly overhead since no fragment of its aluminum siding any longer extended beyond the ragged edges of the Virgin’s canopy. Indeed, the hands of his watch were rendezvousing at the top of the dial for a midday quickie (the big hand chauvinistically on top as usual, as it was even on women’s watches).

“Noon!” he exclaimed, in case the others had missed it. He pointed to the sun. He pointed to the larder. “Who’s the chef on this tub? The sous-chef? The pâtissier?” His glance took in the three bottles of pisco. “I doubt I need inquire about the sommelier.”

At neither end of the boat was there movement or acknowledgment, so Switters stood up, the better to attract attention.

“Lunch,” he said. His tone was even, rational, devoid of any knuckle of bellicosity. “That’s what we call it in my country. L-U-N-C-H. Lunch. I’m fond of lunch. I am, in fact, a lunch aficionado. Give me liberty or give me lunch. Breakfast comes around too early in the day, and dinner can interfere with one’s plans for the evening, but lunch is right on the money, the only thing it interrupts is work.”

His voice rose slightly. “I require lunch on a daily basis. I’m insured against non-lunch by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and Blue Cheese. Finicky? Not this luncher. I eat the fat, I eat the lean, and I lick the platter clean. Normally, I do shun the flesh of dead animals. Live animals, as well: bestiality is not a part of my colorful repertoire, although that is really none of your business. But in the dietary arena, pals, I have nothing to hide, and would at this juncture gladly masticate and ingest Spam-on-a-stick if you served some up. All I’m asking is that you serve something up, and speedily. I become grumpy when denied my noontide repast.”

A hint of the histrionic now entered his delivery, and he pumped up the volume a decibel or two. “A hearty lunch is essential for growing bodies. Beyond that, it’s a many-splendored thing. Man does not live by deals alone. Lunch is beauty. Lunch is truth. The Rubenesque beauty of chocolate pudding soaking up cream. The truth embodied in the Brechtian dictum, ‘First feed the face.’ Butter the bread, boys! Split the elusive pea! Hop to it! Lunch justifies any morning and sedates the worst of afternoons. I would partake. I would partake.”

Inti and the boys stared at him, to be sure, but their expressions were closer to indifference than curiosity or appreciation. Inti’s face, in particular, seemed glazed by those smooth sugars of inscrutability that are widely, if incorrectly, believed to flavor certain ethnic types. Frustrated that his rhetoric had inspired not a twitch of culinary action, Switters, stomach growling all the while, sat back down to reason things out.

It could be coca leaves, he reasoned. A cud of coca was reputed to keep a Peruvian Indian chugging from dawn to dusk and kill his appetite for lunch in the process. Another reason, thought he, to eschew the toot tree. He had missed one lunch already in the past few days due to XTC. Coca was to dining what late-night television was to sex, and he was about to say as much, to no one in particular, when he noticed a stalk of midget bananas partially protruding from under a roll of tattered mosquito netting that lay alongside the provisions. Well, eureka, then!

Tossing aside the netting, he reached for the bananas, only to yelp and jump backward in alarm as his fingers came within an inch of the ugliest spider he’d ever laid orbs on. Now that got a reaction from his stoic shipmates. Their faces contorted, their bare feet stamped, and they issued strange hissing sounds that must have been some Amazonian equivalent of laughter, persisting in such demonstration while he backed steadily away from the stalk and its inhabitant, a blondish creature that resembled, in size and hair-cover, an armpit with legs.

It wasn’t a tarantula. Switters was familiar with tarantulas. No, this living emblem of evolutionary perversity wasn’t merely hairy, it was sprinkled with purple spots—an armpit with a rash—and its pupilless white eyes rolled about the brow of its cephalothorax like mothballs in a lapidary. Yes, and it was rearing back on its hindmost legs in a most unfriendly presentation.

As Switters continued to retreat, finally reseating himself on his cardboard divan, the Indians continued to express amusement. Maybe I should open my own comedy club in Pucallpa, mused Switters. Call it Arachnophobia. Instead, he opened his valise. Rummaged among his shorts and socks and handkerchiefs. And fished out the automatic pistol.

“Nothing personal,” he said, as he stood facing the stalk. “I respect all living things, and I’m aware that to you, I, myself, must appear a monstrosity. But you’ve got my goddamn bananas, pal, and this is the law of the jungle!”

With that, he fired off about a dozen ear-splitting rounds, blowing bits of spider and banana all over the bow. “Anyone for fruit salad?” he asked politely.

Indeed, when the smoke cleared there wasn’t much left of the bunch. Green shreds, yellow dollops, hairy confetti. Digging around in the organic debris, he did, however, find four and a half survivors. The half-banana, he presented to Sailor. The remainder he calmly peeled and devoured, one after the other, smiling with humble satisfaction.

“Now,” he said to the Indians, who had become very still and very respectful (even the ocelot looked upon him with awe when it finally came out of hiding), “how about a soupçon of after-lunch conversation? It’s my opinion—expressed before the C.R.A.F.T. membership in Bangkok on February 18, 1993, and reiterated here for your consideration—that the syntactic word-clusters in Finnegans Wake aren’t sentences in the usual sense, but rather are intermediate states in a radiating nexus of pan-linguistic interactions, corresponding to—”

He broke off abruptly and did not continue. There were two reasons for this:

(1) Despite experiencing an acute craving for some intellectual stimulation, even if he had to supply it himself—and from Maestra he’d inherited a tendency to become periodically enraptured with the wheeze of his own verbal bagpipes—it did not long escape his notice that his monologue was not merely masturbatory but condescending.

(2) He couldn’t remember a fucking thing.

About that time the rain came.

A rank of ample black clouds had been double-parked along the western horizon like limousines at a mobster’s funeral. Rather suddenly now, they wheeled away from the long green curb and congregated overhead, where, like overweight yet still athletic Harlem Globetrotters, they bobbed and weaved, passing lightning bolts trickily among themselves while the wind whistled “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

Then they merged into one sky-filling duffel bag, which unzipped itself and dumped its contents: trillions of raindrops as big as butter beans and as warm as blood. His protective canopy notwithstanding, Switters thought he might drown.

In twenty minutes or less, the downpour was over. It took the boys twice that long, using Inti’s cooking pots, to bail out the boat.

If, during the interval in which it was obscured from view, the sun had seized the opportunity to do something un-sunlike, there was no lingering evidence. The sun was pretty much in the same position as where they’d left it a deluge ago, and it rapidly resumed wilting them with its nuclear halitosis. The sun, however, might generate radiation until it was red in the face, might stoke its furnace until it reached twenty million degrees Fahrenheit, it still could not begin to demoisturize the Amazon. Switters wouldn’t be truly dry again until he was back in Lima, and even there he would find himself dampened—from the exertion of muscling a wheelchair.

That night, after a surprisingly delicious dinner of corn and beans, Switters slept in the Virgin. She had been beached on a sandbar. The sand would have made a softer mattress, but it was subject to visitation by reptiles. There was even worry that a myopic or excessively lonely bull crocodile might try to mate with his valise.

The stars were as big and bright as brass doorknobs, and so numerous they jostled one another for twinkle space. Because the mosquito population was equally dense, Switters spent the night rolled up in his netting like a pharaonic burrito, a crash-test mummy who couldn’t see the stars for his wrapping. Visual deprivation was compensated for by auditory glut. From the sewing-machine motors of cicadas to the beer-hall bellows of various amphibians, from the tin-toy clicks and chirps and whirs of countless insects to the weight-room grunts of wild pigs, from the sweet melodic outbursts of nocturnal birds (Mozarts with short attention spans) to the honks and whoops and howls of God knows what, a rackety tsunami of biological rumpus rolled out of the jungle and over the river, which stirred its own sulky boudoirish murmur into the mix.

An additional sonic contribution was made by Inti and his crew, who, following dinner, took a bottle of pisco, threadbare blankets, and the banana-splattered mosquito netting and disappeared into the bush. Off and on for hours, the younger boys issued loud, primitive cries, as if Inti were beating them out there. Or . . . or . . . or something else. Something South American.

(As opposed to, say, Utahan. Recently, a Mormon gentleman in Utah had been shocked silly by the discovery that his wife was actually a man. They had been married three years and five months. It was an oversight that never would have occurred in South America, where the prevailing Catholic ethic seemed to stimulate rather than suppress vividity.)

When at dawn Inti gently shook him awake, Switters was surprised that he’d been sleeping, and even more amazed that he felt reasonably rested. As Inti helped with the unwinding, Switters emerged from the swathes of netting like a butterfly escaping its cocoon. “Free at last, oh, free at last!” he exulted, hopping onto the sandbar, where he danced a little jig. The Indians regarded him with a mixture of fondness and fear.

Throughout bathing and breakfast, the air around them was torn by the chattering, shrieking of monkeys, and as the darkness faded Switters could see parrots in the treetops, parrots in the air, parrots and more parrots. Keenly alert, in a heightened state of awareness, Sailor was bouncing up and down on his perch.

“Hmmm. You know something, pal? I could spring you right here, couldn’t I? We’re seventy miles from Pucallpa, the jungle’s starting to jungle in earnest, you’ve got cousins by the dozen out there. I could open your door, record your exit for posterity, and get my poor South Americaed butt back to somewhere cool and clean and crispy. You’d be happy, Maestra’d probably be happy, and God knows I’d be happy. Shall we go for it? What do you say?”

Sailor didn’t say anything, and in the end Switters resisted temptation. Why? No sound reason beyond the fact that Juan Carlos de Fausto had presented him with a harebrained scheme, and for harebrained schemes Switters was known to have something of an affection.

Inti pointed to the orange frown of sun that was grumpily forcing itself above the distant Andean foothills. Then he pointed directly overhead. He rubbed his belly and shook his bowl-cut. Switters got the message. “Okay,” he sighed. “No comida.”

“Si, señor. No comida. Lo siento.” Inti was apologetic. Even a bit ashamed. Lunch was simply not a tradition aboard the Little Virgin. Ah, but there was a lunch substitute. Shyly, Inti held out his hand. In his palm was a folded packet of green leaves, about the size of a matchbook. Inti was extremely nervous, giving Switters the impression that the Indian had never offered coca to a white man before. Switters made it clear that he was honored, but he politely refused. He’d already decided that the next time he felt hunger trying to kick-start its motorcycle, he would still the shudders and silence the rumbles with meditation.

He was out of practice, having meditated with increasing infrequency since he left Bangkok. He was also well aware that meditation was intended neither as a diversion nor a therapy. Indeed, if he could believe his teacher, ideal meditation had no practical application whatsoever. Sure, there were Westerners who practiced it as a relaxation technique, as a device for calming and centering themselves so that they might sell more stuff or fare better in office politics, but that was like using the Hope diamond to scratch grocery lists onto a bathroom mirror.

“Meditation,” said his teacher, “hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ‘cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It’s then and exactly then that you’re sensing the true nature of the universe, you’re linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you’re content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there’s the only place to be.”

Obviously Switters’s meditation teacher was no Thai monk or Himalayan sage. His guru, in fact, was a CIA pilot from Hondo, Texas, by the name of Bobby Case, known to some as Bad Bobby and to others as Nut Case. He was Switters’s bosom buddy. The U.S. ambassador to Thailand, who sported a bitchy wit, referred to the pair of them as the Flying Pedophilia Brothers, a nickname to which they both objected. When Switters complained that it was slanderous and unfair, Bobby said, “Damn straight it is. I don’t mind being called a pedophile, but your brother?!”

As a CIA agent who “sat” (that is, meditated), Bobby Case wasn’t the rarity the uninformed might suppose. Thirty or forty years earlier, Langley had exposed a relatively large number of its field hands to meditation, yoga, parapsychology, and psychedelic drugs in a series of experiments to see if any or all of those alien potents and techniques might have military and/or intelligence applications. For example, could LSD be employed as a control mechanism, could meditation counteract the attempted brainwashing of a captured U.S. agent?

The experiments backfired. Once the guinea pigs had their veils lifted, their blinders removed by their unexpected collisions with the true nature of existence, once they gazed, unencumbered by dogma or ego, into the still heart of that which of which there is no whicher, they couldn’t help but perceive the cowboys who bossed them, the Ivy League patricians who bossed their bosses, as ridiculous, and their mission as trivial, if not evil. Many left the company, some to enter ashrams or Asian monasteries. (One such defector wrote The Silent Mind, a premier book on the subject of sitting.) A few remained with Langley. They performed their duties much as before, but with compassion now, and in full consciousness. No longer “blowing smoke up their butts,” as Bobby Case described maya, the folly of living in a world of illusion. They continued to meditate. Sometimes they taught meditation to promising colleagues. Awareness was passed along, handed down. Thus was angelhood expanded, perpetuated.

Bobby, who had been the recipient of an older agent’s wisdom, saw the angel in Switters the moment he met him. Not every angel meditated. Some even shunned drugs. The two things they all had in common were a cynical suspicion of politico-economic systems and a disdain for what passed for “patriotism” in the numbed noodles of the manipulated masses. Their blessing and their curse was that they actually believed in freedom—although Switters and Bad Bobby used to speculate that belief, itself, might be a form of bondage.

Incidentally, this angel vs. cowboy business: didn’t it smack rather loudly of elitism? Probably. But that didn’t worry Switters. As a youth, he’d been assured by Don’t-Call-Me-Grandma Maestra that the instant elitism became a dirty word among Americans, any potential for a high culture to develop in their country was tomahawked in its cradle. She quoted Thomas Jefferson to the effect that, “There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent, and virtue.” Switters had pointed out that either way, aristocracy seemed to be a matter of luck. Maestra responded tartly, “Virtue is not something you can win in a goddamn lottery.” And, years later, Bobby had told him, “What shiftless folks call ‘luck,’ the wise ol’ boys recognized as karma.” Well, if the CIA angels were a true elite within a false elite, so much the better, true being presumably preferable to false. It didn’t really matter to Switters. What mattered was that he could taste a kind of intoxicating ambrosia in the perilous ambiguities of his vocation. Angelhood was his syrup of wahoo. It made his coconut tingle.

In any event, that day on the vivid South American river, Switters stripped down to his shorts. They were boxer shorts, and except for the fact that they were patterned with little cartoon chipmunks, they weren’t much different from what Inti and the boys were wearing. He sat with crossed legs, his hands resting palms upward on his shins. Maestra, his lifelong influence, didn’t know the first thing about meditation, while ol’ Nut Case, his inspiration in that area, would have chided him for sitting so pragmatically, so purposefully, using zazen as a surrogate tuna sandwich. “Hellfire,” Bobby would have snorted, “that’s worse than drinking good whiskey for medicinal purposes, or some unhappy shit like that.” Switters didn’t care. He straightened his back, lined up his nose with his navel, cast down his gaze, and regulated his breathing; not tarrying, for it was only a trial: taking the damp and dirty folds of cardboard that would serve as his zabuton on a test drive, so to speak. Everything clicked, in a clickless way. He was ready. When all echoes of breakfast faded and his gastric chamber orchestra struck up the overture to lunch, he would lower himself obliviously into the formless flux.

What he hadn’t counted on were the demons.

The demons came in the form of flies. Black flies—which, technically, are gnats. Simulium vittatum. The bantam spawn of Beelzebub. There must have been an overnight hatch of the tiny vampires, for suddenly they were as thick as shoppers, thirsty as frat rats, persistent as pitchmen. Switters swatted furiously, but he was simply outnumbered. No matter how many he squashed, there was always another wave, piercing his flesh, siphoning his plasma.

One of the Indians gave him a thick yellowish root to rub over his body. Combining with his perspiration to form a paste, the root substantially reduced the pricks of pain and drainage of his vessels, but a dark gnat cumulus continued to circle his head, and every five seconds or so, an individual demon would spin off from the swarm to kamikaze into his mouth, an eye, up one of his nostrils.

The attack continued for hours. Meditation was out of the question. Concentration, meditation’s diametric opposite, was likewise impaired.

At approximately the same time that the black flies descended, the river narrowed. Perhaps there was a connection. Up to that point, the Ucayali had been so wide Switters felt as if they were on a lake or a waveless bronze bay. Now, he could have thrown a banana from midstream and hit either shore. Or, he could have were he in shape. He was barely thirty-six, and his biceps were losing their luster. He’d tried to shame himself into logging some gym time, but any way you sliced it, working out was maintenance and maintenance was a bore.

At any rate, there was a strong sense of riverness, now, and that much was good. Rivers were the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men’s dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could. Rivers had transported entire cultures, absorbed the tears of vanquished races, and propelled those foams that would impregnate future realms. Everywhere dammed and defiled, they cast modern man’s witless reflection back at him—and went on singing the world’s inexhaustible song.

Switters guessed that they had left the Ucayali and entered the Abujao. Inti confirmed that they were on a secondary river, but Abujao was not a name he recognized.

The last signs of cattle ranching had petered out. The forest, thick, wet, and green, vine-snarled and leaf-tented, towered to nearly two hundred feet, walling them in on both sides. An impenetrable curtain, menacing, unrelieved, the jungle vibrated in the breezeless heat, dripped in the cloying humidity, and except for flights of parrots and the occasional flash of flower—a cascade of leopard-spotted orchids, a treeful of red blossoms as big as basketballs—grew quickly monotonous.

The river, on the other hand, was agurgle with antics. In exhibitions of reverse surfing, flying fish and freshwater dolphins leapt from the water to catch brief rides on shafts of sunlight. Then, putting a spin on that feat, cormorants, wings folded like a high-diver’s arms, would plunge beak-first into the water, presumably, since they rarely speared a fish, for nothing but cormorant kicks. On benches of gravel, heavy-lidded caimans did Robert Mitchum imitations, seeming at once slow and sinister and stoned. Cabbage-green turtles that must have each weighed as much as a wheelbarrow load of cabbages slid off of and onto mud banks and rocks, while frogs of various hues and sizes plopped on every side like fugitives from mutant haiku. (“Too damn vivid,” Bashō might have complained in seventeenth-century Japanese.) Around a bend, three tapirs, the mystery beast from Kubrick’s 2001, waded the stream. According to Juan Carlos, most of Peru’s tapirs had been killed off by hunters, depriving the animal of its right to inhabit the world and depriving the world of living proof of what would result were a racehorse to be mated with Porky Pig.

Because low water had exposed many rocks that in the rainy season would be well submerged, Inti was forced into almost constant maneuvering, and the Little Virgin could no longer average her customary six knots per hour. The slower pace, combined with the Abujao’s more abundant attractions, afforded Switters the opportunity for an unusual riverine interface. Despite his distaste for the incessant teeming that characterized tropical South America, he was by no means insensitive to natural wonders, and he felt he ought somehow to take advantage of this opportunity. There was a fly in the ointment, however. Simulium vittatum.

His attentive powers were blunted by the persistent need to throw wild punches at the proboscises of the diminutive Durante-esque devils—and to fend off larger, unidentifiable insects who kept trying to crash the party. In the entomological kingdom, the quest for lunch was ongoing. Switters could empathize.

No comida.

No concentración.

And meditación was out of the question.

The next morning, when Inti and the boys returned from the bush with their second empty pisco bottle and facefuls of sheepish expression, Switters held out his hand.

“Gimme coca,” he said.

Externally, day two on the olive Abujao mirrored day one. For thirteen more lunchless hours, they zigzagged among mossy boulders and through sopping streamers of feverish heat, attended by squadrons of black flies that refused to quit them until a late afternoon downpour literally drowned the biting bugs in midair.

Internally, the furniture had been rearranged. Switters was booming with vim. Impervious to hunger, he was possessed of such a quantity of unvented vigor that he longed to leap into the river and race the boat to Boquichicos. This he could not do, due to caimans, spiny catfish, the odd swimming viper, and the fact that he’d put his silk suit back on in order to expose less of his flesh to those South American things that would feed upon it.

Energized yet strangely at peace, he reclined on his rapidly moldering cardboard couch, his face, hands, and feet impastoed with the root goo that caused him to resemble a comic-book Chinaman (in real life, Asians were no more yellow in complexion than Caucasians were truly white), the wad of leaf in his jaw beckoning—reaching out!—to the massive green rampage of forest spirits along either bank. Or so it seemed. At some point he commenced to play with the baby ocelot.

That Switters was no pet-lover has been established. For days he’d paid keener notice to the wild parrots in the trees than to poor Sailor in his nearby cage. Yet, the truth was, he had sort of a soft spot for very young animals: for puppies, for bunnies, for small kitty cats. If only they wouldn’t grow up! He’d sometimes wished there was a serum with which one might inject pups and kittens, a drug that would arrest their growth and retard their descent into adulthood. Oddly or not, his liking for domestic animals was restricted to those months when they were still frisky, spunky, and playful, before they became cautious and staid, before their spontaneity was genetically assassinated and their sense of wonder crushed by the lockstep rigors of the reproductive drive and the territorial imperative.

During the period when Switters and Bobby Case were under fire in Bangkok, tattletale embassy personnel having observed them on more than a few occasions in the company of what the ambassador referred to as “underage” girls, Bad Bobby had addressed their alleged misbehavior. “It’s only natural,” he’d said, “that I chase after jailbait. I’m a midlife adolescent, I can’t make commitments, I’m scared of intimacy, and last but not least, I’m a piece of south Texas white trash who likes his pussy to fit tighter than his boots. But with you, though, Swit, it’s something different. I get the feeling you’re attracted to . . . well, I reckon I’d have to call it innocence.”

Unwilling to flatly deny it, Switters had asked, “Attracted to innocence in order to defile it?”

Bobby hooted and threw up his hands in mock horror. The girls in the Safari Bar all tittered because he was crazed Bobby Case and he was drinking with his crazed friend Switters. “You’re not fixing to feign a guilt trip on me, are you? ‘Cause if you are, I’m going on home and read Finnegans Wake.”

“You desert me in my hour of need, I’ll follow you home and read Finnegans Wake to you.”

“Oh no you don’t!” Bobby exclaimed, signaling frantically for another round of Sing Ha. The girls wanted to join them—the Safari girls loved Bobby and Switters—but the men bought them champagne and shooed them away. They were under fire and needed to talk.

“There’s folks,” said Bobby, “who think sex is filthy and nasty, and they’re spooked by it and mad at it and don’t want anything to do with it and don’t want anybody else messing with it, either. And there’s folks who think sex is as natural and wholesome as Mom’s apple pie and they’re relaxed about it and can’t get enough of it, even on Sunday.”

“Personally,” said Switters, “I think sex is filthy and nasty—and I can’t get enough of it. Even on Sunday.”

“Uh-huh. Yes indeedy. And it’s particularly nasty when it’s all sweet and fresh and innocent. Isn’t that how it strikes you, Switters? I believe you lingo jockeys refer to this as paradox.” He yelled “Paradox!” at the top of his lungs, and the girls laughed merrily. “Or, we could say that innocence and nastiness enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Symbiotic! For the connoisseurs among us. Also for young folks, who’re just busting with nastiness night and day, and have a completely innocent kind of awe of it.”

“You’re a troubled man, Captain Case. There’re dark forces at work in you, and I will neither sanction them nor be a party to their rationalization.”

“Yeah, well, don’t forget who your employer is. If you and me didn’t rationalize our butts off, we couldn’t look in the mirror to shave.”

“You haven’t shaved in a week.”

“Beside the point. What I’m trying to get at here—and I’m doing it on your behalf and in your defense, since I’m not fit to be defended—is that consensual, non-abusive, good-hearted fucking is not in and of itself defiling, not even to the very young.”

“It’s often a matter of cultural context.”

“There you go. Look at the ladies in this very room.” Bobby gestured wildly at a gaggle of chic bar girls huddled around the jukebox. They giggled and waved back at him. “At least half of ’em are as innocent as rosebuds.”

“Because their minds are still curious and their hearts are still pure.”

“There you go. Sure, the shadow of the big A is hovering over ’em like Death’s own helicopter, and they have to put up with the bedside manners of snockered Sony executives and unhappy shit like that, you know, and sleeping with jerks can definitely numb a person’s heart, but frequent fucking hasn’t traumatized ’em or even cheapened ’em, not these ladies or anyone else, except maybe in those unfortunate blue-nosed societies that are uptight about the body in general. It’s a matter of attitude.”

“Cultural context.”

“There you go. I read somewhere that in the olden days, when a girl reached a certain age—puberty, I reckon—she’d be initiated into sex by one of her uncles. Same with a boy, only an aunt would do the job. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. It was considered a highly important learning experience, the uncle and auntie were teachers, and it was a serious though evidently smiley-faced family duty. And the thing is, you know, there’s no evidence that this hands-on brand of sex education was anything but beneficial or that it ever left even the most itty-bitty psychological scar.”

“Well, that was then and this is now. Today, it’d land the kids in therapy and the adults in jail. For decades in both instances.”

“Different cultural context, if I can coin a phrase. And precisely why we should avoid America like the mumps. Thailand is perfect for an ol’ boy like me, who’s into sitting and hankers to be every niece’s uncle; and it’s perfect for a cat like you, who’s got this deep secret Jones for innocence.”

“Yeah, so deep and secret even I don’t know about it. Maybe you ought to consider, pal, that you might be indulging in a simple-minded supposition.”

“Supposition!” hollered Bobby, eliciting the usual amused response. “Okay, son. Forget it. You don’t appreciate my support, I withdraw it. I wouldn’t want to sully the Patpong night with any supposition.”

They went quiet for a while, pulling on their frosty Sing Has. Then Switters said, “In regards to my personal proclivities, you’re generating considerable flapdoodle.” Immediately he bawled, “Proclivities! Flapdoodle!” in a voice more thunderous than Bobby’s. He nodded at his friend and said softly, “To save you the trouble.”

“You’re a gentleman and I thank you. The ladies thank you, too.”

“However,” Switters resumed, “I have to say you’re correct when you suggest that loss of virginity is in no way equivalent to loss of innocence. Unless, of course, innocence is defined as ignorance.”

“In which case,” put in Bobby, “every sum bitch in the state of Texas is innocent as a snowflake. I share this with you as a fellow Texan.”

“You won’t find the term ‘Texan’ on a single document in my resumé.”

“Only because you’ve doctored your damn files. All-region linebacker at Stephen F. Austin High School. Or do I have you confused with some other, more studly, guy?”

“We only lived in Austin two years. And I spent both those summers with my grandmother in Seattle.”

“Well, let’s see: factoring in your age, that makes you one-eighteenth of a Texan. Woefully inadequate, I admit, but it probably accounts for your good looks.”

“And my appreciation of red-eye gravy.”

“Praise the Lord!” Bobby called for more beer. “By the way, I been meaning to ask you: how come you never went on to play football in college?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Seems every campus I visited on those, uh, recruiting trips, all the players ever talked about was money. Football was a business to them, even at the college level, and the lone dream they had in life was to be let loose in the NFL gold mine with an agent and a shovel. So, I decided to give rugby a whirl. Rugby’s every bit as rough and every bit as challenging, and a lot more fun because in America, at least, there’s never been a chance anybody could make a nickel on it. I guess I liked it because it was beyond the reach of commerce and hype. In rugby you were just a guy laying his teeth on the line for the sport of it, you were not a commodity.”

“Uh-huh!” Bobby crowed, with a triumphant smirk. “There you go. Attracted to purity. Switters, I rest my case.”

“Case, I rest my Switters,” countered Switters, and the pair convulsed with such silly, stupid laughter that even the bar girls shook their heads and looked the other way.

Bobby Case was soon to be reassigned to a U2 base in Alaska. It was rumored that upon his departure, the gutters of Patpong (Bangkok’s “entertainment” district) had run with women’s tears. Incidentally, despite Bobby’s description of himself as a “midlife adolescent,” he was several years Switters’s junior, a fact underscored by his twenty-seven-inch waist and boyish shock of skunk-black hair, and contradicted by the purplish crescents beneath his glint-and-squint aviator’s eyes. His last hours in Bangkok were spent in deep meditation at a Buddhist shrine, although in balance it should be reported that the evening prior, he’d addressed the C.R.A.F.T. Club for forty minutes on the first sentence of Finnegans Wake, which happened to be the only sentence of that book he’d ever read.

Switters was called home to Langley. He spent his last hours in Bangkok in the company of an actual adolescent. He bought her a new silk dress, jeans, and a compact disk player. Then he put her on a bus back to her native village with six thousand dollars in her pink plastic purse, her brief career as a whore at an end. She would rescue her family financially, and—since sexual shame was nonexistent in Thailand and he’d seen to it that she was free of disease—eventually marry her childhood sweetheart in a jolly public ceremony beside a field apop with ripening rice. The six thou he’d won from some Japanese businessmen in a baka hachi game that nearly sparked an international incident. As for Switters’s farewell presentation to the C.R.A.F.T. Club, his lecture on the Wake went on until nearly daybreak and is said to have concluded with him bleeding, in the nude, and crooning “Send in the Clowns,” a song the membership was shocked to learn he knew.

Switters was not much given to self-analysis. Perhaps he sensed that it forced the dishonest into even deeper deception and led the candid into bouts of despair. Consequently, he’d given little thought to Bobby’s characterization of him that Bangkok evening as a seeker after purity. And now, two years later, aboard a dory in the Peruvian Amazon, rolling a spotted cub back and forth on its spine and pondering, what he pondered was not so much any alleged attraction to innocence on his part but his indisputable attraction to Suzy, reasonably confident they were not the same thing.

Like many modern-day sixteen-year-olds, Suzy was at a juncture where innocence and sophistication converged, much as the olive-colored Abujao converged with the cigar-colored Ucayali, mingling, chaotically at first, their contrasting hues and oppositional currents. The time, no doubt, had passed when it might have been effective to inoculate Suzy with his hypothetical adulthood-prevention serum. Quite likely, it would have been a mistake at any stage. Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn’t fixity the hallmark of the living dead?

At any rate, to enumerate the ways in which Suzy had changed, he was obliged to picture how she’d been at the beginning. Initially, he had to strain to recall the details of their first meeting. Then, he had to strain to stop recalling them. All this Suzy straining was amplified, magnified, and possibly provoked, by the coca.

It had been four years. On leave and destined for Seattle, he’d stopped off in Sacramento at his mother’s request, to meet her new husband and stepdaughter. The husband, a well-to-do hardware wholesaler, had admitted him and after a minute or two of small talk, directed him to his mother’s sitting room. The door was ajar. Switters could hear voices. He rapped once and was charging into the room when his mother squealed and blocked his entrance. “No, you can’t come in! She’s trying on her training bra.”

Switters froze in his tracks, momentarily startled, then curious and thoughtful. “Oh, really?” he asked with great interest. “What’s she training them to do?”

There had erupted an unrestrained and altogether delicious giggle—really more of a girlish guffaw—and the slender figure that had been standing with her back to the door made a silky half-turn to look at him, swinging in the process a storybook pelt of straight blond princess hair. She was barefoot, he remembered, toenails twinkling with a pink-baby varnish. Her longish legs were bare to the brie-like thighs, at which point they vanished into white cotton shorts, stretched taut over a little rump so round Christopher Columbus could have employed one of its protuberances as a visual aid and bowled bocci with the other. Panty outline was in evidence. Above the waist she was naked, save for a dainty white harness, from which dangled shop tags of paper and plastic, and which she did not wear but, rather, clutched loosely at a distance of several inches in front of her chest. In that position it concealed only the nippled points of mammalian swellings, hard as quinces, that might have served as helmets for the marionettes in a German army puppet show—if the toy Huns were outfitted in winter camouflage. They were not quite in the tits category, but they had a running start at it.

Into view now, its prow piercing his reverie, came a dugout canoe, paddled by five loinclothed Indians with decorated faces and feathered coifs. These feathers had once been the exclusive property of individual parrots and macaws, a particular not lost on old Sailor Boy, whose reaction was anything but relaxed. “Come on, pal,” said Switters to the agitated fowl, “practice what you preach.” The wild canoers neither waved nor nodded at the crew of the Virgin; the Pucallpa clansmen ignored them as well. On the forest-shaded river, the boats passed in silence, twenty feet apart, as if the other did not exist. Switters looked imploringly at Inti, who shrugged and muttered, “Kandakandero.”

Okay, where was he? Staring at Suzy, Suzy staring back, he was captivated to the extent that he failed to hear a word of his mother’s prolonged greeting or to adequately return the maternal embrace; Suzy, openly curious, amused, and more self-conscious about her amusement than about her exposed breastlings, which she eventually covered almost as an afterthought. At twelve, modesty was a custom she had yet to fully assimilate. She stood there vacillating between poise and awkwardness, as if she were unsure just how much she had to protect.

The ghost of the guffaw still clung to her tumid lips, causing them to quiver, and in their quivering fullness they reminded Switters of one of those marine creatures that attach themselves to rocks and dare observers to guess whether they are animals or flowers. Her eyes were so large and moist and aqua they might have been scissored from a resort brochure, and her nose was fine, freckled, and slightly upturned, as if sniffing the air for hints of fun. Because she had experienced neither success nor failure in life to any appreciable degree, her countenance remained unwrenched by society’s dreary tugs but rather was lit by the fanciful phosphors of the mythic universe. Or, so he imagined. It would be no exaggeration to say she struck him as a cross between Little Bo Peep and a wild thing from the woods.

If Suzy viewed her new stepbrother as a glamorous, witty man of the world, scarred of cheek and mesmeric of eye, Switters viewed his new stepsister as a freshly budded embodiment of the feminine archetype, equally adept at wounding a man and nursing his wounds. Her frank gaze and expectant smile, the blithe lewdness of her posture and the resolute piety symbolized by the plain gold crucifix that swung from a chain about her never-hickeyed neck, combined to suggest something timeless, some hidden knowledge, ancient and innate, well beyond her years. Did he perceive in her (or project onto her) a glimmer of primal Eve, parting the original ferns? Of salty Aphrodite, scratching her clam in the surf? Of a callow Salome, naively rehearsing a hootchy-kootch that would rattle a royal household and cost a man his head? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t go that far. Maybe he only appraised her with the dum-dum delight with which the GI Elvis must have appraised the pubescent Priscilla.

What is certain is that he liked her instantly, as she liked him. At that point—it should be said in his favor—his feelings were honestly platonic. (The flutter in his scrotum he attributed to the long flight from Bangkok.) Lust would come later, catching him unaware, intensifying slowly, a lump of hard lard in a skillet over coals, that melted almost imperceptibly, not reaching its current and ongoing maddening sizzle until that past Easter, five months earlier, when, attending a family dinner at a Japanese restaurant, he’d fondled her under the low table while she held a menu in front of her face, pretending to experience difficulty in choosing between the lotus cake and the green tea ice cream for dessert. Arrrgh! Jesus on a pogo stick! Her sea-anemone mouth had fallen agape, and he could still see the way the red neon from the Kirin beer sign had reflected off her orthodontic braces. “For crying out loud, Suzy,” her dad had complained, as she struggled not to cry out loud, “why don’t you just order both.”

Emboldened by the coca, Switters unlocked the false bottom in his valise, an object to which the Indians still gave wide berth, fear-ing, perhaps, that it was inhabited by crocodile familiars, or at least impregnated with a magical essence. Pushing aside esoteric weapons, surveillance equipment, cryptography devices, and his aforementioned secret shame—the reproachful album of Broadway show tunes—he located and then withdrew an even more covert and humiliating item. It had yellowed a bit, and frayed, but was appreciably the same as it had been that day four years ago. (How surprised he’d been to later discover its friendly tail practically wagging from a hamper of unrecyclable clothing that his mother had condemned to the incinerator.)

For the next half hour or so, he dangled it just out of reach of the cub, who leapt in the air and swung at it repeatedly with its front paws. Then, on an impulse he’d prefer not to dissect, he pressed the skimpy article against his own face and held it there, as if some olfactory whisper of her might come wafting through the multitudinous stinks of time and space.

It turned out to smell like cordite.

The Indians watched him with complete acceptance. It was unlikely they had ever seen, or even imagined, a training bra and thus were immune to its implications. Moreover, they had come to treat Switters with a respect bordering on reverence. Perhaps that was due to the firepower with which he had dispatched the spider, perhaps it was his willingness to chew coca; or perhaps it was because, as they overcame their shyness and could finally look at him directly, they took notice of his eyes, eyes that it has become tiresome to again depict as “fierce,” etc., but that in point of fact, quite possibly could have stared down John Wayne, unnerved Rasputin, and hypnotized Houdini.

About an hour before sunset, Inti guided the Johnson into an eddy and stalled her motor. This in itself was not unusual. They normally traveled from five in the morning until six in the evening, stopping while there was enough light by which to cook supper. However, the shore alongside this eddy was quite marshy, and caimans as long as coffins lumbered on wicked claws among the reeds. It seemed an unlikely spot for camping.

Inti motioned for Switters to join him in the stern. There, the Indian attempted to communicate something of a relatively complex nature. Not many years earlier, Switters would have spent his time aboard the Virgin learning as much as he could of Inti’s language, a dialect of Campa, and with his linguistic talents, he might have picked up a fair amount of it. Nowadays, though, his interest in languages had shifted away from communicative utility; away, even, from revelatory rhetoric; had moved toward what he regarded as the future of language in the post-historical age: an environment in which words, relieved of some of their traditional burden, might be employed not to describe realities but to create them. Literal realities. Of course, he would have been as hard-pressed to define his proposed contribution to evolutionary linguistics as to define, with exactitude, his ultimate role in the CIA. He had ideas, he had plans, but they were as shadowy as the caimans that barked in the marsh.

Inti, nevertheless, managed to get his point across. The party was, at that moment, about three hours downstream from Boquichicos. They could find a suitable campsite for the night and travel on to Boquichicos in the morning. Or, they could just keep going, which would mean canceling supper (the boys had speared a fine mess of fish) and navigating the boulder-strewn river in darkness without so much as running lights.

Switters hesitated. In the reeds, the caimans rustled like drapery. In the air, thirsty mosquito clans gathered in great numbers, anticipating an uncorking of blood. Somewhere a monkey howled, and Switters’s gut, no longer lullabyed by coca (funny how much noise a ball of mystic white light can make), followed suit. He turned to Sailor for guidance. As usual, the parrot said nothing, but the way it perched—its weight on one foot, one wing slightly forward, its head tilted expectantly—reminded Switters of a bellboy awaiting a tip.

So, “To the Hotel Boquichicos!” he cried, waving like a battle flag Suzy’s peewee brassiere.

There were no bellboys at the Hotel Boquichicos. No bellmen, bellwomen, bellpersons, bellhops, belloids, belltrons, bellniks, bellaholics, bellwethers, belles-lettres, or “bellbottom trousers coat of navy blue.” Nothing of that sort. Inti and the lads were permitted to tote Switters’s luggage into the lobby (spacious, though virtually devoid of furnishings), but once past the door he was on his own. A mammoth moth (described earlier) had attempted to follow him inside but was dissuaded by a swat from his Panama hat.

A mixture of Creole music and oddly Spanish static (come to think of it, all static sounds vaguely Spanish) trickled from a vintage, nicotine-colored Bakelite radio hooked up to an automobile battery behind the front desk, while the clerk, a haggard, graying mestizo, spent more time examining the gringo’s passport than a pawnbroker might devote to a Las Vegas wedding ring. His scrutiny was illuminated by a pair of kerosene lanterns.

Spreading and flapping his thin arms, as if to encompass the vast jungle that lay outside, the clerk said in English, “You will find no buyers for your tractors here, señor.” Switters had presented his “cover” papers along with his passport. “I think you come very wrong place.” He issued a weaselly laugh.

With a weary sigh, Switters indicated the parrot cage and set about to explain, as succinctly as possible, his intentions in the fair city (he’d been unable to make out a bit of it in the darkness) of Boquichicos. Cautiously, but with surprising speed, the clerk handed him a rusty key and pointed to the staircase. The clerk wished to deal no further with what was obviously a madman.

“Electricity make from six to nine,” he called out, as if that were information to which even a visiting loco was entitled. Presumably, he meant in the evening.

The stairs were adjacent to what must surely have been one of the world’s longest bars. To walk its length in under nineteen seconds would no doubt qualify one for a place in some special Olympics. Had there not been a lamp flickering at its far end, it might have been perceived as extending into infinity. There were, Switters guessed, a minimum of forty barstools. Only one of these was occupied, it by a middle-aged foreigner. The man had sandy hair and a pink complexion, and wore pressed khaki shorts and a khaki shirt with military epaulets. Flip-flops dangled at an angle from his large pink feet, and a bottle of English gin kept him company. No bartender was in view. It took Switters two trips to lug his belongings up to his third-floor room (the third floor was the top floor: the second floor, Switters was to learn, was wholly unoccupied), and each time that he passed the solitary drinker, the fellow nodded and smiled encouragingly, hoping, it seemed, that Switters might join him.

Switters yawned ostentatiously, a signal that he was too tired for barroom conviviality. Indeed, he could barely wait for a hot shower and clean sheets.

The shower water, predictably, was tepid at best, and the sheets, while clean enough, were damp and smelled pungently of elf breath. Since the ceiling fan only rotated between the hours of six and nine (the river was presently so low that Boquichicos’s tiny hydroelectric plant could operate no more than that), the air in the room was thick and still. The air was like a flexed muscle, the bicep, perhaps, of some macho swamp thing showing off for a female swamp thing, green in both cases. So heavily did it weigh down on Switters that he felt he couldn’t have gotten out of bed had he wanted to. Despite the bed’s slimy texture and toadstool aroma, he didn’t want to. He reached out from under its mosquito netting and snuffed the bedside candle.

“Sweet dreams, Sailor Boy. This time tomorrow, if all goes well, you’ll be a free Sailor Boy. In fact, you won’t be Sailor Boy at all, you’ll be a wild thing without a name.”

Unable to decide whether or not he envied the parrot, Switters turned his thoughts, as he often did at bedtime, to the ways in which word and grammar had interfaced with action and activity during the day; had collided with, piqued, mirrored, contrasted, explained, enlarged, or directed his life. It so happened that something most unexpected, maybe even important, had occurred in the linguistic interface that very evening. To wit:

Athapaskan is the name given to a family of very similar languages spoken by North American Indians in the Canadian Yukon, as well as by tribes in Arizona and New Mexico, although the groups are separated by more than two thousand miles and have evolved various markedly different cultures. Now, astonishingly, it appeared that a dialect of Athapaskan might have migrated as far south as the Peruvian Amazon. As they parted company at the hotel entrance, Switters had first glanced hard at the pisco bottle in Inti’s hand and then at the boys huddled shyly behind him. Showing his coca-ruined teeth, Inti had smacked the nearest boy on the buttocks and, turning away, muttered, “Udrú.” It was intended as a private joke. Inti, in his wildest jungle dreams, could not have imagined that Switters would have recognized udrú as the Athapaskan word for “vagina.”

Ah, but Switters knew the word for vagina in seventy-one separate languages. It was kind of a hobby of his.

He grinned in the dark at the scope of his own expertise.

In the morning he managed a cold-water toilet, donned a clean white linen suit over a solid green T-shirt (its hue matched the air in the room), and went downstairs. The sandy-haired, baby-faced gent from the evening before still sat at the bar. Although he was perched on the very same stool, he presumably had not been there all night, for he, too, looked freshly shaved, and the gin bottle had been replaced by a pot of tea.

“I say,” he called to Switters in a decidedly British accent. “Searching for a spot of breakfast?”

“You, pal, have read my mind.” He hadn’t eaten since the previous dawn. “All those damned roosters crowing me awake before sunup, there’s got to be an egg or two on the premises. And if not, fruit will do. Or a bowl of mush.”

“Euryphagous, are we?” asked the man, instantly winning Switters’s friendship on the strength of his vocabulary. “And a Yank, into the bargain! Last night I took you for Italian. Your suit was a frightful mess, but it was a suit. Then, just now, I thought you might be a fellow subject of the Queen. Never expected to run across a Yank in a suit in bloody Boquichicos.”

“Yeah, well, as for Yanks, the old colony’s a variety pack, I’m afraid. You never know which or what is gonna show up when or where.” Switters settled onto the next barstool. “Tell me something: Is it cool—is it acceptable—to ask for papaya around here?”

The man raised a pair of sandy eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, uh, in the dialect of Spanish spoken in Cuba, they refer to that particular fruit as a bombita. ‘Little bomb.’ Which makes sense, considering its shape and everything. But in Cuban Spanish, the word papaya means ‘vagina.’ Which has a certain logic, as well, I guess. However . . .”

“Oh, yes, I see,” said the Englishman. “If one asks for a jugo de papaya in Havana, one gets a rather funny look.”

“Or a glass of juice that’ll put hair on your chest. So to speak.” When the Englishman slightly grimaced, Switters added, “Gives a whole new meaning to ‘bottoms up.’ “

“Rather. And afterward, I suppose, a chap would want a cigarette.” The man spoke dryly and without overt levity.

“Personally, I only got the funny look.”

“I see. Well. Have no fear. Unless I’m much mistaken, papaya in these parts will give offense to none.”

At that moment a disturbingly pretty mestizo girl, not much older than Suzy, emerged from the gloom with a tray of cornbread and tropical jams, which she set before the Brit. When she looked questioningly at Switters, he became flustered and blurted, “Bombita,” simply lacking the nerve to ask for papaya in the unlikely event that here, too, it might possibly mean . . .

“You’re wanting bombita, you better go see Sendero Luminoso,” she said, giving him the kind of wary, patronizing smile one might give a known lunatic. He blushed and quickly ordered eggs. Sailor would have to wait for his breakfast fruit.

Apparently too well-mannered to commence eating before the other was served, the Englishman retrieved from somewhere on his person a fine leather case. Embossed in gold upon its lid was a coat of arms and the legend, Royal Anthropological Society. “Oh, bugger!” he swore, after opening the case. “I seem not to have a one of my bloody cards. A chap gets lax in a place like this.” He wiped his large pink hand on his shirt and then extended it. “R. Potney Smithe,” he said. “Ethnographer.”

“Switters. Errand boy.”

They shook hands. The hand of Smithe (it rhymed with knife) was neither as damp nor as soft as Switters had feared.

“I see. I see. And are you running an errand in Boquichicos, Mr. Switters?”

“Most assuredly.”

“Contemplating a lengthy, um . . . errand run?”

“Au contraire.” Switters checked his watch. It was 6:13. “In about an hour, I’m scheduled to take a little nature walk. Then, provided I’m not overwhelmed by some aspect of the local fauna . . .”

“As well you might be. From this outpost to the Bolivian border, there exist twelve hundred species of birds, two hundred species of mammals, ninety or more frog species, thirty-two different venomous snakes—”

“. . . or flora . . .”

“A most immoderate vegetative display, you may be sure.”

“. . . I expect to depart here in midafternoon. Tomorrow morning at the very latest.”

“Pity,” said R. Potney Smithe, though he didn’t say why.

The girl reappeared with a plastic plate of fried eggs and beans. Switters worked his smile on her. If there was any reason to tarry in Boquichicos . . .

After they had eaten, Smithe lit a cork-tipped cigarette, inhaled deeply, and said, “No offense, mind you, and I hope you won’t think me cheeky, but isn’t it, um, difficult finding yourself an ‘errand boy’? I mean, a chap of your age and with your taste in attire.”

“Ain’t no shame in honest labor, pal. You must have had the occasion to observe honest labor, even if you’ve never actively participated.”

“And why wouldn’t I have done?”

“Well, no offense to you, either, Mr. Smithe . . .”

“Oh, do call me Potney.”

“. . . but, first, your accent reveals that you probably spent your formative years knocking croquet balls about the manicured lawns of Conway-on-the-Twitty or some such pretty acreage, where the servants did all the heavy lifting; and, second, you’re a professional in a branch of science that ought to be the most enlightening and intriguing and flexible and instructive of any branch of science—outside of, maybe, particle physics—and would be if the anthropologists had a shred of imagination or the dimmest sense of wonder, or the cojones, the bollocks, to look at the big picture, to help focus and enlarge the big picture; but instead, it’s a timid, dull, overspecialized exercise in nit-picking, shit-sifting, and knothole-peeking. There’s work to be done in anthropology, Potney ol’ man, if anthropologists will get off their campstools—or barstools—and widen their vision enough to do it.”

Smithe expelled a globe of smoke, and it bobbed just above them for a while like an air-feeding jellyfish or a rickety umbrella, slow to disperse in the cloying humidity. “Your accusation suffers, I daresay, not from lack of zeal but fact. Well spoken for an ‘errand boy’ but frightfully old-fashioned, I’m afraid, and from my point of view, more than a bit narrow in its own right. We ethnographers have a long history of direct participation in the everyday life of the cultures we study. We eat their food, speak their language, experience firsthand their habits and customs—”

“Yeah, and then you go back to your nice university and publish a ten-thousand-word monograph on the size of their water jars or their various ceremonial names for grandmother (maestra not being among them, I guarantee) or the way they peel their yams. Hey, the way they peel yams—clockwise or counterclockwise?—could be significant if it reflected some deeper aspect of their existence. Like, for example, if they use the same cutting motion in peeling a sweet potato that they use in circumcising a pecker, and that pattern consciously, deliberately replicates the spiral of the Milky Way or—and stranger things have happened—the double helix of DNA. As it is, you won’t or can’t make those connections, so all you end up producing is a lot of academic twaddle.”

“All right, let me have a go at that.”

“Hold on. I’m not finished. Surely, your knowledge of natural history is not so puny that you’re unaware that extinction is a consequence of overspecialization. It’s a cardinal law of evolution, and many a species has paid the price. Human beings are by nature comprehensive. That’s been the secret of our success, at least in evolutionary terms. The more civilized we’ve become, however, the further we’ve moved away from comprehensiveness, and in direct ratio we’ve been losing our adaptability. Now, isn’t it just a wee bit ironic, Potney, that you guys in anthropology—the study of man—are contributing to the eventual extinction of man by your blind devotion to this suicidal binge of overspecialization? Who’re you gonna write papers on when we’re gone?”

The girl returned to clear their dishes. Trotting out another of his seraphic smiles, Switters asked for papaya by its rightful name and was almost disappointed when she wasn’t embarrassed or insulted or coy but, instead, inquired matter-of-factly if he wanted mitad or totalidad: half or whole. (Even Switters’s nimble mind couldn’t picture half a vagina.)

Potney Smithe, who had remained nonplussed throughout the Switters tirade, coughed a couple of times and said, “If you’re talking about the need for more interdisciplinary activity in the academic community, I quite agree. Yes. Um. However, if you’re advocating speculation, or a breach of scientific detachment . . .”

“Detachment, my ass. Objectivity’s as big a hoax in science as it is in journalism. Well, not quite that big. But allow me to interrupt you again, please, for a minute.” He consulted his watch. “I’ve got to dash off and meet a guide.”

“Your nature ramble.”

“Exactly. But first I’d like to pass along a short, personal story, because it might explain my hostility toward your profession and why I may have seemed rude. Aside from the fact that I’m a Yank.”

“Oh, I say . . .”

“You’re the second anthropologist I’ve ever met. The first was an Australian—met him in the Safari Bar in Bangkok—and he’d done a fair amount of field work deep in the interior of New Guinea. Big juju in there, you know, loads of spooky ol’ magic. Well, this Ph.D. lived with one of those wild mud tribes for two years, and they sort of took a liking to him. So when he left, their shaman gave him a little pigskin pouch with some yellowish powder in it and told him that if he’d sprinkle the stuff on his head and shoulders, he’d become temporarily invisible to everyone but himself. He could go into the biggest department store in Sydney, the shaman promised, and help himself. Steal anything he wanted and nobody would see him. That’s what the powder was for. The anthropologist is telling me all this, see, but at that point he just chuckled and went back to his cocktail. So, I said ‘Well?’ And he said, ‘Well, what?’ And I said, ‘How did it work out?’ And he looked at me kind of haughtily and said, ‘Naturally, I never tried it.’ “

“His response disappointed you, did it?”

“Potney, I’m not a violent man. But it taxed my powers of restraint not to slap him silly. ‘Naturally, I never tried it,’ indeed. I wanted to grab his nose and twist his face around to the back of his head. The prig! The spineless twit!”

Potney lit another cigarette. “I appreciate your candor in sharing this anecdote. It does cast your prejudice in a more favorable light. If rightly viewed, I suppose your peevishness over the bloke’s . . . the bloke’s decorum is somewhat understandable.” He paused, staring into a bloom of smoke with a botanist’s engrossment. “Sometimes, however . . . sometimes . . . sometimes it really doesn’t pay to get too chummy with these primitive magical practices. If they don’t actually do you physical or psychological harm, they can steer you well off-track. I myself am proof of that, sorry to say. Had I not allowed myself to become fascinated with one of those Kandakandero buggers and his bag of tricks, I wouldn’t be back in this bloody place, waiting around for God knows what, mucking up my career and my marriage.”

He shoved his teacup aside and in a loud yet plaintive voice, cried out for gin.

“I’d be interested in hearing more about that,” said Switters, and he sincerely meant it, “but duty calls.” He took the saucer of papaya slices and slid off the stool.

“Perhaps I’ll see you later, then? I’d fancy an earful of errand-boy philosophy. An overview. The big picture, as you put it. Um.”

“No chance in hell, pal. But I appreciate the chat. Tell the señorita I’ll dream about her for the rest of my life. And hang in there, Pot. Ain’t nothing to lose but our winnings, and only the winners are lost.”

While Sailor pecked at papaya pulp, Switters, in his new rubber boots now, opened the shutters and parted the bougainvillea vines that nearly obscured the window. He was hoping for a view of town, but his room was at the rear of the hotel and looked down upon a clean-swept courtyard. There, white chickens scratched white chicken poetry into the sad bare earth, and a trio of pigs squealed and grunted, as if in endless protest against a world that tolerated the tragedy of bacon. Sudsy wash-water had been emptied in a corner of the yard, paving the area with soap-bubble cobblestones that glimmered in the morning sun. A couple of mango trees had been planted in the center, and though they were probably still too young to bear fruit, they produced enough foliage to shade the girl, who sat on an upturned crate, shelling beans into a blue enamel basin balanced on her lap. Her faded cotton dress was pushed up as far as the basin, affording a vista of custard thigh and, if he was not mistaken, a pink wink of panty. He sighed.

Tennessee Williams once wrote, “We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.” In a certain sense, the playwright was correct. Yes, but oh! What a view from that upstairs window!

What Tennessee failed to mention was that if we look out of that window with an itchy curiosity and a passionate eye; with a generous spirit and a capacity for delight; and, yes, the language with which to support and enrich the things we see, then it DOESN’T MATTER that the house is burning down around us. It doesn’t matter. Let the motherfucker blaze!

Did those thoughts constitute an “errand-boy philosophy”? Possibly not. But for the moment they would have to do.

Boquichicos proved to be as different from Pucallpa as the dory Virgin was different from a tanker ship. It was considerably smaller, quieter, cleaner, more benign. Switters recalled Juan Carlos de Fausto’s remark that Boquichicos was a planned community, founded by the government with “strict environmental considerations.” Basically, that was true. Whereas Pucallpa sprawled in anarchistic abandon, mindlessly fouling, pillaging, and devouring its natural surroundings, Boquichicos had been assigned firm parameters beyond which it was forbidden to slop or tentacle. As a result, the numinous emerald breath of the forest lay gently against the town’s whitewashed cheeks, while the river here serenaded the citizenry with an open-throated warble instead of a cancer-clogged rattle of death.

Laid out in classic Spanish style around a central plaza, every dirt street, of which there were only six, had been rolled level and smooth, every building except the church uniformly roofed in palm-frond thatch, giving it an Indian flavor. The walls of the edifices had been constructed with mud bricks and/or with lumber milled after clearing the town site, then proudly brushed with a blanching lime solution that had once made them shine but was now wearing noticeably thin. None of the structures, including the municipal hall, the hotel, and the church, was anywhere near as tall as the jungle trees that cast shade on their rear entrances, nor did their doorways match in breadth some of the trunks of those trees. Far and away the town’s most significant structure, its crown jewel, its saving grace, was its modern waste treatment facility. (Were they wise, the inhabitants would float daily candles of thanksgiving upon the sassafras-colored waters of their nifty little sewage lagoon.) Certainly Pucallpa could boast of no such nicety, and quite likely Iquitos couldn’t either.

There were perhaps a half-dozen trucks in Boquichicos—idle, scabious with rust, tires starting to sag: where was there to drive?—and not a single car. The town’s short streets, every one a dead end, were enlivened by pecking chickens, rooting pigs, yapping curs, and naked children, all of them skinny and soiled, though neither a glimpse nor a whiff of recently deceased canine intruded upon the Switters sensibility. Nevertheless, there were vultures circling—patient, confident of the more certain, and tasty, of life’s two inevitables—their necrophiliac radar sweeping the weeds.

And weeds there were aplenty. Egged on by fierce equatorial sunshine and soaking tropic rains, an amazing variety of plants invaded gutters and yards, threatening to take over the plaza, even, their bitter nectars slaking the thirst of Day-Glo butterflies and a billion humming insects of plainer hue.

Built to accommodate an oil boom that never materialized (geologists had vastly overestimated the potential yield of the area’s petroleum deposit), Boquichicos blossomed briefly, then shriveled. It had lost at least half of its peak population. Half stayed on, however, because housing was pleasant and affordable, and because they believed a more reliable boom—a timber boom—was right around the corner. It wouldn’t be long, the enterprising reasoned, before the Japanese had mowed down the great woods of Indonesia, Borneo, Malaysia, New Guinea, and possibly Alaska, and would be setting out in earnest to deforest west-central South America. In the Brazilian Amazon, they had already turned ancient majestic ecosystems into heaps of lifeless orange sawdust (one way to muffle vividity), and their buyers were becoming active around Peru’s Pucallpa. Soon, it was predicted, chainsaws would be snarling monstrous money mantras within earshot of the Boquichicos plaza (where that morning all manner of birdsong rang), and once again those forty-odd barstools at the hotel would be polished night and day by affluent or, at least, ambitious backsides.

Incidentally, some might wonder what a relatively small nation such as Japan could find to do with so much timber. Switters knew. CIA reports confirmed that millions of imported logs had been submerged in bays all along Japan’s coastline, salted away, so to speak, for that time in the not-too-distant future when much of the world had run out of trees. Switters also knew—and he thought about it with a mirthless smile as he strolled across the plaza lugging Sailor Boy’s unusual cage—that a brother operative stationed in Tokyo was busily scheming to foil the Japanese gambit. Not under company orders but surreptitiously, on his own. This Goliath-hexing David was, of course, an angel.

Also incidentally, Switters had once been under the impression that the term angel, as applied to certain evolved mavericks within the CIA, was an entirely ironic reference to a dopey book by the evangelist Billy Graham, entitled Angels: God’s Secret Agents. Not so, said Bad Bobby Case. Bobby claimed that the term referred to a little known scriptural passage recounting the existence of “neutral angels,” angels who refused to take sides in the Heaven-splitting quarrel between Yahweh and Lucifer, and who chided them both for their intransigence, arrogance, and addiction to power. How a hotshot from Hondo knew such things (Case was graduated second in his class at Texas Tech, but that was aeronautical engineering), Switters couldn’t guess, nor could he guess where the spy pilot might be that morning or what he was doing, but he would have given a vat of red-eye gravy to have Bobby with him there, sharing an early-bird beer in the somber little marketplace of far Boquichicos.

The market was right next to the plaza. It consisted of a dozen or so irregularly spaced stalls with thatched awnings, as well as several rows of unshaded tables covered with ragged, faded, roach-eaten oilcloth. On display were a skimpy assortment of fruits and vegetables, dominated by plantains, chili peppers, and pale piles of yucca or cassava root; eggs, live poultry, smoked fish, animal and reptile hides; woven mats and baskets; dry goods and clothing (including shoddy cotton T-shirts adorned with unauthorized portraits of the most familiar face on the planet, more familiar, and perhaps better loved, than Jesus, Buddha, or Michael Jordan—the face of a bland, candy-assed cartoon rodent with a hypocoristic Irish moniker); and, at the stall where Switters currently stood, pisco, homemade rum, and warm beer.

Switters sipped slowly—the wise do not gulp warm beer—and looked around for Inti. The Indian was late. Maybe he’d had difficulty hiring a guide to escort Switters to the colpa, the clay lick where the parrots and macaws were said to gather every day to coat their tiny tastebuds with a nutritious mineral slick. Maybe he’d gotten into trouble over the noisy nocturnal fellowship he enjoyed with his lads. It wasn’t feasible that Inti could have headed back to Pucallpa for the very practical reason that so far he’d only been paid a 40 percent deposit on his services. As unlikely as it was, however, the faintest fleck of suspicion that Inti might have abandoned him in this moldy, weedy, hell-for-lonesome outpost was enough to freeze the sweat on Switters’s brow. He began to drink faster and faster, until the beer erupted in froth and its spume filled his sinus passages. Foam was still trickling out of his nostrils when, a minute later, he thought he spotted Inti at the opposite end of the market.

Some sort of commotion was in progress, and the captain of the Virgin seemed to be at the center of it. “Watch my beverage,” Switters said to the parrot. “I’ll be right back.”

The argument proved to be between Inti and a sinewy, gold-toothed, young mestizo man in Nike basketball sneakers and a spooky anaconda-skin cape. Several of the mestizo’s friends were supporting him, mainly with their physical presence, although they became vocally exhortative from time to time. Inti looked quite relieved to see Switters. Impressed by the latter’s fine suit and hat, the mestizo jumped to the conclusion that he was an important señor, a lawyer(!), perhaps, and he, too, welcomed the intervention of a reasonable authority. Hope of an objective opinion in the mestizo’s favor quickly drained, however, when Inti pointed to the Yankee, made a symbolic pistol of his fist and forefinger, and, jabbering aggressively all the while, fired a volley of imaginary shots into his adversary’s sternum. Inti was urging Switters to obliterate the Boquichicosian exactly as he had the banana-hogging spider, and from the way the man stepped back, his face turning as gray as his wild snaky cloak, he obviously had some fear that Switters might comply.

“No, no, no,” said Switters, shaking his head, forcing a big smile and trying to appear as genial as the toastmaster at a booster club prayer breakfast. He raised his arms in the universal peacemaker gesture and inquired conciliatorily, though in bad Spanish, what the trouble might be. This precipitated a dueling barrage of rapid-fire Campa-Spanish that sounded like stormy-night static on Radio Babel. It took a while, but eventually details of the dispute emerged, aided considerably by the fact that when cornered, the mestizo turned out to speak a surprisingly excellent brand of English.

Evidently, two weeks earlier, Inti had given Fer-de-lance (in order to enhance his reputation in one way or another, the mestizo had assumed the name of a deadly Amazon pit viper) a case of Lima’s finest pisco in exchange for a baby ocelot. The animal could be expected to fetch a high price in Pucallpa. Later upon the very evening that Switters had hired Inti, the Indian had been caught trying to peddle the ocelot on the fringe of Pucallpa’s semilegal parrot market. A game warden cited him for violating one of Peru’s new wildlife protection laws and confiscated the cub, but Inti informed him that he was heading again into the upstream bush the following dawn and promised to release the cat in the forest near where it had been captured, if he could have it back. After much discussion, the warden agreed. A bottle of pisco sealed the bargain.

That would explain, Switters thought, the potbellied guy in the shabby brown uniform who stood on the dock with folded arms and saw us off that morning. I wondered about that gentleman.

What Inti had done instead, however, was to return the little ocelot to Fer-de-lance (for the first time Switters now noticed a lidded, jiggling basket off to one side) and demand his pisco back. Fer-de-lance was having none of that, if for no other reason than that the bulk of the brandy had already met its brandy fate, which was to say, it had been sucked into that black hole that yawns at the gates of human yearning.

Switters finally settled the matter by convincing the strange mestizo to return a single bottle of pisco to reward Inti for his trouble and save his face, while he, Switters, would assume custody of the ocelot. The idea wasn’t to smuggle the cub home for Suzy, although that thought crossed his mind, but to release it on his way to the colpa to free the parrot. Ah yes. The Switters Pet Liberation Service.

That concluded, he stepped over to the gently rocking basket and stooped to lift its lid, intending to ascertain that the cub was not overheating in there, wondering, at the same time, if it might grow up with some animal memory of Suzy’s amateur brassiere. The instant he touched the woven top, however, there was a rude cry, and Fer-de-lance seized his arm, gripping it in fingers as strong as steel pincers.

“Shit,” Switters muttered. “I should’ve known it wasn’t going to be that easy.” He tried to relax his muscles and clear his mind, as he’d been trained to do in martial arts. “Here goes my glad morning. Here goes my nice fresh suit.” Then, in one liquid motion, he sprang to his feet, whirled, pak saoed Fer-de-lance’s hand away from his arm, and unleashed a punch.

The punch was not as fast as it might have been (he was as far out of practice as he was out of shape), and before it could land, an amazingly agile Inti blocked it. Inti then grabbed Switters’s right arm, and Fer-de-lance reestablished his steely claim on the left one. Solicitously, they turned Switters around. The basket, upended in the action, lay on its side—and from it there slowly slithered, flexing and reflexing, an anvil-headed snake as black and glistening as evil itself, death rays fairly shooting from its slitty chartreuse eyes.

The crowd cleared. Inti pulled Switters away. He pointed toward a second basket that sat in the shadow of a thatched overhang a few yards distant. He commenced to snort, hiss, and stomp, much as he had when Switters had been startled by the spider. “Yeah, I get the picture,” Switters grumbled. “And I suppose a pathological sense of humor is better than no sense of humor.” By the time he looked around, Fer-de-lance had somehow steered the viper back into its container.

“Okay, pal, your sleazy business deals have wasted a good half hour and nearly got me snake-bit. Let’s get this circus on the road. Where the hell’s our tour guide to the parrot spa?” Naturally, he had to rephrase the question. When he made his query intelligible to Inti, the skipper—ocelot basket (the correct basket) in his arms, pisco bottle stuck in his waistband like a pistola—assured him that his juvenile playmates had been sent to procure the finest guide available and would be showing up with that esteemed colpa connoisseur at any moment.

“Good. It’s getting late. And it’s getting hot.”

Indeed, though it was not yet midmorning, the sun was looking down on them like the bad eye of a billy goat, jaundiced and shot with blood; and beneath its baleful glare, every living cell in every living thing seemed to slump like a Dalí watch. Switters felt his protoplasm turning into dry-cleaning fluid, and his suit, which soon enough would need a good cleaning, was glued to his body like a poster to a wall. The load of perspiration seemed to double his weight.

Breathing slowly, shallowly, as if the steamy air might choke him, he lagged several feet behind Inti while they traversed the marketplace. They hadn’t gotten far before he became aware of another commotion of sorts. This one was occurring around Sailor’s cage.

The pyramid cage was surrounded by a group of male Indians, five or six in number. Switters identified them as Indians not so much by their painted faces (geometrically arranged dabs of berry pulp), their features (long, flaring noses, chiseled cheekbones, sorrowful dark eyes), or their clothing (thorn-ripped cotton shorts and not much else) as by their haircuts.

Among the forest tribes of South America, countless languages were spoken, countless differing customs practiced. The one thing virtually all of them had in common was the unisex pageboy hairdo. It was as if in dim antiquity, back before time had really got its motor going, some primordial deity—the Great God Buster Brown, perhaps—had swept through the immense Amazonian woodlands with a clay bowl and a dull knife and administered to every early mortal the same bad coif. Hardly a unifying element—tribes that traditionally attacked each other on sight sported identical bangs—it nevertheless had persisted and prevailed. What Gaia the Hairdresser hath styled, let no man shear asunder.

Mixed blood South Americans tended to style their locks according to European fashion, allying in that manner with their countrymen of pure Spanish or Portuguese ancestry. In Lima, though, Switters had observed that certain of the youngish blancos—Hector Sumac and that girl, Gloria, at the club, for example—had begun to wear their hair in refined, upscale versions of the Indian crop. Switters wondered if there was a standardized Amazonian name for the style, if it had a different name in each tribal language or if it was something so taken for granted that it had no name at all other than each tribe’s word for hair. Momentarily, he was tempted to ask Inti what he called his haircut, but on the off chance that the boatman might answer “Arthur,” as George Harrison had responded to the same question in A Hard Day’s Night, he held his tongue. There was some trouble even a troubleshooter didn’t go looking for.

Little or no trouble, it turned out, was brewing at the beer stall. The group of Indians wasn’t angry or rowdy, it was simply intrigued for some reason by Sailor Boy, excited just enough so that its members had transcended their usual reserve and were milling about his cage, pointing scarred brown fingers and stopping passersby to question them, or so it seemed, about the parrot inside. That was a bit bewildering because Sailor, while a handsome bird, even in advanced maturity, was by no means a rare or exceptional specimen. And just bringing a pet parrot to this part of the world was probably akin to bringing a Miller Lite to Bavaria.

“They shopping for antiques or something? The warranty on this cracker-burner expired years ago.” Switters asked Inti, as best he could, what the attraction was, but Inti didn’t know nor could he find out in any appreciable detail, for although Inti and the Boquichicos bunch both spoke varieties of Campa, the dialects lacked sufficient vocabulary in common to permit any but the most rudimentary exchange. And since Inti and Switters didn’t have a lot of words in common, either, the most Switters could determine was that the Indians weren’t actually interested in Sailor Boy, they were interested in his cage.

“Perfect,” said Switters. “Can you inform your country cousins that this unique, custom-built aviary is about to be vacated in the next couple of hours and I’m prepared to make them a real sweet deal. What do they have to trade? A diamond bracelet, maybe?” Aware that rough diamonds were occasionally found in the gravel riverbeds thereabouts, he was thinking of Maestra.

The three-way language barrier proved insurmountable, however, and though the Indians’ curiosity about Sailor’s portable prison not only persisted but intensified now that its owner had appeared, Switters’s interest flagged, and he began looking about for signs of the Pucallpa boys and the colpa guide. “They must be getting that guide from a mail-order catalogue,” he complained, fanning himself with his hat.

When they did finally appear, the lads were accompanied not by a local tracker but by R. Potney Smithe.

“Hallo again,” called the anthropologist brightly. Vapors of gin preceded him. “The news about town is that you’re in requirement of a chap to lead you to the parrot wallow.”

“Is that a problem?”

Smithe chuckled. “Hardly, old man. The trailhead’s just behind the church over there. A straight shot, more or less, all the way. Follows the river. Unless you’re achingly keen on contributing to the indigenous economy, you really shouldn’t be wanting a guide. I’d be happy to tag along, though, if you feel the need for companionship.”

“Ain’t no shortage of that,” said Switters, gesturing to indicate the captain and crew of the Virgin as well as the contingent of local Indians.

“I see.” When Smithe acknowledged the Indians around the birdcage, they closed in and buttonholed him, speaking respectfully, although all at once. To Switters’s surprise, the Englishman spoke back to them in their own language, and for a few minutes they carried on a conversation, often looking deliberately, meaningfully, from the parrot cage to the jungle and back again.

Smithe turned to Switters. “Blokes have a fascination with this bloody cage.”

“Obviously. Why?”

Smithe pulled thoughtfully at first one of his fleshy cheeks and then the other. His jowls glistened in the heat and humidity like burst melons. “Symbolism,” he said. “Homoimagistic identification or some such rot. Never mind that. It’s simple, really. This is only the second, um, pyramid shape the Nacanaca have ever seen.”

“The first one must have been a doozy.”

“Quite.” Nodding his big head, Smithe smiled mysteriously. “Assuming that doozy can be construed to mean ‘impressive’ or ‘outstanding,’ it was—and is—rather a doozy.”

Briefly Switters entertained a vision of some lost pyramid, a ruin of ancient architecture hidden in the jungle out there. It would have had to have been Incan, though, and he knew that Incan pyramids bore but a passing resemblance to the Egyptian structures after which Sailor’s cage was modeled. He scowled at the anthropologist, as if demanding that he continue, and Smithe appeared about to oblige when a sudden squawked command caused everyone within earshot to act for a split second as if they were shaking invisible martinis.

“Peeple of zee wurl, relax!” is what they heard. Just like that. Loud. Out of nowhere.

“Bloody hell!” Smithe swore.

“Aheee!” exclaimed Inti.

“Send in the clowns,” muttered Switters, for reasons that were not entirely clear.

Although intimately accustomed to raucous bird cries, the Nacanaca had jumped more comically than any of them. When they recovered, they asked Smithe what the “magic” parrot had said, for they were convinced it had made a pronouncement, quite likely with supernatural implications. Smithe conferred with Switters, who replied, “You heard it right, Potney. The ol’ green featherduster has bade us chill out, calm down, and lighten up; which, if you can forgive the parade of conflicting prepositions, is as sage a piece of advice as we’re likely to get in this life—especially from an erstwhile housepet.”

When Smithe succeeded in conveying the essence of Sailor’s favorite saying, the Nacanaca’s fascination seemed to escalate. They jabbered to Smithe and among themselves, going on at such length that Switters lost patience and broke in to announce that he was leaving at once for the clay lick. He motioned for one of the crew to carry the cage, since Inti was toting the ocelot and he, himself, was going to be occupied with taping atmospheric footage on the camcorder. Maestra might as well get a good show out of this.

Before the little safari could successfully embark, however, Potney Smithe halted it. “I say, Switters. I say. . . .” But he didn’t say. He stammered indistinctly, searching for the correct wordage. He had the coloration of a conch shell and the bulk of a bear, so that a fanciful person could imagine him the offspring of a mermaid and a panda. “I say. I have something, I may have something, of consequence to impart.”

“Then impart or depart,” said Switters. “It’s hotter than the soles of Dante’s loafers out here.” Immediately he regretted the remark, for he heard himself starting to sound like one of the petty mopers who wasted untold priceless moments of their brief stay on this planet complaining about its weather. Unless it was about to cause you bodily harm, rot your rhubarb on the stalk, or carry off your children, weather ought either to be celebrated or ignored, he felt, one or the other; although at times such as this, when it was steaming one’s brain like a Chinese dumpling, it failed to inspire much in the way of celebration, while not thinking about it was even more difficult than not thinking about . . . Suzy.

Switters softened his tone. “I read somewhere that each second, four-point-three pounds of sunlight hit the earth. That figure strikes me as kind of low. What about you, Potney?” He mopped his brow. “I mean, I realize that sunlight is, well, light, but don’t you suppose they meant four-point-three tons?”

Smithe smiled indulgently and wagged his cigarette. “You aren’t exactly dressed for trekking in the torrid zone, old boy; now are you?”

“Why, that depends on—”

“Although I must say, the boots are sensible.” He glanced at the chèvresque sky. “It’s going to be raining soon.”

Switters also glanced skyward. It didn’t look like rain to him. He’d bet his bottom dollar it wasn’t going to rain. “So what’s your story, Pot? My little operation here is falling way behind schedule.”

“You have your errand to run.”

“That I do. You’ve hit the nail on the head.”

Smithe cleared his throat vigorously, sending droplets of sweat flying off his Adam’s apple. “A Yank in a business suit ‘running an errand’ in the Peruvian bush. A bit west of here, one would automatically think ‘cocaine,’ but there’s precious little if any coca refined in the immediate vicinity, and the mineral wealth is negligible as well. Yes. Um. If it’s exotic birds you’re after . . .”

“Listen, pal . . .”

“None of my bleeding business, is it? No. None. However, if your errand at the colpa is such that it might endure a nominal delay, well, there’s been a development.” Switters tried to interrupt, but Smithe waved him off. “These Nacanaca blokes, you see, would like to borrow your parrot for a bit. They want to take it—and its cage, obviously—into the jungle a ways. Alarmed, are you? Of course you are. But you see, they’ll bring it back. They only want to show it to a Kandakandero chap. A most remarkable chap, I assure you. The Nacanaca believe that this great Kandakandero witchman will be sufficiently impressed to grant you an audience.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Thanks but no thanks. My social calendar is filled to the brim right now. Next time I’m in town, perhaps.” He looked to Inti. “Let’s round ’em up and head ’em out.”

“Oh, righto. Absolutely spot on.” Smithe had gone from pink to crimson. “I’ve boiled my pudding in this bleeding hole for five bleeding months, petitioning, pleading, flattering, bribing, doing everything short of dropping on all fours and cavorting like a Staffordshire bull terrier to win another interview with End of Time, and you come along on your bleeding errand, oblivious, unmindful, not caring a fiddler’s fuck, and fall into it, just bloody stumble into it, roses and whistles; and, of course, it’s not your cup of tea, it means nothing divided by zero to a bloke like you, you’re wanting none of it. Well, brilliant, that’s brilliant. Just my lot, isn’t it? My brilliant bleeding lot.”

Switters regarded him with astonishment. “Easy,” he cautioned. “Easy, pal. Heed the counsel of our Sailor Boy over there. Relax. You’re acting like I’m some sort of spoilsport, and I don’t have an L.A.P.D. clue what sport I’m spoiling. I’m only—”

“Oh, it’s not your fault. Really. Sorry about that. It’s just my bloody—”

“Stop whining, Potney. Whining’s unattractive, even when your whine sounds like Kenneth Branagh eating frozen strawberries with a silver fork. Just tell me specifically what’s on your burner. What’s this ‘end of time’ stuff? ‘Interviewing the end of time’? Sun got to you? Sun and gin? Mad dogs and Englishmen syndrome?”

Gradually Smithe was returning to his natural hue. A weariness moved into his smooth, shiny face like a retired midwestern farmer moving into a flamingo beach hotel. He shrugged his ursine shoulders and flicked, halfheartedly, his cigarette into the bug-gnawed weeds. “Never mind.” He sighed. “Load of flapdoodle, that.”

“Flapdoodle?!” Switters grinned incredulously, and with a kind of sarcastic delight.

“Yes. Bosh. Nonsense,” explained Smithe. His tone was defensive.

“I know what flapdoodle means. I just wasn’t aware that anybody under the age of ninety-five still used the term. Even in Merry Olde.”

“Don’t mock.”

“So, flapdoodle, is it? Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I happen to have a soft spot for flapdoodle. And if you toss in a pinch of the old codswallop or balderdash, why, you could get me really enthralled.”

“Don’t mock.”

“Not mocking, Pot. Maybe we should find a patch of shade someplace and talk this over.”

“If you’re serious.”

Switters was humoring the ethnographer, catering to his agitation, but at the same time he was a wee bit intrigued, he couldn’t help himself. “Flapdoodle,” he practically sang, as they made their way to the covered side entrance of the nearby infirmary. “Makes the world go ‘round.”

The Boquichicos infirmary’s side entrance functioned, somewhat arbitrarily, as an emergency entrance. Bodies emptying from machete wounds or inflating from snakebite were admitted through it. The front or main entrance was reserved for those with aches, coughs, fevers, or one or more of the thirty or so parasites that could bore, burrow, squirm, swim, or wriggle into the human organism in a place such as this, and that contributed substantially to the region’s reputation for vivid superfluity. (A time was approaching when there would be an argument over exactly which one of those entrances, side or front, was the proper one through which to admit an immobilized Switters, but that unpleasant quandary was still a few days away.)

A short path of flagstones led, from nowhere in particular, to the side door. Above the walkway was a narrow, thatched roof, supported by whitewashed poles. It was beneath that roof that Switters and Smithe took refuge, at first from the sun and, no more than five minutes later, from the rain; for scarcely had Smithe commenced to expound upon the Nacanaca, the Kandakandero chap, and the request to borrow Maestra’s parrot, than a few guppy-sized waterdrops began to dash themselves against the dusty earth or splat with a timid thump against the platterlike leaves of thick green plants. Quickly there was a population explosion such as was entirely appropriate in a Catholic country, and the progenitor drops multiplied and geometrized into a blinding, deafening horde.

At the onset of the torrent, Switters pulled a scrap of cocktail napkin from his pocket, wrote upon it, I.O.U. my bottom dollar, and handed it matter-of-factly to Potney, who blinked at the message, folded it absentmindedly in a big rosy fist, raised his voice against the downpour, and went on with his narration.

On the pretext of keeping Sailor Boy dry, Inti had joined the two white men under the roof. The Virgin crew and the Nacanacan delegation remained out in the rain, which had grown so dense it turned them into silver silhouettes, though they stood but a dozen yards away. The Indians seemed oblivious to the soaking they were getting, and Smithe, who admittedly had the more comfortable position, was virtually oblivious to the weather, as well. “Celebrate it or ignore it,” Switters had maintained, and now he found himself surprised and somewhat shamed that others so easily practiced what he preached.

That, then, was the setting for Smithe’s impartation, an unusual if not outright bizarre account, which shall be summarized in the paragraphs that follow; summarized because to re-create it, to reproduce it verbatim, isn’t merely unnecessary, it could be construed as an abuse of both the reader’s patience and posterior. That such abuse can sometimes be rewarding—consider Finnegans Wake or the church-pew ass-numbing that leads to genital excitation—is beside the point. Or ought to be.

R. Potney Smithe first came to Boquichicos in 1992. His aim had been to conduct ethnographic fieldwork among the Nacanaca, a wild tribe that had been “pacified” by Peruvian government anthropologists in the mid-1980s as a precautionary measure for the new town that authorities were about to establish, and then semi-civilized by contact with that town and its imported values. The Nacanaca were a transitional people, no longer feral but not quite tame, and were in danger of abandoning, forgetting, or being robbed of their traditional manners and ways. Christian missionaries were doing all they could, naturally, to assist in that dispossession. Smithe’s purpose was to catalogue as many of the old customs and beliefs as possible before they disappeared. It was fulfilling work.

Alas, even while he immersed himself up to his skimpy beige eyebrows in Nacanacan culture, or what was left of it, he felt the hot point of his interest slowly, unintentionally, even unhappily, shifting to another tribe, a people with whom he had no direct communication; who, indeed, he’d never glimpsed except as shadows gliding silently among other shadows in the forest, a phantom race whose magic and indomitability held a great influence over the Nacanaca and, eventually, over Potney, himself. Kandakandero.

The principal Nacanaca village was a mile east of Boquichicos, on the opposite side of the river. It was on high ground, close to good fishing holes. However, its chácara—its garden—was located across the stream on the Boquichicos side, but several miles deeper into the jungle. Oddly enough, in an environment so relentlessly profuse in vegetation, good garden plots were few and far between. The jungle topsoil was as thin as varnish, and although immense trees had learned how to utilize it to staggering advantage, cassava, gourds, peppers, and other cultivated crops were there akin to orphaned children, whose thin gruel was watered down a bit more each year until it no longer provided the sustenance necessary for life. Biological and/or geological accidents sometimes produced rare pockets of fecundity, however, and such was the case with the Nacanacan chácara. It was quite possibly the largest, most perennially fertile garden patch in the Peruvian Amazon.

Some said this chácara had once “belonged” to the Kandakandero or, at least, that they had tended it for generations, only to abandon it when oil exploration and an influx of outsiders caused them to fade ever farther into the forest: the Kandakandero had not suffered Boquichicos gladly. Others claimed that the chácara had always been cultivated by Nacanaca and that the fiercer Kandakandero simply forced the Nacanaca to share its bounty, as if exacting tribute. In any event, Smithe knew from firsthand experience that once each month, on the new moon, a delegation of Kandakandero braves would show up at the garden to have their baskets filled with produce by compliant Nacanaca.

“Whether charity or extortion, I wouldn’t know,” said Smithe, “but I do know they come only at night, when there is little moon, and that there’s a kind of ‘way station’ a few miles farther into the bush, a lodge where they remain overnight or occasionally longer in order to perform certain rituals having to do with the newly acquired produce. Nacanaca elders often participate in those ceremonies as invited guests, and finally, I, myself, after two solid years of jungle diplomacy. . . . Worth the bother? Well, it’s a show that would strike any Christian as dreadfully malodorous, to be sure; but I’d already developed a tolerance for pagan proclivities; some such immunity is required in my profession. Yes. Um. What separates these jejune jollifications from others I’ve witnessed, either in person or on film, is that they’re presided over by the Kandakandero’s witchman, their shaman: a most remarkable chap.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” said Switters. “That’s the buzz. And what, pray tell, is so damned remarkable about him?”

Smithe didn’t answer right away. He stared for a while at the rippling wallpaper of rain, and when at last he spoke, he could barely be heard above its din. “It’s his head, you see.”

“Did you say ‘head’? What about his head?”

“Its shape.” The Englishman abruptly, inexplicably, beamed. “His head,” he said, louder now, almost triumphantly, “his head is a pyramid.”

Switters had been around the block. He had even, one might say, been around the block within the block within the block within the block (depending upon his or her own experience, the reader will or will not know what this suggests). Aware that the world was a very weird place, he was no more prone to automatically scoff at unusual information than he was disposed to unquestioning acceptance. (The narrow, no-nonsense skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.) Nevertheless, Switters’s open-mindedness was sorely tested by Potney’s report, especially when the anthropologist insisted that the head he was describing did not merely suggest some vague outline of a pyramid, that it was neither a variation of hydrocephalus nor a particularly pronounced example of Down’s syndrome, but actually was a pyramid (which was to say, a quadrilateral mass having smooth, steeply sloping sides meeting at a pointed apex), and in every other way except its shape, constituted a healthy, functioning human noggin.

“Entirely literal, old boy, I almost regret to say. Wretchedly literal.” Smithe paused to light a cigarette, sending a plump pillow of smoke off to be drilled into feathery oblivion by the numberless bullets of the rain. “Yes. But if you knew your Peruvian ethnology and whatnot, you’d know that this chap’s pyramid head is not completely without precedent. Not in the high Andes, at any rate.”

Whereupon Smithe informed Switters of the occasional practice among certain Andean Indians of strapping boards to the soft heads of infants, molding them over time into cones that mirrored the contours of the volcanos that loomed on their horizons and that they worshiped as gods. Such sculpting of the skull—literally re-creating man in gods’ image—was common enough to have been well documented, and while contemporary Kandakandero had no physical contact whatsoever with malformed Andean volcano-worshipers, one could not rule out an interchange in centuries past. Stories, moreover, had wings. Also, and Smithe would speak more of this later, the Kandakandero seemed to have the ability to access information, events, images, et cetera from great distances, a notion that failed to shock Switters because the CIA had once experimented with a similar psychic technique (under the term remote viewing), and several of the angels had become quite adept at it before opposition from irate Christian hillbillies in Congress had shut the project down.

There was doubt in Potney’s mind, however, that End of Time’s pyramid head was a copycat creation. At least, not entirely so. “I suspect DDT played a part in it. At the beginning.”

“DDT? In the Amazon?”

“Oh my, yes. You Yanks mightn’t fling your poison about at home any longer, but that jolly well hasn’t stopped you from shipping it abroad. Especially to the unsuspecting undeveloped. Peru reeks of it. Even back here, I’m afraid.”

“Ain’t no weevils fattening they little selves on Nacanaca vegetables?”

“Wouldn’t think so, although the chácara’s entomological interlopers aren’t the primary target, nor are malarial mosquitoes. DDT arrives here from Pucallpa in five-gallon drums. The government issues it to the Nacanaca, who trade it to the Ka’daks for hides and potions, or else the Ka’daks simply bully it from them. Whatever. Both tribes use it for fishing.”

Smithe described a scene in which Indians pour five gallons of pesticide into a small river, just above a rapids or a waterfall, then stroll downstream to effortlessly scoop killed fish out of the eddies.

DDT as trade-good fish poison was finding its way into the jungle years before Boquichicos was settled, and congenital deformity was thought to have increased as a result, though there was no scientific proof of it. Smithe’s theory was that End of Time had come into the world slightly mutated, due to maternal consumption of contaminated fish. The Kandakandero had taken his affliction as a sign of divine favor and a portent of supernatural abilities, and immediately consecrated him to witchwork. Before he began his active apprenticeship, while he was still a baby, the local shaman had placed his pointy little head in a series of progressively larger mahogany presses (Switters thought of that old-fashioned pressed tennis racket of his, heavy and wooden, that Suzy, with her modern lightweight graphite number, had made such fun of), deliberately and dramatically accentuating its pyramidal tendency.

It was only a hypothesis. It could have been something altogether different, altogether unimaginable. What did seem conclusive, however, was that by the time End of Time was a teenager, he had ousted his people’s reigning shaman and assumed the man’s duties. And now, at age twenty-five or thereabouts, he was regarded (by that handful of souls aware of his existence) as either the most feared and mysterious member of the most feared and mysterious tribe in that part of South America or as an addled medical oddity cashing in on the small-change benefits of primitive superstition.

If Switters’s brow resembled the coils in an electric heater, it wasn’t so much due to lingering doubt over the veracity of Smithe’s story as to his effort to remember what his grandmother had told him about pyramid power. According to Maestra, and she had it on good authority, there was something about the configuration, the dimensional relationships of a pyramid’s angles, the way it crystallized in static form the essence of dynamic geometry, that caused it to focus, laserlike, an electromagnetic or other atmospheric force (perhaps that energy the Chinese called chi), concentrating it in a relatively small, prescribed area. Switters recalled something about razor blades being sharpened and fruit kept from spoiling by pyramid-focused rays. That, come to think of it, was the rationale behind Sailor’s customized cage. He supposed that if a pyramid really could hone steel and preserve peaches, a pyramid-shaped head might have a pretty entertaining effect on the brain inside it—and it would probably be no great exaggeration to describe as “most remarkable,” a “chap” with such a brain.

“So,” said Switters, “these Nacanaca boys believe their ferocious cousins would get a kick out of Sailor’s cage because it’s shaped like the head of their grand boohoo?”

Smithe nodded. “Something like that, yes. Far be it from me to speak for the atavistic mind.” He paused to inhale and exhale a blue-tinted wad of smoke. “There is a bit more to it. When your bird blurted out that number about people needing to relax—clever turn, that: your tutelage?—it struck a chord. This End of Time chap, he has some novel ideas. A philosophy, one might be tempted to call it. Something beyond the usual mumbo jumbo, at any rate. Relaxation, at least in the Nacanaca understanding of the concept, fits rather neatly with it, I suppose. So, you see, our blokes here have concluded that End of Time must have a supernatural connection with this cage and its occupant, and while that’s a load of bosh, I daresay he would be impressed. It’s likely he’d grant you an audience, which would provide you with scrapbook fodder of the most exotic order, and me with the possibility of riding in on your coattails.”

“You’ve socialized with him previously?”

“Yes. Three years ago. At the way station, for thirty-six hours. Bloody bugger really put me through it. Can’t imagine why I’d want to go back—except that it’s, well, haunted me ever since. And there’s the chance I might turn it into something. Original yet academically rigorous. That first encounter went rather awry, I’m afraid. Crossed the line. Um. I’m no Carlos Castaneda.”

Switters grinned. “Of course you aren’t.” You’re one of those people, he thought, who want to go to Heaven without dying. Cowardice in the name of objectivity is fairly characteristic of academics, especially in Merry Olde. But he didn’t wish to get into that. Instead, he inquired as to the nature of the living pyramid’s so-called novel ideas. Considering the young shaman’s name—an inexact translation by Smithe and Fer-de-lance, it turned out, of a virtually unpronounceable Kandakandero word—he guessed his notions must have something to do with eschatology, with apocalypticism, with time.

“Oh, there may be a bubble of that in the keg. I didn’t bung into it. Not my end of the field, you see. Not that. Nor the other, either, honestly, though it may be yours. Our chap, you see, is rather obsessed with . . . with gaiety.”

Gaiety? Potney Smithe’s explanation was a rickety trellis of sober anthropological observations, lathed in the fine mill of British understatement, but rattled by occasional gusts of alcoholic verbosity, and, of course, splintered here and there by cracks from Switters. Once again, we shall attempt summation.

Kandakandero had always referred to themselves as “the Real People.” Theirs was ethnocentrism in its unadulterated form. Other tribes, other races were not merely deemed to be inferior humans, they were relegated in the Ka’dak mind to the status of animals or ghosts. Then End of Time came along. It’s very true, he told his clan, that we are superior to other Indians because we have stronger magic and purer ways. As for white men, they are so helpless and stupid they could not survive in the forest for a single moon. Yet the white man can do wondrous things that we cannot.

Fly, for example. For decades, air traffic between Lima and Belém or to and from Europe had passed over that area of the Peruvian jungle roamed by the seminomadic Ka’daks, and more recently, small planes out of Pucallpa had been buzzing around. White men also had shiny boxes that they attached to the sterns of their canoes to make them swim faster than dolphins, and they possessed weapons so powerful and accurate they reduced hunting and warfare to child’s play. In Boquichicos they had motionless boxes that churned out more music than a tribe could make, other boxes that cooked meat and yucca without a spark of fire. (The Ka’daks were well informed about what transpired in Boquichicos, though whether they spied on the town from the forest, accessed it psychically, or simply relied on Nacanaca gossip, Smithe wasn’t prepared to say.) End of Time recognized that white men were a threat to his people’s habitat, that eventually these pale weaklings with their noisy magic would dominate the forest world and all within it, including the heretofore invincible Ka’daks. White men were the new Real People, the spirits obviously were favoring them. Why?

Over and over again, End of Time drank his potions, snorted his snuffs, entered his trances, rubbed his portable pyramid. He questioned sundry Nacanaca and once sat for five days in a treetop observing, undetected, goings-on in Boquichicos. What was it about these men (aside from a hideous complexion that no god could possibly find pleasing) that made them so different from the older and once wiser Kandakandero? (No fool, End of Time could distinguish between superficial and fundamental differences.) Roughly speaking, they ate, drank, smoked, and slept the same. They shat, pissed, and fucked the same. So what was the white man’s secret?

Finally, one day, it hit him like a blow dart. The big secret was laughter.

Amazonian Indians, in general, tended to be somber, and the Ka’daks were especially severe. Kandakandero did not laugh. They did not even smile. Moreover, they had never laughed or smiled. The very concept was alien to them. Smithe suggested that for “the Real People,” life simply might be too “real”: too terrible, too short, too arduous, too . . . vivid. Whatever the reason, you might as realistically expect a Ka’dak to shout “E5mc²” as to chuckle. No giggle had ever, in all of history, chased its tail around one of their campfires, no smirk had ever cracked their war paint, no guffaw had ever taken up where a belch left off, no titter or tee-hee had scratched for them its crystal fleas. The roar of civilized laughter might strike them as ridiculous, but it wouldn’t strike them as funny. The Ka’daks didn’t know from funny.

In a radical break with both instinct and inclination, End of Time tried to teach himself to smile. He practiced alone, monitoring his progress in a reflecting pool. The first time he smiled for his gathered clansmen, he left them so astonished, so awestruck that half fell, trembling, to their knees, and the rest ran away and hid in the bushes. When he commenced to experiment with laughing, nobody was able to sleep for months. And when he insisted that others learn the art of grinning and chortling, the whole tribe nearly had a nervous breakdown.

The shaman persevered, however, even as it occurred to him that his glee was hollow, mechanical, and contrived. He sensed that an attitude adjustment must be required, that the perpetually piercing level of intensity that characterized the Kandakandero might need to be softened, toned down. (Real People of the world, relax!) Around the occasion of Potney Smithe’s visit, End of Time was just coming to the realization that white men didn’t laugh as a chore or on schedule or to please the gods, that the mystical hee-haw was not self-induced but had to be provoked; that some external happenstance, frequently invisible, aroused laughter in them.

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 appetite 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.

This wasn’t quite what Switters had had in mind when he told Maestra he needed to get away from cities for a while. Nevertheless, he went forward. With the air of a man trying to eat the coating off a chocolate-covered grasshopper, he walked into that very forest.

He would not walk out.

R. Potney Smithe was lounging in the shade beside the garden patch, swatting flies, smoking cigarettes, and attempting to coax residual gin molecules out of his own saliva, when he was summoned to the ceremonial lodge by a Nacanaca runner. It was midmorning, and he’d been at the chácara since the previous afternoon.

The summons surprised him. At first, Switters’s lengthy absence had made him hopeful, but as the night passed, and then the morning, he’d lost faith. Whatever was transpiring at that crude structure he called a way station—a station on the way from a primitive yucca patch to Christ knew what—there was scant cause to believe it might advance his fortunes in any considerable direction. Both the mysterious American (Ediberto at the hotel said he was a tractor salesman: not bloody likely!) and the grotesque shaman had their own special approaches to existence, and in those approaches, neither the traditions upon which Smithe had been nurtured nor the discipline in which he’d been schooled held any sway. One of those blokes was as indifferent as the other. But now he’d been sent for, and if not to interview End of Time, then what? Hope swelled anew, it could be said, though to Smithe, the phrase “swelled anew” always suggested the recurrence of a hemorrhoidal tribulation.

The trail was overgrown, and in places, slick and steep. It took Smithe more than an hour to reach the lodge, a three-sided sort of raised longhouse, supported by poles and blackened by smoke. Upon his arrival, he found that End of Time was gone. The place, in fact, was deserted, except for Switters, who lay peacefully asleep in Fer-de-lance’s hammock, slung between two poles, and a couple of Nacanaca bucks who seemed to be watching over him.

Disheartened and a bit perplexed, the anthropologist climbed the unsteady ladder to the main platform and seated himself on a mat beside the hammock. “Where are the Kandakandero?” he asked in Nacanacan.

“Gone,” the Indians answered.

“Coming back?”

“No.”

“Where’s Fer-de-lance?”

“Went to see great snake.” They were referring to an anaconda, reputedly forty feet in length, that was said to inhabit a pool a few miles from there. Fer-de-lance frequently went looking for it, though his intent—to capture it, kill it, or commune with it—had never been disclosed.

“Has Señor Switters been sleeping long?” Forgetting himself, he asked this in Spanish, then rephrased it in Nacanacan.

Before either Indian could reply, there came a grunt from the hammock. The device commenced ever so slightly to swing. “Meaningless question, Pot,” said Switters. His voice was relaxed, and so thick with sleep he could barely be understood. He yawned. He stretched. The hammock pitched, as if upon a gentle tide. “You know as well as I that duration is naught but an illusion around this here juju parlor.” He yawned again.

“An end to time, you mean?”

“There’s that, for damn sure. Although Fer-de-lance is of the opinion that you two may have mistranslated our witchman’s name.”

“Oh?” said Smithe.

Switters didn’t elaborate. Instead, he yawned yet again and rubbed his eyes. “Whatever his name is, he’s some piece of work.”

“Unique.”

“The most misused word in the English language, unique, but I believe you’ve employed it immaculately. The dude is genuinely one of a kind. Even without his medicines.”

“He gave you ayahuasca?”

“Yeah, and something extra in the bargain. Some kind of powder he blew up my nose with a reed.”

“A wild turkey bone, actually. But long and hollow, in that respect like a reed.”

“Okay. As an ethnographer, you’d know such things. But, Jesus . . . ! I’m no stranger to mind-altering substances, Potney—keep that under your hat if you don’t mind—but the stuff your man dispenses takes the cake, the pie, the strudel, the whole damn pâtisserie. Whew! Baby! It just keeps peeling away layers, one after the other, for hours.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, deep meditation can do that, too, except in meditation, what’s peeling away are your own thought patterns. Worries, anxieties, clichés, bright ideas, ambitions, plans, mental and emotional hangups, all that half-conscious brain litter. You strip the layers away, one by one, until the images grow fainter and fainter and the noise grows quieter and quieter, and bing! you arrive at the core, which is naked emptiness, a kind of exhilarating vacuum. But this shit! Each layer is a separate dimension, a new world. They’re like landscapes, you travel around inside them. And you’re not alone in there, they’re occupied.”

Smithe nodded. “Did you . . . ? The bulbs?”

“Bulbs. Yeah. That’s a good name for them. Shiny copper-colored bulbs. Orbiting the earth. Called themselves masters, overlords.”

“Most disquieting. Told me they’re in charge of absolutely everything. Run the show.”

“Me, too. Afterward, I asked End of Time about it. He off-loaded one of those wicked homemade grins he’s been working on and shrugged, ‘Oh, they always say that.’ Made it sound like they were just big blowhards.”

“Boasting.”

“Yeah. Mind-fuckers. But who . . . ? Or what . . . ?” Switters fell silent.

“Raises a great many questions, but they’re devilishly difficult to formulate.”

“Hard to talk about. The whole experience.”

“Quite.” Smithe produced a silver monogrammed case, from which he withdrew a cigarette. “Impossible to put into words.”

“I know what you’re saying. But it isn’t because words are inadequate. I won’t go that far.”

“Certain things words can’t convey.”

“Oh, but they can. Because those things you’re referring to are . . . well, if they’re not actually made of words or derived from words, at least inhabit words: language is the solution in which they’re suspended. Even love ultimately requires a linguistic base.”

“All concepts are basically verbal concepts? Now that you mention it, I have heard that theory advanced.” Smithe spoke disinterestedly and at the same time anxiously. He hadn’t muddied and bloodied himself bushwhacking his way to the lodge in order to sit around arguing semiotics. Only genteel breeding was preventing him from interrupting Switters with an irritated bellow: Tell me about End of Time!

“Even if most of our best words have been trivialized, corrupted, eviscerated by the merchandisers, by the marketeers, by the. . . .” Switters broke off. He could feel a rant coming on, but was too tired and, although his outward manner scarcely betrayed it, too shaken to go through with it.

Smithe seized the chance. “Now, tell me about—”

“The point is—” Like James Brown, spent, limp, reeling to the microphone for just one more whoop, Switters momentarily revived himself. “Words can still handle anything we can throw at them, including the kitchen sink. Finnegans Wake proved that, if nothing else. It’s a matter of usage. If a house is off-plumb and rickety and lets in the wind, you blame the mason, not the bricks.”

“Um.”

“Our words are up to the job. It’s our syntax that’s limiting.”

“And what’s so wrong with our syntax?”

“Well, in the first place, it’s too abstract.”

“And in the second place?”

“It’s too concrete.”

In the silence that greeted his pronouncement, Switters snuggled down in the hammock and shut his eyes.

Switters rested for about ten minutes, during which time the Nacanacas descended the ladder and laid some yucca to roast in the embers of the firepit, while Smithe, in agitation, paced the floorboards. When at last Switters reopened what Suzy called his “big-bad-wolf eyes,” Smithe strode immediately to his side. “I say, was that a Broadway show tune you were humming just now?”

Caught off guard, Switters nearly let the Cats out of the bag. “That was . . . no, couldn’t have been. Probably some—some riff from, uh, Zappa or else the, uh, Grateful Dead,” he stammered, preserving a secret he shared not even with Bobby Case. “Speaking of which, End of Time—if we’re going to persist in calling him that—would make the consummate Deadhead, don’t you think? Skull shaped like an Egyptian tomb. Take one of those turkey bones and blow Jerry Garcia’s ashes up his nostrils.”

Potney Smithe’s musical leanings listed sharply in the direction of Vivaldi, but he was grateful (if not yet dead) to find conversation returning to the Kandakandero shaman. “I’ve not been stimulated overmuch by what I’ve heard so far. Do tell me what happened when you turned up night before last to join your bird. What was said?”

A great deal had been said, much of it, no doubt, lost in translation, but essentially, as Switters related it, his encounter with End of Time was not greatly dissimilar to Smithe’s. The shaman received him from behind a screen, a barrier that could not, however, conceal his delight with the pyramid cage or its occupant. Sailor Boy, for his part, was talking up a storm. Or was he? The customary admonishment, “Peeple of zee wurl, relax!” squawked from behind the screen at thirty-second intervals, and though the message hadn’t varied from the familiar in either content or tone, its frequency of transmission was something radically new. Later, Switters realized that the squawks could have been issuing from End of Time himself, Amazonian Indians being famously adept at mimicking bird calls. Perhaps they took turns, even: a man and parrot duet.

“We yakked all night—that Fer-de-lance is a whiz with nuances and complexities—jabbering about the pitfalls of morbidity, about levity versus gravity, struggle versus play, me mostly mouthing other people’s ideas, but your curandero man contributing some fairly engaging wrinkles of his own. He said, for example, that in order for his people to withstand the assault of the white man, they must fashion shields out of laughter. He means that literally, I think. Speaks of laughter as if it were a force, a physical force or natural phenomenon. And within the realm of laughter, he says, light and darkness merge, no longer existing as separate or distinct conditions. A people who could live in that realm would be free of all of life’s dualities. The white man can’t do the trick because he lacks the Kandakandero knowledge of the different levels of reality, and so far the Ka’daks can’t do it because they lack the buoyancy of the white man’s humor. The person who successfully combined the two would move through the world as a ‘shadow of light.’ Can you picture a shadow of light? A person in whom the luminous and the dark are inseparable? Reminds me a bit of neutral angels, if you’re familiar with the term.”

“Um. I daresay he’s evolved intellectually since I had a go at him.”

“For a dude whose brain is stuffed in a pyramid, that’s hardly surprising. That laugh of his is starting to get out of control, though. Sounds a lot like Woody Woodpecker. Friend of mine used to cackle like that to amuse the bar girls in Bangkok.”

“Indeed? Well, do continue. What else?”

“Ah, well, gee, I don’t know. We just kicked that gong around all night, like I said. Then, for breakfast, we ate my grandmother’s parrot.”

Switters had not eaten Sailor Boy on purpose. At the time, in fact, he wasn’t aware that it was Sailor Boy he was eating. The gourdful of thin gray stew contained, so he presumed, the rubbery flesh of an overage chicken. It wasn’t until later in the day, after awakening from a four- or five-hour rest, that Fer-de-lance showed him the headdress that, prior to his departure, End of Time had woven from Sailor’s feathers. By then, it was too late to retch.

The shaman had eaten the parrot to appropriate its magic. “You’re lucky he didn’t eat you as well,” Fer-de-lance had snarled when Switters expressed outrage. “Who do you think you’ve been dealing with? Some quaint poseur from central casting?” The parrot stew was served to Switters as a test. “He wanted to see how strong you are,” said the mestizo.

There were other tests in line. Fer-de-lance challenged Switters to don the headdress at sunset and go stand alone in the forest. That would be the signal for End of Time to return, whereupon he would reveal himself, pyramid and all, and personally administer to the gringo blanco the vision root.

“What was I going to do,” asked Switters, “turn tail and run? I’d come this far. My courage was in question. And, besides, I’d yet to lay eyes on the guy. Before curiosity kills it, the cat learns more of the world than a hundred uninquisitive dogs.”

Thus, he replaced his Panama hat with poor Sailor’s plumage (How would that look on video?) and as dusk pressed the dimmer switch, transforming the verdant disorder of the diurnal jungle into a muscular monolith, an enveloping solid throb, a Stonehenge of whispers, a phantom colonnade, he walked gingerly away from the lodge to go stand alone in the gloom. He neither saw nor heard End of Time’s approach. Switters was standing there, staring, listening, barely breathing, unable, for some reason, to remember a single lyric to “Send in the Clowns,” when he felt something touch his shoulder, causing him to nearly jump over a treetop.

“How did he look?”

“You know how he looks. Like a youngish Amazonian Indian with the skyline of Cairo on his shoulders.”

“His facial decoration? What color, what pattern? Achiote berry or tinhorao bark? His necklace? Bone, feathers, claws, seeds, or teeth? These details are significant.”

“For Christ’s sake, Pot!”

“You took no notes?” The tone was accusatory.

“Not after that turkey bone went up my snout. I spent the next eight hours riding the quark. Pursued by my own ghost down the Hallways of Always. Hobnobbing with giant metallic cockroaches and transgalactic jive bulbs. You’ve been there. What do you expect?”

“Yes, but you did agree. . . .”

“The Hallways of Always, pal. One dies in there and is reborn. One doesn’t take notes. Come on, Pot. If not watched carefully, you could turn into another tedious anthropologist.”

“Impaired while under the influence, but what about prior to and following?”

“Very little of either. And somehow I don’t believe ‘impaired’ is the right word.” He paused. “Listen, I’m quite aware of the sort of stuff you’re after, and I’m sure that picturesque details by the dozen will come to mind eventually. Right now, my biocomputer’s down. I’m. . . . Death and resurrection, not to mention breakfasting on the longtime family pet, can take a lot out of a guy. Okay?” Again, he closed his eyes.

Smithe walked away. Head bowed, nose pointed at the toes that, like fans of pink pickles, spread over the tips of his flip-flops, neck knotted, meaty hands clasped behind his broad back, he paced. Aware of the sort of stuff I’m after? he thought. Not bloody likely. Smithe, himself, was neither comfortably nor completely aware of the “sort of stuff” he was after. Direct testimony, certainly, yet something as far beyond ordinary field notes as End of Time was beyond Chief Sitting Bull; data that might fuel disquisition and exegesis of an academically pragmatic caliber, that might even make something agreeably quotidian out of the bizarrely exotic, yet would not conceal from the sensitive some flavor of the cosmological rites that had blown most of the patio furniture off his personal lanai. He supposed, in short, that he was searching for planks to bridge a rupture that had widened within him and without, ever since he had so unwisely . . .

“Do you have to sulk like that?” Switters’s voice was tired but tough. “If word gets back to End of Time that you’re deficient in the category of joie de vivre, he’ll—”

“He’ll what?” snapped Smithe testily.

“He’ll cancel your damn rendezvous.”

Smithe halted in mid-stride. His chin withdrew from his chest like a city slicker’s hand from a branding iron. “What rendezvous?”

“The one I set up for you.”

“Are you ragging me?”

“Potney! If you can’t trust a Yank, who can you trust?”

“He’s actually agreed to meet?”

“At the next new moon. Be here or be square.”

“You’re serious. How in the world? . . .”

“All in a night’s work.”

“For an errand boy?”

“Precisely. Although in the gastrointestinal aftermath of ingesting fricassee à Sailor Boy”—he winced and it was not at all contrived—”I watched the errand I was sent to run, run through me.”

The bells of his own jubilation prevented Smithe from hearing this last, which was just as well, regardless that in his elated state he might not have found it egregiously offensive. He was positively thrilled. His pale eyes sparkled, and strong white teeth, heretofore unrevealed, came out of the lipwork. “Bloody marvelous,” he crooned. “Bloody marvelous.”

Smithe struck a match to the cork-tipped Parliament he’d removed from a case some minutes earlier but not yet lit. “My work concerns itself with what Linton has called ‘social heredity,’ which, as you might suppose, consists of the learned, socially transmitted habits, customs, morals, laws, arts, crafts, et cetera of whole cultures: tribes, bands, clans, villages. Groups of socially related people, in other words. To focus on a single individual within a group, even such an extraordinary individual as our End of Time, is virtually unprecedented. Unique in the annals. Um. The paper I intend to prepare will be controversial, surely, but if viewed in a broad light, could well, unless I’m rationalizing wildly, do my reputation a power of good.” He said all this as if he’d just that moment thought of it. “Could right things with Eleanor, too,” he added almost as an afterthought.

“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Switters smiled. “Nothing like a jolt of unexpected boldness to make a woman’s nipples stiffen. Why, just before I left the hotel, I e-mailed a young Christian lady of my acquaintance that I was coming to palpitate her clitoris the way a worker ant milks its favorite aphid. That’ll burst her buttons, I guarantee. Unless my aged grandmother intercepts and intervenes.”

Smithe looked him over with active bemusement. The Englishman seemed incapable of judging when Switters was speaking earnestly and when he was merely being flippant. (The truth of the matter was, Switters could not always judge that, himself.)

In no way, however, did Smithe’s confusion lessen his gratitude. He thanked Switters over and over for interceding on his behalf. Then, abruptly he stubbed out his cigarette on a blackened post and said, “It’s barely noon. If we set out at once, I daresay we could reach Boquichicos by nightfall. What do you say, old boy? Shall we get cracking? Brisk march will do wonders for your condition. You can impart further detail over dinner at the hotel. My treat. Dinner.”

“The haute cuisine of Boquichicos is a lovely prospect,” said Switters, but he made no move to extricate himself from the hammock. Rather, he lay there looking troubled. He plowed his fingers through his badly tangled curls. He ran his tongue over his palate, tasting the bitter film left by parrot goulash and yopo vomit. He had to admit that he could do with a bit of bodily maintenance. “I can’t . . . uh . . . End of Time said. . . . There’s this. . . . Listen, I’ve been thinking that I might ask the Nacanaca studs to carry me back. In the hammock. Like a hunting trophy. A roll-up. Sedan chair sort of thing.”

“Really, Switters! How imperial.” Smithe laughed, but he, too, suddenly looked troubled, as if he had a premonition that things were about to go bad in a dramatic manner. “Are you that short on stamina?”

“No, but . . .”

“Then buck up, old boy. Show us some of the heralded Yankee spunk.”

Switters propped himself up on one elbow but stirred no further. The hammock swung gently, to and fro. “This is absolutely silly, I’m aware of that, but . . .”

“Do go on.”

“I’m under, I guess, a kind of taboo.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

Switters sighed, and for a second he looked less anxious than sheepish. “Well, End of Time told me, right before he left, that I had to pay a price for having been shown the secrets of the cosmos. At first I thought he wanted money, like almost everybody else on this pathological planet, and I objected because I’ve got barely enough cash to pay my hotel bill and my river crew, and am counting on Mr. Plastic to take care of me back in Lima. But that wasn’t the sort of price he had in mind.”

“No?”

“No. He said that henceforth I must never allow my feet to touch the ground. I can stand on top of things, as I understood it, but I can’t stand on the floor or the earth. And if I ever do, if my feet touch the ground, I will instantly fall over dead.”

“The bleeding bugger.”

“Yeah. So what do you make of it? He’s playing with my head, right? I mean, it’s silly, ridiculous.”

“Oh, without question. Quite silly. Load of bosh.”

“I was hoping you’d concur. As an experienced anthropologist, you must have come across this kind of thing before. I know, for example, that West Africa is crawling with curses and taboos—but there’re also a lot of credible witnesses who swear that they’re real, they’ve seen them work. That’s why I was inclined to err on the side of caution, to be perfectly honest.” He cloned the sheepish smile.

“Righto,” said Smithe. He paused, as if pondering. “Fascinating, though. There’s a quite similar prohibition in Irish folklore. Should a mortal ever stumble upon a fairy hill and be allowed to fraternize with the fairies, watch their dances and so forth, then the chap is warned that his feet may never thereafter touch the earth, under penalty of death. Evans-Wentz wrote of this, as I recall. Stories abound of pixilated Irishmen who, out of fear, spent the remainder of their lives on horseback.”

“Superstition, of course?”

“Of course. The Irish.”

“Flapdoodle?”

“Don’t rag me. I’ve been told more than once that my manner of speech is a trifle old-fashioned. Blame it on my school. Eleanor does. But you’re quite right. Flapdoodle. As a matter of fact, End of Time, that scalawag, placed a comparable taboo on me.”

“No kidding?” For the first time in that conversation, Switters looked relieved. “The same taboo as my own?”

“Uh, no, not precisely, though promising identical consequences.”

“And you’re alive and ambulating. That bodes well for me.” When Smithe didn’t respond, Switters asked, “Doesn’t it?”

“Um.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Oh, it should. It should. Yes.”

For reasons not entirely clear, Switters felt his heart sinking. He made an effort to nail Potney with his infamous glare. “Let’s have it, pal.”

“Sorry?”

“Your taboo, goddamn it! Let’s have it.”

Smithe’s wan smile was even more sheepish than Switters’s own. “A bit off the bean, I’m afraid.” He shuffled his flip-flops.

“Never mind the fucking bean!” Although still basically on his back, he managed to look menacing.

“If you must know,” said Smithe, clearing his throat, “and there’s little reason why you shouldn’t, End of Time warned me that as penalty for having journeyed with him to so-called secret places, I would face instant death—in much the mode you, yourself, described—were I ever to touch another man’s penis.”

Switters didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He lay there, mute, listening as the creak of the hammock twine blended with the rustling of jungle foliage on all sides of them.

“Rubbish, obviously,” said Smithe, trying to sound blasé. “One must contend with a sometimes maddening lack of rational—”

“You’ve tested it?” Switters interrupted.

“When dealing with the primitive mind—”

“So, you’ve tested it?”

“Why, no, no,” Smithe almost sputtered. “Naturally, I haven’t actually put it to the test. That’s silly.”

“But you’re supposed to be a scientist. Were you afraid to test it?”

“Fear has had nothing to do with it. I might have tested it, probably would have, but, well, you know, the nature of the thing involved.”

“You mean the penis thing?”

“Of course, I do. I jolly well do mean that. What do you take me for? I’m a married man. Christ!”

“Easy, big fellow. No inference intended. But you’ll agree, will you not, that scientists must occasionally undertake experiments they find personally distasteful? You speak of rationality, yet how can you for a damn second rationally contend that this taboo is rubbish when you haven’t subjected it to experiment?”

Smithe snorted.

“You’ve got to test it, pal. For your sake as well as my own—and I can’t deny I have a stake in this. In the outcome, I mean.”

“You’re not suggesting? . . . Surely.”

“Hey, it’s not my cup of tee-hee, either. I’m as straight as you are. Probably straighter. From what I hear, your lads in the fancy schools of Merry Olde can get pretty chummy with one another when the lights are low.”

“Of all the biased—”

“Okay, forget I said that. It’s no big deal one way or the other. What’s the big deal? Women don’t have this problem. They’re more evolved.” He paused. “R. Potney Smithe. What’s the R for?”

“I fail to see . . .”

“What’s the R for?”

“Reginald.”

“Reginald. Okay. You very easily could have gone by Reggie. Couldn’t you have? Reggie Smithe. A moniker mundane by any standard. But, no, you elected to be called Potney. A fairly brave choice there, pal. I admire you for it. I’m serious. I mean it. Says something about your character. And here you are in this jungle juju joint when you could have been snapping petits fours with the vicar of Kidderminster or some damn such. You’ve got guts.” (Switters spoke in the abstract, of course, since the image of guts as an actual physical mass was seldom permitted to invade his consciousness.)

“I fail to see . . .”

“Come on, Pot. Let’s get it over with.”

Smithe glanced around him, as if looking for support, but the long, narrow, platformed room was empty except for the two of them.

“Just a touch. One brief touch, that’s it. You needn’t grab hold of anything. I’d object if you did. Strenuously.”

Smithe’s hide, at all times richly hued, looked now as if it had been rolled in paprika. He seemed on the verge of spontaneous combustion. “Down there,” he said, nodding his teddy bear head in the direction of the firepit and the Nacanaca. “They could easily notice. . . .”

“Not if you hurry. And so what if they did? Do you honestly believe anybody in this part of the world would be scandalized? We’re in South America!”

With that, Switters unzipped the fly of his bedraggled linen trousers. The scratchy snickersnee swoosh produced by the swift separation of metal teeth was a sound more ominous to both men than any hiss or shriek or howl that might emanate from the unknown forest. Briefly, each of them froze, as if paralyzed by stun rays from an advanced technology.

Then, Smithe turned toward the hammock, a look of grim determination on his face. “Bloody good, then,” he said. Childishly awkward in his flip-flops and quasimilitaristic tan tropical togs, he began to advance. “You’re right. Let’s be done with it.”

“Uh,” said Switters, hurriedly, “uh, now if you have any reason to suppose there’s something to this taboo, that it might actually—”

“No, no.” Smithe paused. “Oh, if a bloke were to accept such superstitious nonsense on faith, it’s quite possible that he would be psychologically susceptible to whatever end the perpetrator of the malediction might have planted in his unsophisticated mind. But no civilized, sensible—”

“Okay, but what if you secretly believe in it, believe in it subconsciously and don’t know that you believe?”

Smithe seemed not to hear. He was advancing again. Thus, wishing to avoid any clumsy, embarrassing, last-minute fumbling, Switters freed his penis from its confinement within the folds of cheerfully patterned boxer shorts and pulled it out into the open. Almost instantly, it commenced, of its own volition, to crane its neck and bob its head about, as if sniffing the air, sensing that something fun—something uplifting, even—might be in the offing. Oh, Christ Almighty, no! This can’t be happening! In a panicky effort to quell the unwanted alertness, the independent impetus toward active participation, Switters strained to think of the most repulsive, unsexy things he could mentally conjure. He thought of an overflowing cat box and buckets of offal, thought of gift shoppes, TV game shows, and the time George Bush had addressed the employees at Langley. Just as he squeezed his eyes shut, the better to picture these anti-aphrodisiacs, R. Potney Smithe extended a forefinger and jabbed Switters’s half-erect member the way a shy but righteously purposeful Jehovah’s Witness might press an agnostic’s doorbell. Switters felt an electric jolt, although later he conceded that he might only have imagined it.

Smithe took a couple of steps backward. All of the ruddiness drained from his features, and he commenced to pull and pick at his shirtfront, as if involved in floccillation. Then he swayed. Pivoted to the right. And toppled onto the scorched and pitted floor.

For quite a while—it may have been as long as five minutes—Switters swung quietly in the hammock, staring at the heap on the floor, searching for signs of life; signs, more precisely, that Smithe was, as the Brit himself would have put it, ragging him, putting him on, pushing to an extreme his occasional dry fondness for jest.

At that point a figure ascended the wobbly ladder, and Fer-de-lance climbed onto the platform. The aspiring witchman glided noiselessly across the room, like one of the creatures for whom he seemed to have such affinity, and looking, in snakeskin cape and Ray-Ban sunglasses, like a Hollywood Boulevard vampire. He knelt beside Smithe’s form.

“Muy muerto,” Fer-de-lance whispered. “Muy muerto.” He glanced over his shoulder at Switters, who was struggling to inconspicuously fasten his fly. “This mister is very, very dead,” said he.