part 2

Every taboo is holy.

—Eskimo saying

 

 

Except for one shortish but memorable visit to Sacramento, another to Langley, Virginia, Switters spent the next six months in Seattle. It was the strangest period of his life.

It was stranger than his cloak-and-dagger days in and around Kuwait, stranger than his strangest nights of pleasure in the brothels of Southeast Asia, stranger than the annual Bloomsday literary banquets at the C.R.A.F.T. Club of Bangkok (though of these he couldn’t remember a fucking thing); stranger, even, than nine hours of modern poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Well and good, but surely, one must ask, was there nothing about that half year, passed largely idle, in Seattle that was not positively humdrum when compared to the calamitous craziness he’d recently undergone in South America or the beatific bumfuzzlements he was soon to undergo in Syria? Yes, as far as Switters was concerned, the Seattle sojourn would always be the stranger of the experiences or, at least, the period when his equanimity was most rigorously challenged. And he was, after all, the final authority on that sojourn, although others were unquestionably involved. These included Maestra, Suzy, and Bad Bobby Case, as well as an assistant deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency called Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald; and, indirectly, from afar, the Kandakandero Indian known, perhaps erroneously, as End of Time. (Fer-de-lance had concluded that the shaman’s name could be more accurately translated to mean End of Future, or more explicitly yet, Today Is Tomorrow. Accent on the verb. Today Is Tomorrow.)

The oddness of those months back in the U.S. could be attributed not merely to the major problems implicit in adjusting to life in a wheelchair but also to his efforts to come to terms with the usher—the Ka’dak witchman or Switters, himself—who had assigned him to that mobile yet restrictive seat. Compounding those predicaments, naturally, were the reactions of others, mainly but not exclusively, the friends, relatives, and employers listed above.

During his first week back, he’d had to contend with no one but Maestra. To her, he’d provided only the most ambiguous explanation of his sudden confinement to a wheelchair, claiming that his disability was related to activities that he was not at liberty to discuss; the same activities, he said, that unfortunately had destroyed her camcorder along with its heartwarming record of Sailor Boy’s flight to freedom.

“Right,” said Maestra sarcastically, rolling, behind the huge circular lenses of her spectacles, a pair of bleary, beady eyes. “The old ‘for reasons of national security’ alibi. Heh! I’m a loyal American of long standing, but that doesn’t mean I’m so flag-addled I can’t recognize our favorite euphemism for ‘governmental hanky-panky swept under the rug.’ Anyway,” she continued, “there’s a place where men disabled in the line of duty can go to convalesce. It’s called Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. If you prefer to recuperate at Chez Maestra instead, you’d better be prepared to spill some beans.”

Switters put her off. “In a few days,” he promised. “I’ll be able to talk about it in a few days.” Thereafter, every time she attempted to bring up the subject or even, in passing, shot him an imploring glance, he’d wink, grin, and proclaim, “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”

Alas, Maestra was not the type to be charmed more than once or twice by a line from Rimbaud memorized in a long-ago poetry class, no matter how attractively delivered. Faced with her increasing impatience and growing suspicions—”I have to say, buddy boy, you look pretty healthy to me; that camcorder cost twelve hundred bucks, I’m privy to your wanting to milk Suzy’s aphid, and you neglected to bring me a bracelet”—Switters, already in a confounded state and not knowing what else to do, sent for Bobby Case.

“Switters! What the hell? What have you gone and done to yourself?”

The e-message Bobby received in Alaska had stated only that his friend needed urgently to see him and supplied a Seattle address. Having a couple of days off, Case hitched a ride aboard a military transport plane out of Fairbanks bound for McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma. Within twenty-four hours after reading his e-mail, he arrived, noisily, at Maestra’s door on a rented motorcycle.

“Bobby! Wow! Welcome. That was fast.”

“Naw, man. That was slower than snail snot. Must be losing my edge. But you?! What the hell? Fall down the stairs in a whorehouse?”

Switters checked Bobby’s black leather jacket for signs of moisture. “It’s quit drizzling, hasn’t it? Let’s go out on the side deck where we can talk privately—although even the deck could be bugged.”

“Company or offshore bug?”

“Maestra bug.”

“Really? Your granny doesn’t look like no ear artist, although she does appear to have a burr in her britches.”

“She rude to you when she let you in?”

“Nice as pie. I even got the impression she was kinda flirting with me.”

“That’s Maestra. An Aphrodite type right down to the finish line.”

“She took to me. It’s you she seems to have a problem with.”

“Well, she’ll have to stand in line with the rest. Come on. Follow me.”

“I’m right behind you, son. But what did she mean when she called you Mr. Worker Ant?”

“Never mind that.” He all but blushed. “It’s a pet name. Family thing.”

“Oh. Like when my uncles and aunts used to call me ‘little asshole.’ “

Demonstrating his growing expertise with the chair, Switters wheeled down the dim foyer, past the living room—pausing briefly to ascertain that the Matisse was still there—and through a formal dining room permanently lacquered with the unsophisticated fumes from takeout food. From the dining room, French doors led out onto a spacious deck with a sweeping view of the cold and busy sound named for Peter Puget. Next to a potted evergreen there was a Styrofoam chest, which he circled three times rapidly before coming to a halt beside it, facing the water.

“You’ve taken to that chair like a worm to tequila,” Bobby marveled. “How long’s it been your mode of transport?”

Switters patted the blue Naugahyde upholstered arms of the lightweight, foldable Invacare 9000 XT, pride of Elyria, Ohio. He patted its plastic-coated, chrome-plated hand rims (used to manually propel it), kicked with the side of his foot its pneumatic “flat-free” tires, squirmed his rump about on the “contour plus” cushion that topped the “drop hook solid folding” seat. How such a brand-new deluxe-model wheelchair had ended up in the Boquichicos infirmary, he didn’t know. Part of a foreign-aid package, presumably. He did know that he had failed to send it back with Inti as promised, and he felt a prickle of guilt over that omission, even though he’d wired the clinic a thousand dollars his second day back in the States.

“It’s flame resistant.”

“That’s handy.”

“And bacteria resistant.”

“Smart. Furniture on wheels, you don’t know where it’s been.”

“Oh, I keep a watchful eye.”

“And lock it up at night, I hope. Person can’t be too aseptic in this day and age.” In a characteristic gesture, Bobby tossed a pompadourlike tussock of inky hair out of his eyes while simultaneously patting down the cowlick that coiled like a busted bedspring farther back on his head. Switters had recently turned thirty-six (his birthday had passed unheralded—except by the migraine-makers—on a flight from Paris to New York), which meant that Bobby must have been at least approaching his thirty-third year, but he seemed, if anything, to have grown more boyish—Huck Finnish in stance, Tiger Woodsish in build—since Switters had seen him last, and also more foredoomed. Small wonder Maestra or any other woman would find him worth a flutter. “Fine piece of engineering, but you’d think they’d figure out a way to plumb the damn things.”

“To accommodate a wet bar or . . .”

“Naw,” Bobby went on, shaking his raven mane as if rejecting his previous thought, “that’d never work. But I’ll tell you, son, what’d throw my happy heart to the wolves if I was to have to park a bony Texas butt in one of these suckers every day is the trial and tribulation of just taking a whiz. I mean, don’t you have to off-load yourself onto a customized throne and wee-wee sitting down like you was queen of the May?”

“Such unlucky gentlemen do exist,” said Switters, “but behold the masculine ease with which I can perform the rite of the void.” In demonstration, he bolted boldly upright and stood on the footplate as if before a public urinal. “Of course, you have to make sure the brake is set, and balance your weight, or you could pitch face-first into the fixture.”

Bobby looked like a buffaloed rubbernecker at the Lazarus show. “You can stand?!”

Grinning, Switters hopped backward up onto the seat, where he then began to jog in place, raising his knees almost as high as the scarlet T-shirt he wore under his double-breasted navy pinstriped suit. The wheelchair shook. It teetered precariously. For an instant, he seemed to panic. He throttled the trot.

“What the? . . .” Bobby’s face was changing expressions faster than Clark Kent changed underwear. He went swiftly from astonishment to relief to annoyance to amusement to imagined comprehension. “Okay. Alrighty. I get it. Even a maniac like yourself wouldn’t go to all this trouble just to mock the afflicted or play a cruel joke on your ol’ podner. So’s I reckon you’re fixing to go deep cover, and you’ll be trying to convince some alleged bad guys somewhere that you’ve been crippled by the forces of imperialism. The CIA and Actors Studio: telling them apart has never been simple. Did you know Mata Hari’s real name was Gertrude? But hey! Anyway. I’m gladder than shit you’re not actually stoved in ‘cause I was hoping we could hit a dance club or two this evening.”

Switters reseated himself. “It’s not like that, Bobby,” he said quietly. “It’s not a cover. I really am confined to this contraption. Indefinitely, if not permanently.”

“Then what the? . . . You were bouncing around like a poot in a microwave.”

“Why don’t you take your bandanna, if you don’t mind, and dry off one of those patio chairs.” Switters lifted the lid of the Styrofoam cooler. There was a rattle of ice shards as he removed a pair of glistening bottles. Sing Ha. “For old times’ sake,” he said. “Only four of these in stock, I wasn’t expecting you so soon. But there’s a Thai restaurant a mile from here, and they deliver. Good. Have a seat. You’re not chilly, are you?”

“I live in Nome,” Bobby said. “Nome, Alaska. And in case your Langley-trained powers of observation have completely deserted you, I happen to be wearing my leathers. You’re the one liable to get cold.”

The sun had muscled through the oyster frappé for the first time in weeks, but a light breeze was blowing off the water, and it was raw around its edges. “The state I’m in, I’m impervious to climate. So make yourself comfortable. I’ve got a story to relate . . .”

“I should hope.”

“. . . and you’re going to find it harder to swallow than a cat fur omelet. It’s hard for me, too, so be patient, if patience is among your virtues . . .”

“You could fit all my virtues in Minnie Mouse’s belly button and still have room for Mickey’s tongue and their prenuptial agreement.”

“. . . because it’s going to take me some time, even to get started. Maybe while I’m gathering my wits, as the maître d’ used to say at the Algonquin Hotel, you could fill me in on what you’ve been up to.”

Noticing Switters’s untypical solemnity, Bobby said, “Sure. Take it slow if you need to. But you’ve got to tell me one thing up front. The question that’s burning a hole in my tortilla is . . . well, is or is not the affliction that’s landed you in this senior-citizen dune buggy the result of a sexually transmitted disease? I mean, I hate to be blunt, but if you’ve been bit by something of that nature two years after Bangkok, there’s a chance that I might . . .”

Switters had to laugh.

“Well, we were plowing the same fields, you know. Extracting ore from neighboring shafts. So to speak.”

The word relax was on the tip of Switters’s tongue when the memory of Sailor intervened. Instead, he said, “Not it at all. Nothing remotely in that category, I promise.” He removed a cell phone from the side pocket of the wheelchair and ordered a dozen Sing Has from the Green Papaya Café. Then, without waiting for Bobby to file his Alaska report, he began—first haltingly, bumblingly, then, gaining silver and fizz, dramatically, almost with heedless relish—to recount the events of the weeks just past.

The sun, as if wanting to listen in, as if there might be something new under it, after all, fought off the curdling stratocumulus and moved in closer. By the time Switters finished his hour-long account, the deck was awash in afternoon sunlight; mild, respectful, autumnal rays, bright enough but lacking any sear in their beam. The sea breeze persisted throughout, but so restrained, finally, it could give the impression that it, too, had been mesmerized by the tale.

If the sun was enticed and the breeze engrossed, Bobby Case was those things and more. The former Air Force officer was literally transfixed—whether with amazement, awe, disbelief, sympathy, or scorn, it was impossible to ascertain. Many minutes passed, however, during which he could not raise his beer to his lips. When at last he spoke, his voice was taut from the strain of trying to sound normal and unimpressed. “So, that ol’ boy? That limey? He really bought the farm?”

“Muy muerto.”

“Damn shame.”

“Yeah. Potney was a fine fellow. An aristocrat, I suspect, although the kind inclined to wear black business shoes and dress socks with Bermuda shorts.”

“Every country club in the state of Texas has got a few of them. And you believe the Indian’s curse killed him?”

“Well . . .” Switters, too, was making an effort to behave matter-of-factly. “I believe he chomped an apple he couldn’t—”

Bobby’s eyes narrowed. “An apple?” he asked archly.

“Yeah. Eve’s apple. The fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

“Oh? Thought for a second you were referring to the head of your—”

“Bobby! For Christ’s sake! No, no tooth marks on that fruit, which, anyway, I would’ve modestly described as a crab apple or a plum. Jesus, pal! He only jabbed it. What I’m saying is that Potney took a bite out of the old forbidden Winesap and could neither assimilate it nor eliminate it. A cruel dilemma. As Hesse said, ‘The magic theater is not for everyone.’ “

“Bought a ticket to a show his rigid background hadn’t prepared him to handle? But once seen, couldn’t forget? Alrighty. How, exactly, did that kill him?”

Switters shook his head silently, slowly.

“More to the damn point, you? You’re a horse of a different feather.”

Switters just kept shaking his head.

Some gulls screeched by, sounding, as usual, in a state of barely controlled hysteria. Wondering if his friend wasn’t close to being in the same condition, Bobby decided he ought to experiment with empathy. “If it was anybody but you, podner, I’d say you were haunting your own house. Like that uncle of mine in Jasper who still thinks Fidel Castro’s hiding under his rose bushes. Raggedy ass roses, too. Never prunes ’em right. But knowing you’re telling the truth, and after the crazy shit you saw down there, well, I’m trying to put myself in your place, and I have to say, if it was me who went through it and saw what you saw, I reckon I’d be lying on my back with my feet in the air like some upended June bug. At least, ‘til I figured it all out.”

Switters lit a Havana panatela, Cuban cigars being an occasional perk of CIA employment. On the out-puff (he never inhaled), he said, “Figuring it out is the rub.”

“Yep, and I don’t know if I can help you much with that end of it. For the time being, at least, I’m going to let you wrassle with the psychological aspects. As for me . . . we’re in agreement that you’ve got good reason to be keeping your tootsies off the pavement. You got no choice right now but to scoot around in that wheelchair. The first order of business is to find a way to get you out of it.”

“That would probably entail lifting the taboo.”

“There you go.” Bobby sucked on his beer bottle like a tot on a lollipop or a tout on a pencil. After a minute or two, he said, “We’re both company men. Even if I am just a contractual flyboy and you’re stuck below supergrader because of your personal proclivities. We’re still company. So let’s approach this problem like company. How would the geniuses back at the pickle factory deal with it?”

“Depends on the level of White House involvement.”

“You got that straight, son. President’s men the biggest damn cowboys on the planet, and we take the heat for ’em. Democrats bad as Republicans.”

“Worse, maybe.”

“Yep. That beloved JFK. More dirty tricks than a whore in a coal mine. By the time he supposedly ate acid and saw the evil truth about Vietnam, his karmic boomerang was already winging home to roost. Live by the cowboy, die by the cowboy, I reckon. But we digress. Now. The company. First thing, they’d dispatch some Joe to meet with that would-be giggle box of a shaman and buy him out. Bribe him to call off the bugaboo. Right?”

“Quite likely. But End of Time—or Today Is Tomorrow—has no use for money. In fact, I can’t imagine what you might possibly bribe him with.”

“Everybody has a price. ‘Cept for you and me. On second thought, ‘cept for you. I know all too well what mine’d be. But, alrighty, let’s say we can’t buy him off. Next thing, the company would send in some disinformation Joes, plant evidence, try to discredit him. Rile up the populace against him. Pressure him, blackmail him, get him run out of office.”

“Near as I can tell, except maybe for a noninfluential outsider named Fer-de-lance, he has no rivals. If he ever had any, I suspect he may have eaten them.”

Bobby burst out laughing.

“I’m not so sure that’s far-fetched. You find it amusing?”

“Nope, nope,” said Case. “I was just thinking about you eating granny’s parrot.” He grinned from sideburn to sideburn.

“Shhh,” Switters shushed him, glancing around furtively.

“Sorry. But we did sweep for bugs. Which in itself is pretty funny. Anyhow, if all else failed, company’d dispatch an operative to smack the witchman. If the cowboys had a hand in it, they would.”

“Well, they don’t. And in the Amazon forest? I’m not sure they could. They couldn’t even smack Castro. In seven attempts.”

“All they had to do was go to Jasper, spray Uncle Jerry’s roses.”

“Besides, who would do it?”

Bobby didn’t hesitate. “Me.”

“You must be cartooning!”

“Nope. Not if it came to that. Not if it was the only way to release you.”

Simultaneously touched and appalled, Switters asked, “You’d actually? . . .”

“If it came to that. As Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, it’s permissible to—”

“I know what Krishna is alleged to have said in the Gita: ‘If your cause is just,’ et cetera. And like the ‘eye for an eye’ crap Yahweh is alleged to have thundered in the Bible, it’s been twisted to excuse and justify every vile sort of opportunistic bloodletting. Anyway—and I sincerely appreciate your offer—the threat of death, or even death itself, is unlikely to produce the desired results. Today Is Tomorrow and his pals have a different slant on mortality than we so-called civilized types. The overly oxygenated who like to think all peoples are the same have never crossed paths with a Kandakandero.”

“Hell, they’ve never crossed paths with a Frenchman. One-worldism is just a disguised brand of xenophobia. Even your cousin Potney from cousinly Merry Olde laid a bodacious cultural difference or two on the table. Otherwise, you mighten not be in this mess. Now, as for getting you out of it . . . I see your point. Eliminating the laughing shaman wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the taboo.”

“Not unless he died in some arcane manner that you and I couldn’t even guess at.”

“Hmm.” Bobby filled his throat with Sing Ha. Switters followed suit. Out on Puget Sound, an aging freighter filled its stack with steam. The noise, long and mournful, set a neighbor’s dog to yowling a canine version of a country western tune, which in turn set off the gulls, those graceful but grabby scavengers who wouldn’t have hesitated to pick Hank Williams cleaner than a Cadillac full of agents and a courtroom full of ex-wives. Then, everything went quiet again, the sun let itself be bound and hooded by strato-terrorists, and Switters returned to shaking his head. As the ambience, sky and water alike, gradually turned a single shade of teal, Bobby slumped low in his patio chair, his battered boots propped on the ice chest. He appeared lost in thought.

Teal is an unfriendly color, and the air had an unfriendly feel. Chill, at last, found Switters’s bones. He tapped the toe of Bobby’s left boot with the toe of his own right sneaker. “Park Place, Illinois Avenue, and a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for your thoughts,” he said.

“Make that a Boardwalk hotel full of blondes and fried chicken and you got a deal.” He bolted upright and grinned his boyish hardpan grin. “I was thinking,” he said, “that wheelchair or no wheelchair, I’m taking you dancing tonight.”

They did go dancing. Even Switters danced, after a fashion, careening his Invacare 9000 around the floor of the Werewolf Club, more or less in time to the energetic rock of Electric Baby Moses, moving, more or less in concert, with one of the several young women Bobby had attracted to their table. Or, perhaps, Switters had attracted them on his own. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates,” he practically shouted at one point in the evening.

Even so, they taxied home alone. Alone, and more than meagerly intoxicated. So intoxicated, in fact, that an incautious Switters sang in the cab a medley of refrains from Broadway shows, included among them a seemingly poignant rendition of “Send in the Clowns.” Bobby, fortunately, thought his friend was merely waxing ironic—and to a certain extent irony was involved. The stiff-witted and academic seem not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the same instant; that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an affectionate glow in heart.

They awoke the next morning wound in the rusty anchor chains of hangover, but Maestra fixed them a delicious late breakfast of ham biscuits with red-eye gravy, surprising because they’d roused her noisily at 3 A.M., Switters lacking a key to the house, and because Maestra never had been what she contemptuously referred to as a “kitchen chicken.” Bobby told her she made the Galloping Gourmet look like he was stuck in cement and kissed her on the cheek, and although she waved him off as if he were some kind of hopeless lunatic, Switters could tell she was pleased.

Arriving on the side deck just as the mist was lifting (they’d paused on the way to admire the Matisse), Switters suggested a tuft of hair of the dog. “Nope,” countered Bobby, “nothing doing. First, we’re gonna sit. I have a sneaking suspicion you haven’t sat in a coon’s age.”

“However the hell long that is,” said Switters. “I don’t believe small arboreal carnivores are exactly famous for lavish longevity, not judging from the frequency with which they show up as road kill.”

“Mock the folk wisdom of your ancestors if you must, ain’t no concern of mine, but I can sense you haven’t been sitting, son; and while meditation wasn’t designed as therapy, it might do more for you than gravy does for biscuits—at this weird troubling time in your life.”

They sat.

They sat for nearly two hours, in the course of which Switters lost himself so that his essence passed into what some are wont to call, perhaps unrealistically, the Real Reality: that realm of consciousness beyond ego and ambition where mind becomes a silver minnow in a great electric lake of soul, and where the quarks and the gods pick up their mail on their way from nowhere to everywhere (or is it the other way around?).

Afterward, tranquilized and centered by the meditation, and enheartened by the previous evening’s coed recreation, Switters felt better than he had in a fortnight; felt so good that he came to an optimistic decision concerning his next course of action. His instinct, however, was not to share this with Bobby immediately. Instead, he focused on loosening the last remaining loops of hangover’s iron turban. “Young buck like you might not notice,” he said, decapping a beer, “but I find piper inflation to be on the rise.”

“Yep. The bastard’s been charging me twice the price for half the fun. When I avail myself of his services, that is. Since the excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages is the state sport of Alaska—they’d challenge for the gold at the Drunkard Olympics, but’d lose major points to Ireland in the charm category—I’ve been pretty much teetotaling, out of sheer contrariness, not wanting to be just another shitface in the crowd.” Accepting a wet bottle from Switters, he examined it at some length. “Nostalgia’s nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history, but I’d be lying like a cop in court if I was to tell you Sing Ha was anything but sucky beer.”

Switters nodded. “It went down well enough in Bangkok, where there was hardly any choice, but here in the land of a thousand brewskies, it does come across as rather weak-kneed and effete.”

“Tastes like butterfly piss. Of course, it’s brewed by Buddhists. Guess it takes a Christian to put some muscle in a liquid refreshment.”

“That’s it. It’s the fear and anger that’s missing in Sing Ha. Bereft of those punitive and vindictive qualities we Christers have come to respect and love. No bops in the hops. No assault in the malt. But, Captain Case, if you’re a no-show at Alaska’s finer watering holes, how do you spend your time up there? Needlepoint? Laboring to reach page two of Finnegans Wake?”

“Fly more than you might think.”

“Really? I wouldn’t have thought. With our increased satellite capabilities, why do we fly manned spy missions at all?”

The crosshatched crinkles around Bobby’s eyes stiffened slightly. “Can’t rightly address that, son.”

Caught off guard, Switters very nearly flinched. “Oh. Not my need to know?”

“There you go.”

In the CIA, there existed a pervasive and perpetual rule that a company employee, no matter how light his or her cover, no matter if coverless, must never divulge to anyone—spouse, parent, lover, friend, or even fellow CIAnik—more about his or her job than that person had a need, not an abiding interest but an actual need, to know. With Maestra and to a lesser extent with Suzy, Switters had been somewhat lax in adhering to that rule, which was why he may have been so surprised to find Bad Bobby, flaunter of a fair number of society’s more firmly held conventions and active critic of the multinational commercial entities to whose Muzak the company, with escalating frequency, now danced, strictly obeying it. Switters had long ago come to accept if not appreciate the fact that he himself was a study in contradictions, blaming the incongruities in his personality on his having been born on the cusp between Cancer and Leo, pulled in opposite directions by lunar and solar forces (that he maintained severe reservations about the reliability of astrology only reinforced the evidence). Now, he was starting to notice glaring inconsistencies in Bobby, as well. Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people, at any rate. Maybe those among us ever steadfast and predictable, those whose yang did not intermittently slop over into their yin, maybe those were candidates for Maestra’s subhuman category of “missing link.”

“Well. Then. Forgetting your official duties, in which I was only feigning a polite interest in the first place, can I ask if you’ve got anything drawn up on the monkey wrench board, anything that might be causing John Foster Dulles to rotate in his sarcophagus?” Upon uttering the name, Dulles, Switters spat. Upon hearing it, Bobby spat as well. Two molten pearls of Dulles-inspired spittle shimmered on the tiles. (It may or may not be instructive to note that the Dulles who stimulated this derogatory salute was the so-called statesman, John Foster, and not his brother, Allen, the very first director of the CIA.)

“You mean angelic aces up my sleeve? Nothing new. Cook some books, so to speak; jam a few signals here and there, and then the usual archival stuff. Still collecting data on Guatemalan smack squads, on company drug running, the Manson setup, UFO coverups, et cetera. Not much corporate, which is where the dirt is nowadays. Got more than enough, though, to make ’em think twice about ever sacking me. Otherwise, I’m not sure when or if I’ll play them cards.”

“You wouldn’t want to end up like Audubon Poe.”

“Aw, ol’ Audubon Poe’s doing fine and dandy, for a man with a blue sticker on his head. Leading a more productive life than me or you. At this flaccid moment of our personal histories.”

Before Switters could inquire after ex-agent Poe, Maestra appeared at the French doors to remind the two men that they’d promised to play her newest video games with her as soon as they’d finished their post-breakfast breather. It was now past noon, and Apocalyptic Ack-Ack was set up and ready to roll.

Bobby proved to be unbeatable at Apocalyptic Ack-Ack, but Switters was victorious at New World Order and Maestra creamed them both at Armies of Armageddon, so everyone was cheerful and devoured an extra large vegetarian pizza garrulously together before Maestra retired for a nap. The men peed, washed up, and changed clothes: Switters into his ginger Irish tweeds, Bobby into Wrangler jeans and a sweater so bulky and thick it must have taken a woolly mammoth and two Shetland ponies to make it. Then, after stopping once again to approve the brushwork of Henri M., they returned to the safety of the deck. There, in a grayish November glow that might have been filtered through frozen squid bladders, a kind of sunlight substitute invented by Norwegian chemists, Switters sat wondering how to broach the subject of his next move. It wasn’t long before Bobby provided a segue.

“So, son, what’re you gonna tell ’em back at the pickle factory?”

“Excellent question. My leave’s up in ten days. I’ll concoct something before I go rolling into the spookmeister’s oracle. He certainly couldn’t accommodate anything remotely resembling the truth. Not Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, I have to decide on what to tell Maestra.” He paused. “And Suzy.”

“Suzy?”

“Yes.”

“Your little stepsister?”

“Yes. I’ve decided to fly down to see her on Monday.” (It was then Saturday afternoon.)

“To get in her pants?”

“To help her write her first high-school term paper.” He paused. He smiled. “And . . .” He broke off.

“And what?”

“And get in her pants.” Instantly, he regretted the statement, not because it was false—he had every intention of consummating their relationship and believed she felt the same—nor because he was especially embarrassed by sharing his intent with his best friend, but, rather, because the crudeness of the remark, the casual male baldness of it, misrepresented the depth of his feeling for her. His beach-blanket buttercup. His dewy wolverine.

As for Bobby, he failed to respond right away. He, in fact, gave every indication of being pensive. Lost not only in thought but in vastness of sweater, he looked as small as an offscreen movie actor, and not many years older than Suzy herself. “Oh, you Switters,” he said at last. “You poor bastard. Do you know what you’re messing with here? Do you know you’re giving your address out to something that’ll make a shaman’s curse seem like a get-well card from Mother Teresa?”

Switters was mute, his beer arm stalled in midair between ice chest and mouth, so Bobby continued: “Do you know you’re messing with the single biggest taboo in our culture? A taboo worse than taxing the church and burning the flag rolled up in one, a taboo that’ll get your balls handed to you on a paper plate and every doctor in America’d break his Hippocratic oath and three golf dates rather than sew ’em back on?” He set down his beer and leaned forward toward the wheelchair. “I’m talking, of course, about the taboo against the sexuality of adolescent girls.

“Yes, son. The taboo of taboos in the United States of America, and I’m sticking my scrawny Texas neck out even to mention it. Good thing we swept for bugs.” Bobby retrieved his Sing Ha, took a long, unsatisfying swig, and leaned back. “It’s an indisputable, observable fact that even infants have sex lives—purely recreational, mindless, and self-centered, obviously: a simple matter of being pleasured by genital stimulation—but it continues kinda marginally throughout childhood until by the time puberty hits ’em full force, they’re masturbating at such a rate it’s a wonder they don’t develop repetitive motion syndrome. Girls as well as boys, por favor. In fact, because human females mature faster, they get there first, and it’s doubtful if we slow boats to China ever catch up.”

Half-closing his eyes, Switters, perversely, tried to imagine Suzy masturbating, but it was beyond him, and, besides, Bobby was pressing on.

“The unadorned truth is, adolescent girls are horny as jackrabbits. It’s not their fault, nature designed it that way. For the protection of the species. And there’s nothing politics or religion can do to alter that physical reality, short of drugging the girls with medical depressants or siphoning off their hormones with rubber tubes. But because modern society is by nature unnatural, we’re in a state of absolute denial over it. Absolute denial. That our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and little sisters might be highly charged sexual dynamos makes us so uncomfortable, so queasy, that we, men and women both, have to lie to ourselves and each other and pretend it doesn’t exist.

“Well, that which you deny sooner or later rises up and bites you in the ass. That ol’ boy Miller dealt with this very subject in The Crucible, but we applauded the play and pretended it was about witchcraft or some such shit and went right on with our denial. And with our witchhunts. It’s the witchhunting that worries me. For Suzy’s sake as much as yours.”

“Uh-huh.” Switters nodded dumbly, but his beer bottle remained stationary midway between the Styrofoam container that had lowered its temperature and the organic container that would empty its contents and warm them up again.

“We ain’t in Thailand anymore, son. Remember that. It ain’t Denmark or Sweden, neither. Here, a girl’s got to sweep her natural biological urges under the rug. Keep ’em to herself and feel guilty about ’em. If not, she’ll be charged a stiff price, socially and psychologically. Our girls are culturally unprepared for the . . . the, uh, emotional intricacies of fucking. Although, at sixteen, your Suzy’ll be getting there pretty damn quick. In the meantime, though, I know you wouldn’t want to muddy her sweet waters. Not you, who’s got such a thing about innocence.”

“That again,” grumbled Switters.

“And you also have your own self to consider. Listen. Any adult male heterosexual who says he isn’t never turned on by pubescent girls is a liar or a geek, and you can tell him Bad Bobby said so. But we’re in denial over that, too. Serious denial. A man go Humbert-Humberting around in America, he’ll find himself thrown into the volcano, a sacrifice to appease the gods who’ve blighted humanity with all these nasty, unwanted, upsetting transgenerational cravings. The morality police’ll tar a romantically smitten fool like you with the same wire brush they use, justifiably, on the sicksacks and twisttops who actually prey on children and injure ’em out of a psychotic need to exercise power over somebody weaker than their own weak selves. The smut sniffers from the victimization industry are also into exercising power, remember, and drawing fair and intelligent distinctions has never been one of their long suits. Some of ’em, sad to say, are only seeking revenge for hurtful things that happened to them as children—but, then, the same could be said of the child molesters. Two sides of the same unlucky coin. At any rate, we got us a climate where normal men are scared to admit, even in the mirror, that they occasionally get bit by the lust bug whilst gandering at a junior miss. And I reckon society’ll go right on lying about it until the day it reaches enlightenment.” In one swift gulp, he finished off his beer. “ ‘Course, as long as it keeps lying to itself about itself, there ain’t much chance of it ever becoming enlightened. Anyhow. Don’t do it, Swit. That’s my advice. For a dozen good reasons, don’t do it.”

When Bobby stood up and stretched, Switters said, “That was quite a speech, pal. Thanks. I’ll chew every bolus of it many times I’m sure, and I’ll carefully consider your counsel. But . . .”

“But?”

“But you haven’t met Suzy.”

“No, and I don’t want to, neither. ‘Cause every word I said, though true, was hypocritical to the core. If it was me in your place and she was willing, and I thought she knew what she was doing, I’d be in her pants quicker than she could bring ’em home from The Gap. But I’m white trash from Hondo and don’t have the morals of a flea.”

Like chip dip with a short shelf life, the imported Scandinavian sunshine had commenced to degenerate, reverting to the cod paste from which it was synthesized. Scud blew by close to the surface of the sound like dank puffballs of bacterial fuzz, and the men could almost taste mildew in the air. The atmosphere was leaden and thin simultaneously, as if composed of some new element that defied known laws of atomic weight and could be properly breathed only by lifelong residents of the Pacific Northwest. Feathery and innocuous on one hand, sodden and ill-willed on the other, it was the meteorological equivalent of Pat Boone singing heavy metal.

Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle’s weather, and not merely because of its ambivalence. He liked its subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive. It was all those things and more—but it was never vivid.

The vivid excesses from which he recoiled in nature Switters found irresistible in language. Bobby’s pointed rhetoric, the platitudinousness of its content notwithstanding (that teenage girls were sexual beings and society didn’t like it wasn’t exactly news), had left Switters lightly hypnotized. It was Bobby who broke the spell by abruptly asking, “You worried about how little Suzy’s gonna react to finding your ol’ butt stuck in a chair? Meals on wheels? Not the most virile of images, I wouldn’t reckon.”

“What? Oh. No. No.” Switters smiled confidently. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”

“Heh! So I keep hearing. Sounds like a slogan from a recruiting poster.” The voice was not Bobby’s but Maestra’s. She was standing on the threshold of the French doors, which she had managed to open undetected. How long she’d been there, how much she’d overheard, how an octogenarian widow with a walking stick had sneaked up on a couple of swashbucklers from the Central Intelligence Agency were questions of immediate concern. “What does a woman have to do to gain some attention around this place?”

“Dreadful sorry, ma’am,” said Bobby, in his most courtly manner. “We’ve been pining away for your companionship but assumed you were enjoying a soothing respite from the likes of us two polecats.”

“I was, indeed,” she said, “until it reached the stage where I felt the two polecats were ignoring me.”

“Never,” Bobby assured her. “Impossible. Say, how’d you like to take a little spin?”

“A spin? Me? You mean on your motorcycle?”

Switters jumped in. “Not a good idea. It’ll be dark before you know it.” He was right about that. It was not yet five o’clock, but in Seattle in November, the diurnal house band played very short sets.

“Let’s ride!” said Maestra, waving her left arm in the air until its bracelets rang out like an Afro-Cuban rhythm section in a bus wreck. “Unless Herr Alzheimer is playing tricks on me, I’ve got an old leather jacket in the hall closet.”

There was no stopping them. She even refused to wear a helmet, not wishing to look like a wimp next to Bobby, who consistently violated the helmet law on the grounds that his head was his own affair, cowlick and all. With some misgiving, Switters saw them off, then wheeled into the living room and parked below the Matisse. The big blue nude rose like a mountain range, an azure Appalachia of loaves, humps, and knobs, a topographical maquette constructed from huckleberry jelly, a curvaceous cobalt upland where clumps of wild asters clung precariously to the hillsides and the bluebirds all sipped curaçao. Matisse’s nude was nude but not really naked, which is to say, though she was beyond shame or embarrassment, she was far from brazen. Her purpose was not to titillate but to inspire awe at the infinite blueness of our finite world.

In her way, she was more innocent than Suzy, wiser than Maestra; a woman such as Switters had never known nor would ever know—or so he thought—and as such, perfectly suited to preside over his musings of the moment.

Bobby is correct, he mused. To deny that young girls were throbbing hives of sexual honey was to be both sexist and ageist. On the other hand, to steal samples of that honey or dupe them out of it, or to view them as only hives or even as primarily hives was an equal or perhaps greater wrong. The big blue nude seemed to nod in agreement. Taboos, however, were not good, either. Taboos were superstitions with fangs on them, and if not transcended, they punctured the brain and drained the spirit. A taboo was a crystallized knot of societal fear and must be unraveled, cut through, or smashed if a people were to set themselves free. Ancient Greeks had a concept they called “eating the taboo,” and the agorhi sect in India took a similar approach. As a path to liberation, these golden Greeks and holy Hindus would deliberately break any and all of their culture’s prevailing taboos in order to loosen their hold, destroy their power. It was an active, somewhat radical method of triumphing over fear by confronting that which frightened: embracing it, dancing with it, absorbing it, and moving past it. It was a casting out of demons.

Wouldn’t it be to his betterment and, perhaps, to society’s as well, to go on down to Sacramento and, in one way or another, stare that taboo in the eye? Wouldn’t it? Or was this merely some elaborate Swittersesque rationalization? (The big blue nude gave nary a sign.)

At 6 P.M. he began to worry. At quarter past, he revved up the fret machine. It was darker than the clam beds of Styx out there, and a needle-nose rain had commenced to fall. Where could they be? Certainly, something had gone wrong. In her frail condition, Maestra might have lost her grip and fallen off. Bobby, hardly the most cautious of bikers, might have skidded them into a lumber truck. Or a driver, typically unmindful of motorcycles and further handicapped by the gloom and the rain, might have plowed into them or run them over a curb. There must have been an accident. What else would have delayed them? Switters dismissed any notion of hanky-panky. There were limits to Bobby’s gallantry. She was a grandmother, for God’s sake! She was older than salt.

He had just decided to give them ten more minutes before calling the police when the telephone burbled. A table was sideswiped and a floorlamp flattened on his way to the phone. Evidently he needed more practice in the Invacare 9000. He was not yet the starship commander he fancied himself to be.

“Bobby! What’s happened? Is she all right?”

“All right? Yeah, she’s fine—except for being stubborn as a frostbit fireplug. We’re having a big fight, to tell you the truth.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re at the video store. I’m dying to see Blade Runner again—you know as good as me it’s the best damn movie ever made—but your granny’s got her mind set on some fou-fou flick about the expatriate art scene in Paris in the twenties. Guys with big noses sitting around in sidewalk cafés arguing over whether Gertrude Stein weighs more than Ernest Hemingway, or some unhappy shit like that.”

“You must mean The Moderns. It’s a delicious film. You’d lick your chops over it. Why don’t you just rent them both?”

“Because, Solomon, in case you forgot, we agreed to play CD-ROM Monopoly with her later on, and that game takes longer than the lemonade line in Hell. I got to fly tomorrow night.”

“In that case,” said Switters, feeling like the vice president at a Senate deadlock, “I cast my deciding vote for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Now come on home.” He slammed down the receiver.

Bobby left the next morning. As he zipped himself into his leathers at the front door, he said, “We really didn’t dig very deep into your situation. We talked about how to break the curse or whatever it is—and I’m still ready and willing to waltz down to the Amazon and seize any operational opportunity that should arise, you say the word—but we never got into the significance of the thing. What it means, where it came from. Was it a well-thought-out decision, that particular taboo? Is it traditional to ban interlopers and visiting firemen from touching certain things, in your case the earth? Is earth-touching symbolic in some cryptic way, or was it arbitrary, just a matter of a wily ol’ jungle wiseguy having off-the-cuff sport with a city slicker? And how does it tie in with your yopo trip? What’d you see or learn on that trip that was so heavy or precious or privileged that you would have to pay for it by spending the rest of your life with your heels elevated? And just because some goofy limey bush professor keeled over from Kadockywocky juju, does that necessarily mean you would? Boy howdy! There’s a fieldful of stones we left unturned.”

“I’ve been flipping them like pancakes myself, and suppose I’ll keep at it unless the company creates a major distraction for me.”

Bobby chuckled. “I’d love to be a fly on the pickle factory ceiling when you report for duty in that hospital hotrod. At least travel for the disabled is easier nowadays. There a direct flight from Seattle to D.C.?”

“Probably, but I don’t book it. I fly into New York and take the train down, so that I never have to patronize an airport named for John Foster Dulles.” After saying “Dulles,” Switters immediately expectorated, and Bobby did likewise. In such aesthetic harmony was their dual expulsion of salivary projectiles that they could have represented the U.S. in synchronized spitting. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter that we didn’t spend this all too rare reunion dissecting and analyzing my peculiar state of affairs. There’ll be plenty of time to ponder End of Time, even if today is tomorrow. And there’re happenings in this life that simply don’t lend themselves to rational interpretation. To look at them logically can be to look at them wrongly. Logic can distort as well as clarify. What’s important is—well, my psyche was a pregnant mouse at a cat show when you arrived, I was in a fair amount of disarray, but you showed me a good time, gave me some laughs, got me relaxed. Thanks to you, pal, I can now approach my prospects with a relatively clear mind.”

“Clear enough to stay away from little Suzy?”

“Well . . .”

Bobby shook his head reproachfully. “I sure hope Hell has wheelchair access.”

“If not, I may have to settle for Paradise.” (In his cerebral data base, crammed as it was with etymological privity [some might say pedantry, but there was nothing the least bit trivial about those underpinnings of modern language that were by extension the underpinnings of modern consciousness], he knew the word paradise to be derived from Old Persian for “walled garden” or “enclosed orchard”—but the significance of this, while he was still many months removed from the Syrian oasis, obviously would not have occurred to him.) “Heaven or Hades, as long as Pee-wee Herman’s on the premises I’ll be content. Pee-wee may be becoming my idol.”

“I can appreciate that,” said Bobby, thinking of the video they had watched before Maestra bankrupted them both at Monopoly. “It’s the innocence.”

“It’s the joie de vivre.”

They embraced in the manner that had raised more than a few cowboy eyebrows. Bobby walked down the steps and mounted the Harley. “By the way,” he called, “you don’t have to sweat anymore about what to tell your granny. I talked to her last night on our ride. It’s all taken care of. She’s cool as an ice worm in snow melt.” He roared away.

 

 

Whatever story Bobby had fed Maestra, it proved effective. As Switters wheeled about her spacious house at top speed, slaloming through an obstacle course of furniture, skidding around corners—practicing, honing his skills—she smiled knowingly, approvingly, almost with a wink. If only Capt. Nut Case had given Suzy a similar briefing!

Alas, as Bobby had hinted it might, the wheelchair had a dampening effect on Suzy’s presumed and anticipated passions. When she came home from school (rather late, he thought) on Monday afternoon to find him chair-bound in his mother’s parlor, she emitted a sharp cry of dismay and approached him tentatively, with grave concern. “Had a minor mishap in South America,” he quipped, and she brightened. But when he, foolishly perhaps, confessed that his confinement might be long-term, if not permanent, her horrified frown reappeared.

Not that she was unsympathetic. Au contraire. From that moment on, she was solicitous and attentive nearly to a fault, but her ministrations were those of a nurse, not a nymph. His condition had awakened in her maternal and nurturing instincts, altogether admirable qualities in their place, but hardly the emotions for which he yearned. Although those big sea-squirt eyes of hers, poker chips in Neptune’s deep casino, still regarded him adoringly, the coquetry in them had given way to pity. Pity. Lust’s worst enemy.

There was something else. When on Tuesday, Suzy again was late from school, Switters inquired of his mother, Eunice, of her possible whereabouts. “Oh,” said Eunice, “she’s probably hanging out with Brian.”

“Who’s Brian?”

His mother smiled. “I think our little Suzy has a boyfriend.”

It took every Asian breathing technique he’d ever learned, and one or two he improvised for the occasion, to rescue his brain from the Tabasco-filled birdbath into whose crimson waters it had suddenly fallen. When the searing and flopping finally abated, he felt a measure of relief at the way things were turning out. Almost concurrently, he felt a disappointment so profound he thought he might weep. It was similar to the mixture of relief and disappointment a moth must feel at the extinguishing of a candle.

If he thought he was free of the exquisite torture of obsession, however, if he believed fate had dictated he lay that shining burden down, he was mistaken. When, at about six o’clock, she came down the hall to his room with a can of Pepsi and a plate of brownies, came in her school uniform (pleated blue skirt and loose white blouse), came with her tiny gold crucifix twinkling like an eastern star above the twin mosques of her breasts (my, how they’d grown! that old training bra couldn’t begin to corral them now), came with her round rump ticking like two casseroles in an oven, came with her smart smile and guileless gaze, he could sense the want spreading throughout his organism like a cotton-candy cancer, and his mania once more had the wind to its back.

Suzy kissed him on the mouth, but without tongue or duration. “Don’t eat all these brownies now, and spoil your dinner.”

“Did you bake them?” In his mind he licked the spoon, her fingers, knuckles, wrists, forearms. . . .

“Yeah, but, like, not from scratch.” She sat down on a hassock. “If you’re going to hang in your room like this, you ought, you know, to be in the bed.”

“No, I oughtn’t. But I’d be delighted to jump into bed if you’d jump in with me.”

She blushed, though only lightly. “Oh, Switters! You’re so-oo bad.”

“That isn’t bad, that’s good. Don’t they teach you anything at your penguin academy?”

“Next year, I’m transferring to public school. Catholic school . . . I mean, I love the religious training and stuff, but a lot of the rules are just so lame.” She closed her fingers around her throat to illustrate in some fashion the lameness of parochial regulations. “My dad doesn’t mind, ‘cause he got excommunicated for, you know, divorcing my mom and marrying your mom. Switters, has your mom been married lots of times?”

“Let’s put it this way: my mother’s on a first-name basis with the staff at several honeymoon hotels. I believe she may get a discount. Now, speaking of honeymoons, darling, don’t you think it’s time we started practicing for ours?” He inched the wheelchair closer to her hassock.

Giggling nervously, she shook her head. She had cut her hair and wore it now in a bob that, while better shaped and slightly longer, was not unlike a blonde version of the Amazon coif. The effect was somewhat childish, somewhat boyish. “You shouldn’t even talk like that. You being injured and stuff.”

“Nothing wrong with me that your pretty little sushi roll wouldn’t improve.”

“Switters! That’s not what your grandmother says.”

He blinked. “My grandmother? What did she say? When?”

“Last night. Remember when we were eating dinner and the phone rang? I ran to get it ‘cause I thought it might be Bri . . . like, this friend of mine, you know. Well, it was your grandma up in Seattle. She told me how delicate your condition is and that, like, if I should ever be tempted to, like, let you do anything romantic or nasty, I should bear in mind that it could kill you. ‘It’d probably be the death of him,’ she said. So, you see.”

Damn that Maestra! “That meddling old. . . . She’s lying through her teeth, and even her teeth are false.”

Suzy stood. “She’s just trying to protect you.”

“I don’t need protection. I’m sturdy as a Budweiser draft horse.”

“You are, are you? In that wheelchair? Hello?” She moved toward the door. “You behave yourself. I’ll come get you when dinner’s ready. We’re both just trying to take care of you, you know. I think your grandmother’s way cool.” Suzy blew him a quick kiss and left the room.

“She cheats at Monopoly!” he called after her. It was all he could think to say.

This is ridiculous. I know life, the way humans live it, is absurd more often than not, and I don’t particularly mind. I rather like the smell of absurdity in the morning. At the onset of a potentially dull day, a whiff of the genuinely ludicrous can be exhilarating. But this situation is too much. It’s too much for me. It’s stupid. I admit, I kind of enjoyed it at first, the sheer unexpected outlandishness of it, but now the novelty has definitely worn off, it’s become a prime-time drag, it’s drying up my syrup of wahoo.

I’m going to stand and walk away from this geriatric golf cart. I’m going to bound down the hall like an impala with a pack of hyenas on its butt and snatch Suzy up in my arms, which have toned up quite nicely, thank you, since I’ve been pushing these hand rims; I’m going to sweep her off her feet and chew the buttons right off her blouse, I don’t care if the whole family sees me do it. I can’t take any more of this. It’s silliness worthy of the U.S. Congress, it’s estúpido supremo.

Bracing the heels of his hands on the chair’s Naugahyde arms, Switters lifted himself off its seat, extending and bending, simultaneously, his right leg until the tip of his black sneaker was a mere centimeter or less above the oval rag rug, one of many such carpets that contributed to the Early American decor of the rambling suburban ranch house. R. Potney Smithe’s death was undoubtedly a result of the power of suggestion—a kind of extreme version of the tactics of Hollywood and Madison Avenue—and only the mentally weak are susceptible to such psychological manipulation. Hey, even if Today Is Tomorrow possesses some cause-and-effect magical faculty totally unfamiliar to science, its reach surely is geographically restricted, it can’t extend thousands of miles to north-central California.

He wiggled his toes until he could almost feel the molecular interaction of foot with floor. Yet he didn’t quite make contact. Suppose it’s real, the Kandakandero magic, suppose I touch this ugly rug and it strikes me dead: so what? I certainly can’t go on in this manner for the rest of my life. Under such a cloud. It’s oppressive. I’m a prisoner in an invisible jail. Worse, I’m an object of pity to the opposite sex. Rimbaud was wrong! I’m not putting up with it. Fuck your taboo and the snake it rode in on. I’m free! Kill me if you can, pal. Go ahead. I dare you.

Although he pressed down harder on the chair arms, however, although he raised his buttocks higher and waggled his toes faster, he remained a quarter centimeter from actual contact with the floor. Chickpeas of sweat popped out on his brow, arteries popped out in his eyeballs. His Adam’s apple turned into an Adam’s grapefruit, and the ringing in his ears sounded uncomfortably like the whine Potney Smithe emitted immediately before keeling over. Whew!

His biceps started to quiver—perhaps he had misjudged the extent to which they’d recently firmed up—and his right leg quivered, too. Yet, like a model threatened with loss of employment, he held the pose.

The thing about death, though, is that it eliminates so many options. At least, in terms of the personality game. As long as I’m alive, there’s always a chance that something extremely interesting will develop from all this. Who can guess where it might eventually lead or what I might learn from it? Doesn’t the infinite emerge from the fiasco? And any time I want to test it or bring it to resolution, that option is only two inches away. What’s the big hurry? There may be red-eye gravy for dinner.

And there may be other ways to woo the darling Suzy. Indeed, no sooner had he relaxed his posture and settled back into his seat, with a long breath and a frangible whimper, than he began to formulate . . . well, if not a cunning strategy at least a fresh approach. He would, he told himself, concentrate his energy upon assisting her with her term paper. In the process, he’d open the charm taps, let her see how vigorous and entertaining he could be, treat her to displays of pith and pluck that would gradually dispel any image she might have of him as sickly or incomplete. He’d turn her pity inside out, kick it off its ivory perch, feed it to the foxes of ecstasy, and, while he was at it, feed Brian baby to the pterodactyls of oblivion. And if that course went awry, if it backfired, if the fact that he was no longer pantingly petitioning for consensual copulation succeeded only in confirming to Suzy that his “injuries” had rendered him feeble and fruitless, then he would consider telling her the truth. All of it: Sailor Boy to penis poke.

He sighed again, massaged his arms, and, like a railyard dick chasing hobos off a flatcar, swept the beans of sweat from his brow.

After dinner, under the semiwatchful eye of his mother, her stepmother, Switters and Suzy huddled in the den to discuss her paper, the subject of which was to be Our Lady of Fatima. Since there was a gap in Switters’s erudition where this particular virgin was concerned, Suzy filled him in.

It seems that on May 13, 1917, three shepherd children from Fatima, Portugal, were visited (allegedly visited, though Suzy did not qualify it thusly) by a woman (Suzy said lady) in a white gown and veil while tending their sheep in the hills outside of the village. The children said that the woman—the vision of the woman—told them to return to that place on the thirteenth of each month until the following October, at which time she would reveal her identity. The kids complied, she dropped in on them briefly each month as promised, and on October 13, she spoke dramatically and at some length, disclosing, among other things, that she traveled under the name of the Lady of the Rosary. She bade the little sheepherders to recite the rosary every day and asked that a chapel be built in her honor. Switters suggested that this last smacked of raw egoism, but Suzy only frowned at him and went on.

Although the Roman Catholic Church never officially proclaimed the children’s rosary-touting visitor to be a reappearance on earth of the Virgin Mary, it authorized devotion to her in 1932, and had a shrine with a basilica erected at Fatima, to which thousands of pilgrims were still attracted each year. “Maybe that’s where I’ll take you on our honeymoon,” whispered Switters, and for a second he could have sworn he saw a flicker of excited expectation in her eyes.

The best was yet to come. At some point during the October visitation, the Fatima Lady issued to the children three sets of predictions and warnings, two of which she urged them to immediately make public. “Warnings! Predictions! This is more like it,” said Switters. “You be nice and listen,” said Suzy.

There wasn’t a great deal more to hear, as it turned out. Regarding the Fatima Lady’s prophecies, Suzy was short on detail. “Wars and big floods and, uh, famines and earthquakes and stuff.”

“That figures.” Switters nodded. “Death and destruction are a prophet’s bread and butter. Nobody ever grabbed much ink predicting bountiful harvests, lovely spring weather, or that a good time would be had by all. Even the Second Coming is billed as ‘Doomsday.’ “

“She said that some great war was going to end in the next year. That was nice. But that if people didn’t heed her words, another greater one would come along soon.”

“Those would have been World Wars One and Two.”

“Whatever. She was right, wasn’t she?” In the Early American rocker angled next to his wheelchair, Suzy maneuvered a bare shin beneath the other knee so that she was balanced, more or less, on one of her lean, tanned legs, a position that thrust her upper body slightly forward until he could feel her breath upon his neck. She smelled both clean and dirty, sour and sweet, like a child. The reverie of childhood—its seamless daydreams, its gamelife and toylife, its timeless aura of magic happiness—was there in her aroma. Whatever that little bastard Brian might be doing to her (or she to him), she still smelled like the punch line in a nursery rhyme. “She couldn’t be wrong,” Suzy continued. “She was Mother Mary.”

The precise logic of that declaration eluded Switters, but he thought he knew where it was coming from. Many human females, as they approached puberty, as the first hormonal waters—the precursor of the adolescent geyser—began to bubble up through their private earth, became enamored, to greater or lesser degrees, with horses and/or the Virgin Mary. Unlike human males, whose fixation on sports figures, explosions, horsepower, and vulgar comedy could muddle their minds into early middle age, and in hard cases, even beyond, the equine and Marian fantasies of healthy girls tended to wane and then peter out (so to speak) altogether once they became sexually active. The most cursory familiarity with Freudian psychology could explain the girlish preoccupation with horses; the infatuation with Mary, particularly on the part of non-Catholics, was more complicated, although he guessed it could be attributed to her status as Super Virgin: she conceived without coitus, gave birth without pain, commanded the affection and admiration of men without being corrupted by them; which was to say, she triumphed gloriously over the terrors, dangers, and uncertainties facing young females as they came “of age.” The fact that Mary broadcast a monstrously mixed message—motherhood is divine, sex a sin—could not be underestimated for the damage it was capable of inflicting on a developing psyche, but given the discrepant nature of reality, the myth of the Virgin Mother might be said also to provide basic training in the acceptance of life’s contradictions; and most girls did eventually escape her misogynistically generated web, though frequently secretly scarred.

That Suzy was bright and spunky, that she had an open heart and generous spirit, that she was physically attractive and therefore did not have to retreat into doctrine as a form of compensation, all indicated that she would soon outgrow Marianism. For the time being, however, especially as they prepared her term paper, he would accept it just as he accepted her limited vocabulary and imprecise speech. Hey, Mary might have been his own patron saint had not her innocence been commandeered as a front for a rapacious institution. He tried to picture what Mary (known then as Miriam or Mariamne) must have been like before she was hijacked and haloed by the patriarchs, back when she was Suzy’s age, a dusty-footed, chocolate-eyed Jewish filly, swelling with a fetus of suspect origin—but the Virgin that unexpectedly filled his mind’s eye was the Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters, a scruffy dory bearing him ever farther up a steaming jungle river toward a destiny almost too queer to comprehend.

He shook it off. “Very well, cupcake,” he said, “here’s what we must do. First, we’ll take the broad overall view. Research the subject generally but thoroughly. Then, we’ll narrow our focus down to something manageable and particular and original. For example, the significance of the number thirteen in the Fatima visitations. We’ll research that specific area with even greater thoroughness. Then we’ll organize our material, make an outline of the salient points we want to cover. After that, we’ll write a first draft. Submit it to ruthless scrutiny. Edit it to perfection. And bingo! Final draft. An A-plus paper. Scholarship to Stanford.”

“Wow! Hello? Sister Francis didn’t tell us all that. Sounds like a lot of work. Are you sure that’s how people write term papers?”

“Absolutely. Some novelists even write books that way. The more dronish ones.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “You’re the brain.”

“You’ve got a brain, too, and don’t forget it. If you develop it, it’ll be around to enrich your life long after your tits and ass have declared bankruptcy.”

“Switters!” His mother looked up from her fashion magazine and shook a crimson-nailed finger at him.

“It’s cool,” Suzy assured the older woman. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s, like, the smartest person anywhere.” She planted a vigorous kiss that very nearly slid off his cheek and onto his lips.

“I don’t know about that,” grumbled Eunice, although whether the source of her uncertainty was Switters’s intellect or Suzy’s kiss remained unclear.

Cranking up the search engine on the family computer, they commenced their investigation that very evening, discovering, to their mutual astonishment, twenty full pages of entries relating to Fatima. They failed to make a dent in the list, however, because when Suzy noticed that her Tweety Bird wristwatch read ten o’clock, she insisted that Switters go to bed. He protested energetically. “I was riding herd on these domesticated electrons before you were potty trained,” he said. “As much as I loathe computers, I can drive them all night long. I mean it. I’m good until dawn.”

“No, you’re not,” she responded. “You need lots of rest and stuff. I’m in charge here. I’m the nurse, and I’m going to take care of you, no matter what you say.” She switched off the computer. “We can, like, do this tomorrow.”

“All right, then, Nurse Ratchet. As long as you’ll come straight home from school.”

She frowned at this but agreed.

“Are you sure you can’t tell your own family what’s wrong with you?” his mother asked, not for the first time.

“He can’t,” snapped Suzy. “It’s a governmental secret.”

“That’s correct, Mother. And if you don’t quit prying, I’m going to suspect you of being in the pay of a foreign power. I’ll bet Sergi is putting you up to it.”

“Don’t you dare mention that name in this house,” she said, reddening. Sergi was one of her previous husbands.

Suzy pushed him out of the den. In the hall she asked, “Switters, there really is something the matter with you, isn’t there? It’s not some kind of, like, CIA trick?”

Oh, God! Here’s my chance. I can just give her the whole story and be done with it. But he didn’t. “It’s no trick, darling,” he said, agonizing as he said it.

“You promise you can’t stand up and walk?”

Come on. Tell her the truth. Or have you worked for the company so long you’re only comfortable when you’re lying? He clenched his fists. He bit his tongue. “I promise,” he said.

She rolled him into the bathroom. “Get ready for bed,” she ordered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Not being in the right frame of mind for prolonged maintenance, he was already in bed when she returned, bearing a glass of milk and a bowl of oatmeal cookies. Having had his sweet tooth shattered by a rifle butt in Kuwait, he’d left her earlier delivery of brownies virtually untouched on the bedside table, but she pretended not to notice.

Suzy smoothed his covers. Then, very gingerly, so as not to disturb his “injuries,” she lay down on top of him. “Here’s your good night kiss,” she said, but instead of one kiss there was a series, a staccato series, repeatedly stabbing, as it were, his mouth with the wet pink dagger of her little tongue.

Through the Early American patchwork quilt, through the floral patterned sheet, he could feel her rosy biological heat, a smokeless fire that enveloped the vestigial dollhouse and charred the residual mud pie; a soft, ancient, mindless burning emanating from a source oblivious to cultural conditioning; that neither knew nor cared that “civilized” girls no longer married at twelve, that unscrupulous older males might take advantage of its urgings, or that shrill neurotic voices might rage against it. Broiled by it, Switters centered himself and lay motionless, except to rest a cautious, non-probing, non-squeezing, rather avuncular hand lightly on her small, ripe rump.

“Tell me something about yourself,” she demanded.

“Okay. Shoot.”

“No, I mean, like, tell me something true about you that I don’t already know. A secret fact. That nobody else knows.”

He pondered this for a moment or two. Then he declared, “The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.”

For some reason, Suzy found this the most radical, outlandish, unexpected, and witty remark she’d ever heard. Giggling, and shaking her head in wonderment, she slipped carefully off him and moved to the door. “Gotta go now. Remember, if you need anything, just ring that little bell.”

He glanced at the quasi-antique copper bell on the table beside the milk glass but said nothing.

“You’re amazing,” she said. “I only wish that—” She broke off abruptly and left the room.

He lay awake most of the night, trying to finish her sentence for her.

The California State Library was located in Sacramento, appropriately enough since Sacramento was the capital of that state. Glamorous, greedy Los Angeles had its Hollywood sign; picturesque, kooky San Francisco had its Golden Gate Bridge; provincial, authoritarian Sacramento—in which the true pulse of America pumped a steadier beat—had its Capitol Mall. Within that mall, beneath the huge gold dome of the capitol building and at the end of a broad, tree-lined avenue, the state library sheltered its precious charge of books.

Although he anticipated—correctly, as it turned out—that the library would be home to a minimum of volumes pertaining to Our Lady of Fatima and that they must turn to the Internet for the bulk of their research, still he wanted Suzy to have the library experience, to undergo the sheer bookness of the place, to taste the “seepage,” as he put it: the information and beauty that tended to leak from shelves of books even when the books went unread.

“Virtual reality is nothing new,” he told her as she guided his chair up and down the rows of stacks. “Books, the ones worth reading, have always generated virtual reality. Of course, unless one can get past its cultural and sensorial levels, what is reality but virtual?”

Suzy was silent, but he imagined he could hear tiny luminous thought-worms chewing roadways in her half-green apple. DNA was certainly devious in that it ripened the body before the brain.

On the way back to the suburbs, feeling tome-toned and opus-pocused, Switters piloting his rented convertible, Suzy playing navigator, nurse, and tour guide, they debated whether the fact that Sacramento was noted for its manufacture of missiles, weapons systems, cake mixes, potato chips, and caskets did not qualify it as the quintessential American city. “Okay, but, like, Sacramento’s also called the Camellia Capital of the World,” she reminded him.

“A few weeks ago, I was in the Dead Dog Capital of the World. I have to say, camellias are an improvement.” Sensing that she was trying to form some connection in her mind between a place so vile it was renowned for dead dogs and his presumed wounds and injuries, he sought to restore a more poetic and, he hoped, romantic mood by reciting a Buson haiku:

“A camellia falls,
Spilling out rainwater
—from yesterday.”

“Could you pull off over there?” she immediately asked, pointing not to a motel as he at first thought but to a gas station. “I really have to use the bathroom.”

“Say toilet, would you, darling. I don’t believe bathing is one of the services Texaco provides.”

“Whatever.”

“No, it’s not unimportant. Intelligent speech is under pressure in our fair land and needs all the support it can get.”

He spent the five minutes that she was absent trying not to picture her camellia spilling out yesterday’s water.

She made him rest when they got home.

After dinner they went computerside and uncorked the Fatima jug. Quickly their cups runnethed over.

The children were Lucia, age ten, Francisco, nine, and Jacinta, seven. They were poor and completely uneducated. When they returned from the pastures that spring evening in 1917, they seemed to be entranced, almost in a state of ecstasy. Lucia ate her supper in blissful silence, and Francisco, too, was distracted and quiet, but little Jacinta was too young and excited to contain herself. The cat she let out of the bag, and which in time grew larger than a tiger, was that they had been visited on the northern slope of the Cova da Iria (where her uncle, Lucia’s father, leased pastureland) by a beautiful woman enveloped in blinding light. She appeared to them, following several flashes of lightning (it was a clear, sunny day) from a point some meters above their heads, in the top branches of a stubby tree. As Switters read aloud Lucia’s later description of the woman, her dazzling white tunic that gathered at the waist without benefit of belt or sash, her graceful hands folded prayerfully at her breast and wound round with a pearl-beaded rosary, her exquisitely refined features, the sadness and maternal concern that showed in her countenance, the loveliness that exceeded anything to which a bride might aspire, the light that she radiated (“clearer and brighter than a crystal cup filled with purest water penetrated by the most sparkling rays of the sun”), he noticed that Suzy herself was becoming enraptured. For any number of reasons, he thought, this is probably not a good sign.

He was tempted to suggest that they launch a botanical probe into the bush that the Lady had selected as her landing pad. In Portuguese, it was called carrasqueira, in English, holm oak. By any chance did it have psychotropic properties? Might the children have chewed its leaves or, perhaps, inadvertently inhaled its pollen? Alas, even were Suzy open to such an approach, Sister Francis would likely have a Sacred Heart attack, in which case an A-grade might be out of the question.

When, however, they learned that the Fatima children had twice in the previous year been visited by an angel, Switters couldn’t keep quiet. “No television, no radio, and they were illiterate. Kids sometimes have to provide their own entertainment. It was always Lucia, the eldest cousin, who saw these holy apparitions first, and it was with her that they spoke. Maybe little Lucia had an active imagination, a fantasy life fueled by Bible stories, the only extraordinary material to which she’d ever been exposed, and she pulled the younger kids into her fantasies, much the same way that Tom Sawyer pulled in Huckleberry Finn.”

Suzy protested. “I don’t know why you have to be so negative. Don’t you believe in miracles and stuff?”

“Well, I know from first-hand experience that the universe is a very woo-woo place, and that so-called consensual reality is not much more than the tip of the iceberg. But my credibility alarm starts to jangle a bit when the Virgin Mary shows up speaking flawless Portuguese and looking like a Roman Catholic Sunday School portrait instead of the Middle Eastern Jewish matron she was at the time of her death. If I remember it correctly, rosary beads weren’t introduced until more than a thousand years after Christ, so why—”

“Hello? God’s time isn’t the same as our time.”

She had him there. Certainly he wasn’t going to argue on the side of linear time, not after what he’d been through. Today was tomorrow, wasn’t it? Or, at least, the future leaked into the present on a fairly routine basis. The past, as well.

“Anyway, like, what about all the people who saw the sun dance in the sky and stuff? On October thirteenth. They weren’t Huckleberry Finns.”

“Hmmm,” hmmmed Switters. “That’s interesting in itself. Of the seventy thousand people who joined the children in the Cova da Iria pasture for the Lady’s farewell performance and prophecy session, roughly half claimed to have witnessed a meteorological light show of staggering proportions. The other half saw absolutely nothing. What does that tell us, darling? That fifty percent of humanity is susceptible to mass hallucination?”

“Or that fifty percent are pure enough to see God’s miracles and the rest are like you.”

“Fifty percent purity? Man, I wish the figure was even a fraction that high! As for me personally, I witness a divine miracle every time you enter the room.”

“Oh, Switters!”

When she tucked him in a short while later—he wasn’t tired, but he didn’t object—she loaded a full package of tongue into their good night kiss.

Asked in an interview in 1946 if the Lady of Fatima had revealed anything about the end of the world, Lucia (by then Sister Mary dos Dores, a lay nun) responded rather like a CIA officer with cowboyish leanings. “I cannot answer that question,” she said through tight lips. Lucia did not, as far as has been reported, add, “for reasons of national security.”

Whether or not the Lady had been forthcoming about a possible final curtain ringing down on the Homo sapiens revue—and none but Lucia had actually heard her prophecies—she was not exactly a bubble of optimism in regard to our planetary prospects. For example, that spectacular celestial cha-cha that thirty-five thousand people claimed to have observed, along with Lucia and her cousins, on October 13, 1917, was executed, she said, not by the sun but by a preview of a flaming comet, a fireball that according to the Lady (and disputed by astronomers everywhere) would return someday to dry up oceans, lakes, and rivers and shrivel a third of the earth’s vegetation. No, not precisely a planetary death sentence, but considerably more severe than a stiff fine and a hundred hours of community service.

If it was doom that intrigued them, however, the Fatima faithful got their money’s worth. The white-clad apparition predicted straightaway that a plague would fall upon the land soon after the Great War ended and that two of the shepherd children would be among its victims. In 1919, first Francisco, then Jacinta succumbed to the influenza epidemic that killed twenty million people in Europe and North America. The Lady had hit a chilling bull’s-eye with that one, and she was only slightly off center with her prophecy of approaching famine: almost on cue, a vine fungus spread through Europe, lasted more than three years, and left no grape unspoiled.

Her forecast in the second set of predictions that Russia would “spread its errors” throughout the world could probably also be considered a hit. Strongly disposed toward threats and scoldings—the Lady repeatedly warned that if people didn’t amend their lives, beg forgiveness, and run marathons on their rosary beads there was going to be hell to pay—she was particularly hard on Communists, obviously viewing Communism as something more amplitudinously evil than a mere inherently flawed economic system. Rather like John Foster Dulles, thought Switters, but he didn’t say as much for fear he might uncontrollably fire a saliva shot at the polished hardwood floor or the antique rag rug that lay upon it. Bobby would never have forgiven him if he hadn’t.

It was Thursday afternoon, and Suzy, a shade less reluctantly than the day before, had come straight home from school. The two of them were in the den, sorting through the printouts of their Internet research, concentrating, at Switters’s urging, on the Fatima predictions and warnings. Suzy had wanted to change into jeans and a sweatshirt, but at his request she remained attired in her school uniform. Whether his aim was to reduce temptation or to torture himself with it was probably debatable. In any event, he ceased counting her pleats long enough to wave a sheet of paper in the charged air that separated them. “This!” he exclaimed. “Right here. It’s the only tidbit of information we’ve uncovered in three days that could spike the punch at the teddy bears’ picnic.”

“Hello?”

“Right here.” The printout, which he now handed her, concerned Our Lady’s third and final prophecy. At the time of its delivery, the children would say nothing of this last prediction except that it was of great consequence and would bring joy to some and sorrow to others.

Around 1940, some twenty-three years after it was supposedly issued, the nun formerly known as Lucia Santos wrote down the secret prophecy and sealed it in an envelope with instructions that it be opened in 1960, or upon her death should she die earlier than that date. The envelope was locked in the office safe of the bishop of Leiria in Portugal, where Church sources said it remained until 1957, when Pope Pius XII had it brought, under tight security, to Rome. Pius was itching to rip it open, but Lucia was still alive. In fact, Lucia was still breathing in 1997, whereas Pius XII died in 1958 without ever satisfying his curiosity.

While the Church would neither confirm nor deny it, highly placed Vatican sources claimed that at some point in 1960, Pius’s successor, Pope John XXIII, did, finally, open the mystery envelope—and wept for three days over the “terrible news” it contained. Throughout the remainder of his life, John XXIII adamantly refused to discuss it with anyone, and the message was reputed to rest in a vault at the papal palace, unread by a soul save that sobbing pontiff nearly forty years in the past.

“Yeah,” said Suzy. “That’s pretty wild. But you know, how could I write about it when, like, I don’t know what it says.”

“We could speculate.”

“You mean? . . .”

“I mean, extrapolating from her two published predictions, we could try to guess the content of the final and missing one. Might be fun. What possible prognostication from a controversial source could set a modern pope to blubbering for three whole days?”

“But bring joy to some.”

“Exactly. Think about it.”

From the way Suzy screwed up her face, she was thinking hard about it. “You’re cute when you frown,” said Switters.

She seemed daunted, perplexed by her stepbrother’s proposal, and eventually she vetoed it. “No, I just want to tell the story. You know, tell about the children and Our Lady and all the stuff that happened. Even Sister Francis doesn’t know much about it. She said she didn’t. And the class is, like, clueless. It’s kind of a beautiful story, so I just want to write it down for everybody. Okay?”

Switters shrugged. “It’s your party. I’ll help you organize the material if you’d like, and you can take it from there.”

She lowered her eyes. “Switters? Are you disappointed?”

“Nein,” he lied. “Only thing that disappoints me is that the authorities haven’t locked you up somewhere. You’re too damn cute to be at large. You’re a public menace.”

“Switters.”

“I’ll bet your armpits taste like strawberry ice cream.”

She had just slid onto his lap and was tightening her tawny arms around his neck, her tongue muscles quivering like the hamstrings of a cheetah about to spring from its lair, when his mother made one of her periodic checks of the room. “Now, now, children,” Eunice admonished.

“Can’t I show my big brother some gratitude and affection?” Suzy asked. Her tone was defiant.

“You’ve been watching too much TV, young lady,” said Eunice, somewhat inexplicably.

Reddening, Suzy stood, about to defend herself, but Switters intervened. “Mother’s right,” he said calmly. From an end table within his reach, he snatched up a cast-iron ashtray, fashioned to resemble an Early American hearth skillet, and used it to gesture at the forty-inch Sony across the den. “There’s the problem right there,” he announced. “Does it not possess the power of a totem pole and the heart of a rat? Die, demon box, die!” With that, he hurled the ashtray at the TV, badly cracking its plastic casing and missing the screen (purposefully or not) by a fraction of an inch.

As the ashtray, a souvenir of Monticello, caromed with a loud clanking onto the floor, his mother emitted a sound midway between a gasp and a shriek, and Suzy regarded him as if he were the most astounding entity to grace the earth since Fatima, Portugal, 1917.

Choosing to skip the family dinner, Switters slipped away and drove over toward Rancho Cordova, where he knew there to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet with a drive-through service window. “I understand,” he said to the clean-cut, if acne-peppered, hobbledehoy who dispensed his order (he imagined him to look a lot like Brian), “that KFC still uses the colonel’s original frying recipe. Is that correct?”

“Uh, yes, sir, it is.”

“Eleven secret herbs and spices. So I’ve heard.”

“Yes, sir. I believe so.”

“Would you identify them for me, please?”

“Huh?”

“The eleven secret herbs and spices. Tell me what they are.”

Bewildered, the boy began blinking rather frenetically, as if during one of the lid closures, the customer and his cheeky red convertible might disappear.

“Don’t play dumb,” snarled Switters. “If you can’t come up with all eleven off the top of your head, nine or ten will do.”

The boy gathered his composure. “Uh, I’m sorry, sir. They’re our secret recipe. Would you please pull forward?”

“I’ll pay you forty dollars.” He wagged two bank notes in the pustulated face.

“No, sir,” said the boy, glancing over his shoulder with one of those half frightened, half irate I’m-going-to-send-for-the-manager expressions. “I don’t. . . . You’re gonna have to pull forward.”

“What if I told you I have your girlfriend in the trunk of this car?”

His eyes widening until it appeared his pimples might pop, the young man seemed as if he were about to shout or retreat or both, yet he did neither for the simple reason that Switters had fixed him so forcefully with his fierce, hypnotic gaze that he was all but paralyzed. “I-I don’t—” he stammered weakly. “I’m just a cashier. I don’t know nothing about the—the cooking side of it.”

“So, you won’t betray the colonel for love or money? Not even to spare your girlfriend’s life?” Switters abruptly relaxed his glare and lit up the boy with a smile that could paint a carousel. “Congratulations! You’ve done it, pal. You’ve passed the test.” He held out his hand, but the boy was too stunned to shake it. “I’m Operative, uh, Poe, Audubon Poe of the Central Intelligence Agency. As you’re doubtlessly aware, the CIA’s main responsibility these days is protecting America’s corporate interests, such as the colonel’s eleven cryptic herbs and spices, from insidious foreign competitors. You play an important role in this struggle, pal. So, well done! Your government’s proud of you, and I’m sure the colonel’d be proud of you, too—if the beloved old motherfucker weren’t as dead as the gravy you counterfeit gastronomes slop on his unsuspecting biscuits.”

Switters tossed the boy a twenty. “Take the night off,” he exhorted. “Badger some phrontifugic adult to buy you a six-pack. Domestic, of course. Sacramento is, indeed, the quintessential American city, and you are a genuine American hero!” He gunned the engine. “I’ll let your girlfriend out at the next rest stop!” he cried, and he squealed out of the KFC lot, laying down enough burnt rubber to blackface the cast of the Amos ’n’ Andy show for most of a season.

With a Cajun-style drumstick between his oft-abused but still pearly teeth, he headed back toward the west, roaring into one of those lurid orangeade sunsets that could qualify as nature’s revenge on Louis XIV.

Shortly before 10 P.M., as Switters sat propped up on the four-poster bed reading from Finnegans Wake, there was a soft knock at his door, and Suzy tiptoed in. “You missed dinner,” she said.

“I dined out. How are things?”

“Daddy’s been kind of gnarly. He wants to know why you, like, attacked his TV set.”

“Yes. Good question. I’ve been wondering about that myself. I suppose you could say that these past few days in suburbia have roused my imp from its slumber.”

“You mean,” she asked, half frowning, half grinning, “the Devil made you do it?”

“Well, no, darling, that’s not it at all. The Devil doesn’t make us do anything. The Devil, for example, doesn’t make us mean. Rather, when we’re mean, we make the Devil. Literally. Our actions create him. Conversely, when we behave with compassion, generosity, and grace, we create God in the world. But all that’s beside the point. I think probably the most truthful thing you can tell your daddy is that I attacked his TV set out of love of life.”

“Love of life,” Suzy whispered almost inaudibly, rolling the phrase around in her mouth and her mind, as if it were a concept so unfamiliar, so novel, it would take awhile to grasp it.

“What,” asked Switters, “did my mother have to say?”

“Oh, she said ‘Dumpling’s’—sometimes she calls you Dumpling—’Dumpling’s a man of mystery, just like his father.’ “ She watched an odd, ironic smile bend his lower lip like a bartender twisting a peel of lemon. “So, like, what did your father do?”

“He was a man of mystery.”

“ ‘Man of mystery,’ “ she repeated in a whisper, as though she were again ruminating on an exotic, esoteric but flavorful notion—and this time she watched the bedside reading lamp illuminate his spray of tiny scars, causing them to resemble a constellation projected on a planetarium ceiling. After a moment or two, she asked politely, “Uh, what’re you doing tomorrow?”

“For one thing, I thought I’d sift through the Fatima detritus and get your outline started for you.”

“Oh my God, Switters, you’re just so fine! I was really hoping you’d do that. Like, I can’t be here tomorrow. My dad’s taking your mom shopping again in San Francisco, and they, I guess, don’t want me to be home alone with you. So, I’m going with my girlfriend after school, and then Brian’s taking me to his football game.”

“Brian’s an athlete, is it?”

“No, he doesn’t play. He’s a cheerleader.”

Switters brightened. “A cheerleader. He doesn’t by any chance moonlight at Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

She moved her buttercup bangs in a negative rotation. “Uh, I’m gonna try to leave early. Like, after the first quarter. I think I can, you know, get a ride home. The parental unit won’t be back from San Francisco until ten o’clock. They told me.”

“But you’re leaving the game early and coming home?”

Lowering her filoplume lashes until they almost swept the blush from her cheeks, she said ever so gravely, “To be with you.” She slid awkwardly onto the bed beside him, kissed him briefly but wetly, removed one of his hands from the binding of Finnegans Wake, and placed it in the general vicinity of her crotch. “I want to get naked with you,” she said, blurting it out, softly but forcefully, like a jet of steam.

Switters swallowed hard, as though he were gulping down a goose egg. When his larynx stopped wobbling, he asked, “Are you sure?”

She nodded soberly. “I . . . think so. You’re my . . . my. . . . But I . . . I’ll be here if I can. I might not.”

The next day Switters had the house to himself. He stayed in bed until he heard the Mercedes sedan pull out of the three-car garage, heading for the boutiques of Maiden Lane. Then he breakfasted on peanut butter and soy bacon sandwiches, taking them out by the swimming pool to eat. The pool had been emptied for the season and covered with a blue plastic tarp that for a zip of an instant transported him back to Inti’s Virgin and the tattered canopy with which the dory had tried in vain to hold back the Amazon sun. In November, the Sacramento sun needed no such restraint, although it was certainly warmer there than in Seattle, and drier, as well. The golf course that bordered the stucco ranch house that Eunice had won in the marriage lottery was as green as Socrates’s last cocktail, but everything between it and the coastal range to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east was so amber, dusty, flea-bitten, and buff it reminded him of the lion population in a second-rate zoo. It was visual cereal that, milkless, crunched in his eyes, and he realized that were he to strike out across those stubble fields where wheat and barley had recently been sheared, he’d be better off in a wheelchair than on foot. Even the steely soles of Inti’s feet would have been diced.

Done with breakfast, he decided to attempt meditation. It was never easy to commence—his internal river of thought and verbiage had a velocity that overflowed or crumbled Buddha’s dams—and on that morning it was particularly difficult to get started. Bobby had taught him not to wrench the valves, however, so he sat passively, neither fostering thought nor trying not to think, and gradually the flow subsided—except for one unstemmable trickle, and that trickle’s source was Suzy. After about an hour of that, he thought What the hell!, and gave it up. He hadn’t made it into the medulla of the medulla, but he’d gotten closer to the Void than airports are to most major cities; he’d glimpsed its invisible skyline, breathed its odorless smokes; and since it was eternal, knew it’d be there the next time he bought a ticket. Just not today. Today, for better or worse, was a day to think about Suzy.

There is something so sweet about a young girl’s sexual longings, he thought. There’s a sad and happy sweetness in them. Her longing was not for orgasmic release: that would come with the years. Her longing was not even for an amplification of the genital quaver that her body for some time would have been softly trilling; nor was it strictly a longing for love and affection: in fact, the more love and affection a girl was receiving from her family and friends, the less that was a part of it. As much as anything else, it was a longing for information. There was information about men; about being with men, alone, in dark places, that she sensed she must access in order to navigate the mysterious vastness of her life-to-be. Her subconscious mind was signaling to her that such information was essential to her very survival in the adult world, and her hormones, for reasons of their own, were augmenting those signals with a barrage of swelling itches and tingles. Implicit in most sexual yearning was a deep-seated desire to connect somehow with the mystery of being, but the yearning of the young was overlaid with a scary yet optimistic desire to solve the smaller (though they’d hardly seem small at the time) mysteries of the adult universe, a universe in which the penis seemed to cast a long shadow and the vagina formed a gateway to both shame and salvation. If the longing of many older women lacked that sweetness, it was because they already had gleaned the information for which young girls were so shyly desperate, and may have found it disappointing and unsatisfactory, particularly where men were concerned.

Switters went back indoors and rolled about the house for a while, maneuvering around utterly obsolete churns and spinning wheels and uncomfortable wooden rocking chairs. Were he ever offered a voyage in a time machine, Colonial America would be far down his list of preferred destinations, although he suspected that Jefferson, Franklin, and the lot would be worthy drinking companions, maybe even deserving of C.R.A.F.T. Club membership, which was not something one could say of a single governmental leader of the past hundred and fifty years.

In contrast to the harsh pragmatism of the Early American decor, the contents of his mother’s closets, which he examined now in some detail, were stylish and luxurious. Hanging there, bereft of the flesh whose silhouettes they mimicked, were soft, powdery pantsuits, slithery black cocktail dresses, and matte suede jackets trimmed with lamb, each flying an inconspicuous but haughty little flag emblazoned with an Italian name (Oscar de la Renta, Dolce & Gabbana) that he’d have recognized if he read Vogue or even Newsweek instead of Tricycle and Soldier of Fortune. Eunice did them justice, too, he had to admit, though he failed to find her, at fifty-seven, hair in a hennaed bun, face in a brittle tuck, to be as buzzy with allure as he remembered her mother, Maestra, to be at that age. Dwayne’s closet, which he also examined, was filled with goofy golfing garb and shiny suits Switters wouldn’t have worn to a Chiang Mai cockfight.

Gradually he made his way to the door of Suzy’s room, but although he went so far as to grasp the knob, he just could not allow himself to violate its sanctity. He’d never been that kind of spy. He sat there for a long time, however. Thinking.

Suzy doesn’t merely want to feel, she wants to know. She yearned to concretize the unsubstantial image of the “real” life that awaited her; to prepare herself, perhaps, for the transfiguration, the metamorphosis that would split her dreamy cocoon, discharging her, a wing-damp, unsure butterfly, into the leafy gardens of wifedom and motherhood. Well, would he not be the perfect teacher? He not only had the experience, he also had the devotion, the caring. If the male erection was the compass with which so many women, for better or worse, must get their bearings in the world, what finer instrument than his own? Why, if Amelia Earhart had had my peepee on board. . . . He recalled Bobby’s story of how, in olden times, the uncles had initiated—

But no. He couldn’t sell it to his conscience. The bedroom was not a classroom. There were some skills (if skill was the right word) that a person needed to develop, through trial and error, on their own. To “teach” Suzy about sex, from his well-burnished lectern, would be to deprive her of the follies and fumbles of teen romance: the embarrassment and awkwardness, worry and wonder, telltale stains and tangled-up limbs—all the gawky ecstasies and sticky surprises that jack out of the box of neophyte lust. What right did he have to streamline that process? What right to teach her anything?

He asked that question again late in the afternoon, when, after completing an outline of the Fatima story at the family computer, he found himself adding to it the following provocation:

The Virgin Mary, in her Lady of the Rosary guise, appeared to the kids at Fatima six times in 1917. Way back in 1531, she chose Guadalupe, Mexico, for the first stop on her tardy comeback tour, imprinting her image, so it’s said, on a poor Indian’s poncho and instructing him to have a church built outside of Mexico City. Next stop, Paris, three hundred years later (God’s time is not our time), where a novice spied her twice in a chapel. This time, she wanted a medal to be cast with her image and regular devotions said to her. She was back in a relative flash in 1858, appearing no less than eighteen times in a grotto down the road at Lourdes and referring to herself as the Immaculate Conception. She must have liked the neighborhood because she turned up next before four children in Pontmain, France, and succeeded in getting another church constructed in her honor. In 1879 she hovered above a village chapel in Ireland; in the 1930s she did Belgium big time, appearing to various youngsters no fewer than forty-one times in several locations, referring to herself at Beauraing as the Virgin of the Golden Heart, and at Banneux as the Virgin of the Poor. It was in Amsterdam between 1945 and 1959 that she took off the velvet gloves, calling herself the Lady of All Nations and demanding that her contact petition the pope to grant her the titles Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate. Starting in 1981, she touched down in two of the most screwed-up places on earth, Rwanda and Bosnia, wanting to be known as Mother of the World, no less, and Queen of Peace. And speaking of bad locations, her image affixed itself to the side of a finance company office in Florida a couple of years ago, though she didn’t apply for a loan.

So, my steamy little kumquat, I’m forced to ask: where has Jesus been during all this? Mary makes multiple appearances, demands increasing recognition, assumes ever more grandiose titles, and insists on equal billing as the Co-Redeemer. Yet over those five centuries, and the fifteen that preceded them, not a peek of Jesus or a peep from him. What’s going on here? In his time on earth, he didn’t seem all that shy. Notice how Mary never mentions him in any of her pronouncements? God, yes, but not Jesus. She herself is hardly mentioned in the Gospels, and on those few occasions when she does make the scene, Jesus is less than enthusiastic about her, going so far, in Matthew, I believe, as to snub her, asking, “Who is my mother?” and answering that anyone who does God’s bidding qualifies as his mother. Could there be a revenge motif here? Could Jesus be under house arrest, chained up in his mother’s basement? Does she have something on him, is he being blackmailed? I suppose we could perceive all this Mary activity as a natural resurfacing of the feminine principle in society, a welcome reemergence of the goddess as the dominant religious figure. But might it also signal a palace coup of the sort that cost the brilliant upstart Lucifer his No. 2 position in Heaven—or else a public airing of a nasty little family feud?

As Switters read, then read again, the preceding two paragraphs, his forefinger hovered over the delete key like the meatless digit of the Reaper pausing above his black eraser. What right did he have to provoke her sweet mind, to litter with funky horse blossoms of doubt the aseptic, uncracked sidewalks of her street of bliss?

“Every right in the world,” he heard a voice within him say. “Not only a right but a duty.”

Around sunset, as a geranium and satsuma luminescence turned the adjacent golf course into the playboard of a pinball machine, an onslaught of nervousness sent Switters to the garage refrigerator where Dwayne maintained a supply of beer. He drained a can of Budweiser, popped open a second, stuck a couple extras in the wheelchair saddlebag. Then he propelled himself about the house some more, grimacing at the hurricane lamps and clunky tin candlesnuffers. At one point he announced loudly, as if to a straggling duffer out on the seventeenth hole, “This home has bad feng shui. I can sense it.”

He’d had a similar feeling once about his apartment in Langley, and, as he was later to e-mail Bobby Case (with apparent embellishment), “I went to call some feng shui geomancers to take care of the problem, but I dialed Sinn Fein by mistake, and a bunch of Irishmen showed up with automatic weapons.” To which Bobby responded, “You’re just lucky you didn’t dial Sean Penn.”

As the daylight vanished, his agitation increased. He pictured banks of halogens winking on at the parochial school stadium, the zit-bejeweled gladiators (he was one once) lining up for kickoff; the high, thin squeals from the students in the bleachers, the coldness and hardness of the narrow boards beneath their buttocks, the shrill whistle of referees and cheesy deep-fried echo of the P.A. system; the spilled cola and missquirted mustard, puffs of dust and puffs of quicklime, the pumped-up adolescent wonder of it all. And then the first quarter drawing to an end . . . the sophomore cutie stealing away. . . .

Switters had been Siamese-twinning it most of his life, but for the dichotomy that bedeviled him now he was not quite prepared. For the spider bite of guilt, yes, but not the ice hook of doubt. One moment he craved to give her a bath in his semen, to rub it, warm and pearly, into her navel, her lips, the nipples that in his mind evoked the candy-coated lug nuts on Cupid’s pink Corvette. The next, he wished simply to kiss her toes. No, no, not the toes: much too erogenous! To kiss her heel or, better yet, her left elbow. In its cotton sleeve. To kiss once, lightly, the top of her sweet head—and then to shield her, with every means at his disposal, from the slings and eros of adult rage and fortune; to deflect the poison bullets of the “real world,” which is to say, the marketplace, so that not one would ever blast a hole in the magic tutu of her childhood.

Damn! Switters had always been a shade contradictory, but he’d never been neurotic. Like many robust people, in fact, he held neurosis in contempt. Yet, here he was, a fever flaming in his veins, a thunder in his pulses; his lungs ballooning, then deflating, his thoughts all over the map like a fast-food chain. And the alcohol, as was its evil genius, was only egotizing and adrenalizing matters, making them worse. Better the silly genius of hemp.

He proceeded to his room, where he raised a window for ventilation and then lit a joint. Following a husky toke or two, a semblance of calm was restored. He toked further, nodding, closing his eyes. Ahhh. His vision of the football game took on a softer focus now. Rather than a ritual parody of the primate territorial imperative, complete with nonlethal but often painful violence, colored at its margins with decidedly sexual overtones, and fouled in recent years by the stink of commerce, it became . . . well, no, it was still all that, but there was an innocent oomph about it, too, a playful, high-spirited, savage zest, and he envied Suzy being there and, moreover, wished he could have been on the field, performing for her, flattening running backs and cracking wide receivers nearly in half.

Seconds later, he giggled at the dumbness of that fantasy, and, slumping low in the wheelchair, soon forgot about the game altogether. Other, seemingly more profound, thoughts took over his brain, thoughts such as, To what extent would a given quantity of catnip have affected quantum mechanics in Schrödinger’s theoretical catbox? and, Why was C selected to symbolize the speed of light when Z is obviously the fastest letter in the alphabet?

The chiming of two of Eunice’s three ridiculously oversize, depressingly ugly grandfather clocks interrupted his reverie. He thought he counted eight bongs, and his wristwatch confirmed it. Hell’s bells! The first quarter would have ended long ago. Suzy wasn’t coming. She warned that she might not. She had her own set of fears, including her kind concern that a physical assertion of their love might compromise his “delicate condition.”

She wasn’t coming after all. So be it. It was for the best. He lit another joint and partway through it, realized he was famished. A classic case of the cannabic munchies. (If manufacturers of chocolate and peanut butter were half smart, they’d lobby relentlessly for decriminalization.) He was so hungry he reached under the bed and retrieved the plates of brownies and cookies he’d hidden there so as not to hurt her feelings. They were by this time entering the early stages of fossilization—crusty, dry, and stale—but he devoured them as though they were bootleg ambrosia.

Sucrose sugars from the baked goods linked arms, singing, with dextrose sugars from the beer, to form a near-riotous rabble in his bloodstream, a chemical mob whose march on his cerebral ramparts was mollified but not diverted by the more gentle, introspective (though hardly staid) tetrahydro-cannabinols from the marijuana. Provoked by these energies, he found himself rummaging in the secret compartment of his crocodile valise for his disk of Broadway hits, and when, moments later, the sailors’ chorus from South Pacific began to belt out “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” he was moved to dance.

He rolled to the bed and vaulted up on it. Dancing on a bed has intrinsic limitations, and his preliminary steps quickly evolved, or devolved, into ungainly bounces. Rather than fighting it, he went with it, and by the time “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” from Oklahoma blared on (he’d cranked the amps to full volume), he was bounding like a rambunctious kid on a bedtime trampoline, the fritter-colored curls at the dome of his skull almost brushing the ceiling. The exertion provided a much-needed release. His wahoo was rapidly rising.

Midair, during one of the higher bounces, he thought he heard a voice in the hall exclaim, “Good God! What is that sucky music?”

He landed. Springs depressed, then recoiled, and without breaking his rhythm, he catapulted ceilingward again, and as he elevated he saw her. Standing now in the doorway. She’d rouged her mouth, a bit too thickish, and shadowed her eyes, a shade too bluely, and she was wearing one of Eunice’s party dresses, a slinky charcoal sheath that he recognized from his recent inspection of his mother’s wardrobe. It was a sophisticated little number, but although she and Eunice were approximately the same height now, it hung loosely on her, its effect anything but chic. It was Suzy’s objective, apparently, to look womanly and seductive. In actuality, she looked like a child playing dress-up in her stepmother’s clothing (which, to some extent, she was), an impression reinforced by the fact that she was barefoot. To the extent that the effect was comical, it was also overwhelmingly erotic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

And only the winners were lost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Minor mishap in South America.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Seventy-one, actually.”

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

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

“And that word is? . . .”

“Sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not your need to know.”

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

And Switters told him.

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

“I’m short on funds.”

“Not my department.”

“But I’m able to work. What’s the assignment? I can handle it. Better than any of your gung-ho cowpokes.” Switters rose and stood on the footplate. Then he hopped backward onto the seat, much as he had for Bobby, although he refrained from running in place. “I’m sure this looks crazy, but . . .”

“Yes, doesn’t it?”

“Come on, Mayflower. You know my record.”

“Yes, don’t I?”

“I’m available for duty.”

“Physically, maybe. There are other concerns. Would you please sit down.”

“I could have lied.”

“Pardon?”

“I could have lied about the witchman, the taboo, the whole jar of jam. I didn’t have to spill a bean. I could have fed you a perfectly plausible, ordinary explanation. . . .”

“No. You would have had to be medically cleared before returning to duty. And when Walter Reed found nothing physically wrong. . . . But why didn’t you—I’m curious—give me a more believable alibi? If you honestly want to remain with the company . . .”

“I want very damn much to remain with the company!” Switters paused, took a deep breath, and lowered his intensity. “I guess that in itself could be considered a sign of mental illness—but we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?”

Mayflower didn’t hesitate. “No!” he snapped through clenched teeth. “Not in the same boat at all.”

In the silence that followed, Switters remained standing in the wheelchair. What’s happening to me now? he wondered.

Seemingly, what was happening was that he was losing his job, and it staggered him to realize how much his identity had become dependent on that job. He’d meditated enough to realize that his true self—his selfless self, if you will, his essence—didn’t know or care that he worked for the CIA; didn’t, for that matter, know or care that his name was Switters. And by no means was he wedded to his title (“operative”: what the fuck was that?), his desk (didn’t have one), his duties (only occasionally exciting), or his paycheck (the more advertising he saw the less he wanted to buy). Moreover, he enjoyed a variety of outside interests.

What gripped him, nourished him, enlarged and thrilled him, and molded the contours of his ego was in actuality the job within the job: the ill-defined, self-directed business of angelhood, with all of the romantic elitism with which that exercise in quixotic, but sometimes effective, subversion was colored. It was so special and furtive, so nutty yet seemingly noble, so poetic, even, that he had gradually permitted it to define him to himself, although he was keenly aware that much of the time he was working closer to the bullshit than the bull.

So: if he was no longer an angel, so-called, who would he be? Perhaps it was time to find out. Perhaps it didn’t matter. The one thing he now knew was that he couldn’t lie to Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald—not after he had lied to Suzy.

“You can lie to God but not to the Devil.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Slowly Switters returned to a sitting position. Good question. What was it supposed to mean? “Lies may disappoint God or exasperate him, but ultimately his compassion dissolves them, cancels them out. The Devil, though, he grows fat on our lies; the more you lie to him, the better he likes it. It’s an investment in his firm, it increases the value of his stock by fostering the practice of lying. Only truth can hurt the Devil. That’s why honesty has been banished from almost every existing institution: corporate, religious, and governmental. Truth can be dangerously liberating. Did I mention that the Devil’s other name is El Controlador? He who controls.”

“That’s news to me.” Mayflower was looking at his desk clock. “But then I lack your background in theology.” He parted his pale lips just enough to indicate he spoke facetiously.

“Oh, yes. And his other name is El Manipulador. He who—”

“I know what it means. And I suspect I know what you’re getting at. If I felt it necessary to defend the company, and the national interests it serves, against your implied criticism—and I emphatically do not—I would point out that both manipulation and control are sometimes requisite in order to secure and insure stability. If that smacks to you of the satanic, then I suggest you think of it as us using the Devil to further the aims of God.” He cleared his throat again in that self-consciously dignified way of his. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to—”

“Stability the handiwork of God? You’ve got to be kidding! If God’s aim is stability, then he’s a monumental, incompetent failure, the biggest loser of all time. This universe he’s credited with creating is dynamic, in almost constant flux. Any stability we might perceive in it on any level is as temporary as it is aberrant. Symbiosis, maybe; even a kind of harmonious interaction, but not stability. The Tao is a shaky balancing act between unstable yin and unstable yang. The fact is . . .”

“I must call an end to—”

“. . . neither God nor the Devil is the least concerned with stability. Human artifices such as fixity and certainty are a big bore to the immortals. Which is why it’s so corny of us to try to paint God as absolute good and Satan as absolute evil. Of course, I resorted to that convenient, conventional symbology myself in my previous analogy, so you’re right, Mayflower, I was blathering like a theologian, and a half-baked one at that. Maybe it’s okay, after all, to lie to the Devil. But for reasons of my own, I refuse to lie to you or yours.”

(Where was this coming from? Usually, he only went on like this when he was bent or stoned, and that morning he’d had but one beer with breakfast.)

“Happy to hear it,” said Mayflower, pressing the intercom buzzer. “Joolie, would you show Mr. Switters out. I hate to terminate this fascinating discussion, but. . . .” Clenching and unclenching his hard, perfect teeth, he stood. “Perhaps we can resume it at some future date. During a round of golf or . . . no, I suppose you’ll not be golfing, will you? Excuse me. I’m sorry.”

“No problem, pal. Most American men secretly hate women and love golf. I love women and hate golf.”

“Yes, you are a man apart, aren’t you? Well then. The committee meets Friday. Check in with me on, uh, Monday, and you’ll be advised of your status. Should we decide on suspension or dismissal, you obviously have the right to appeal. I should caution you, however, that the Civil Service Commission is quite reluctant to interfere in internal matters of the CIA.”

Doing his best to pop a wheelie, though only half succeeding, Switters spun and followed Joolie out. Before the door closed behind him, he called over his shoulder: “I’ll give your regards to Audubon Poe.” He could have sworn he heard Mayflower sputter.

“Joolie, would it be considered sexual harassment if I—”

“Don’t even think about it,” warned Joolie. But like a miser making a night deposit at an inner city bank, she leaned over with a kind of fearful glee and planted a peck perilously close to his pucker.

Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?

That night he hit the bars in D.C.’s hotel district, wishing he were in Patpong as he zigzagged from one to another, slicing through knots of pedestrians like Alexander’s sword, turning away at the door when he found a lounge to have a pianist in residence, for fear that, provoked by booze, he might erupt in song at the first tinkling rendition of a Broadway standard. Years earlier, he’d contemplated having a device surgically implanted in his throat to prevent any such musical indiscretion under the quickening of drink, and had gone so far as to contact a certain Hungarian clinic, only to have its administrator suggest he see a psychiatrist instead.

Bar patrons were swift to move aside for him, showing him the guilty, condescending respect reserved for the disabled. At Spin Doctor’s, he was invited to wheel his chair up to a table occupied by five government workers: two male, three female, under thirty, reasonably attractive. After a round or two, he was entertaining them with an abridged, shaman-free account of taking his grandmother’s parrot to the Amazon to reunite it with its origins. They seemed enthralled, but midway through his narration one of the men interrupted him to describe the difficulties he was experiencing trying to housebreak his new puppy, and soon all of them were telling their favorite dumb, boring pet stories. Raising his voice above the rest, Switters announced solemnly, “This morning, I received proof positive that my tabby cat is the reincarnation of a Las Vegas crime lord.” The table fell silent, and once more all ears were his. He merely looked them over, however, removed his hand from the baby fat of the feminine knee to his right (a hard-won concession), finished off his tequila jackhammer, then sped recklessly to the door. Jesus, he thought as he rolled out onto the street, I might just as well have sung “Memories.”

 

 

The next day he slept late, not surprisingly, and upon rising began quite mindlessly to pack. It was almost as if he were being directed by his welled unconscious, a wholly intuitive impulse that he did not think to challenge until he had cleaned out his closets. It was evening before he received confirmation that his intuition had been on the money. E-mail arrived from Bobby Case claiming that the angel grapevine was abuzz with rumors that Switters was about to be sacked.

Bobby offered assistance, hinting that he had enough embarrassing dirt on company activities to make Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald a reluctant ally for life. Switters replied that he would think it over. Bobby e-mailed back, “Okay, think, but don’t forget to sit.”

So, over the weekend he sat. And he got stoned. And he thought some. And when on Monday morning Joolie telephoned to inform him he was in trouble—Mayflower wanted him in on Tuesday for a daylong debriefing session—he could actually sound nonchalant, though some of it was faked. Impressed, Joolie confessed in a tremulous whisper (fully aware that she was being recorded) that she wished she could have known him better.

“Yes,” agreed Switters, “I can picture the two of us sharing a gypsy cave above a deserted beach with nothing on but the shortwave radio, a shaft of sunlight visually activating the coppery coils around your . . .” Joolie, a true redhead, hung up for fear she might swoon.

Switters then called a real estate agency and put his condo on the market. He had very little equity in the property, but any amount he might realize would help. He wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, but the fact that he was about to disobey orders by refusing to be debriefed would end up costing him his severance pay.

Too antsy to wait for a train, he took that very night a red-eye flight (sans gravy) to Seattle by way of Los Angeles, greatly annoying the D.C. taxi driver when, after announcing Dulles as his destination, he spat on the floor of the cab.

Undoubtedly, there are those who would be inclined to sneer at Switters, judging him in word and deed to have proven himself immature, frivolous, or even zany (to employ that stale adjective—from the Italian, zanni, a would-be or untalented clown—that the leaden are so fond of applying to characters less stodgy and predictable than they or their friends). The psychoanalytically disposed, on the other hand, might detect in his behavior, particularly as described in recent pages, a classic, arguably heroic, example of despair refusing to take itself seriously. Well, maybe.

Sigmund Freud once wrote that “Wit is the denial of suffering,” meaning not that the witty, the playful among us, deny that suffering exists—in varying degrees, everyone suffers—but rather that they deny suffering power over their lives, deny it prominence, use jocularity to keep it in its place. Freud may have been right. Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control (and fleece) its members by insisting they take its symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.

It’s entirely possible, however, that Switters was merely exhibiting the tics that can show up in a spirited intelligence when it can no longer count on, as an outlet, periodic meetings of the C.R.A.F.T. Club.

 

 

Switters was raised in Northern California, Colorado, and Texas, but whenever his mother’s domestic life went topsy-turvy, as it seemed intermittently to do, he’d been sent for months at a time to Seattle, and it was in Seattle that he once again took refuge. It could not be said that during his youthful asylums under Maestra’s roof she had ever mothered him, tending always to treat him as friend and equal, and she definitely wasn’t going to mother him now. In fact, once he broke down and informed her of his predicament and the queer Amazonian incidents (he omitted the part about eating her Sailor Boy) that had rather directly occasioned it, it became plain that he could not remain in her house.

Accepting no blame for having set events in play—guilt, in her opinion, being one of the most useless human emotions—Maestra chided him repeatedly for what she termed his “disappointing display of ignorance and superstition.”

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

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

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

Fierce invalid,” he corrected her.

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

“Never.”

“You did!”

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

“What? Precisely.”

“Precision doesn’t enter into it.”

“Heh!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“More interesting TV commercials.”

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

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

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

“That could be fun.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the start, their boats were lovelier than his. His, in fact, were pathetically engineered. How inept was Switters with tools? Had he been assigned to build crosses in Jerusalem, Jesus would have died of old age. The Art Girls, conversely, made lovely little vessels; clean, sleek, and well-proportioned, while his were decidedly otherwise. Yet, when they began to race them (human nature being what it is, racing was inevitable), his—lopsided, clumsy, cracked, splintery, wobbly of mast (often no more than a carrot stick)—always won. Always.

Challenged, the Art Girls fashioned increasingly finer craft. Forsaking those scraps of broken citrus crates that had provided shipwright fodder in the beginning, and that were now in short supply and deemed inferior into the bargain, they turned to the art school for materials, appropriating for hull and deck pieces of wood originally intended for stretcher bars, frames, maquettes, and the like, while making off with costly rice paper, parchment, and strips of Belgian linen canvas that could be cut into little sails. Rather quickly, spurred as much by artistic temperament and the human love of difficulty as by Switters’s unexplained and undeserved success, they progressed from catboat to sloop to ketch to yawl to schooner. They spoke of jibs and mizzensails, added bilge boards, keels, and rudders. And being artists, they painted their vessels in brilliant blues, whites, and golds, often inscribing a well-chosen name on the bow such as Shakti, Athena, Mermaid Lightning, Madame Picasso, or Madame Picasso’s Revenge.

Each and every one of Switters’s boats was christened Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters (scratched on the foredeck with a ballpoint pen), each was of the same primitive design in which he made no improvements beyond substituting a cabbage leaf sail for the customary lettuce leaf whenever the breeze was especially stiff or when he happened to accidentally produce a rat-trap-sized boat rather than the mousetrap size that was his usual limit. It wasn’t that Switters eschewed beauty and grace. No, indeed. He was, in fact, a champion of the beautiful in an age when beauty had been voted out of office by philistines on both the right and the left. His boats remained raw and rudimentary because he was incapable of making them differently, the handyman gene having been recessive for generations in the males of his family (which might well account for their tendency to become “men of mystery,” borrowing Eunice’s droll phrase). And anyway, his dumb dinghies continued to triumph.

“Sorry, darlings,” he’d apologize as, at the finish line, the girls would parade single file past his wheelchair to plant a victory kiss on his victory grin.

“I don’t get it.”

“He must cheat.”

“Is it some kind of, like, trick?”

“Fuck!”

Into the shallow streams of their racecourse—streams that bore mum petals, sprigs of dried statice, seeds, spices, crab shell fragments and tossed latte cups; streams shoaled by squashed apples, rotting lemons, runaway brussels sprouts, and the occasional yeasty horse turd; streams drizzled with cloud water, tea, lemonade, soup, screwtop wine, and drool (avian, equine, and human), in addition to a half-hundred varieties of coffee; streams dredged clean by municipal workers every night only to be collaged the next day with lurid organic detritus shed by activities within the Pike, the belly and heart of Seattle—into those cobble-bottomed streams the girls commenced to shove brigs, brigantines, barks, frigates, and clipper ships: vessels meant not for sport but for cargo or battle. It was as if, having despaired of exceeding his vulgar Virgins in speed and endurance, they sought to overwhelm them with scope, intricacy, and grace.

Indeed, they were works of marvel, those nautical midgets, especially when the clipper ship decks were stacked with lumber, rum barrels, hogsheads, cotton bales, or sacks of grain; when the frigates were outfitted with cannon and beaked figureheads for ramming an enemy. Races were interrupted, delayed, or canceled altogether due to outbreaks of naval warfare. As the fighting raged around it—”Fuck the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”—a lumpish Switters Virgin, flying a crude Jolly Roger, would go careening by in awkward audacity and lurch its way (providing it didn’t run aground on a half-submerged bagel) to the storm drain at the end of the street. Pretending to ignore him, the Art Girls made plans for a reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar, deciding it might be a more interesting and authentic engagement if the warships were manned.

“Fruit flies,” suggested Luna, one of the more innovative of the girls. “We could rub grape pulp and stuff on the decks and in the rigging, and next thing you know we’ll have a crew.”

“Hello?” countered Brie, who was Luna’s heated rival in the talent department. “Did you happen to notice that it’s winter? There aren’t any fruit flies out.”

“Are, too. There’s always a flock of ’em flitting around that rosy-cheeked brunette who works in the stall over there.”

“Yeah,” agreed Twila. “Even when she walks down the street.”

“You mean Dev?” asked Switters innocently. As one, to a woman, each of the girls swung like a beacon to face him, their eyes narrowed with suspicion, or rather, some psychic knowledge well beyond suspicion, a daunting display of feminine intuition in full efflorescence. He actually blushed.

When they’d had enough of broiling his marrow under their sarcastic smirks, they returned to preparations for Trafalgar. “Are we going to have critters aboard or not?”

“Darlings, please!” pleaded Switters, reclaiming his pallor. “Critters? Rarely has a linguistic corruption stunk so excrementally of willful hayseediness. It’s the sort of ill-bred mispronunciation associated with barnyard sodomites and greeting-card wits, even exceeding in déclassé offensiveness the use of shrooms when mushrooms is the word intended.”

“Life is offensive. Get used to it.” They had him there.

“Bet Dev says shrooms.” There, too.

Being as fundamentally nonviolent as they were artistically restless, the girls soon lost their taste for naval warfare. One day, to everyone’s delight, a lowly garbage scow appeared in place of a windjammer, and the next day somebody launched an ark. These were followed by fishing trawlers, tugboats, barges, rafts, kayaks, houseboats, tankers, and ocean liners. And, as any art historian could have predicted, there eventually bloomed a period of stylistic mannerism, of art for art’s sake. The girls began to bring in boats that bore little or no resemblance to boats: impressionistic boats, expressionistic boats, Cubistic boats, boats more closely resembling swivel chairs, toupees, bowling trophies, or poodle dogs than anything that ever plied the seas; boats that wouldn’t steer correctly and in some cases wouldn’t even float. Anti-boats. Suicides. Sinkers. Bangladesh ferry service. Then, Luna stopped the show with a miniature Christ who walked on water. Everyone was stunned, but two days later, during which time she’d neither eaten nor slept, Brie unveiled a Christ who not only walked on water but also towed skis. Apparently, the end was near.

Their little regattas had been attracting an increasing number of kibitzers, so it was hardly a surprise when a writer for the Post-Intelligencer mentioned them in her column. “Regrettable,” bemoaned Switters. “Any day now we can expect the novelty-greedy snouts of TV cameras to come sniffing at our pleasures.”

A product of their culture, the Art Girls could neither share nor understand his objection. An aversion to media exposure was as incomprehensible to them as would have been in earlier times an aversion to the favors of a king or the blessings of the Church.

There might have developed a quarrel, but (naturally enough, since it was well into April) the rains stopped. The sky went blue on them, the sun bounded on stage like a cut-rate comedian who doubled as his own spotlight, and within a day the market streets and gutters were as dry as rye. And dry they remained. With the dawning of spring, moreover, it dawned on the girls that their school year was drawing to a close, final exams were imminent, portfolios must be readied for grading; and, so, with a chirpy panic, they turned their full attention to the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs that for months they’d been ignoring, to the faculty’s supreme bewilderment, in favor of maritime models and nautical whirligigs.

On their rare forays into the market now, they did, singularly or in pairs, seek out Switters, always with just a trace of dreaminess in their perky hellos and good-byes. “What are you doing with yourself these days?” they’d inquire, implying that his life must be dreary without them.

“The house is on fire,” he’d answer merrily. “I’m looking out the second-story window. In my case, that happens to be two inches above the ground. Perfect!”

Whereas in the past it had been an unspoken rule that no prying was permitted, now they’d ask, “But what are you doing here in the market? What did you do before? You know, like before?”

“Oh, I gave up a proctology practice to go live in the Ural Mountains. Or did I give up a urology practice to go work for Procter and Gamble? Hmm?”

“You can’t remember whether you were a proctologist or a urologist?”

“Alas. All I know is that if you could sit on it, I was interested in it.”

At least half the girls made it clear, largely through body language, that anything they sat on could be his for the asking. Yet, he did not ask. He was, in some oblique fashion, paying off a debt to Suzy, who, he kept reminding himself, was but three or four years their junior, and for whose sake he seemed to feel he owed more than a modicum of retribution. He lusted maniacally for the Art Girls, of course, and, in all frankness, might never have let remorse over Suzy stand in the way of getting to know them more intimately had not his sunrise visits from Dev been so carnally extracting.

It was spring. There was no mistaking it. The air had become like cotton candy, spun not from sugar but the sex glands of meadowlarks and dry white wine. In the Pike Place Market, green sprouts popped up between the cobblestones. When he ventured out of a morning, freshly if resentfully groomed, yet bearing Dev’s funky signature like a laundry mark on a shirt, Switters left his topcoat at home.

Pale sunlight warmed the “starship,” the “second-story window,” the “throne of enlightenment” from whose eminence he kept watch on the world. Because spring brought with it, as it does each year, quiet spasms of longing that may be interpreted as sad, he found himself thinking of the sad-faced little mercado down in Boquichicos, so woefully wanting in goods and goods-buyers compared to the overstuffed market in which he parked his “one-man tilt-a-whirl.” And because in the high stalls (including Dev’s), oranges, onions, potatoes, and so forth were stacked in pyramid piles, he was repeatedly reminded of the shaman of the Kandakandero. Was it around Today Is Tomorrow’s cranial apex that Sailor Boy’s plumage had come to rest? And what of Fer-de-lance? The boy was out of vivid South America, but vivid South America was not quite out of the boy.

Bereft of Art Girl yachting parties, Switters again had lots of time to think, and while he thought often of Suzy and what he might have done to protect their relationship, thought of the CIA and what he might have done to preserve his job, he focused his thinking on his South American affliction, specifically on the question raised by Bobby Case, to wit: What had he been shown by the witchman’s ayahuasca, his yopo, that was so privileged and precious that he’d be expected to pay for it by spending the rest of his life with his feet off the ground?

Was his predicament in any way a distant echo of Adam and Eve’s? Had he, with a chit supplied by a creepy trickster, bought lunch at the Tree of Knowledge Bar & Grill, where only the cosmic elite were supposed to eat? If so, what forbidden information, exactly, had he ingested? That every daisy, sparrow, and minnow on the planet had an identity just as strong as his own? That all flesh was slowed-down light and physical reality a weird dance of electrified nothingness? That at a certain level of consciousness, death ceased to become a relevant issue? As did time? Today is tomorrow? Okay. But hadn’t he known those things all along?

In Genesis 3:22, a peevish voice attributed to Yahweh said of Adam (caught with pip on his lip), “Behold, the man is become as one of us.” Us? More than one god, then? Goddesses, perhaps: a Ms. Yahweh? Was Yah’s collective pronoun meant to include his beaming lieutenant, Lucifer? Or, for that matter, the Serpent? How about the community of angels (an apolitical faction of which might already have been disposed toward neutrality)? Or might God possibly—and this was pretty far-fetched—have been referring to the bulbs? The coppery pods, the shiny, trash-talking siliques who had boasted that they were running the show? Ridiculous, maybe, but what were those damn bulbs? Were they intrinsic to the plants from which ayahuasca and yopo were derived, an example of an abiding botanical intelligence amplified and made comprehensible by an interfacing of vegetative alkaloids with human neurons? Were they, rather, projected manifestations of his own psyche, hallucinated totems from the collective unconscious? Or were they actual independent entities, a life-form residing, say, one physical dimension away from our own, reachable at a kind of supercharged Web site accessed through chemical rather than electronic means?

Well, whatever, he certainly hadn’t become “as one” of them, or “as one” of the witchman’s ilk, either. So, why was he being punished? Instructed? Initiated? Eighty-sixed, at any rate, from the garden of reason? The very terminology to which he was forced to resort in order to consider these issues was suspect, being at once alien and shopworn, the parlance having in recent decades been yanked from its arcane native contexts and incorporated into the vocabularies of popularizers, charlatans, and dilettantes. Ugh! Still, they were real issues, were they not, as challenging to science, which preferred to sweep them under the rug, as to Switters, who, for reasons personal and acute, lacked that timid luxury?

Thrilled by the strange implications of such questions and at the same moment embarrassed by them, he examined them repeatedly but sheepishly, like a forensic scientist sorting a collection of crime-scene lingerie. These private musings occurred mainly in public—on sun-smeared corners, in shadowed archways, or beneath the great cartoonish market clock—where the murmuring of unsuspecting throngs washed over him, and Florida grapefruit and Arizona melons, like the popped orbs of Buick-sized frogs, watched him without blinking.

It was in one of those places, toying with one of those riddles, that he was approached, too abruptly for his liking, by a blue-chinned, dagger-nosed young man with an excess of glower behind his spectacles and an excess of wrinkle in his suit.

If the fellow was Mayflower’s Joe, coming out of the cold, something pretty serious must be up. At second glance, though, Switters would have bet this sulky slubberdegullion couldn’t tail the Statue of Liberty. He was no Joe. The company still had standards. Of course, he might be a master of disguise. Lower lip like that could be a nice touch, provided he didn’t trip over it.

“You Switters?”

“Who wants to know, pal?”

“I’m here to drive you to your grandmother’s.”

“Don’t believe I rang for a car. My chauffeur’s name is Abdulla, he’s been known to patronize a dry cleaner, he calls me Mr. Switters, and unless I have him confused with the gardener, this is not his day off.”

The man bristled, but any thought he might have had to rummage in his repertoire of rude retorts was dispelled by a look from Switters, hypnotic and fierce. Out of a jacket pocket unraveling at its seams, he drew a card that identified him as a paralegal at a downtown law firm that Switters remembered Maestra having mentioned once or twice in connection with her will.

“Guess there’s some bad news,” he said. “I’m parked around the corner on Pine.”

In Maestra’s foyer Switters was greeted by a doctor and a lawyer. Does it get any worse than that? Assuming that no decent person would allow a land developer in their home, only the presence of a cop and a priest was required (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) to complete this roll call of damnation.

The physician was courteous and kind. He explained that Maestra had suffered a mild stroke, particularly mild when one considered her age, from which there were indications she would fully recover. There was no evidence of paralysis, although her speech was noticeably slurred. She was lightly sedated, and a nurse had been engaged to watch over her for the next seventy-two hours. Until she regained normal speech, she wished to see no one. “Switters would try to take advantage of my vocal impediment to win his first argument with me in thirty years.” The doctor quoted her with a chuckle, gave Switters his phone number, and left the house.

It was now the lawyer’s turn. She, too, was polite, though with her it seemed more a matter of professionalism than compassion. Uncommonly tall, she was as black of skin as many of her colleagues were of heart, and there was a trace of tradewind in her accent. “Barbados,” she’d later explain. Her dignity, magnified by her height, might have been daunting to a man less reckless than he. In any case, since Ms. Foxweather had a couple of bombs to drop, her altitude was entirely appropriate.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been apprised of your grandmother’s indictment?” Foxweather inquired, opening the hatch and letting a big one fall. “No, I thought as much. Well, she was charged in January with computer trespass. Intrusion with mischievous intent. And it was mischief, I should stress. There was no evidence of larceny or social activism, per se. Nevertheless, it’s a serious charge at an inopportune time since the government is attempting to clamp down in these cases before they get out of hand. The feds aim to send a message.”

Whether in disbelief (though he shouldn’t have been overly surprised), dismay, or a kind of admiration that was not far from delight, Switters just kept shaking his head. Foxweather couldn’t be faulted for imagining that it was palsy that had landed him in his chair.

“Because of your grandmother’s age, prison was never really a possibility and because, as far as can be proven, she didn’t capitalize financially on her intrusions, there was. . . . Well, intentionally or unintentionally, she did bring down at least one computer network and destroy a fair amount of intellectual property, and while I did my best, the fine was steep. It was levied this morning, and I have to say, I’m convinced the judgment is what caused her stroke.”

The attorney finally took a seat—Switters was getting a crick in his neck—and cut to the nougat. Maestra, even should she completely recover and suffer no further blockages, was going to require care. She threatened to cane-whip the tightwad who might try to move her into an efficiency apartment and gun down like a landfill rat the Nazi who would plant her in a nursing home (Switters and Foxweather exchanged glances that indicated they both knew the old lady wasn’t joking), and home care was not inexpensive. The Magnolia manse was costly to keep up. Taxes were in arrears. There was a six-figure fine to pay. And, of course, legal fees. When all was said and done, Maestra, who’d donated generously over the years to some rather kooky causes, was staring into the hungry eyeholes of the lean white dog of bankruptcy.

“Now, I’ve agreed to accept her old cabin up at Snoqualmie Pass in exchange for my services. So that helps some. Ahem. Aside from this house, however, your granny has only one asset of any great value.”

“The Matisse.”

“Precisely. And it would fetch more than enough at auction to see her through. But she says she’s promised it to you upon her demise and, therefore, doesn’t feel she has the moral right to sell it.”

Switters wheeled himself to the living room door and looked in. There it hung above the mantel, in all of its sprawling, life-affirming effrontery. How could anything so flat be so rotund, anything so still be so antic, anything so meaty be so spiritually contemplative, anything so deliberately misshapen be so gratifying? Upon patterned cushions that might have been honked, zig by zag, out of Ornette Coleman’s horn, the odalisque exposed her flesh to a society that had grown frightened again of flesh. Without fear, inhibition, egotism, monetary motive, or, for that matter, prurience or desire, she loomed, she spread—as if she were both metropolitan skyline and wilderness plain: woman as city, woman as prairie, woman as the whole wide world. And yet, the longer he looked, the more removed she became from womanliness and worldliness, for in essence, she was but a song sung in color, a magnificently useless expanse of liberated paint. Owing nothing to society, expecting nothing, the painting bumped against the brain like a cloud against an oil derrick. It had the innocence and brute force of a dream.

Switters turned to Ms. Foxweather. “Matisse must not have had any damn heat in his studio. Woman went blue on him.”

“Oh, but that’s the way—”

“Sell it!” he snapped. “I never liked it anyhow.”

You can lie to God but not to the Devil?

For at least two reasons, Switters had been planning to move into the mountain cabin as soon as the snow melted. First, he was ready for a sabbatical from the Pike Place Market, which, with the advent of warm weather, was becoming almost South American in its vividity; and second, if Maestra was staring the pale dog in its ciphers, Switters was already under its paws. With his unemployment benefits about to expire and his unsold condo facing foreclosure, he’d been steeling himself to approach Maestra for a loan. Now . . .

A lawyer’s going to be weekending in my sylvan cabin whilst, in the glow of my beloved Matisse, some ruthless corporate raider will be plotting the hostile takeover of a pharmaceutical firm noted for the manufacture of mood-elevating laxatives. Along with appropriate details and his concern about his grandmother, Switters e-mailed the preceding to Bobby Case. When Bobby failed to respond right away, Switters figured he must be off flying a hazardous recon mission over North Korea (for, presumably, that’s what his new assignment entailed) or else up to his knees in Okinawan pussy (Bad Bob was ecstatic to be in Asia again, boy howdy!).

In about twelve hours, however, the e-bell rang. Damn! Why do those yellow-bellied fates always gang up on the elderly? How is she?

In the mind and the body, where it counts, Maestra’s doing remarkably well, Switters answered, although, for the moment, her voice is unsettlingly reminiscent of her dear departed parrot. Financially, Sailor Boy may be the better off of the two. I had no idea. Turns out she’s been donating large sums of cash to organizations whose names and objectives are not well known.

Probably CIA fronts, every one of them, Bobby tapped. But that Matisse, which a drifter like you never deserved in the first place, ought to bring in millions.

Yes, millions. If it doesn’t set off an alarm. Not only is its authenticity likely to be challenged, there’s a possibility it could be stolen property. Maestra’s first husband acquired it under somewhat foggy circumstances. In any event, I’m living by the temporary graces of Mr. Plastic and in dire need of gainful employment. I have to keep Maestra out of the nursing home, should it come to that, keep her in her own house with her wicked computers. Also, I’ve decided to go back and confront Today Is Tomorrow in the autumn. One year should just about suffice for two-inch enlightenment. Wouldn’t want to overdo it. Wear out my welcome in Nirvana.

Now you’re talking, son! I’ll get back to you if I have any bright ideas. Meanwhile, give the old hacker my affection and admiration.

The very next day, Bobby was on-line with an intriguing proposal.

If you’re able and willing to travel, You Know Who has got a speck of work for an ex-operative with your particular experience. April 30. Hotel Gül. Antalya, Turkey. Sit in the lobby and look innocuous—can you manage that?—until you hear somebody say, “Fuck the Dallas Cowboys.” Pay: low. Risk: high. But you won’t turn it down because the thrills are practically unlimited, and I know you’re aching to get back in the game.

Was he? Aching (from the Old High German ach!, an exclamation of pain) to get back in the game (from the Indo-European base gwhemb, “to leap merrily,” as in gambol)? Certainly, he had always looked upon his activities, official and unofficial, in the geo-political arena as a game: a combination of rugby, chess, and liar’s poker, with a little Russian roulette mixed in for good measure. While there were no conclusive victories to be had in that game beyond simple survival, a player scored whenever his acts of subversion thwarted or even delayed the coalescing of power in any single camp. In a sense, one won by making it difficult for others to win or, at least, to grow fat on the fruits of their triumph.

Six months in a wheelchair, however, had altered his overview slightly if significantly. When one was living two inches off the ground, one remained close enough to the earth to experience its tug, share its rhythms, recognize it as home, and not go floating off into some ethereal ozone where one behaved as if one’s physical body was excess baggage and one’s brain a weather balloon. On the other hand, one had just enough loft so that one glided above the frantic strivings and petty discontents that preoccupied the earthbound, circumnavigating those dreary miasmas that threatened to bleach their hearts a single shade of gray. In short, one could be keenly interested in worldly matters yet remain serenely detached from their outcome.

Switters, if the truth be told, was as enthusiastic about geopolitical monkey-wrenching as he’d ever been, but now, two inches removed, was no more attached to the end results than he’d been to the outcome of the rain-gutter boat races against the Art Girls. (Were he inclined—and he decidedly was not—he probably could have drawn several parallels between his passage through life and the careening of his unlikely little boats through the market’s littery channels.) In fact, he’d reached the conclusion that the inertia of the masses and the corruption of their manipulators had become so ingrained, so immense, that nothing short of a literal miracle could effect a happy ending to humanity’s planetary occupancy, let alone the kind of game in which he played upon that slanted field. And yet, it was a game absolutely worth playing. For its own sake. For the wahoo that was in it. For the chance that it would enlarge one’s soul.

So, perhaps he wasn’t exactly aching to resume play, but he mustn’t have been averse to it, for he wasted no time in twisting Mr. Plastic’s arm until the card blubbered like a cornered snitch, surrendering a one-way ticket to Istanbul for Switters and a heavy silver bracelet in a Northwest Indian raven motif for Maestra. In one of the market’s dimmer cul-de-sacs, he enjoyed a furtive farewell straddle from a drawers-down Dev, while yards away at her deserted stall, consumers edged across the narrow line of civilized restraint that separated shopping from looting, cleaning out the first of the season’s Mexican strawberries. Switters reimbursed her from his undernourished wallet in order to keep her brothers from slapping her around. Then, he was off to meet, for the very first time, the archangel—

“Audubon Poe.” The flannel-shirted, Mariners-capped man who spoke the name had been standing on the Pike Street curb poring over a bus schedule all the while that Switters was sliding into a taxi, folding his chair, and dragging it in beside him. He was a youngish, nerdy yet nimble Caucasian, not unlike Hector Sumac of Lima, Peru. As the cabbie signaled to pull into traffic, the stranger had suddenly thrust his face in the taxi window, uttered Poe’s name, frowned one of those obligatorily disapproving frowns that is actually a smile with its pants on backward, and shook his head. “You know he’s an arms runner,” he said, making it sound more like a piece of hot gossip than an accusation or a warning. And just as quickly he was gone.

“Airport,” said Switters.

“Where you fly today, sir?” asked the driver.

“Turkey.”

“Ah? Turkey. Long way. Vacation there?”

“Run arms there,” Switters replied matter-of-factly, wondering where that Joe had come from and what the hell Bobby had gotten him into.