Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What he hadn’t counted on were the
demons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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