Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  “The company’s changed since your divorce,” said Switters.

  “I hear they let black men be agents now,” said Washington.

  “Black women, too. Only we call them ‘African-Americans’ these days.”

  “Ja, ja, that’s right. I can’t keep up with all our name changes, man. Back in Harlem, we was ‘Negroes’ or ‘colored people.’ Then it got to be ‘blacks’ and ‘people of color.’ But ‘Negro’ means ‘black,’ meant ‘black’ all along unless I’m mistaken; and maybe I’m thick, living among the Swedes all this time—I mean, America’s a bouncy country whereas the Swedes ain’t got that much bounce to ’em, you know—but I fail to detect where they be a hell of a lot of difference between the terms ‘colored people’ and ‘people of color.’ Or between ‘Afro-American’ and ‘African-American,’ far as that goes.”

  “The distinctions are subtle, all right,” Switters admitted. “Too subtle for the rational mind. Only the political mind can grasp them. I suspect there’s a bid for empowerment behind it all, the power going to whoever seizes the right to coin the names. In a reality made of language, the people who get to name things have psychological ownership of those things. Couples name their pets and children, Madison Avenue names the products that dominate our desires, theologians name the deities that dominate our spirit—’Yahweh’ changed to ‘Jehovah’ changed to plain ol’ generic ‘God’—kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they’ve successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King’s life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we’re like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control. Or maybe not.”

  “Verbal wolf urine?” inquired Audubon Poe incredulously. He had tucked a polka-dotted ascot into the throat of his denim work shirt, accentuating the dapperness that seemed to originate from his hair. “Anna, you must promise me you’ll never marry a man who uses phrases that picturesque.”

  Anna giggled in a manner that suggested she thought it might be good fun to marry just such a man. Switters averted his eyes, while Poe smiled ruefully and returned the conversation to the CIA. “You say the company has changed. For better, you think, or for worse?”

  “It may be too soon to tell. About the company and about the world in general.” Before Switters could say more—if, indeed, he had any intention of continuing—a crewman approached and whispered something in Poe’s ear.

  “Blow coming up,” Poe announced when the sailor departed. “Radio reports there could be seven- to eight-foot swells throughout the night. Switters, I’m afraid we’re going to have to dump you earlier than planned. There’re likely to be Turks up and about, though they turn in early in these parts, but we can’t wait until tomorrow night, as we’ve got a drop to make off of Somalia next week that we don’t dare miss. Innocent lives at stake and so forth. If you’ll just get your gear together . . .”

  “Happily,” said Switters, and he meant it, although it’s debatable whether he would attribute his glee to the prospect of action or to the fact that he was about to escape without making a fool of himself—or worse—over Anna.

  In any case, he had waved good-bye to the girl from a safe distance, shook the manicured hand that had nearly punched the breath out of the Central Intelligence Agency, and allowed the crew to lower him, his luggage, his chair, and the burlap sacks containing two thousand gas masks into a rubber raft. Skeeter Washington manned the oars (a motor might have attracted attention) and manned them well. The wind was already escalating, and between the darkened yacht and the rocky shore there was considerable chop, but Skeeter slid over the crests and attacked the troughs as if mastering a difficult composition by Thelonius Monk. Indeed, he was humming as he rowed.

  “What’s that tune, Skeeter?”

  “Huh? Oh, that? Just something new I been working on. I thinking about calling it ‘Slida,’ thanks to you, man. Americans won’t know what that mean nohow and the Swedes be broadminded about such matters. If my record company in Stockholm don’t dig the reference, guess I could call it—what was your Japanese word for it?—’Chitsu’? Unless you got a better one.”

  The raft pitched to one side and caromed off a rock. Switters had to wipe spray from his eyes. “Well, you likely would want to avoid the Welsh. In Wales, they say, llawes goch.”

  “Say what? You jiving me? That be ugly, man. Why, I wouldn’t go near nothing with a name like that.”

  “A rose by any name would smell as sweet,” Switters reminded him, then dug his left heel under the tubing to keep from being jolted overboard. They were entering the surf now, and despite Skeeter’s skillful maneuvering, the raft was lurching violently. “Vietnamese is worse. In Vietnam they call it lo torcung am dao or lo torcung am ba, depending on whether a baby is coming out of it or a man is going in.”

  “And what about when it’s not in use?”

  Switters shrugged. He started to suggest that the Vietnamese term was so long that simply speaking it might constitute foreplay. However, he would have had to yell to make himself heard above the roar of breakers, and as they were then less than thirty yards from the beach, yelling was probably not a wise idea.

  “I assume you got the Turkish in you repertoire, ja?” he thought he heard Skeeter say right before they slipped sideways again and a wave broke over them. (Good thing his computer and pistol were in plastic bags.) If he remembered correctly, the Turkish term for the vagina was dölyolu, but with the coast guard or a Jonah cult possibly nearby, he wasn’t about to shout that into the gap-toothed chaw of the rock-biting waves.

  The oasis didn’t seem to be getting any closer. For a moment, he seriously considered that it might be a mirage, a faux tableau created by too much heat rising from too much sand into too much sky. True, the nomads had seen it, as well, but to Bedouins a mirage would have its own tangibility. Could it have been a shared hallucination, like the Virgin Mary’s dancing fireball at Fatima? Well, whatever, it was all his now.

  He was no longer singing. He still had the urge to sing, he had the wahoo in him—the hint of anxiety only boosted it, and its level had rarely been higher—but the exertion of propelling the chair robbed him of the breath to sing. Surrounded on all sides by an immense silence, the only sound he heard beyond his own shallow gasps was sand crackling beneath his wheels and thorny weeds brushing against the spokes like a tone-deaf witch trying to pluck a banjo.

  That a person’s elation seemed to be tightly bound to his or her unencumbrance was a detail generally overlooked by psychologists (not surprisingly, since psychologists tended to skirt the subject of elation altogether, except when describing symptomatic behavior at the manic extreme of bipolar personality disorder), but Switters’s high spirits could be primarily attributed to the fact that he was . . . well, the word footloose did not really apply, not literally, considering his perambulatory injunction, but at large, certainly, at liberty, exempt, burdened neither with possessions nor duties; free in a wild, wide-open land, where he was consciously going against the flow (of reason, not of nature), deliberately choosing the short straw, flaunting the rule of “safety first” (surely one of the most unromantic phrases in the English language). However, it also had not failed to energize his coconut that the operation in Iraq had gone so swimmingly.

  The hardest part of the mission had been the landing on Jonah’s riviera. Once Skeeter had succeeded in beaching the rubber raft and helping him into his chair—a tricky, time-consuming task due to the surf, the rocks, and Switters’s inability to disembark on his own or otherwise assist—it had been a piece of cake. They had stowed the gas masks in the ruins of an old stone net shed, where Skeeter rested while Switters got out of his soaked yeast-colored linen suit and into a dry, navy blue, pin-striped, double-breasted number of a sort that was not uncommon in
Turkey. They talked briefly, shook hands (Switters imagined he could feel a current of pent-up music in Skeeter’s fingers), and parted, Skeeter to buck the waves back to the yacht, Switters to trundle the four kilometers into the town of Samanda(breve)gi, where, in a compound next to the marketplace, he had come upon a small contingent of Kurds.

  Kurds belonged in The Guinness Book of World Records on at least two counts: they were the largest ethnic minority on earth without an independent homeland, and they had been double-crossed and betrayed by more foreign powers than any other people in history. For this last reason alone, Switters had expected it would take days if not weeks to win their confidence. The United States, after all, had been among the nations to use them as pawns. After that one night, however, spent smoking (cheap cigars provided by Switters), drinking (arrack, a date-based liquor furnished by the Kurds), and discussing (poetry and philosophy, in Arabic) around their headman’s hearth, he had felt comfortable enough to confide in them, and they had agreed to participate, to the extent that they could, in his humanitarian escapade.

  Because Iraq’s border with Turkey was deeply troubled where Kurds were concerned, and abristle with Turkish troops, Switters thought it best to try to enter from Syria. His new friends agreed. If he would buy the petrol, a couple of their restless young men would drive him and his gas masks (they demanded thirty masks for themselves, though they resided far from the threatened region) across southeastern Turkey in one of their rickety old Mercedes trucks. Somewhere near Nusaybin, they would put him in touch with Syrian Kurds who would help him cross over into Syria. And so it came to pass.

  The second Kurdish group, as colorful as carnival cavorters in their billowy trousers, embroidered blouses, and tablecloth-sized head coverings, had taken him along Syria’s northeastern snout on camelback. It was while swaying to and fro atop one of those spitting, whining, kicking, loaf-lipped beasts that he had finally made contact with Maestra. He’d been afraid to e-mail her since, as evidenced by the Joe who’d seen him off in Seattle, the company was picnicking in his computer, and for reasons he hoped were just her characteristic orneriness, she wasn’t answering her phone. As much to take his mind off his uncomfortable ride as to ease his worry about her, he’d punched her Magnolia number into the satellite phone one more time—and was actually startled when the line was picked up and a gruff voice bellowed, “This had better be good!”

  “Did anyone ever tell you, Maestra, that you have the disposition of a camel?”

  “Damn straight I do, so don’t try to milk me or pile a load on my hump. Where are you, boy?”

  “Are you aware that a camel’s hump is naught but a lump of fat?”

  “Really? Then it’s the same as a woman’s breast.”

  “Oh no, you must be mistaken. A woman’s breast . . . why, a woman’s breast is a miniature moon. It’s made out of moon paste and warm snow and honey.”

  “Heh! You romantic ninny. Where are you?”

  He dared not be specific, but she got the idea that he was in camel country, and, more important, he got the idea that she’d fully recovered from her stroke. She was, in fact, arranging to fly to New York to be on hand for the auction of the Matisse in late June. “I’m making sure those poufs at Sotheby’s don’t try to stiff me.”

  Thus it was with much lightening of heart that he slipped into Iraq, a country where it was as easy to get beheaded as to get a bad meal. Fortunately, he endured the latter and avoided the former. In a ruined mountain town southwest of Dahuk, he had bestowed the masks (minus the hundred he’d given his latest escorts) on a tearfully grateful mayor, whose constituents had been recently decimated with nerve gas dropped on them by the very Baghdad authorities who had promised them self-government in 1970. The mayor hosted a celebration in his honor that evening, with lambs on the spit, hookahs on the rug, and belly dancers on the balcony. Because these Kurds were more strict in their adherence to Mohammed’s commandments than was the isolated group in Samanda(breve)gi, it proved a nonalcoholic affair, a condition that actually suited Switters since his digestive tract found arrack as combustible as pisco and since sobriety could be a useful ally in a hasty getaway.

  Knowing full well that Baghdad would have informants in the town (there would have been a minimum of two or three at the party) who’d waste little time in reporting his presence to the nearest military garrison, Switters excused himself early on in the festivities and, instead of visiting the outhouse, as advertised, ducked into the small room he’d been given and retrieved his belongings. He rolled out the rear entrance, rattled across an adjacent courtyard dotted with stones and tethered donkeys (belly dance music drowning out the clatter), and on through a gate onto a dark side street. The neighborhood was as empty as a Transylvanian blood bank, most of its inhabitants being at the party, but outside PUK headquarters a block down the street, he found a battle-hardened old militiaman leaning against the battered hood of a Czech-made version of the Jeep. The guard spoke little Arabic, while Switters’s Turkish vocabulary was pretty much limited to dölyolu. In Kurdish, even the word for that revered orifice was absent—temporarily, he trusted—from the tip of his tongue; yet, somehow the message was conveyed that Switters desired to be driven to the Syrian frontier, a hundred miles away. The request had been stubbornly refused, even after Switters flashed the wad of deutsche marks that Poe had provided to see him through (the rest of his pay, about nine thousand dollars plus airfare, was being wired to his Seattle bank). So, for the first and only time in the operation, he drew his pistol. He cocked it with an ominous click and snuggled its barrel up under the guard’s floating rib. “To the opera!” he called. “And five gold guineas if you catch the king’s carriage.”

  The emaciated PUK grenadier wept openly when Switters flung his rifle out of the moving Jeep, and Switters, tears gathering in his own eyes, felt such shame that he had the warrior turn the vehicle around, and they went back and picked it up. “Jesus, pal! Your attachment to your symbolic manhood could get me killed.” The teeth the Kurd showed when he smiled made his abductor’s seem a textbook example of the rewards of dental scrupulosity. They clasped hands in the Islamic manner. And—

  Wham, bam, thank you, Saddam! Nigh him wigworms and nigh him cheekadeekchimple! They were out of there.

  The distance between Switters and the oasis at last began to shrink. Quite suddenly, in fact, the compound seemed to enlarge, as if, cued by a director and strictly timed (ta da!), it had burst out on stage. It was no mirage. But what was it? It had better be good because all around it, in every direction, as far as his eyes could see, the world was as empty and dry as a mummy’s condom.

  He was wondering if he shouldn’t have remained with the Bedouins. They were a marvelous people to whom travel was a gift and hospitality a law. The Kurds had been gracious enough, but he preferred the Bedouins, for they were less religious and thus more lively and free. Kurds were essentially settlers who roamed only when forced from their villages by strife. Bedouins were nomadic to the bone. Whereas Kurds were in a constant state of bitter agitation over their lack of an autonomous homeland, Bedouins had no use for such paralyzing concepts. Their homeland was the circle of light around their campfire, their autonomy was in the raw sparkle of the stars.

  In almost every nation in the Middle East, Near East, and Africa, nomads were under strong governmental pressure to plant themselves in established settlements. Whatever the socio-political, economic reasons given, underlying it all was that great pathetic lunatic insecurity that drove men to cling to various illusions of certainty and permanence. The supreme irony, of course, was that they clung to those ideals because they were scared witless by the certainty and permanence of death. To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.

  The fires of this particular band of wandering herdsmen had been noticed by Switters only a few kilometers inside Syria, along the isolated, seasonally fertile wadi down which he’d been drive
n, headlamps off, to avoid both Iraqi and Syrian border patrols. Knowing that they would be honor bound to receive him hospitably, he ordered the commandeered Jeep stopped about three hundred yards from their encampment, gave the driver a fistful of deutsche marks, and sent him back to his Kurds and fray. “Thanks for the lift, pal. Good luck to you and your homeboys. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you ought to switch brands of toothpaste. Give Atomic Flash or Great White Shark a try.”

  Initially, he’d planned to make his way back into Turkey, where an American with a properly stamped passport and no gunnysacks of gas masks in his possession would have aroused not the slightest suspicion. He might expect to reach the Istanbul airport within the week. But he was full of himself after his little caper, and soon he was full of the Bedouins, as well.

  Despite the fleas that prickled him nightly the way stars prickled the desert sky, he loved sleeping on their musky carpets inside their big black tents. (The universe is organized anarchy, he thought, and I’m lying in the folds of its flag.) He loved their syrupy coffee, earthenware jars, silver ornaments, tilted eyebrows, and the way they danced the dobqi, their bare feet as expressive as a ham actor’s face. Yes, and he loved it that they were as wild as bears and yet impeccably neat and polite. Their good manners would put a Newport socialite to shame. Every country had a soul if one knew where to look for it, but for the stateless Bedouins, their soul was their country. It was vast, and they occupied it fully. It was also portable, and he felt compelled to follow it awhile.