Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (32 page)

“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.”