Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins Page A

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