Swimming in the Volcano Read Online Free Page A

after we smash. Sister Vera will come and nag over my body about family planning and wastefulness.
    Every male in St. Catherine beyond the age of eleven had been accosted by Sister Vera from the Ministry of Health and People’s Welfare. Some foreign-aid deal, annotated by many strange complexities, had stuck her with an entire freighterload of rubbers which she personally distributed by the bucketful. In this way she was herself the recipient of a variety of insults and slander—cradle robber, barren puppet, “whore of the empire’s executioner,” one left-wing mimeograph called her—and the government didn’t concern itself with her mission as long as she got rid of the condoms before the time came to renegotiate this particular aid package into something more appealing, like video equipment or an armored personnel carrier.
    It was no mystery then that Isaac had been induced to carry a year’s supply of rubbers in the backseat of the Comet. Sister Vera was assiduous, arguing that his fares could help themselves from the bag even though Isaac swore to her over and over that he would never wear such a smothering device himself, that he was spirituallyopposed to the practice. He held a peculiar scientific belief relating to this matter. Isaac believed that the actual spirits—he called them angels—of his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and so on, resided in the realm of his penis. It was understood by him that his ancestors were down there, every last one of them but too many to know by name, reduced to something approximating molecular waterbugs in the pool of his seed, yet whole and autonomous and accessible. Mitchell had even seen Isaac mumbling to his dick as if it were a microphone into the netherworld. To Isaac, this was science—an old old old one, true, but recently confirmed in his opinion by what he had read of the study of genetics. He loved newspapers from the States and considered tabloids the highest source of encouraging information. In fact, in a Florida sheet he had read that his special ability to talk with the deceased was a common and legitimate exercise, now studied inside machines and under microscopes at major universities.
    Mitchell had met both Isaac and Sister Vera within minutes of his arrival on the island eight months previously. The nondenominational Sister, dressed like a meter maid, advanced on him as he waited for his gear to be lugged out of Customs by a mafia of porters. Perhaps the sight of his footlocker had provoked her—a white man moving in to bombard the local ovaries with blue-eyed imperial genes. She swooped down on him, lecturing with the fierce rhetoric of a victim, as though he were to be held accountable for every birth on the island in the past year, and urged him to accept her handout. Infrequent weeks of whirlwind missions—a deficit symposium in Rome, a consultation with the Export Office in Kathmandu—were the extent of his travel abroad; Mitchell did not yet know how to say no (and mean it) in a foreign country without excessive anxiety and a scarlet rash of guilt. Sister Vera’s only clear affiliation seemed to be the cult of contraception, but she had a deft talent for intimidation, her success at it rivaling the most orthodox harangues of the greater religions. She gave him the usual, shoved it into his arms, a shopping bag containing one gross of loose condoms, and when she left he opened the mouth of the sack and stared at them wistfully. They were little time bombs of copulation, in such quantity they could only be of use to the tireless libertines that undoubtedly roamed Sister Vera’s dreams.
    Isaac too had been alerted by the footlocker and wandered over to offer
Miss Defy
for hire. Mitchell’s first impression was that he was too chummy, too upbeat, a potential nuisance, and he dismissed him regardless, because someone from the Ministry of Agriculture was supposed to meet the flight,