The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe Read Free Book Online

Chapter VI
The Firewall
    In November of 2008, a full seven months before the truth squad’s scheduled hecatomb time for Everett, he, the scheduled mark, did a stunning thing. He maintained his mad pace and beat them into print—with one of the handful of popular books ever written on linguistics: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, an account of his and his family’s thirty years with the Pirahã. 147 It was dead serious in an academic sense. He loaded it with scholarly linguistic and anthropological reports of his findings in the Amazon. He left academics blinking…and nonacademics with eyes wide open, staring. The book broke free of its scholarly binding right away.
    Margaret Mead had her adventures among the Samoans, and Bronislaw Malinowski had his among the Trobriand Islanders. But Everett’s adventures among the Pirahã kept blowing up into situations too deadly to be written off as “adventures.”
    There were more immediate ways to die in the rainforests than anyone who had never lived there could possibly imagine. The constant threat of death gave even Everett’s scholarly observations a grisly edge…especially compared to those of linguists who never left their aerated offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
    In the rainforests, mosquitoes transmitting dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and malaria rose up by the cloudful from dusk to dawn, as numerous as the oxygen atoms they flew through, or so it felt. No matter what precautions you took, if you lived there for three months or more, you were guaranteed infection by mosquitoes penetrating your skin with their proboscises’ forty-seven cutting edges, first injecting their saliva to prevent the puncture from clotting and then drinking your blood at their leisure. The saliva causes the itching that follows.
    In 1979, barely a year into the Everetts’ thirty years with the Pirahã, Keren and their older daughter, Shannon, came down with high fevers, the shakes, the chills, the itches, the whole checklist from back when Everett once had typhoid fever. So for five days he treated them with antibiotics from his missionary medicine kit, as instructed. The fevers did not abate. Keren’s temperature rose to the very tip of the thermometer. Their only hope was to head for the hospital at the provincial capital, Porto Velho, the nearest outpost of civilization, four hundred miles inland on another river, the Madeira.
    They set out on the Maici, the entire family—Everett, Keren, Shannon, Kristene, who was four, and Caleb, only two—crammed together in an aluminum canoe Everett had borrowed from a visiting Catholic missionary. All it had was a 6.5-horsepower outboard motor. In a tinny, tiny, tippy canoe overloaded like this, every moment felt like the last moment before capsizing into a jungle river fifty feet deep. Keren was already delirious. She slapped at both Shannon and Everett. It took ten hours to reach the point where they had to cross overland from the Maici to the Madeira. Then, a miracle—the kindness of strangers—four young Brazilians appeared from out of nowhere and put Keren and Shannon in hammocks and hung the hammocks from logs they slung over their shoulders fore and aft and hauled them over to the Madeira.
    A day and a night had gone by. On the Madeira, as muddy as the Mississippi and as wide at the mouth, they caught a ship with three decks, one above the other. It went up and down the river like a public bus. They had a three-day trip ahead of them…with no cabins or any other form of privacy except for a single bathroom on the first deck (for about two hundred passengers on a boat designed for ninety-nine, maximum) and no seats; instead, grossly overcrowded ranks of hammocks bearing a jam-up of people hanging shank to flank from the ceilings with their hummocky hips choking the air…
    By now, Keren and Shannon were both suffering from severe diarrhea in addition to the fever and pain. Fortunately, Everett had brought along a chamber pot.