José and I have been trying to reason with these Politically Bent Banditos, as we have with all the Banditos we’ve been hanging out with during our trip. Reasoning with Banditos is tough, and I’m no miracle worker. A day or so with each band just isn’t enough, but José and I have been doing our best as Missionaries of Bandito Enlightenment. We have brought as many books as Pepe, our little burro, can carry, and José is making great progress in his continuing Quest for Knowledge. Each night we sit down for an hour or so of intensive study. Since José can’t read, I’m his instructor. He is an excellent student, although his mind occasionally wanders. Fond recollections of his Bandito Past, I suspect. But he has more or less mastered Subatomic Particle Theory and we are now delving into Astrophysics.⁵⁸

José’s Bandito Reputation has preceded him everywhere, so we always get a rousing welcome, but some Banditos get sullen when we try to change their Bandito Worldviews. I find these Left-Wing Banditos particularly exasperating. They always seem to be in a bad mood (a sure sign that something’s lacking in Marxist philosophy). Most Banditos have no interest in the New Physics, especially when they’re cranky, but we’ve made converts here and there. Mostly in Costa Rica, where the Banditos are more happy-go-lucky. Someday I will return there and set up a Bandito School of Physics and Cosmology. If the idea catches on, it could bring peace to this troubled part of the world. As Banditos learn the Underlying Nature of Reality, they will throw down their weapons. I am certain of that.⁵⁹

In fact, the one major success we’ve had was in Costa Rica, and it was more or less accidental. We stumbled across a Bandito Stronghold that José was unfamiliar with. As a matter of fact, it was a temporary, ad hoc sort of Bandito Stronghold that consisted of a dozen or so tents pitched by a small stream in a beautiful, lush valley that had once been part of a banana plantation.

We were making our way along the bank of the stream when José, walking point with High Pockets, froze. I looked around: Several dozen Banditos had appeared out of nowhere and had us covered with a motley array of weapons, including a young Budding Bandito with a BB gun.

There were some tense moments as they escorted us to their camp, first taking our weapons and fitting High Pockets with a makeshift muzzle.

Everything turned out to be okay, however. The gang’s leader, a Full-Blown Bandito named Fredi, turned out to be a distant relative of José’s. Once this was established, we were treated with the utmost respect and courtesy. We were bathed by Bandito Maidens, fed and given all the mescal we wanted. Pepe was also fed and watered and High Pockets was given his choice of the many Bandito Bitches (all True Banditos like dogs) that were scratching around the camp.⁶⁰

Fredi declared a holiday from Bandito Business and had his men prepare a fiesta in our honor.

As night fell, cooking fires and torches were lit, a few pigs were slaughtered and roasted and gallons of mescal were broken out. Another score of Banditos from nearby strongholds also showed up, having heard of our arrival through the Bandito Grapevine.

Meanwhile, José and I conspired in private as to what tack we would take with this group, by far the largest number of Banditos we’d run into since embarking on our Quest. José persuaded me to let him handle things this time since my track record as Professor of Bandito Physics had, so far, been dismal. I told him to give it a shot. His results were spectacular, I have to admit.

As we sat down to dinner, Fredi mentioned that he’d heard José had had some problems back in Colombia and offered to help out in any way he could.

This was the opening José had been waiting for. He casually asked Fredi if it would be okay to address the camp, whose ranks had swollen to about sixty, after dinner.

Fredi agreed immediately, then bellowed for more mescal, which, following José’s orders, I had spiked with copious quantities of psylisibic mushrooms.

The fiesta turned out to be your basic Bandito Bash: huge amounts of food and mescal, a lot of raucous laughter and Bandito Braggadocio, a few fistfights and, of course, an improvised fireworks display consisting of mortar and rocket launcher fire. The finale was supplied by a Pyromaniacal Bandito with a flamethrower.⁶¹

José kept asking me what time it was. I knew what he was doing: calculating when the psylicibin would be kicking in. I didn’t need a watch to figure this out: I was blasted out of my gourd.

José’s plan to get the Banditos psychedelically plastered before his lecture was a brilliant one, but what he did next was the masterstroke and I felt some sort of cross-eyed embarrassment for not having thought of it myself.

First, a digression is necessary. Traveling back in time to Chapter 13, the reader might recall that part of José’s conversion from a simple (though not to be taken lightly) Bandito to a Subatomic Bandito involved meditation. At that time I promised you all would eventually hear about my technique. Well, “eventually” then is the present now.⁶²

I devised this meditative technique while High Pockets and I were living alone back at the shack, soon after the mugging of Tina’s Family and its effects on my Worldview. It seems like a lifetime ago.

Most types of meditation involve some sort of bullshit mantra, usually an inane word some towel-headed moron gives you after you cough up a few bucks.

Well, my mantra isn’t inane and it won’t cost you anything (assuming you either borrowed or stole this book).

When I was a kid I went to summer camp.⁶³ It was about a four-hour ride to the camp and the bus was always packed with dozens of future Barristers, Bankers, and other Banditos-To-Be.

Anyway, there was this sap who had to accompany us on the trip. His job was to keep chaos and destruction to a minimum.

One method always worked, and looking back on it now, I realize why. Remember “Row, Row, Row Your Boat?” Well, that’s it. That’s my mantra.

Talk about a Subatomic Tune! Think about it.⁶⁴ If you don’t believe there are some major-league metaphors going on here, I suggest you put this book down and forget it. Go read some Kahlil Gibran.

Jesus Christ, no wonder it calmed us down. What’s the point of destroying a bus or punching some other little prick’s lights out if the whole mess is just a fucking dream?

Anyway, I ran into a hitch up at the shack. This method of transcendental meditation works best if you do it in harmony (a three-part harmony is the best). I suspect this has something to do with certain harmonic properties (illusory as they may be) of the Macrocosmic World.

Obviously, I had no one to harmonize with. Or so I thought. The second time I tried my mantra, High Pockets was sitting next to me. You guessed it. He started howling or, more accurately, wailing in harmony, as only a big mutt with a depraved puppyhood can wail.

This worked out fairly well until José’s conversion, which afforded me a three-part harmony. The profundity of some of my experiences while under the influence of a Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat High are impossible to convey on paper. Suffice to say that both José and I agree it has put us in closer touch with the Subatomic World. José even claims he has formed an alliance with an Alternative Bandito from the O-Zone. God only knows what kind of weird doggy trips High Pockets has been taking.

Anyway, José separated the sixty Blasted Banditos into three sections. He had them form a circle around a blazing bonfire, tenors to the north, altos to the east and baritones to the south. José stood on the west side of the campfire and called out for silence.

I sat a few yards behind him in case he needed coaching.

High Pockets had gone back into the jungle with his little Canine Cupcake to knock off another piece.

José paced back and forth in front of the three-score Silent Banditos for a minute or so, gathering his thoughts and having an occasional belt of mescal.

José knew Banditos don’t normally sit around the campfire singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” so he first softened them up by complimenting everything about them, from their excellent Bandito Cuisine to their oversize Bandito Sombreros. Between the psychedelic mushrooms and a few minutes of this bullshit, José had them eating out of his hand.

He then asked if everybody trusted him. A chorus of “Sí Sí’s,” “Naturalmentes” and “Seguro hombres.”

About a half hour later, José had taught the group “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in English—it doesn’t have the same effect in Spanish, probably because it doesn’t rhyme—and explained what the words meant. (Incidentally, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is the only English José knows.) He rehearsed each of the three sections separately, then held up his now empty mescal bottle like a conductor’s baton.

“Uno, dos, tres, quatro.” And the chorus began, softly at first, then a little louder, then louder still, until the jungle reverberated with a joyously whacked-out Bandito Choir singing in perfect three-part harmony.

High Pockets and his girlfriend were howling from somewhere in the jungle.

Stars twinkled overhead.

Pulsars pulsed.

Quasars quased.

Subatomic Particles bombarded the earth and all its children.

Goose bumps erupted all over my body.

Suddenly José waved his bottle for the chorus to stop.

The ensuing quiet was a truly Cosmic Silence. In front of José lay a silent sea of motionless sombreros.

The thought crossed my mind that if José’s Bandito Audience was even half as whacked as I was, he was going to have one helluva successful lecture. That is, if he could keep his head together.

As it turned out, José not only kept his head together, but also gave probably the most insightful discourse on the Underlying Nature of Reality any Bandito has ever heard.

Naturally, he started at the beginning, with his mugging of Tina’s family. In order to avoid any Bandito Outbursts, he skirted the issue of Tina’s betrayal of Tom and Gary, making only brief mention of her nymphomania (and, of course, not a hint about the concealed diaphragm).

He then shocked the hell out of me by immediately reviewing the Double Slit Experiment and its implications vis a vis Bandito Consciousness, both Cosmic and Real-Life. A Bandito in the back of the tenor section punctuated José’s summation of this concept by firing a mortar shell more or less straight up. It eventually came down about fifty yards away in the jungle. Dirt, debris and pureed bananas rained down on the camp, but José continued without missing a beat.

He spent the next hour or so reviewing Quantum Theory in general. José’s teaching methods differed from mine in one vital aspect: He never brought up Newton or any of the other old farts that predated the New Physics, and, in retrospect, I have to agree with his reasoning. Why confuse the issue with irrelevant theories?

His Bandito Audience sat rapt and quiet—except for that one Bandito Tenor who kept launching mortar rounds in response to José’s more mind-expanding utterances.

As he began to delve into the problem of Schrödinger’s Bandito, however, a volley of randomly aimed rocket launcher fire erupted from the baritone section. The scene was starting to get downright surreal.⁶⁶

José did a brilliant segue into a Full-Blown Discourse on the nature of Space, Time and Matter. I drained the remainder of my mescal and smiled at my protégé’s insights like a proud father.

José paced back and forth, occasionally gesturing with his bottle as he explained that the world as we know it, the world of Bananas and Banditos (I assumed he’d left out Contrabandistas and Dope Lords for the sake of brevity), is merely an image formed by standing and moving waves of electromagnetism and Subatomic Processes, and how the findings of Quantum Mechanics have virtually destroyed the notion of “solid” objects.

At this point, a solid object landed directly in front of José. The object turned out to be a mortar shell. For some reason, it was a dud.

José gave it a quick glance and rambled on. I could tell he was getting a little disoriented from the way he lapsed in and out of metaphors. First he would call an electron an electron; then he would refer to it as a Cosmic Bandito.⁶⁷ He was still basically coherent, however, and went on to explain that as a direct result of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, electrons are sometimes seen to be spread over a wide area and sometimes localized in a small region. Moreover, just when we feel we have a Cosmic Bandito’s location pinpointed, it might fool us and be somewhere else.

At this point High Pockets appeared and lay down with his head on my lap. He was visibly shaken by the sporadic and indiscriminate mortar, rocket launcher and small-arms fire coming from the Bandito Chorus. I fumbled through my pockets and came up with our last Milk Bone Flavor Snack for Small Dogs, but he was too upset to eat. He also seemed exhausted, probably from his girlfriend’s sexual demands.

I looked at José. He was swilling mescal from a fresh bottle. After a particularly healthy pull, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, said, “Ahh,” doffed his sombrero and warned his audience he was about to explain the Real Underlying Nature of Reality. He asked the Banditos if they were ready.

The mob answered with a fresh volley of heavenward-aimed projectiles.⁶⁸

José then began a slurred dissertation on one of the most difficult concepts of the New Physics: The concept of the Curvature of Space. The Bandito Barrage eased up and , then stopped altogether (except for an occasional shot from the jerk in the back of the tenor section) as José explained the nature of the Space-Time Continuum. Time, he asserted, is not a separate entity from three-dimensional space but a part of the same something, and that there is no universal flow of time, any more than there is a universal flow of upwardness or downwardness.

Moreover, he continued, the very fabric of space-time is not straight, as everyday experience leads us to believe, but curved.

A pregnant pause. José had a slug of mescal, then belched contemplatively. He had his audience by the short hairs and he knew it.

This curvature, José asserted, manifests itself in such phenomena as gravity. And, he hinted, possibly matter itself.

Another pregnant pause.

I was dumbstruck by the timing and profundity of José’s delivery. He then quoted (in Spanish, of course) one of his favorite modern-day physicists, John Wheeler: “There is nothing in the world except empty, curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry.”

José jabbed the Space-Time Continuum with his mescal bottle. Bananas and Banditos, he asserted, are mere undulations of nothingness!

This statement precipitated another spontaneous eruption of small-arms fire. Several mortar rounds exploded nearby, showering José’s Bandito Symposium with more debris.

José removed a shredded banana peel from his face and bellowed for silence.

He looked up at the stars, seeking inspiration, then ordered the mob to remove their sombreros and do likewise.

The sight of three-score Banditos silently staring into the Cosmos made me dizzy, so I looked down at High Pockets and stroked his head. His tail, as usual, wagged.

“The Great Spirit wags,” I mumbled, briefly thinking of the old Indian, wherever he was. I then thought of Señor Rodriguez, Tina, Tom, Gary and, especially, Tina’s father.

This resulted in my slipping into a reverie. Possibly it was a coma of some sort.

Anyway, when my mind returned from vacation José was well into a dissertation on our favorite subject: The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. He reviewed the concepts of Collapsing Wave Functions, Ghost Particles, Antimatter and Tina’s father. He then turned his attention to the Editions Theory of the Interpretation. I could hear the idiot in the tenor section yelling for more mortar shells.

A Bandito in the alto section fired a short burst from what sounded like an Uzi. I sensed the mob was starting to get excited.

When José boasted that he had formed an alliance with an Alternative Full-Blown Bandito from another Branch of Reality, the crowd went wild. The Bandito Chorus discharged whatever weapons they were holding simultaneously.

High Pockets jumped about ten feet straight up.

José was knocked flat on his back by the shock wave.

The maniac with the flamethrower shot a fountain of fire across the camp. , The sky and surrounding jungle lit up in orange and blue.

Ripe and semiripe bananas rained down from the heavens.

A hand grenade rolled into the ammunition tent and went off.

I was struck by flying debris and lost consciousness.

All in all, I have to rate José’s lecture an unqualified success.

José’s problems with these guys started right at the get-go. First they refused to drink the mushroom-laced mescal I offered them, claiming they had to get up early and wanted to be clearheaded for some sort of ambush.⁶⁹

They also refused José’s invitation to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” for fear of being detected by government troops or the CIA.

The shit hit the fan about two minutes into José’s lecture on Basic Bandito Physics 101. Someone in the back yelled for José to shut up so he could get some sleep. The rest of the crew agreed vociferously. One guy made the mistake of tossing a half-eaten plantain at José.

High Pockets and I saw it coming and dove for cover.

José acquitted himself quite well, even though he was severely outnumbered. He wound up with two black eyes, another lump on the forehead and his gold front tooth knocked out (he found it in the morning), but the only real damage was to his Bandito Pride.⁷⁰

We have been checking the classified ads in the International Trib whenever we can get a copy, but Tina’s father has been silent. I suspect we’ll hear from him as our inexorable northward progress becomes unmistakable. When he realizes that like Newton’s apple plummeting to Earth we are on an almost gravitational mission, he will have little choice.

José and I (not to mention High Pockets) are arrows in flight—conceptual arrows, shot from the bow of the Ultimate Zen Archer.⁷¹ Arrows arching through the Space-Time Continuum. Arrows aimed directly at the Worldview of Tina’s father.