Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (28 page)

“Tell me something about yourself,”
she demanded.

“Okay. Shoot.”

“No, I mean, like, tell me something
true about you that I don’t already know. A secret fact. That nobody else
knows.”

He pondered this for a moment or two.
Then he declared, “The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.”

For some reason, Suzy found this the
most radical, outlandish, unexpected, and witty remark she’d ever heard.
Giggling, and shaking her head in wonderment, she slipped carefully off him and
moved to the door. “Gotta go now. Remember, if you need anything, just ring
that little bell.”

He glanced at the quasi-antique copper
bell on the table beside the milk glass but said nothing.

“You’re amazing,” she said. “I only
wish that—” She broke off abruptly and left the room.

He lay awake most of the night,
trying to finish her sentence for her.

The California State Library was
located in Sacramento, appropriately enough since Sacramento was the capital of
that state. Glamorous, greedy Los Angeles had its Hollywood sign; picturesque,
kooky San Francisco had its Golden Gate Bridge; provincial, authoritarian
Sacramento—in which the true pulse of America pumped a steadier beat—had its
Capitol Mall. Within that mall, beneath the huge gold dome of the capitol
building and at the end of a broad, tree-lined avenue, the state library
sheltered its precious charge of books.

Although he anticipated—correctly, as
it turned out—that the library would be home to a minimum of volumes pertaining
to Our Lady of Fatima and that they must turn to the Internet for the bulk of
their research, still he wanted Suzy to have the library experience, to undergo
the sheer
bookness
of the place, to taste the “seepage,” as he put it:
the information and beauty that tended to leak from shelves of books even when
the books went unread.

“Virtual reality is nothing new,” he
told her as she guided his chair up and down the rows of stacks. “Books, the
ones worth reading, have always generated virtual reality. Of course, unless
one can get past its cultural and sensorial levels, what is reality
but
virtual?”

Suzy was silent, but he imagined he
could hear tiny luminous thought-worms chewing roadways in her half-green
apple. DNA was certainly devious in that it ripened the body before the brain.

On the way back to the suburbs,
feeling tome-toned and opus-pocused, Switters piloting his rented convertible,
Suzy playing navigator, nurse, and tour guide, they debated whether the fact
that Sacramento was noted for its manufacture of missiles, weapons systems,
cake mixes, potato chips, and caskets did not qualify it as the quintessential
American city. “Okay, but, like, Sacramento’s also called the Camellia Capital
of the World,” she reminded him.

“A few weeks ago, I was in the Dead
Dog Capital of the World. I have to say, camellias are an improvement.” Sensing
that she was trying to form some connection in her mind between a place so vile
it was renowned for dead dogs and his presumed wounds and injuries, he sought
to restore a more poetic and, he hoped, romantic mood by reciting a Buson
haiku:

“A camellia falls,
Spilling out rainwater
—from yesterday.”

“Could you pull off over there?”
she immediately asked, pointing not to a motel as he at first thought but to a
gas station. “I really have to use the bathroom.”

“Say
toilet
, would you,
darling. I don’t believe bathing is one of the services Texaco provides.”

“Whatever.”

“No, it’s not unimportant.
Intelligent speech is under pressure in our fair land and needs all the support
it can get.”

He spent the five minutes that she
was absent trying
not
to picture her camellia spilling out yesterday’s
water.

She made him rest when they got home.

After dinner they went computerside
and uncorked the Fatima jug. Quickly their cups runnethed over.

The children were Lucia, age ten,
Francisco, nine, and Jacinta, seven. They were poor and completely uneducated.
When they returned from the pastures that spring evening in 1917, they seemed
to be entranced, almost in a state of ecstasy. Lucia ate her supper in blissful
silence, and Francisco, too, was distracted and quiet, but little Jacinta was
too young and excited to contain herself. The cat she let out of the bag, and
which in time grew larger than a tiger, was that they had been visited on the
northern slope of the Cova da Iria (where her uncle, Lucia’s father, leased
pastureland) by a beautiful woman enveloped in blinding light. She appeared to
them, following several flashes of lightning (it was a clear, sunny day) from a
point some meters above their heads, in the top branches of a stubby tree. As
Switters read aloud Lucia’s later description of the woman, her dazzling white
tunic that gathered at the waist without benefit of belt or sash, her graceful
hands folded prayerfully at her breast and wound round with a pearl-beaded
rosary, her exquisitely refined features, the sadness and maternal concern that
showed in her countenance, the loveliness that exceeded anything to which a
bride might aspire, the light that she radiated (“clearer and brighter than a
crystal cup filled with purest water penetrated by the most sparkling rays of
the sun”), he noticed that Suzy herself was becoming enraptured.
For any
number of reasons,
he thought,
this is probably not a good sign.

He was tempted to suggest that they
launch a botanical probe into the bush that the Lady had selected as her
landing pad. In Portuguese, it was called
carrasqueira
, in English, holm
oak. By any chance did it have psychotropic properties? Might the children have
chewed its leaves or, perhaps, inadvertently inhaled its pollen? Alas, even
were Suzy open to such an approach, Sister Francis would likely have a Sacred
Heart attack, in which case an A-grade might be out of the question.

When, however, they learned that the
Fatima children had twice in the previous year been visited by an angel,
Switters couldn’t keep quiet. “No television, no radio, and they were
illiterate. Kids sometimes have to provide their own entertainment. It was
always Lucia, the eldest cousin, who saw these holy apparitions first, and it
was with her that they spoke. Maybe little Lucia had an active imagination, a
fantasy life fueled by Bible stories, the only extraordinary material to which
she’d ever been exposed, and she pulled the younger kids into her fantasies,
much the same way that Tom Sawyer pulled in Huckleberry Finn.”

Suzy protested. “I don’t know why you
have to be so negative. Don’t you believe in miracles and stuff?”

“Well, I know from first-hand
experience that the universe is a very woo-woo place, and that so-called
consensual reality is not much more than the tip of the iceberg. But my
credibility alarm starts to jangle a bit when the Virgin Mary shows up speaking
flawless Portuguese and looking like a Roman Catholic Sunday School portrait
instead of the Middle Eastern Jewish matron she was at the time of her death.
If I remember it correctly, rosary beads weren’t introduced until more than a
thousand years after Christ, so why—”

“Hello? God’s time isn’t the same as
our time.”

She had him there. Certainly he
wasn’t going to argue on the side of linear time, not after what he’d been
through. Today
was
tomorrow, wasn’t it? Or, at least, the future leaked
into the present on a fairly routine basis. The past, as well.

“Anyway, like, what about all the
people who saw the sun dance in the sky and stuff? On October thirteenth. They
weren’t Huckleberry Finns.”

“Hmmm,” hmmmed Switters. “That’s interesting
in itself. Of the seventy thousand people who joined the children in the Cova
da Iria pasture for the Lady’s farewell performance and prophecy session,
roughly half claimed to have witnessed a meteorological light show of
staggering proportions. The other half saw absolutely nothing. What does that
tell us, darling? That fifty percent of humanity is susceptible to mass
hallucination?”

“Or that fifty percent are pure
enough to see God’s miracles and the rest are like you.”

“Fifty percent purity? Man, I wish
the figure was even a fraction that high! As for me personally, I witness a
divine miracle every time you enter the room.”

“Oh, Switters!”

When she tucked him in a short while
later—he wasn’t tired, but he didn’t object—she loaded a full package of tongue
into their good night kiss.

Asked in an interview in 1946 if the
Lady of Fatima had revealed anything about the end of the world, Lucia (by then
Sister Mary dos Dores, a lay nun) responded rather like a CIA officer with
cowboyish leanings. “I cannot answer that question,” she said through tight
lips. Lucia did not, as far as has been reported, add, “for reasons of national
security.”

Whether or not the Lady had been
forthcoming about a possible final curtain ringing down on the Homo sapiens
revue—and none but Lucia had actually heard her prophecies—she was not exactly
a bubble of optimism in regard to our planetary prospects. For example, that
spectacular celestial cha-cha that thirty-five thousand people claimed to have
observed, along with Lucia and her cousins, on October 13, 1917, was executed,
she said, not by the sun but by a preview of a flaming comet, a fireball that
according to the Lady (and disputed by astronomers everywhere) would return
someday to dry up oceans, lakes, and rivers and shrivel a third of the earth’s
vegetation. No, not precisely a planetary death sentence, but considerably more
severe than a stiff fine and a hundred hours of community service.

If it was doom that intrigued them,
however, the Fatima faithful got their money’s worth. The white-clad apparition
predicted straightaway that a plague would fall upon the land soon after the
Great War ended and that two of the shepherd children would be among its
victims. In 1919, first Francisco, then Jacinta succumbed to the influenza
epidemic that killed twenty million people in Europe and North America. The
Lady had hit a chilling bull’s-eye with that one, and she was only slightly off
center with her prophecy of approaching famine: almost on cue, a vine fungus
spread through Europe, lasted more than three years, and left no grape
unspoiled.

Her forecast in the second set of
predictions that Russia would “spread its errors” throughout the world could
probably also be considered a hit. Strongly disposed toward threats and scoldings—the
Lady repeatedly warned that if people didn’t amend their lives, beg
forgiveness, and run marathons on their rosary beads there was going to be hell
to pay—she was particularly hard on Communists, obviously viewing Communism as
something more amplitudinously evil than a mere inherently flawed economic
system.
Rather like John Foster Dulles,
thought Switters, but he didn’t
say as much for fear he might uncontrollably fire a saliva shot at the polished
hardwood floor or the antique rag rug that lay upon it. Bobby would never have
forgiven him if he hadn’t.

It was Thursday afternoon, and Suzy,
a shade less reluctantly than the day before, had come straight home from
school. The two of them were in the den, sorting through the printouts of their
Internet research, concentrating, at Switters’s urging, on the Fatima
predictions and warnings. Suzy had wanted to change into jeans and a
sweatshirt, but at his request she remained attired in her school uniform.
Whether his aim was to reduce temptation or to torture himself with it was
probably debatable. In any event, he ceased counting her pleats long enough to
wave a sheet of paper in the charged air that separated them. “This!” he
exclaimed. “Right here. It’s the only tidbit of information we’ve uncovered in
three days that could spike the punch at the teddy bears’ picnic.”

“Hello?”

“Right here.” The printout, which he
now handed her, concerned Our Lady’s third and final prophecy. At the time of
its delivery, the children would say nothing of this last prediction except
that it was of great consequence and would bring joy to some and sorrow to
others.

Around 1940, some twenty-three years
after it was supposedly issued, the nun formerly known as Lucia Santos wrote
down the secret prophecy and sealed it in an envelope with instructions that it
be opened in 1960, or upon her death should she die earlier than that date. The
envelope was locked in the office safe of the bishop of Leiria in Portugal,
where Church sources said it remained until 1957, when Pope Pius XII had it
brought, under tight security, to Rome. Pius was itching to rip it open, but
Lucia was still alive. In fact, Lucia was still breathing in 1997, whereas Pius
XII died in 1958 without ever satisfying his curiosity.

While the Church would neither
confirm nor deny it, highly placed Vatican sources claimed that at some point
in 1960, Pius’s successor, Pope John XXIII, did, finally, open the mystery
envelope—and wept for three days over the “terrible news” it contained.
Throughout the remainder of his life, John XXIII adamantly refused to discuss
it with anyone, and the message was reputed to rest in a vault at the papal
palace, unread by a soul save that sobbing pontiff nearly forty years in the
past.

“Yeah,” said Suzy. “That’s pretty
wild. But you know, how could I write about it when, like, I don’t know what it
says.”