Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (52 page)

The men nodded gravely. Then,
following an exchange of formal, fairly cordial farewells, they climbed into
the Peugeot, which, suspensefully, took as long to start as a barrio limo, and
drove off into the sands.

“Oh, goody! My trusty starship.”

At some juncture during the seemingly
interminable bull session, Domino had slipped away to his room and fetched his
wheelchair. Now, he dropped onto it. Once he was seated, the sisters, cold,
frazzled, some very nearly asleep on their feet, crowded around him as if he
were a conquering hero. Women love these fierce invalids home from hot
climates?

“Magnifique!”
exclaimed Masked
Beauty. The abbess had shown up at the gate soon after the engagement began
and, having acquired a rudimentary familiarity with Arabic as long ago as her
service in Algeria, translated for the others, as best she could, the
highlights of the debate. She had arrived veiled, in the event that she had to
confront strangers, but had removed the cloth now, and it dangled from her
fingers. A ray of moonlight striking her double-decker wart made the growth
resemble a dab of ketchup-coated curds.
Cottage cheese with ketchup,
he
thought.
Richard Nixon’s favorite meal. Probably got the recipe from John
Foster Dulles. Patooie!

“How do you know so well Islam?” the
abbess asked.

“Oh, I used to flip through the
Koran—and the Bible—and the Talmud—occasionally,” he said. “Before I discovered
Finnegans Wake
.”

Thanking and congratulating him
again, Masked Beauty patted his curly top. Then, shooing her charges ahead of
her like geese, she, and they, went off to bed. Domino stayed behind, however,
intent on pushing his chair. “I don’t believe I can sleep,” she said, “but you
must be exhausted.” He claimed that he was as buzzed as a June bug up a
maypole, so they repaired to his room for a spot of cold tea. It was the first
time she had visited him there since the Fannie affair at the beginning of
summer. She stood with her back to him while he pulled on a shirt and trousers.
Baby ducks,
adieu
.

When they were settled, he in his
Invacare, she on the stool (the cot was avoided as deliberately, as warily, as
if it were an altar upon which certain arcane, unmentionable rituals were known
to have occurred), she told him how grateful she was that the incident at the
gate had concluded without bloodshed. He said that no self-respecting cowboy
would have let such a splendid opportunity to fire his gun pass him by, but
that he supposed a peaceful solution was best for all concerned. “Those
agitated stooges probably have innocent kids to support.”

“It’s their religion,” she said
accusingly.

He corrected her. “It’s their
religion plus
your
religion.”

“Our lives were threatened, and you
are saying that my religion must share the blame? What have we done?”

He sighed. “You’ve tried to own God,”
he said. “Just like them.”

Domino looked puzzled. Then she
nodded. “Okay, I think I see what you mean. The Moslems and the Christians are
each insisting that their way to God is the only way, so if only one side is
right, then those on the other side . . .”

“Having hocked their lives, are left
to face death without the pawn ticket. That smarts. And remember: there’re
three sides to every story, including the monotheism story.”

She curtly dismissed the Jews,
however, stating that Judaism’s Killer B’s wouldn’t figure into the final
equation. Before he could challenge that assertion—and, really, all he was
wanting to do was to settle back and unwind—she asked what the name
Fatima
meant to him.

“It’s the podunk burg in Portugal
where that most profoundly splendid of oxymorons, the Virgin Mother, supposedly
yo-yoed the sun in 1917.” One didn’t play cyberspace errand boy for Marian
enthusiasts of all ages without picking up a tidbit or two. “Fatima, Lourdes,
Bosnia; Knock, Ireland; Tepeyac, Mexico. Isn’t it fascinating how Mary usually
seems to turn up in ugly, boring, economically depressed locales in dire need
of a tourist attraction? Projecting, we could forecast that she’ll show up
next—where? Western Oklahoma, probably. Middle of Saskatchewan. Except that
those places don’t have enough Catholics on site to organize a fish fry.”

Ignoring his sarcasm, she said, “
Fatima
was also the name of Mohammed’s daughter.”

“Yeah, you’re right. The Prophet’s
favored offspring. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“So, the question is: are they
connected? These two Fatimas?”

“Everything is connected. But the
links can sometimes be hard to uncover.” He took a gulp of tea. She took a sip.
Outside, a rooster crowed. It sounded like a spastic adolescent trying to
imitate Tarzan. “Too bad roosters aren’t more like parrots,” he said. “We could
train them to crow inspiring things like, ‘People of the world, relax!’ instead
of kicking off our day with a lot of cock-a-doodle-do.”

Domino smiled in spite of herself.
“Oh, you Switters. I don’t know whether you are a virtue or a vice.”

“Neither do I, but why does it have
to be one or the other? Why, for that matter, can’t we be simultaneously
monotheistic
and
polytheistic?”

“Ugh! Polytheism? Ooh-la-la! All that
noisy jumble of gods hiding in tree trunks and chimney hearths, with necklaces
of skulls and more arms than a granddaddy spider. Abominable!”

“They tend to teem, all right, but
overlooking the fact that some of them are too damn vivid, couldn’t we just
accept them as various aspects of the one God, who’s an eternal, absolute
mystery and can never be pinned down or accurately described, anyway?” He
gulped the last of the tea. “If a person is truly devout, why couldn’t they be
both a Christian
and
a Moslem? And a Jew? Don’t look at me like I’m a
naive ninny. They all rolled out of the same pasture. Ol’ Abraham and his
peevish herdsmen buddies—cowboys, now that I think of it—inventing the
one-god-our-god-and-he-be-a-bruiser concept as a response to and a rebellion
against the sexual superiority of women.”

“I might have known you’d bring sex
into it sooner or later.”

“If you have a problem with the
sexual complexion of the universe, take it up with Mother Nature. I’m just one
of her baby boys.”

The rooster sang an encore. Then,
another. But so far no single photon of dawnlight had squirmed through the curtain
threads. “If women had played an active role in shaping our relationship to
God, everything might be different,” she said. “There might not be a conflict
between the Church and Islam.”

“There might not
be
any Church
and Islam,” he interjected. “Women wouldn’t have seen the need for them.”

“As it is. . . .” She sighed and
shrugged. After a pause, she said, “Despite what I know and you do not, I’m
unwilling to concede defeat—or switch sides.” She rose and smoothed out her
dress. Evidently she’d pulled it on in a hurry when the disturbance had
awakened her: he could tell she was bereft of underwear. Her nipples pushed
against the cotton like urchins pressing their noses against a candy store
window. In the candleshine, her pubis was faintly outlined, like a map of a
phantom peninsula. He considered it wise that she leave, but since the
conversation had taken the turn that it had, he felt he simply had to ask:

“Have you never heard of the neutral
angels?”

Suppose the neutral angels were able
to talk Yahweh and Lucifer—God and Satan, to use their popular titles—into
settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically,
how would they divide the assets of their earthly kingdom?

Would God be satisfied to take loaves
and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while allowing Satan to
have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York steaks, and buckets of chilled
champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative
purposes and give Satan the all-night, no-holds-barred, nasty
“can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell fucks?

Think about it. Would Satan get New
Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get
ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo; Satan, stud poker? Satan get
LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan, Oscar Wilde?

Can anyone see Satan taking pirate
radio stations and God being happy with the likes of CBS? God getting twin
beds; Satan, waterbeds; God, Minnie Mouse, John Wayne, and Shirley Temple; Satan,
Betty Boop, Peter Lorre, and Mae West; God, Billy Graham; Satan, the Dalai
Lama? Would Satan get Harley motorcycles; God, Honda golf carts? Satan get blue
jeans and fish-net stockings; God, polyester suits and pantyhose? Satan get
electric guitars; God, pipe organs; Satan get Andy Warhol and James Joyce; God,
Andrew Wyeth and James Michener; God, the 700 Club; Satan, the C.R.A.F.T. Club;
Satan, oriental rugs; God, shag carpeting? Would God settle for cash and let
Satan leave town with Mr. Plastic? Would Satan mambo and God waltz?

Would Almighty God be that dorky? Or
would he see rather quickly that Satan was making off with most of the really
interesting stuff? More than likely he would. More than likely, God would
holler, “Whoa! Wait just a minute here, Lucifer. I’ll take the pool halls and
juke joints,
you
take the church basements and Boy Scout jamborees. You
handle content for a change, pal. I’m going to take—
style!”

Because Bobby Case had convinced him
that any neutral angel worthy of the name would have recognized that Yahweh and
Lucifer could no more be truly separated than the two sides of a coin (they
needed each other for balance, for completion, for their identity, for their
survival—which may have been why the more reflective of the angels had elected
to remain neutral in the first place), Switters reserved speculative rants such
as the preceding for his private entertainment (except, of course, when
circumstance and/or magnitude of substance abuse dictated otherwise).
Therefore, he treated Domino to a factual, relatively straightforward
presentation of the neutral angel information as it had survived in Levantine
folklore and biblical allusion (often the same thing) for four thousand years.
Domino was incredulous, but rather than dismissing the story out of hand,
agreed to ponder it and to investigate it with what resources she had at her
disposal. “That’s funny,” she said, and she smiled that special smile of hers
that was such a perfect blend of unintentional cynicism and warmest charity.
“Not long ago, I would have said that I would pray over it.” She paused. She
wrinkled her brow in a way that caused a third of it to disappear. “Switters,
are you ever, on your own, inclined toward prayer?”

He barely hesitated. “When I feel I’m
in need of shark repellent, I try to pray. When I feel I’m in need of smelling
salts, I try to meditate. I’m not saying that one’s necessarily superior to the
other—both are capable of being reduced to a kind of metaphysical
panhandling—but if more people smelled the salts and woke the hell up, they’d
find they wouldn’t need to be fretting about sharks all the time.”

“And what about Serpents?”

He grinned. “You mean the Snake in
the garden? The Snake is good, Domino. The Snake is smelling salts on a rope.”

Before either of them could prepare
for it, she stepped to his wheelchair, bent over—loose breasts bobbing like
turtles on a buckboard, hair swinging around to eclipse her moonish cheeks—and
kissed him quite emphatically on the bridge of his nose.

“I like you in a way that is too
unusual,” she whispered.

“The feeling is mutual,” he said.

Then the rooster crowed her out the
door. As he listened to her footsteps disappearing, crunchily, down the sandy
path, he thought he overheard the slick voice of Satan. And Satan, in this
aural hallucination, was saying, “Okay, Yahweh, here’s a proposition for you:
why don’t you take the world’s bargirls under your wing and let me have a turn
with the nuns?”

In the annals of Switters lore, the
diurnal interval following the aborted terrorist attack would be forever known
as the Day of the Hiccuping Jackass.

It may or may not have been an omen,
but the day began with Switters awakening late to discover that he had the
wrong pair of stilts by his cot. Domino had placed the poles across his lap
prior to wheeling him back to his room, and at the time neither he nor she had
noticed (the moon had set, and they were both a bit groggy) that it was Pippi’s
original, tall pair she’d retrieved and not the customized, two-inches-above-the-ground
stilts, the ones he’d designed to provide an ambulatory state of ersatz
enlightenment.
Oh, well,
he thought,
these might be fun for a change,
so he stork-walked to the office on stilts that put his unbreakfasted mouth at
fig level, higher than the ripe lemons that dangled from their branches like
bare lightbulbs in a nineteenth-century shoe factory.

Masked Beauty had slept late, as
well, and she arrived at the office only moments before Switters. She greeted
him with fresh tea and fresh compliments on his handling of the previous
night’s situation. Then she announced that she had had quite enough Marian
material for the time being and she wanted him to begin searching the Net for
information about Islam. It wasn’t mainstream Islam in which she was interested,
she was well versed in that, but the more esoteric doctrines.