Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (60 page)

Thus, as through the intermingling
smokes of falafel fires and lunatic traffic he entered the city where the
alphabet was born and zero invented, Switters was of two minds. Each of them
was agleam. Both of them were hurting.

To report that he was of two minds
is not to imply, exactly, that he was torn by dilemma. Though hardly a stranger
to contrariety, Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life,
as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or. (To say that he
took
both
a both/and
and
an either/or approach may be overstating
the extent of his yin/yanginess.) Wasn’t he friend to both God and the Devil?
Moreover, there had never been any question about whether or not he would leave
the Pachomian convent: his eventual departure was written in every little star
that ever burped its hydrogen and farted its helium in the void above the
roofless roof of the Rapunzel Suite. In fact, something had been revealed (
suggested
may be the more accurate word) at the convent that had propelled him from the
place as unstoppably as if he, himself, were a belch of sidereal gas.

Nevertheless, Switters could be said
to be of two minds for the simple reason that, on the outskirts of Damascus,
his synaptic electric bill was being split, fifty-fifty, by the process of
anticipation and the process of memory, the former yanking his thoughts onward,
the latter drawing them back.

In the end, the migraine proved no
match for those two processes. As vicious as the headache was, it barely
blunted his vague but exciting mental foretaste of South America via Seattle,
while his memory of Christmas in Domino’s tower was too acute to be overridden
at all.

On Christmas Eve, Switters had
attended vespers. He went expecting to be bored in a nostalgic and not
altogether displeasing way. Those expectations were met. Afterward, roast lemon
chicken with garlic sausage stuffing was served in the dining hall. There were
walnut cookies and hot date tarts. The last remaining bottle of old wine—the
sole survivor from the Domino birthday bash—was uncorked, and he led the
sisters in a toast to the rebirth of the Divine in the world.

“And to the kings and wise men who
arrived from the East,” he said in French. In English he added, “Bearing gifts
of frank incest and mirth.”

Masked Beauty, who hadn’t
comprehended the English, asked earnestly if Egypt was by any chance east of
Bethlehem. Domino, who’d caught the pun, asked him to please refrain from
sacrilege. She wagged a scolding-mother finger at him, with an expression that
seemed to say, “Just wait until I get you home, young man!”

He didn’t have long to wait.
Following a brief songfest in front of the rather goofy Christmas tree that he
had fashioned from date palm fronds and snowed with puffs of shaving cream, a
caroling during which everybody sang “Silent Night” in French, English, and the
original German, and Switters performed solo a paraphrase of “Jingle Bells” in
a tootered-up chipmunk voice (“Jingle bells
Batman smells
Robin laid an
egg”), the gathering broke up. He and Domino retired to the tower.

In one corner she had made a smaller
version of his dining-hall tree, substituting satin ribbons for the aerosol
foam. Beneath it, on a brass tray, she’d placed three items:

A bottle of arrack.

A jar of petroleum jelly.

A manila envelope with rumpled edges
and an aura around it.

Before the silent night, holy night
was through, they’d investigate all three.

The wine that Switters had helped
press in October (from grapes that, on stilts, he’d helped to pick) was too
young to be agreeably consumed. Domino had ordered the potent date liquor from
Damascus as a holiday treat. He thanked her for her thoughtfulness, but,
concerned that she might still be under the impression that he was a man who
required alcohol’s flame to light the fuse of his zest, he attempted to assure
her that arrack was a nonessential perk.

“Alcohol,” he said, “is like one of
those beasts that devours its own young.” He told her that strong drink, early
on, gave birth to whole litters of insights and ideas and joyful japes. But if
you didn’t round up those bright and witty cubs and whisk them away from her,
if you allowed them to remain in her lair as the postpartum depression set in
(if you kept drinking, in other words, beyond a certain point), she’d whirl on
them and chew them up or swallow them alive, and in her dark maw she’d turn
them to shit. He held out his cup. “I’ll have just one,” he said, secretly
wishing she had bought him hashish, instead. (Wasn’t it ever thus with
Christmas gifts?)

Of course, he had more than one. More
than two. But he didn’t overdo it, at least not by C.R.A.F.T. Club standards.
Anyway, it turned out that the arrack was primarily for her own benefit. It
prepared her for the other items on the tray. Starting with the petroleum
jelly.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”
he asked. Following an extended barrage of arrack-scented kisses, during which
each of her sumptuous bulges had been lovingly measured and stroked; during
which his lingam had been symbolically peeled and repeeled as if it were the
principal effigy of a bacchantic banana cult, she had presented herself for
lubrication.

“Why not? If I am to live like a
desert woman, I should love like a desert woman.” But she
wasn’t
sure.
Wasn’t this one of the sins that had brought down Sodom?

(The squish of the jelly. The socket
that formed around his finger. The suction of the mouth that never eats. The
flutter of the lashless eye. A pink noise that traveled up the spine like the
whistle of a toy train. A troll burrow commandeered for a royal wedding. The
bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. The groom, in purple helmet, yet to
arrive.)

“Et tu?”
she asked breathily.
“And you? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure I want every youness of
you,” he answered, adding somewhat cryptically, “Ah, that road I’ve never
traveled, where the oyster meets the fig!”

But
he
wasn’t sure, either.
Feeling that remote part of her anatomy commence to dilate, to grow, as it
were, hospitable, it occurred to him—ominously, perhaps—that he knew the word
for it in only four or five languages.

(The bridegroom muscling through the
cellar door. The rattle of the plumbing. The furnace’s roar. Ceiling plaster
cracking. Cans falling off the shelves. Basement flooding. Cat escaping up the
chimney with a banshee yowl and its tail on fire. ‘Twas the night before
Christmas and all through the house, everything was stirring and God save the
mouse.)

Afterward, they lay quietly in each
other’s arms, exhausted, awed, a little stunned; bonded the way people are who
have shared an experience about which others can never be told, and which, they
intuit, will be forever remembered yet rarely referred to between themselves.

Nearly an hour passed before Domino
got up, lit several extra candles, poured them each another half-cup of arrack,
and returned to their carpets, envelope in hand.

“Every girl who enters a convent,”
she began, by way of a preamble, “does so for two reasons, only one of which is
religious. The secondary reasons vary from the girl to the girl, though you are
correct when you are thinking—I know how the Switters mind works—that the
reasons frequently involve some aspect of sexual fear, sexual guilt, or
compensation for rejection by the opposite sex. It is true that there are few
physically attractive nuns. But then there is the case of Masked Beauty, who
became a nun for the same reason she generated that escargot on her nose: she
was sick and tired of always being stared at by men.”

Switters gulped the arrack. He was
not a sipper. Domino didn’t notice. Her eyes were fixed on the envelope.

“Some novices hear the call to serve
humanity, to teach or to nurse. Those who enter closed convents, cloisters,
choose to serve by being rather than by doing. That was what I chose. For my
God, I would be instead of do, believing that the penance and reparations of
the few can effect the salvation of the many. But I had, I must confess, other,
less admirable motives. I wanted, you see, to belong to a special group, to be
a member of a secret society that stood apart from the world, that operated
closer to the bone, closer to the truth, closer to God’s mysteries than the
rest of humankind. Perhaps it was due to the way I was spurned by the girls in
my American school, the ones who kept me out of their clubs and called me
‘French whore’ and so forth. It doesn’t matter why, I still was guilty of
elitist aspirations.”

“Good for you. The right kind of
elitism can restore the butterfat to a homogenized society. It multiplies
nuance and expands the range of cultural motion.” He started to recount for her
Maestra’s views on the virtues of true elitism, but Domino waved him off.

“I’m not looking for justification or
approval, but I was sure you would understand, because in a sense it must be
similar to your decision to belong to the CIA. I’ve come to suspect that we are
somewhat alike in that way, having a desire not for power but for a status that
lies beyond the consciousness of those who are merely powerful. Now, however,
let me tell you that while I loved the stark sanctity of the cloister, it
failed to entirely satisfy me. The secrets there were not especially secret,
for one thing. The Christian select had essentially the same—how do you say
it?—
scoop
as the Christian masses. They simply ritualized it differently
and concentrated on it more exclusively. So, silly Simone was disappointed and
by 1981 had decided to leave the nunhood. Really. I was set to turn in my
wimple. That’s when my aunt showed me the contents of this envelope.” She
patted the scruffy packet.

“It isn’t that what is inside here is
so amazing. You may well regard the last prophecy of Fatima as anticlimactic or
even outright nonsense. The intriguing thing for me, silly sinner that I am,
has always been the very secrecy of it, the fact that I have had access to holy
information that not even the College of Cardinals, not even the present pope
is privy to. By luck or design, our little maverick order was charged with the
safekeeping of a . . . a
unique
message—ha! no grammar ticket!—that the
Blessed Mother deemed vitally important. I’ve found that situation exciting.
It’s put me in league with Mary somehow, and it’s made me feel a part of
something singular, momentous, and . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Fun?”

“No, no. For all of the consternation
it’s caused us here, it has been thrilling for me, as I’ve shamefully admitted,
but I would draw the line at calling it ‘fun.’ How could I when there is
nothing the least bit funny or, from the Western point of view, even hopeful
about the third prophecy. In fact, it’s all quite horrible. Quite horrible.”

Her eyes suddenly became tight and
intense. “But see for yourself.
Voilà
.” She thrust the envelope into his
hands.

It was sturdy, the old envelope, but
scuffed and flaky, and might have felt to him like the dried skin of a
sidewinder had not his fingertips been slick with petroleum jelly.

Switters offered a brief preamble of
his own.

“Etymologically,” he said, clearing
that part of his throat that hadn’t been cleared by the arrack, “a prophet is
somebody who ‘speaks for’ somebody else, so I take prophecy (from the Greek,
proph¯et¯es
)
with about the same amount of salt as I take press releases from a corporate
shill. A prophet is just a self-proclaimed mouthpiece for invisible taciturn
forces that allegedly control our destiny, and prophecy buffs tend to be either
neurotically absorbed with their own salvation or morbidly fascinated by the
prospect of impending catastrophe. Or both. A death wish on the one hand, a
desperate, unrealistic hope for some kind of supernatural rescue operation on
the other.”

As he undid the clasp on the
envelope, she informed him that the roots of the word notwithstanding, the
prophet in this case was not speaking on behalf of a higher power, was hardly
God’s publicist but rather, in a sense, a whistleblower, warning her beloved
humanity what the Almighty had in store for it if it didn’t shape up. Our Lady
of Fatima, then, was a kind of spy, a mole, an operative, working behind the
scenes to delay if not forestall divine retribution, scheming to buy more time
for her earthly brood. Domino thought that Agent Switters, of all people, would
be sympathetic.

He responded that any feeling of
occupational bond with the Virgin Mary was regrettably beyond him at the
moment, but he promised to keep his mind as open to Marian ideas as a
convenience store was to hold-up men. Nevertheless, he believed it only fair to
advise her up front that he was as leery of those who predicted the future as
he was disdainful of those for whom the future always promised to be real in
ways that the present was not. “It’s here. Today. Right now,” he said.

“What is?”

“All of it.”

“Today is tomorrow?”

“There you go.” He flashed her a grin
that could housebreak a walrus. Then, he opened the envelope.

Inside the envelope were not one but
four sheets of paper. On two of them, Domino had provided complete English
translations of the first and second Fatima prophecies. The crowning item,
obviously, was the page of personal papal stationery, now dog-eared and
yellowed, upon which Cardinal Thiry had written down his French version of the
controversial third prophecy nearly forty years earlier. In addition, there was
included an English translation—rendered, presumably, by Domino—of the third
prophecy.