Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (68 page)

When, in the fortnight following
Christmas, he had failed to show up in Seattle, Maestra had e-mailed him and
Bobby had phoned. Their frustration with him was almost explosive. Then, about
a week later, an e-mail had arrived from Suzy. The first two communiqués had
been anticipated, but Suzy’s caught him off guard, and while its tone was very
different, it was no less affecting.

When you were just a sprout,
wrote his grandmother,
I advised you never to trust anybody who didn’t have
secrets. Even though it’s sound advice, I could kick myself for impressing it
so firmly on your soft little brain. I’ve created a damn monster.
Maestra
wanted him home, wanted him out of that wheelchair or off of “those crazy damn
sticks,” and if her requests weren’t promptly honored, she wanted a detailed
explanation of why they were not. His clandestine ways had become intolerable.
She intimated that she was on her last breath and if he was to see her alive,
he’d better not tarry. He was fairly sure the deathbed bit was an act, and he
wrote back to remind her that she’d also taught him that guilt was a useless
emotion. It didn’t prevent him from worrying, however, especially when,
undoubtedly piqued by his flip attitude and lack of candor, she’d not written
back.

As for Bobby, he’d practically
shouted into the phone. “Where the hell are you, podner?! Are you still
there
?”

“You mean
here
? I’m afraid
so.”

“With
her
?”

“Not necessarily.”

“
What,
then?”

After a pause, Switters had answered,
“Not your need to know.” There was a modicum of sweet revenge in that reply,
but any pleasure he took from it was short-lived. Well aware that Switters was
working neither for the company nor Audubon Poe, Case was not, as he put it,
“buying one Texas ounce of that ‘need-to-know’ horseshit.”

Dehydrating Okinawan rice paddies
with the heat of his frustration, Bobby said that he’d always considered
Switters a cut above the other loose cannons, jumping beans, jackrabbits,
flakes, wild cards, and hot potatoes with whom, due to his own shortcomings as
a responsible citizen, he’d been doomed to associate, but he, Switters, had
turned out to be the worst of the lot. “It come upon me one night in Bangkok,
actually, that if you didn’t back offen that fucking James Joyce, it was one
day gonna drive you over the lip—and now it’s went and done it.”

Bobby said he had leave coming up and
he was going to use it to take matters in his own hands. He threatened to blow
into Syria like a twister out of Hondo. Switters had half believed him. But
Bobby hadn’t appeared. Neither had he e-mailed or called.

The letter from his stepsister
arrived later in January, arrived soundlessly, spectrally, no wood fibers to
give it substance, no ink to ferry its essence to the eyes the way blood ferries
oxygen to the brain; arrived as a standardized arrangement of backlit glyphs
upon a cold glass panel; unscented with Suzy’s perfume, unlicked by her wet
tongue, devoid not merely of tearstains but of pizza or lipstick traces; an
aseptic transmission whose ephemerality was all the more pronounced due to the
fact that his computer was programmed to trash-can after six hours any and all
messages for reasons of security (that contemptible word!). With a quaint old
low-tech pencil, Switters had copied it onto the flyleaf of
Finnegans Wake
(talk
about your stained paper: wine, beer, cigar ash, soy sauce, fish sauce, gravy,
blood, unspeakable and indefinable vegetable-animal-and-mineral deposits, the
kind of splotches that might enliven the bedsheets of a Third World beach
motel). He reread it once a week. No more, no less.

Hi,

Guess you weren’t expecting to hear
from me after so long a time, huh? There’s a whole lot I’ve been wanting to
talk to you about and I’d been saving it until I saw you again. Everyone was so
disappointed when you didn’t come home at New Years. This really isn’t your
home though is it? And I know you have a good reason for doing whatever it is
you’re doing now. And Switters I also understand that you must have had good
reasons for behaving how you did in Sacramento. I’m very very sorry I tripped
out that night. I should of trusted you more instead of thinking you were a big
liar or had gone crazy or something. I guess I was just confused. I was such a
baby back then, such a child. I think about what a spank girl I was back then
and it’s like I want to hurl my breakfast or something. I can’t believe it was
only a little over a year ago! I’m 17 now, as you ought to know, and a lot has
changed with me. Time is a funny thing isn’t it? A planet made out of rock and
water takes a few turns in space or whatever and suddenly you’re a different
person than you were before. It’s a weird system if you ask me. Anyway I’m here
in Seattle now and enjoying the rain. Ha ha. There’s some pretty cool kids at
my new school but Maestra won’t let me hang with them much. She’s really great
though, and when I get bummed she plays me old blues records and stuff. Reads
to me out of Shakespeare who I totally love! I don’t want to bore you with my
life but this socked-in morning finds me in a whirl of questions bubbling up
from the unseen below or from somewhere over the rainbow maybe. You’re way far
the wisest man I’ve ever known and you could always make anything in life seem
not just okay but funny and grand. You did hit on me a lot but I know it came
from a place of passion and love and I know you’re a person with deep feelings
that you hide behind your crazy antics and I also know that you’d protect me
with your life from anything or anybody that ever tried to hurt me. Now that
I’m older and more “experienced” you would find me a horse of a different color
as they say. Please forgive me for being such a clueless brat in the past. And
please keep a little bit of me in your heart. There’s a piece of you in mine
and it grows as I grow.

I miss you,

Suzy

On at least one occasion when he
read over her letter, Switters had unlocked the hidden compartment in his
famous crocodile valise, retrieved a particular nylon and cotton vesture
(stained almost as colorfully as the flyleaf of
Finnegans
), and dangled
it in the candlelight, its twin cups, though as empty as potholes, mirroring
the atmospheres as well as the hemispheres of his brain. Perhaps not
surprisingly, Switters, as an erstwhile cyberneticist, had some theories about
the bicameral brain, its fractile reflection of a universe steeped in paradox:
how, simultaneously and inseparably, it functioned both as a computer running
programs and as a program being run, how its mastery of preemphasis often
failed to protect it against random signals, viruses, or the meddling of
“imps.” That sort of thing. Of course, when it’s taken into account that
Switters was a fellow who liked to pretend that his corporeal being was
energized and regulated by a ball of mystic white light—a kind of luminous
coconut—it’s understandable that reservations might arise regarding the
trustworthiness of his views.

In any case, when he went on-line to
compose a reply to Suzy’s letter, he resisted any impulse to refer to the
brain’s tendencies—dramatically pronounced in schizophrenics, virtually
nonexistent in many “missing links”—toward ambivalent or contradictory states.
The example of her bra notwithstanding, such theorizing would have come across
as esoteric if not entirely irrelevant, and, worse, might have veered
dangerously close to self-analysis.

Neither could he consider writing to
Suzy in the roguish manner he’d favored in the past, telling her, for example,
that between her honey thighs she was “as tight as a plastic doll, as squeaky
as a Styrofoam sandwich, as soft and sweet and salty as periwinkle pie.” No, as
accurate as such comparisons still might be, he no longer felt impelled or
entitled to make them.

Instead, after deleting about a dozen
different approaches, he limited his response to a simple declaration of
affectionate appreciation. He was grateful for her words, he said, and would
not forget them or take them lightly.
“ ‘The men don’t know,’ “
he
concluded, quoting a line from Willie Dixon, a bluesman he was sure was in
Maestra’s record collection,
“ ‘but the little girls understand.’ “

Of all of mankind’s inventions, the
helicopter was the most totalitarian. Barbarically invasive, it used its
vertical maneuverability—its capacity to climb, descend, hover, and whirl—as a
means of raucously raiding life’s tender corners, scattering to the rats and
dogs the last sweet crumbs of human privacy. Peasants in their paddies,
Humboldt hippies in their pot patches, happy revelers at inner-city block parties,
drivers on freeways, sunbathers lazing nude on deserted beaches, all were prey,
sitting ducks for those angry gunships with their authoritarian voices and
prying eyes. The sound of the rotary blades—
cop cop cop cop cop!!
—was
entirely appropriate for a craft that had come to symbolize police-state
potentiality and to mechanically embody every libertarian’s nightmare.

Any winged aircraft, from the
smallest Cessna prop puppy to the biggest Boeing behemoth, was a romantic
artifact, a swoozy sculpture, a sailing thing of irresistible appeal; but a
helicopter . . . a helicopter was like a funky old shoetree that a witch had
caused to levitate. Chunky and uncouth, it was as if some weird kid had planted
a homemade whirligig in the fat of a turd.

Switters hated helicopters. Even
though twice—once in Burma, once on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border—they had John
Wayned down to lift him out of dire situations, he never saw one without
fantasizing about shooting it out of the air (the fact that they sometimes
could be used for good, and thus win the approval of the naive masses, served
only to make their evil more insidious). When, on March 20, a whirlybird (cute
nickname for such a hellish machine) dropped from the new spring upon the
oasis, its needling motor sewing stitches in the sky, its blades chopping ozone
into bluish kindling, whipping the first blossoms off the orange trees,
stirring up dust and chicken feathers, turning leaves inside out like
pocketknives, coughing smoke in the faces of frantic cuckoos, Switters barely
could restrain himself from trying to make his fantasy a reality.

The helicopter hadn’t landed. Neither
had it fired upon them. It buzzed the compound, low and loud, a half-dozen
times and then
whump-whump
ed off in the direction of Damascus. However,
its intrusion, coming less than seventy-two hours after Domino had e-mailed
Scanlani to reject the Church’s offer, left little doubt in Switters’s mind
about the mood in Rome. Domino wasn’t as convinced as he of the connection, but
he’d warned her all along that the Vatican wouldn’t suffer her rejection with
mercy or charity.

Switters was especially concerned
because this helicopter, unlike the ones that had flown over them back in
January, did not bear the insignia of Syrian military. It bore, in fact, no
insignia at all, an omission with uncomfortable implications. Once again he had
to wonder if Langley might not be involved in this religious rumpus, an eerie
feeling that intensified when, on two more occasions, he discovered jackals
lurking beneath the walls of the paper-snaked Eden. Domino scoffed at the
notion of eavesdropping jackals until he told her about the several hundred
espionage dolphins that regularly plied the world’s bays and harbors for their
handlers in the CIA. His former colleagues were hardly uningenious.

“It’s likely to get ugly from now on,
sister love. I don’t want to alarm anybody, but I smell smoke in the cabin, and
the exits are not clearly marked.”

As stubborn as Domino was, he
eventually convinced her to call an emergency meeting to formulate a defense
strategy. The helicopter, which had torn down her clothesline and mussed her
hair, provided a bit of an impetus.

That evening in the conference room,
Switters was the last to arrive. He entered wearing a shabby suit (a year of
crude laundry had taken its toll) and a sheepish grin. His laptop, it seemed,
had just received an e-mail from Rome in which, much to his astonishment, the
Church had backed down, agreeing, in exchange for the Fatima prophecy, to
refrock the Pachomians without any undue restrictions on their rights of free
speech.

If Switters thought that that was
the end of it, that he could quit the convent now with an easy mind and swivel
his attentions to the furtherance of his personal agenda, the fleshing out of the
film script of his life, including a scene in which he, with the hard rubber
charm of Bogart, would persuade a picturesque Amazonian medicine man to lift a
quaint taboo, well, if that’s what he thought, he was mistaken. Because the
very next day, Domino contacted Scanlani and brazenly upped the ante.

Although it was completely against
his best interest—and probably hers as well—Switters couldn’t help but be
delighted by her rash action.

Dawn’s last cock-a-doodle was still
aquiver in the red rooster’s craw when she knocked at his door. Unfazed by the
nakedness obvious beneath his thin muslin sheet, she plopped her plumping
bottom (time’s dung beetle was rolling her buttocks into lush round balls) onto
his bedside stool and shared her intentions. If the Vatican fathers wanted the
Fatima document, she told him, they were going to have to meet yet another
demand. To wit: they would have to agree to disclose to the public the full
text of the third prophecy within six months of its receipt, to disseminate its
contents and make them widely known.