Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (69 page)

“A stipulation guaranteed to ferment
patriarchal peevishness, I would venture,” said Switters.

She shrugged. She smiled. She said,
“C’est
la vie.”

“But what about Masked Beauty? I’ve
been under the impression that she’s always insisted on keeping the prophecy
secret because of the doubt and pessimism it could generate among earth’s happy
Christians.”

“Precisely. That’s why I’ve come to
you. My aunt has never really heard your interpretation of the Virgin’s pyramid
reference. She still suspects it’s an admission of the superior truth of Islam.
I need you to explain, to convince her otherwise.” She paused. Her eyes seemed
to stop and savor a particular bulge in the bedclothes. “
Peut-être
convince me, as well,” she mumbled.

They agreed to meet in Masked
Beauty’s quarters in an hour. Domino appeared reluctant to leave his company,
and when she did, he had the distinct feeling that she was going to her room to
indulge in the covert delicious shame that dogged not merely Fannie but most in
her vocation.

Aroused by the image, Switters
considered a similar, perhaps synchronous indulgence but decided instead to
review the prophecies, about which he maintained, not altogether
uncharacteristically, ambivalent feelings. Obviously, the predictions, whether
Marian or Lucian in origin, had correctly called some shots. (Was it mere
coincidence? Did it matter?) Moreover, certain aspects of them about which he’d
held reservations had, over time, been elucidated by Domino to his general
satisfaction. For example, regarding the first prophecy, where the Virgin was
alleged to have warned that “a night illuminated by an unknown light” would be
the sign that God was ready to punish his misbehaving lookalikes with war and
famine, Domino had contended that that was an accurate foretelling of a unique
(she used the word with trepidation, worrying that she should have said
“unusual” instead) meteorological event. On January 25, 1938, much of the
Northern Hemisphere was dazzled and panicked by what has been described as the
most dramatic and bizarre display of the aurora borealis in recorded history.
Undulating bands of vivid color, wide, violent, and continuous throughout the
night, were accompanied by snapping and crackling sounds, causing thousands to
believe that the world was ablaze and doomsday was on the front burner. Less
than ninety days after that awesome atmospheric laser circus, Hitler marched
into Austria, and the great war that Fatima had predicted was off and running.
Switters searched “northern lights” on the Internet and soon found that
Domino’s facts were accurate.

In the second prophecy, he’d been put
off by all that “consecration of Russia” business. As near as he could figure,
Fatima’s command was, at best, Red-baiting and, at worst, a modern example of
misguided evangelical zeal being used to justify Roman Catholic imperialism. It
hadn’t worked in this case, but it conjured up images of black-robed priests
walking arm in arm with genocidal conquistadors, administering absolutions
while the loot—and the bodies—piled up. True, Fatima hadn’t advocated a forced
conversion of Russia, and to consecrate, i.e., to declare or make sacred, was
in and of itself a noble gesture. Yet, it smacked somehow of self-serving
expansionism or, at least, condescension.

Not so, argued Domino. She pointed
out that the Virgin had spoken of “the error of Russia,” and Switters had to
concur that no honest, intelligent person could claim any longer that
Communism, however well-intentioned, was anything less than a wretched economic
and psychological mistake. However, that was not quite the point, according to
Domino. While it had been popular in reactionary circles to paint the Fatima
Virgin as a sort of cold warrior, prodding the holy armies of capitalism to
subdue the godless Commies, Our Lady was actually saying something quite
different. She was, in fact, promoting a revitalization of the Christian faith,
a return to the original teachings of Jesus, the rebel rabbi who so vigorously
scorned the kind of worldly pursuits that had come, a few centuries after his
death, to preoccupy a corrupt and power-mad Church. If the Vatican fathers were
proud and foolish and materialistic, and though it pained her to admit it,
Domino believed they were; if Rome was spiritually broken beyond repair, and
this, too, she’d come to believe; then where could the spiritual center go to
fix itself, to reestablish itself on those principles of Jesus that mankind had
generally found just too damn difficult to follow?

“To the individual heart,” replied
Switters. “The only church that ever was.”

His answer startled Domino, caught
her by such surprise that after jerking upright, she slowly drooped forward in
her chair, like a sunflower that could no longer bear the weight of its crown;
and for thirty seconds or so, she was so lost in thought that her orbs were
kind of an inky smear. He squeezed her knee (one of those familiarities in
which he rarely anymore indulged) and the eyes winked back on, like modem
lights after a power surge. “I meant geographically,” she said. “Where could
Christ’s renewed Church recenter itself in the physical world?”

Switters thought:
Wall Street?
Disneyland? Devil’s Island?
To him, the location of Catholic world
headquarters was so irrelevant to anything remotely significant that he didn’t
bother to venture a serious guess.

“There was nowhere in Western Europe
that was any improvement over Rome, and the United States of America was not
Jesus’s style.”

“Too bouncy,” agreed Switters.

“Christ always shunned the high and
mighty; so we are told. He preferred to mingle with the whores and publicans
and sinners, he directed his message to the wayward and downtrodden. Is this
not so? Well, in Russia there was a vast population of materially and
spiritually impoverished souls, lost and longing for change. It would have been
a clean slate, a fertile field. What better way to deal with an unholy land
than to thrust upon it the mantle of holiness? Yes?
Oui?
To replace a
bad king with an honest peasant, to replace our imperious pope with a converted
Bolshevik, wouldn’t this be an action true to the stark spirit of Jesus?
Perhaps equally as important, shifting the cornerstone of Christianity to
Russia would have served to heal the tragic schism between the Western and Eastern
Orthodox faiths and to reunite their rites. So much suffering on so many levels
might have been avoided if the Church had had the grace to heed its Mother’s
words. In the stillness of her Immaculate Heart, the hurly-burly antics of
Stalin would have seemed like some cruel slapstick, comic and stupid, and few
would have supported him. That was in 1917, remember, when there was time.”

Reviewing Domino’s words on that
spring morning, he repeated the phrase to himself: “when there was time.” Did
the fact—and it certainly appeared to be a fact—that history was accelerating
mean that there was less time? Or more? Were there fewer beans in the jar, or
were the beans simply pouring in at such a furious pace that they were creating
a vortex? He knew that at the center of every cyclone there was a calm circle,
a space into which time’s tentacles did not seem to reach. Was that tondo of
stillness what was meant, then, by the odd phrase, “my Immaculate Heart”?

Intrigued, he sat
zazen
on his
cot for thirty minutes—thirty minutes as measured by those dials and digits
that seemed to have so little to do with that void into which meditative
stillness always transported him. (He supposed
Immaculate Heart
was as
good a label for it as any other.)

Centered now, he felt he was properly
prepared to hypothesize about Today Is Tomorrow. However, on the way to Masked
Beauty’s chambers, he stilted by the pantry shed and picked up a bottle of
wine. Maria Une protested that it was still too young to drink, but he
responded that in the Immaculate Heart, terms such as “too young” were relative
if not inapplicable. The old cook was uncertain how to take that reference, and
while she studied him for signs of sacrilege, he pushed aside the thoughts of
Suzy that the remark had unintentionally engendered.

Then, as he was badgering Maria Une
for a corkscrew, he believed he heard the jackals again, yapping just beyond
the wall in broad daylight. It took him a minute to realize that it was only
Bob and Mustang Sally chortling over some private joke down by the onion beds.
Was he becoming paranoid? No, at least not when compared to Skeeter Washington,
who, admiring the stars one evening on the deck of Poe’s boat, was heard to
say, “If the universe be expanding, they gotta be something chasing it.”

There was a faint lilac smudge where
the wart used to stand. A visual whisper had replaced the visual cackle, the
seeable caw. When candlelight struck it, it seemed a dot of bluish fog, a nail
scar from an ancient crucifixion, a pinpoint of shadow cast by a migratory
moth. Three months after separation from her divine wad of tissue, Masked
Beauty continued to mark its absence by compulsively rubbing and pulling at her
nose, like one of those compassionate zoo apes that openly toys with its genitals
in order to relieve the guilt of visiting schoolchildren.

Caressing her snout, Masked Beauty
glanced from the wine bottle to Domino and back again. Pushing her hair from
her face, Domino glanced from the wine bottle to Masked Beauty and back again.
Switters smiled weakly. “All those sponges in the ocean,” he said, “it’s a
wonder there’s any water left.” Ah, the power of the non sequitur! Not knowing
how to respond, the two women put away the tea things and wiped the dust from a
set of wineglasses. Domino was a bit nervous about how her aunt would react to
Switters’s interpretation of the pyramid prediction, Masked Beauty was clearly
uncomfortable without a veil—or rather, she was uncomfortable without a mask to
mask—but once they grew accustomed to the idea, they both welcomed a glass of
early morning wine. The women sipped, and Switters, as was his practice,
gulped. They were mostly silent; he, with each swallow, became more verbose.

Testing limits of credibility, he
told the abbess everything he knew about the Kandakandero shaman with the
pyramid-shaped head: his origins, his potions and powders, his fatalistic
despair over the white man’s invasion of his forest, his discovery of humor and
his attempts to appropriate its magic, his theory that laughter was a physical
force that could be used both as a shield and as a spirit canoe in which the
wisest and bravest—the Real People—could navigate the river that separated and
connected the Two Worlds.

“Which two worlds? Why, Heaven and
earth, if you please. Life and death. Nature and technology. Yin and yang.”

“You mean the female and the male?”
asked the abbess.

“In a sense. More precisely, more
fundamentally, it’s light and darkness. Light and darkness without any moral
implications. Good and evil exist only in the biomolecular realm. In the atomic
realm, such notions become useless, and in the electronic realm, they disappear
altogether.”

Switters talked briefly about
particle physics and the search for ever smaller elementary particles.
“Recently physicists have started to conclude that in the entire universe there
may be only two particles. Not two
kinds
of particles, mind you, but two
particles, period. One with a positive charge, one with a negative. And listen
to this: the two particles can
exchange
charges, the negative can trade
off to become positive and vice versa. So, in a sense, there’s only
one
particle in the universe, it being a pair whose attributes are
interchangeable.”

“What makes them decide to trade
places?” asked Domino.

“Excellent question, sister love.”
Switters took a swig of wine. It was, indeed, very young, but it possessed a
toddler’s bashful bravado. “Maybe they get bored. I don’t know. Figure that out
and you can go eat lunch with God. Twice a week. Make
him
wash the
dishes.”

Domino made an expression somewhere
between a wince and a smile. Masked Beauty’s was closer to the wince. The
abbess ran a finger along the length of her nose. Her nose resembled an
inflated map of the Yucatán Peninsula, the bluish spot indicating the lost capital
of the Mayas.

“It gets better,” said Switters.
“This is only theory, there’s no empirical evidence, but the belief now is that
when they crack the final nut, split the most minute particle—and we’re talking
about something smaller than a neutrino—what they’ll find inside, at the
absolute fundamental level of the universe, is an electrified vacuum, an energy
field in which light and darkness intermingle. The dark is as black as a
bogman’s toejam, and the light is brighter than God’s front teeth; and they
spiral together, entwined like a couple of snakes. They coil around each other,
the light and the darkness, and they
absorb
each other continuously, yet
they never cancel each other out. You get the picture. Except there isn’t any
picture. It’s more on the order of music. Except the ear can’t hear it. So it’s
like feeling, emotion, some absolutely pristine feeling. It’s like, uh, it’s
like . . . love.”

He paused to drink, and Masked Beauty
studied him. “Are you versed in matters of love, Mr. Switters?”

Switters shot Domino an embarrassed
look. The look he got back had as much insolence as shyness in it. “I love
myself
,”
he said. “But it’s unrequited.”