Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

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-whumped 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.

“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-etre 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