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:
“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?
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
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
