Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

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 Yucatan 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.”

Both women laughed at this. Then Domino said, “Mr. Switters is experienced in love, auntie, but not in pure love.”

(Switters didn’t argue, but had Bobby Case been present, the spy pilot would have objected, “Why, hell, ladies, pure love’s the only kind of love this silly hombre knows at all.”)

Rising to light another stick of incense, the abbess commented that while their discussion of advanced physics was certainly interesting, she failed to detect its bearing on the subject at hand.

“Well,” said Switters, “this pyramid-headed curandero from deep in the Amazonian jungle seems to have concluded that light and darkness can merge in a similar fashion on the biomolecular plane, the social plane. He says it occurs during laughter. That a people who could move in the primal realm of laughter could live free of all of life’s dualities. They would be the first since the original men, the ancestors of the Real People, to live in harmony with the fundamental essence of the universe. The essence our quantum physicists are talking about. Today Is Tomorrow says the civilized man can’t perpetuate that state because he lacks the Kandakandero knowledge of the different levels of reality, he’s become emotionally invested in one narrow, absurdly simplistic view of the nature of existence; and the Indians can’t do it because they lack the buoyancy of the civilized man’s humor. But the people strong and nimble enough to combine unlimited intellectual flexibility with the mysterious energy of the laugh, well, they would become . . .”

“Enlightened?” ventured the abbess.

“Enlightened and endarkened,” Switters corrected her. “Enlightened and endarkened. The ultimate.”

Masked Beauty wasn’t convinced. “A sense of humor is a fine thing,” she agreed, “but it is not a way of life, and it certainly is not a means of serving our Lord. This strange savage of yours does not even know our Lord.”

“Why does that matter? Fatima said that in the next century—which pops out of the box in about nine months, by the way—the message that will bring unexpected joy and wisdom to a segment of humanity isn’t going to be coming from the Church of your Lord. Am I right? She said it will come from the direction of a pyramid. Well, Today Is Tomorrow qualifies as a pyramid, as near as I can tell, and he’s got a much fresher message than Islam, including esoteric Islam, with which, if you factor in the Hermetic tradition, it has a little bit in common.” He gulped. “Mmm. This vintage possesses a rather touching innocence, don’t you think?”

“Yes, and it is almost gone,” the abbess noted. She’d never seen anyone drain a bottle of wine so wholeheartedly. “Perhaps I am just a stupid old woman, but I fail to understand how your shaman’s ideas are at all practical or applicable. How can a mere sense of humor—”

“And a flexible, expansive definition of reality,” Switters reminded her.

“Okay, that as well. But in a troubled world such as ours, one cannot walk around laughing at everything like a mindless magpie. Where is the hope in that?”

He didn’t seem to have a ready response. Tugging at a curl, as if the pressure on his scalp might activate cerebration, he cleared his throat but said nothing. He was entertaining notions about how a radical and active sense of humor could puncture the sterile bubble of bourgeois respectability, how it could destroy smug illusions and in so doing, strengthen the soul; how if the essence could somehow be extracted from laughter, that essence might prove less like sound than like flavor, the flavor of the soul tasting itself at the raw bar of the absolute. Yet, he was neither informed enough (he hadn’t previously given it much thought) or drunk enough to put such notions into words. What the hell? Since when was he the shaman’s mouthpiece?

Observing his hesitation, Domino spoke up. “I don’t believe Mr. Switters is advocating mindless laughter, auntie. I don’t believe he is advocating anything. He’s simply trying to solve the riddle of the third prophecy. And I must say, I find it an attractive alternative to our own interpretation.”

“What? Laughing one’s way into Heaven?”

“I think what is at issue here,” Domino went on, “is a kind of mindful playfulness. I have observed it in Mr. Switters, and I suspect it could be extricated from Today Is Tomorrow’s philosophy—a philosophy, by the way, that seems almost to have resulted from combining aspects of an archaic shamanic tradition with a kind of Zen nonattachment and an irreverent modern wit. Mr. Switters defeats melancholy by refusing to take things, including himself, too seriously.”

“But many things are—”

“Are they? What I’ve learned from Mr. Switters is that no matter how valid, how vital, one’s belief system might be, one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and dogmatic in one’s adherence to it.”

Masked Beauty rubbed her scar as though trying to erase it. Or to stimulate new growth. “I realize that happiness is relative and often dependent upon or at least affected by external circumstances, whereas cheerfulness can be learned and consciously practiced. Both you and Mr. Switters seem to have a knack for practicing cheerfulness—oh, but I can see that our discussing Mr. Switters in this way is making him uncomfortable. Let us return to the ideas of his pyramid man. Assuming that a deliberate comic cheerfulness can evolve into a sustainable joy, where does the wisdom come from?”

Domino deferred to him, but he nodded for her to answer. “I would guess,” she said, “that what might be extrapolated from Today Is Tomorrow’s epiphany is that joy itself is a form of wisdom. Beyond that is the suggestion that if people are nimble enough to move freely between different perceptions of reality and if they maintain a relaxed, playful attitude well-seasoned with laughter, then they would live in harmony with the universe; they would connect with all matter, organic and inorganic, at its purest, most basic level. Could not that be our Lord’s plan for us, his goal for his children? Now, auntie, don’t make a face. Perhaps . . . perhaps that’s even where God resides, there in that—how did Switters call it?—that energized void at the base of creation. It makes more sense than on some poof-poof Riviera among gold-plated clouds.”

Pausing to let that sink in—to sink into her own consciousness as well as her aunt’s—Domino took a Switters-sized swallow of wine. “Perhaps, too,” she resumed, “Today Is Tomorrow’s ideal is precisely what is needed to rescue the human race from its tragic flaw: prideful narcissism. Isn’t that where all this ‘seriousness’ comes from? A dilated ego?”

Switters regarded her with amazement. He saw her in a whole new light. On the grease rack of his esteem, he jacked her up a few more notches. What a stand-up girl! he thought. She gets it. Better than I get it, maybe. He felt a spreading warmth toward her. He also felt a spreading need to urinate. The degree to which the wine had contributed to both of those sensations is not worth examining. It is enough to say that he reached for his stilts, blew kisses, presented the women as a parting gift his favorite word in all of earth’s languages—an ancient Aztec utterance that meant parrot,