poet, interlocutor, and guide to the underworld; all that stuffed into a single word; and a word, he assured them, that could not be properly pronounced unless one had had one’s tongue surgically altered, preferably with an obsidian blade. He presented them with a spitty approximation of that word, and then, before anyone could say, “What? It doesn’t mean vagina?”, he weaved off to the nearest privy, leaving Domino to convince Masked Beauty that the third prophecy of Fatima referred not to a triumph of Islam but to the views of a capitate freak from the Amazonian forest; and to persuade her, further, that the prophecy, bizarre implications and all, should be made public by the institution most at risk from it.

Evidently, she did a pretty good job, for shortly after noon, she sought him out and had him e-mail Scanlani with the Pachomian demand for full disclosure.

If Domino could imagine that God occupied the fundamental subatomic particle, where did she think Satan lived? In the fundamental anti-particle? In a quarklette of dark matter? Wouldn’t the presumed interweaving of light and darkness in that minutest of maws give her a clue that God and Satan might be codependent if not indivisible? The real question was where did the neutral angels reside, the ones who refused to take sides? There would be, of course, plenty of elbow room of a sort in that elementary space. Because the light waves therein would have been transformed into photons had they struck any matter, indications were that the space was infinitely empty. Which also would suggest that God and the Devil were energies in which, outflanking Einstein, mass dropped out of the equation.

By the time Domino arrived to have him e-mail Scanlani, the effects of the grape had worn off, and Switters was no longer bruising his brain with such thoughts. He felt bruised enough by the wine itself, its infantile character having left him with the kind of headache with which newborn babies leave sleepless dads. Any impulse he might have had to wonder aloud to her how it was that the microcosmic could not merely reflect but contain the macrocosmic, any desire to suggest that levity might actually be the hallmark of the sacred, had evaporated, and he was not unhappy to be thusly unburdened. He wished to concentrate on convincing Domino that her tactics with the Vatican would likely provoke strong reaction. He wanted the oasis to steel itself.

Once again, however, he was mistaken. Not three days had passed before word arrived from Rome that the Pachomian demand would gladly be met. According to Scanlani, the Holy Father had been planning all along to make public the third prophecy as soon as he was convinced of its authenticity.

Noticing Switters’s frown, Domino asked if he smelled a rat. “Worse,” he said. “I smell a jackal.”

It did have a stink about it. It seemed much too easy, passing beyond the smooth into the slick. What worried him even more than Rome’s newfound spirit of accommodation was the last line of Scanlani’s communique, the line that advised that within the week, representatives of the Holy See would be arriving at the Syrian oasis to collect the Fatima transcript.

“You cannot allow that,” Switters insisted.

“Why not?”

He then outlined several grisly scenarios, one in which all occupants of the compound were shot dead and the massacre blamed on religious fanatics (or, if Damascus was cooperating, on the troublesome Bedouins); another in which insidious chemicals were employed to make it look as if a deadly virus had swept through the order. They might paint the Pachomians as a suicide cult. They might even slaughter the sisters and blame it on him. “We’re out here in the middle of nowhere, vulnerable, unprotected, naught but the wind and the cuckoos to witness our fate.”

Domino scoffed. She proposed that his service in the CIA had lowered his reality orientations. “There would be no cause to murder us, nothing to gain. Suppose they renege on their promise and don’t make public the prophecy, or else they edit it to their advantage; and suppose then that we protest and release our own version of the prophecy, Cardinal Thiry’s version? How many will believe us? How many will care? In the end, we are no more to them than the nuisance fly.”

“People swat flies,” he said, but he knew that she was right. Governments—and the armed agencies that served them—loathed intellectuals and artists and freethinkers of every stripe, but they didn’t particularly fear them. Not anymore. They didn’t fear them because in the modern corporate state, artists, intellectuals, and freethinkers wielded no political or economic power; had no real hold on the hearts and minds of the masses. Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man’s stories for him. And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume. But though Switters was well aware of those conditions, he was also aware that they could be and ought to be subverted. Moreover, he was aware that cowboys periodically caught Hollywood fever, instigating ludicrous, horrendous capers out of sheer ennui, a smoldering appetite for thrill and domination. So he badgered Domino relentlessly until she at last gave in.

The Pachomians, she e-mailed Scanlani, would surrender the Fatima prophecy only to the Holy Father himself. It would be directly delivered to the pope and none other. “Do not waste your time traveling to Syria,” she told him, at Switters’s insistence. “We shall travel to Rome.”

This time, the reaction was more typical, if not more reassuring. Hostility seethed from every glyph. Scanlani chided Domino for her presumptuousness, her audacity and insubordination in thinking she could order the Holy Father about, thinking she could force a papal audience. He reminded her that her superiors had gone out of their way to be accommodating, and for her ingratitude and impertinence he berated and belittled her as only a practiced lawyer could. His attack brought her close to tears. Contrite, she was ready to back off, but Switters wouldn’t permit it. “The grand mackerels have given in before, and they may again. Stick to your—pardon the expression— guns.”

Reluctantly she did. And a wicked war of words ensued, a dispute that raged for weeks. No Vatican representative came to Syria, but overheated electrons zinged eastward across the Mediterranean on a regular basis, and hard-boiled electrons often passed them, heading west. Several times Domino seemed to lose her stomach for the fight, but Switters, operating on not much more than a hunch, propped her up, girded her loins (though he might have preferred to ungird them), and pushed her back into the fray.

Toward the end of April, she prevailed.

She didn’t know if she had simply worn them down or if they were getting nervous as June and the “New Catholic Women” conference approached, but quite abruptly one day in the weeks following Easter, the Church fathers relented, going so far as to issue a thoroughly polite formal invitation to meet with the Holy Father in a fortnight’s time.

Hugging Switters, almost sobbing with relief, she said she was overjoyed that it was done and that, in the end, winning an audience with the pope was worth all the Sturm und Drang.

“Personally, I’d rather meet Pee-wee Herman,” he said, “but if you’re happy, I’m happy. And if you’re safe and happy, I’m happier yet.”

She suggested that he must be happy on his own account as well. He could leave now, leave at once, and start attending to his considerable personal agenda. “Not so fast,” he said. “You may have won the compulsories, but you still have to skate the freestyles, and there ain’t no way your coach is abandoning you until the last damn twirl is twirled. Oh, no! Not with this set of judges. Some way, somehow, I’ve got to escort you to Rome.”

She told him he was out of his cotton-picking mind. She told him he was crazy and brave and sweet. He told her he was just curious.

The May moon looked like a bottlecap. More specifically, entering its last phase, the moon looked like a bottlecap that a fidgety beer-drinker had squashed double between macho thumb and forefinger. The moon was making Switters thirsty, and he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver wasn’t listening.

“I want to love America,” Toufic lamented, “but America requires me to hate it.”

Toufic had come to drive the Pachomian delegation to the airport at Damascus. He arrived on a Monday evening so that they might get a very early start on Tuesday morning. He arrived with a crumb of hashish for Switters, and they sat by the car now, smoking it in the faintly moon-painted desert. He also arrived with American offenses on his mind. Offenses in Iraq. Offenses in Yugoslavia. Those offenses made Toufic angry, but mostly they made him sad. His large brown eyes seemed saturated with a kind of molten chocolate grief.

“What is wrong with your great country?” Toufic lamented. “Why must it do these terrible things?”

Switters held a cloud of candied smoke in his lungs. “Because the cowboys wiped out the buffalo,” Switters

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