Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

prophecy to her breast, like the child she’d never borne. He glanced at Pippi. Her freckles were winking out like dying stars. He glanced at Mustang Sally. Plastered by sweat to her forehead, her spit curl formed an ominous question mark. “No,” he heard Domino say. Her voice was as firm as cheddar. Then, “How will I know that it’s . . .”

With one of those effortless, swift moves of his, Scanlani glided toward her. Something was clamped in his fist. Something about the length of a small flashlight. Something as shiny black as a licorice popsicle. Something obviously made from nonmetallic materials, perhaps in order that it might pass unnoticed through airport metal detectors. Like Switters’s Beretta. The Beretta that was locked now in a Vatican vault, as though it were one of the Holy See’s legendary treasures.

His arm extended, Scanlani leveled the sinister object at Domino’s head, intending—there was no doubt—to shoot her point-blank, right between the eyes.

Switters screamed. “Stop, motherfucker! You!”

The captain attempted to restrain him, but the way Switters snapped the man’s wrist in half, it might as well have been the wrist of a Barbie doll.

It is tempting to report that that whole past year with Sister Domino was unfolding now before him in a speed-parade of images—odd and endearing and frustrating; a hurricane of blurry memories that blew past his inner eye as if it were tied halfway up a middle-aged palm tree. In actual fact, there was nothing at all in his brain but a clear, clean hum: the cultivated signal that, in men of his background, transformed the primal siren of wah-wah panic into an articulated call to action.

Switters leapt from the chair.

His left foot hit the ground first. The instant it touched, it was as if an angry viper had sunk its fangs into the instep. A severe jolt shot through his body. There was a deafening pop, and a ball of white light—decidedly not a mystic coconut—exploded behind his eyes.

He staggered sideways.

He pitched forward onto his face.

Switters had once read somewhere that according to data accumulated from the black-box flight recorders of crashed aircraft, the last words spoken by pilots, upon realization that they were doomed, was most often, “Oh, shit!”

What did it say about human frailty, about the transparent peel of civilization, about the state of evolution, about the dominion of body over mind, when, at the moment of their imminent death, modern, educated, affluent men were moved to an evocation of excrement? That as the ax abruptly fell on their mortal lives, technologically sophisticated commanders of multimillion-dollar flying machines usually uttered no proclamation of sacred, familial, or romantic love; no patriotic sentiment, no cry for forgiveness, no expression of gratitude or regret, but rather, a scatological oath?

Quite likely, it said very little. Almost certainly, the word shit was issued without the slightest conscious regard for its literal meaning. On an unconscious level, the oath might be significant, but one would have to be a fairly fanatical Freudian to propose that it indicated the persistent domination of an infantile fixation on feces.

In any event, though he might imagine Bobby Case uttering something of the sort (Bobby was a Texan, after all), Switters, mildly appalled by the information, vowed that no such phrase would mark his final exit. “Oh, shit” lacked grace, lacked class, lacked charm, lacked imagination, lacked any indication of full consciousness. It was simply vulgar, simply crude, and while Switters appreciated profanity’s occasional value as verbal punctuation, as a highly effective vehicle for emphasis, he was scornful when louts swore as a substitute for vocabulary, youths as a substitute for rebellion, stand-up comics as a substitute for wit.

When his end came, Switters had always trusted that he would improvise something original if not profound; something appropriate to the specific situation, which was to say, something dramatically correct. If nothing else, should time be short and inspiration shorter, he would, he had vowed, bellow wahoo!— one final, culminating, roller-coaster-rider whoop of defiant exhilaration.

A noble ambition, perhaps. Yet when the earth viper bit, when the internal fireball exploded, when he lost contact with the world and went spiraling off into an electrified darkness, he hadn’t cried wahoo or anything remotely resembling a famous last word. And had there been a black box in the cockpit of his Invacare starship, it would have recorded his last words before he was sent spiraling into that electrified darkness as, “Stop, motherfucker.” How very declasse, how very embarrassing.

Electrified darkness because it wasn’t passive. And it wasn’t really dark. Or rather, it was dark and it wasn’t dark. It was a darkness that behaved like light. Or, maybe, it was light that behaved like darkness. How was he supposed to know? Spiraling into it, out of control, he was in no position to judge. The condition seemed, in a sense, neutral—yet, as stated, it was far from static. Had he time to analyze it (which he did not, being embedded in a trans-temporal state, where the linear pencil of analysis had an eraser at both ends), he might have described it as an interface. As an interface between darkness and light. As an imperceptibly thin crack between yin and yang. A reality between that which is and this which is. A number between one and zero. Spiraling.

Switters realized then that he had passed that way before. The Hallways of Always. Except now there were no botanical tryptamine alkaloids churning in his belly. And so far, no pod things boasting that they owned the business. There was, however, a faint glow in what might be called the distance, a sort of end-of-the-tunnel luminosity, and it was pulling him toward it. “No! I absolutely refuse to have some trendy near-death experience,” he heard himself exclaim. “Serve me the real enchilada or let me—”

“Heh!”

“Maestra? Is that you? Are you . . . okay?”

There was no reply. He spiraled on through the tunnel. Or, the tunnel spiraled on through him. Was he a toy boat in the gutter, or was he the gutter—and where were the Art Girls? He drew closer to the glow. Or, it drew closer to him. It was proving to be not a light as such, but something more on the order of a pulsating membrane, feathery and multicolored, with lots of greens and reds. The membrane had no alter image, no counterpart, and he began to wonder if in that dichotomous void, there wasn’t a singularity after all. Might this be the aura of the Ultimate? The medulla of the mandala? The Immaculate Heart made visible? A hyperspatial hymen? He became aware, then, of sound: not the music of the spheres, by any means, but a low, crusty, constricted noise, scrumbling harshly out of the membrane, almost as though it were clearing its throat.

Yes, that was it. Switters had the distinct feeling, moving into that polychrome pulsar, that it was preparing to speak to him; that, like the alleged prophets of old, he was about to hear the actual voice of that which men call God. He was, as the figure of speech would have it, all ears.

There was another spasm of hacking rasps. Then—it spoke.

“Peeple of zee wurl, relax!”

Was what it said.

The glow sputtered out.

Nothingness replaced it.

And that was that.

Send in the clowns.

At that instant, or so it seemed, Switters reentered the realm of ordinary consciousness. He knew it was the realm of ordinary consciousness because it hurt like hell. And because he sensed the presence of advertising.

Things did not come slowly into focus. He opened his eyes and, bingo, he took everything in sharply and at once: the pale yellow walls, the Chianti-colored curtains, the sleek chrome table at bedside (in Italy, even hospital rooms had style); the Marlboro cigarette billboard that dominated the view from the window; Pippi in a brand-new, contemporary, lightweight habit, Domino wearing her old Syrian chador, wearing her old marrow-melting smile, wearing her round cheeks and vivacious air.

“Where am I?” he asked. Immediately, he groaned and, unwisely, slapped his sore forehead. “Let me withdraw that question,” he pleaded. He withdrew it because, within limits, he could guess where he was and, more important, because the question was so pathetically predictable. What a cliche.

“You’ve come back to life,” said Domino. Her voice, even more than usual, was like a Red Cross doughnut wagon purring into earshot after a disaster.