Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

tomorrow.”

“All right, then, Nurse Ratchet. As long as you’ll come straight home from school.”

She frowned at this but agreed.

“Are you sure you can’t tell your own family what’s wrong with you?” his mother asked, not for the first time.

“He can’t,” snapped Suzy. “It’s a governmental secret.”

“That’s correct, Mother. And if you don’t quit prying, I’m going to suspect you of being in the pay of a foreign power. I’ll bet Sergi is putting you up to it.”

“Don’t you dare mention that name in this house,” she said, reddening. Sergi was one of her previous husbands.

Suzy pushed him out of the den. In the hall she asked, “Switters, there really is something the matter with you, isn’t there? It’s not some kind of, like, CIA trick?”

Oh, God! Here’s my chance. I can just give her the whole story and be done with it. But he didn’t. “It’s no trick, darling,” he said, agonizing as he said it.

“You promise you can’t stand up and walk?”

Come on. Tell her the truth. Or have you worked for the company so long you’re only comfortable when you’re lying? He clenched his fists. He bit his tongue. “I promise,” he said.

She rolled him into the bathroom. “Get ready for bed,” she ordered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Not being in the right frame of mind for prolonged maintenance, he was already in bed when she returned, bearing a glass of milk and a bowl of oatmeal cookies. Having had his sweet tooth shattered by a rifle butt in Kuwait, he’d left her earlier delivery of brownies virtually untouched on the bedside table, but she pretended not to notice.

Suzy smoothed his covers. Then, very gingerly, so as not to disturb his “injuries,” she lay down on top of him. “Here’s your good night kiss,” she said, but instead of one kiss there was a series, a staccato series, repeatedly stabbing, as it were, his mouth with the wet pink dagger of her little tongue.

Through the Early American patchwork quilt, through the floral patterned sheet, he could feel her rosy biological heat, a smokeless fire that enveloped the vestigial dollhouse and charred the residual mud pie; a soft, ancient, mindless burning emanating from a source oblivious to cultural conditioning; that neither knew nor cared that “civilized” girls no longer married at twelve, that unscrupulous older males might take advantage of its urgings, or that shrill neurotic voices might rage against it. Broiled by it, Switters centered himself and lay motionless, except to rest a cautious, non-probing, non-squeezing, rather avuncular hand lightly on her small, ripe rump.

“Tell me something about yourself,” she demanded.

“Okay. Shoot.”

“No, I mean, like, tell me something true about you that I don’t already know. A secret fact. That nobody else knows.”

He pondered this for a moment or two. Then he declared, “The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.”

For some reason, Suzy found this the most radical, outlandish, unexpected, and witty remark she’d ever heard. Giggling, and shaking her head in wonderment, she slipped carefully off him and moved to the door. “Gotta go now. Remember, if you need anything, just ring that little bell.”

He glanced at the quasi-antique copper bell on the table beside the milk glass but said nothing.

“You’re amazing,” she said. “I only wish that—” She broke off abruptly and left the room.

He lay awake most of the night, trying to finish her sentence for her.

The California State Library was located in Sacramento, appropriately enough since Sacramento was the capital of that state. Glamorous, greedy Los Angeles had its Hollywood sign; picturesque, kooky San Francisco had its Golden Gate Bridge; provincial, authoritarian Sacramento—in which the true pulse of America pumped a steadier beat—had its Capitol Mall. Within that mall, beneath the huge gold dome of the capitol building and at the end of a broad, tree-lined avenue, the state library sheltered its precious charge of books.

Although he anticipated—correctly, as it turned out—that the library would be home to a minimum of volumes pertaining to Our Lady of Fatima and that they must turn to the Internet for the bulk of their research, still he wanted Suzy to have the library experience, to undergo the sheer bookness of the place, to taste the “seepage,” as he put it: the information and beauty that tended to leak from shelves of books even when the books went unread.

“Virtual reality is nothing new,” he told her as she guided his chair up and down the rows of stacks. “Books, the ones worth reading, have always generated virtual reality. Of course, unless one can get past its cultural and sensorial levels, what is reality but virtual?”

Suzy was silent, but he imagined he could hear tiny luminous thought-worms chewing roadways in her half- green apple. DNA was certainly devious in that it ripened the body before the brain.

On the way back to the suburbs, feeling tome-toned and opus-pocused, Switters piloting his rented convertible, Suzy playing navigator, nurse, and tour guide, they debated whether the fact that Sacramento was noted for its manufacture of missiles, weapons systems, cake mixes, potato chips, and caskets did not qualify it as the quintessential American city. “Okay, but, like, Sacramento’s also called the Camellia Capital of the World,” she reminded him.

“A few weeks ago, I was in the Dead Dog Capital of the World. I have to say, camellias are an improvement.” Sensing that she was trying to form some connection in her mind between a place so vile it was renowned for dead dogs and his presumed wounds and injuries, he sought to restore a more poetic and, he hoped, romantic mood by reciting a Buson haiku:

“A camellia falls,

Spilling out rainwater

—from yesterday.”

“Could you pull off over there?” she immediately asked, pointing not to a motel as he at first thought but to a gas station. “I really have to use the bathroom.”

“Say toilet, would you, darling. I don’t believe bathing is one of the services Texaco provides.”

“Whatever.”

“No, it’s not unimportant. Intelligent speech is under pressure in our fair land and needs all the support it can get.”

He spent the five minutes that she was absent trying not to picture her camellia spilling out yesterday’s water.

She made him rest when they got home.

After dinner they went computerside and uncorked the Fatima jug. Quickly their cups runnethed over.

The children were Lucia, age ten, Francisco, nine, and Jacinta, seven. They were poor and completely uneducated. When they returned from the pastures that spring evening in 1917, they seemed to be entranced, almost in a state of ecstasy. Lucia ate her supper in blissful silence, and Francisco, too, was distracted and quiet, but little Jacinta was too young and excited to contain herself. The cat she let out of the bag, and which in time grew larger than a tiger, was that they had been visited on the northern slope of the Cova da Iria (where her uncle, Lucia’s father, leased pastureland) by a beautiful woman enveloped in blinding light. She appeared to them, following several flashes of lightning (it was a clear, sunny day) from a point some meters above their heads, in the top branches of a stubby tree. As Switters read aloud Lucia’s later description of the woman, her dazzling white tunic that gathered at the waist without benefit of belt or sash, her graceful hands folded prayerfully at her breast and wound round with a pearl-beaded rosary, her exquisitely refined features, the sadness and maternal concern that showed in her countenance, the loveliness that exceeded anything to which a bride might aspire, the light that she radiated (“clearer and brighter than a crystal cup filled with purest water penetrated by the most sparkling rays of the sun”), he noticed that Suzy herself was becoming enraptured. For any number of reasons, he thought, this is probably not a good sign.

He was tempted to suggest that they launch a botanical probe into the bush that the Lady had selected as her landing pad. In Portuguese, it was called carrasqueira, in English, holm oak. By any