Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

sister must adhere to vows of chastity just like any nun, but prior to taking up the cloth, she need not have been a virgin. So, among us, we have women with some experience, and that makes men and carnality a more tense issue, perhaps, than in certain orthodox convents. But when I get so cotton-picking coincee about it, it is I, myself, who is acting the hypocrite.”

Naturally, Switters had to bite his tongue to keep from asking Domino if she could be counted among those sisters with “some experience.” What he asked, instead, after a lacerating lingual nip, was a question about the role and features of the Pachomian Order.

“Maybe we can discuss that at a later time,” she said. “Right now, before I go to my work, we must talk about you. Who are you? What are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here? So far from the beaten track.”

“May I assume my interrogation is off and running?”

She smiled, and it was a smile, he thought, that could raise roadkill from the dead or turn a lead mine into a Mexican restaurant, yet a smile made more with the eyes than the lips. “You seem to be much improved, Mr. Switters, although you still look like—how do you say it?—a thing that the cat has brought home. I don’t mean to pressure you. If you don’t feel well enough . . .”

“It’s all right,” he assured her, “although should I die in your custody, you’ll have to answer to Amnesty International.” Then, before she could protest, and holding to his vow to stop lying, he jumped right in with the truth, or, at least, an abridged version of it. “Until six months ago, I was a CIA operative. Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Really? I know, of course, about the CIA. It has an unpleasant reputation.”

“And largely deserved, I assure you.” He might have added, “Thanks to corporate-owned politicians and their cowboy dupes,” but he did not.

“Then why were you? . . .”

“Its unpleasantness, as you put it, had a purity, a spice, and anarchy that simply didn’t exist in the academic, military, or corporate sectors, and I hadn’t enough talent for art or poetry. Besides, it offered an unparalleled, world-class opportunity for corrective mischief: subverting subversion, if you will, although I won’t pretend my motives were ever entirely altruistic. But all that’s immaterial now. I had to drop out of the game last November.”

She glanced at his wheelchair, folded in a corner, and he knew what she was assuming. He decided not to correct the assumption. Instead, he told her how he’d recently become involved in a private humanitarian mission inside Iraq, his old stomping grounds, and how, when it was over, he, feeling adventurous and having no particular place to be, joined a band of nomads driving their flocks to summer pasture in the mountains. “We passed by your Garden of Eden here, and for some crackpot reason I felt a magnetic attraction to the place. The rest, as they say, is histrionics.” He shrugged, as if to emphasize the pristine logic of it all.

Whether or not she bought his story he could not tell. She was quiet, thoughtful, her countenance vacillating between serenity and fret. “Finish your breakfast,” she said at last. “I’ll come back for the tray. A supply truck will be arriving in a few days, bringing petrol for our generator. It can take you to Deir ez-Zur, but I can’t see how you will depart Syria without the proper papers.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sister,” he called after her. “Impropriety is what I do for a living.”

Fortified by his first regular meal in more than a week, Switters attempted a few push-ups and sit-ups on the cot. It was a wimpy, pathetic display. After lunch, delivered by a French nun who introduced herself as ZuZu (she was Domino’s age but lacked Domino’s radiance), he tried again, with greater success. Mostly, however, he rested. He meditated, he dozed, he read, he drank in the farmyard sounds and orchard smells of the oasis. Once, a black goat wandered into his room. Almost immediately, ZuZu and another middle-aged nun arrived to shoo it out.

“That Fannie,” ZuZu clucked. “She should pay more mind to her animal.”

“Yes,” said her companion. “Instead of to the animal in her mind.” They laughed and departed. It was probably funnier in French.

In midafternoon, he tried telephoning Maestra. When she didn’t answer, he pulled his computer up onto the cot. Now that Audubon Poe was far away, it shouldn’t matter if the company read or even traced his transmission. Mayflower had little reason to be interested in him, per se, and even if he was, what could the cowboys do to him? Tip off Syrian authorities that he was in their country illegally? Intimate that he was a spy? Get him imprisoned or executed? In the old, crazed Cold War CIA, that might have been a possibility, but these days the company had a different censure and different methods. It had other fish to fry, its own bare asses to cover. Unless it believed he could help it get at Poe, whose whereabouts it doubtless already knew, he would be regarded as no more than a loose cannon with minimum firepower and no direction. He said a prayer to the satellite gods. He e-mailed his grandmother.

In less than an hour, she responded. Maestra was well. There was some unspecified trouble about the Matisse. She was glad he was enjoying his vacation in “Turkey,” and understood that the Turks made fine silver bracelets. Was he finally out of that stupid wheelchair?

It was Domino who brought him his supper. “I’m sorry to be ignoring you,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too.”

She tested his forehead for signs of fever, and in her hand he sensed a current not unlike the throb of pent-up music he’d felt in the fingers of Skeeter Washington, only what was pent up in Sister Domino was of a different order: spiritual, physical, emotional, or a mixture of the three, he wouldn’t venture to suppose.

“Can we talk?” he asked.

“Later tonight, or tomorrow,” she said, glancing out the window at the purpling dusk. “Now we have a special vespers. And, oh, we won’t be turning on the generator for a while, so, I’m sorry, you’ll have to make do with candlelight if you want to read.” She picked up the copy of Finnegans Wake from its place on the bedside stool. “It’s an Irish book, isn’t it? Fannie would be thrilled.”

“Only a dozen souls in Ireland have actually read this tome,” he said, “and I’d bet a crock o’ gold and a barrel o’ Guinness that your Fannie is not one of them.”

About an hour after dark, as he lay digesting his thin goat stew, he heard singing. This time the song was a hymn, and more than a couple of voices were joined in its vocalization. “Vespers,” he said to himself. At almost that same moment, he became aware that an orange glow had commenced to flicker, snap, and waggle against the drawn curtains of his little window. Inquisitive, he stood on the cot, down near its foot, and parted the rough cotton fabric. For the next half hour, he was to gawk at an extraordinary spectacle. The psychedelic porthole aside, no window he’d ever peered through looked out on a more memorable scene.

The convent chapel, identifiable by its stunted steeple and crude stained glass, was located at—and connected to—the far end of the building that apparently served as living quarters for the sisterhood. The chapel was a good seventy yards, maybe more, from the infirmary, which was situated near the compound gate. In front of the chapel, from whose open door the singing floated, there was a small flower garden, and in that flower patch, amidst poppies and jasmine bushes, a bonfire had been built.

As Switters watched, nuns—eight of them in all—filed, still singing, out of the chapel. Each wore her traditional nun habit, rather than the Syrian dresses in which he’d become accustomed to seeing them. Joining hands, they formed a circle around the fire, circumnavigating it several times, both clockwise and counterclockwise. Then they suddenly ceased singing, broke the circle, and began to disrobe.

Initially, a startled Switters jumped to the conclusion that the sisters were practicing witchcraft, that he’d stumbled upon some arcane sect that was combining Catholicism with Wicca. However, as the nuns, one by one— some eagerly, even vehemently, others with obvious reluctance—hurled or gently dropped their habits into the bonfire, he realized that something of a different nature was transpiring here. He couldn’t guess what the ceremony was about, but it was no eye-of-newt sabbat.

As the heavy habits smoked and slowly ignited, the women watched in their underwear. Most wore knee- length bloomers, the sort of ultra-baggy shorts that might have outfitted a low-rent hip-hop ghetto gangster basketball team, and stiff old-fashioned prototype brassieres that could have harnessed pairs of boudoir oxen. One was in modern bra and panties. From that distance, he couldn’t clearly recognize faces, but he thought (or hoped?) she must be Domino. The last of the eight wore bikini underpants and nothing else, and as firelight twinkled on her far naked nipples, he thought, Fannie?

His attention was diverted from Fannie’s (?) breasts by the appearance in the residence hall doorway of yet another figure, a tall woman, whose silhouette had a certain majesty. She was immediately greeted by two sisters,