move, they said. Then, they sold the Pachomian compound to the Jordanian military. If the sisterhood was to survive, it would have to arrange private subsidy. Amazingly enough, it did, although by the time Croetine found the Lebanese businessman who offered her a small oasis in neighboring Syria (he’d scored it as part of a real estate deal but could make scant use of it himself, the oasis being quite out of the way and he being quite Jewish), most of her sisters had moved on to other places, other orders. Undaunted, she returned to Europe, recruited a handful of new members, including her niece, Simone Thiry, and led them to the Syrian desert in 1983.
“We’ve been here ever since. Nine of us in all. Nine mavericks. Once we were settled, my aunt informed us that she was henceforth to be called ‘Masked Beauty’ and that each of us was also to be renamed. She asked us each to remember the name that as a child we would have preferred to the one our parents had given us. Most children have such a wish name, do you know? Well, we got five Marias and three Theresas—and Masked Beauty shouted, ‘No no no! Not the name of your heroine, the woman you were taught to most admire, but your dream name, your whisper name, the one you called yourself when you pretended alone in your room to be somebody else.’ Okay, we tried again, and we still got a couple of Marias. So, we have Maria Une, who first spoke to you at the gate, and Maria Deux. We have also Pippi, ZuZu, Mustang Sally, Fannie, and Bob.”
“Bob?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“What about Domino?”
“I was lazy and just remembered my nickname from high school in Philadelphia.”
“Domino Thiry. I get it, though I wish I didn’t. That phrase was used to hoodwink the American public into supporting our criminal war against Vietnam, and it was popularized if not coined by the pus-brained pluto, John Foster Dulles.” Hesitant, he held the pellet of spittle against his gum for several seconds before at last discharging it as daintily as possible toward a target area beneath the cot. His restraint notwithstanding, the act caused Sister Domino to look at him askance.
Once they had assumed, in ceremony, their new names, Masked Beauty showed her sisters the document she had been hiding for her uncle, the late Pierre Cardinal Thiry. He’d never retrieved it, perhaps preferring that it be lost. But just as certain cloisters are built around a relic—the middle finger bone of a saint, for example, or the charred trouser cuff of a martyr—the Pachomians allowed their tiny community to coalesce around the document. This, even though the document’s text had relevance neither to St. Pachomius nor to any particular canon to which the sisterhood adhered, except maybe a tenuous connection to the desert lands, and the nature of that connection was not for Switters to know. Yet, the Pachomians were the document’s guardians and protectors; they made it both their charge and mortar, their onus and distinction, a symbolic yet tangible secret fulcrum at the center of their turning and toiling for humanity and Christ.
“Caravans used to travel by here,” said Domino. “Camel caravans as well as motor convoys, but in the past ten years or so, we see only the rare band of nomads, such as the one that left you on our doorstep, and a truck that passes every few weeks carrying passengers, freight, and mail between Damascus and Deir ez-Zur. There’s no road, of course, only what nature has left of the old caravan trail.”
Because of their isolation and the meagerness of their ecclesiastical stipend, the Pachomian sisters had had to make their oasis as self-supporting as possible. For at least a decade, the compound had been used as a training center and command post for officers of the Druse militia, and its agricultural aspects had been neglected. It took the nuns several years of hard labor to restore productivity. They cleaned, cleared, tilled, planted, pruned, and husbanded, and in between, transformed the Druse mosque into their chapel. During that period, neither the Church nor society heard any noise from them, and they were largely forgotten.
Toward the end of the eighties, however, letters, essays, and articles bearing the signature or byline of Masked Beauty began to appear in publications both religious and secular, and while they sometimes ranged far and wide, the core of these writings was an unabashed appeal for papal sanction of birth control. In addition to the misery that unlimited procreation caused women and children, Masked Beauty argued that much of the poverty, violence, addiction, ignorance, mental illness, pollution, and climate changes plaguing humankind in general had major roots in careless or coerced reproduction. It would not be mega-weapons, asteroids, earthquakes, or extraterrestrials that destroyed the earth, she wrote, but excessive population. The prophetic “fire next time” referred to loin heat that, if not properly banked, could only lead eventually to cataclysmic global warming.
“A foregone conclusion,” said Switters, “what with six billion gobbling gullets and an equal number of squirting anuses. But religious fundamentalists—and New Age fluffheads, I should add—can barely
For an answer, Domino shot him a look of pity, scorn, and revulsion. It was deserved, he thought. He’d spat on her floor and made crude remarks; she must think him an absolute lout. How could she understand the exorcisement explicit in the expectoration ritual or know that he used a phrase such as “squirting anuses” only in the abstract? Were he actually to picture one such opening—let alone billions—performing that base function, he’d be more revolted than she. After all, she was a woman who could ferry the chamber pots of the sick, whereas he thought of the rectum, on those very rare occasions when he thought of it at all, as a receptacle for white light, the intake valve through which that mystic energy that Bobby Case’s wise ol’ boys called kundalini entered the body to slither up the spinal column in radiant coils, like the Serpent bringing divine knowledge to the unsuspecting bumpkins of Eden. Enlightenment or excrement: O anus, what doth thy truest purpose be?
“I’m sorry about the scatological undertones,” he said. It was the third time he had apologized to her in as many days, and sensing that he was a man unaccustomed to apology, she was moved to forgive him. “Overtones,” she corrected him, with a tolerant smile, and then concluded her story.
The Vatican eventually figured out that Masked Beauty was Abbess Croetine. It ordered her to cease and desist. She refused. Other Pachomians, including Domino, began to publish letters as well. The sisters agitated. The Church complained. And threatened. It was a battle that raged slowly for years. Then, a fortnight ago, it had come to a head. Masked Beauty was summoned to Damascus to face charges at an ecclesiastical hearing presided over by a trio of bishops dispatched from Rome. Citing poor health, the abbess sent Domino in her stead. The tribunal proved immune to the sisterhood’s arguments and Domino’s charms. It officially dissolved the Order of St. Pachomius and commanded its members back to Europe for discipline and reassignment. On behalf of Pachomius, father of all nuns, on behalf of overbooked wombs around the world, Domino told the bishops to go fly a cotton- picking kite.
“They couldn’t evict us. They don’t own this property. We took a vote and decided to stay on. Only Fannie was of a mind to flee, but she relented. Afraid, perhaps, of Asmodeus, her incubus. Then, yesterday after lunch, while you were resting, a courier arrived here from Damascus. He brought the news that we most feared, that we never thought would really happen. We had been excommunicated. Every single one of us. Thrown out of the Church. Forever.”
“So you’re not a nun anymore,” Switters said, hoping he didn’t sound too pleased about it.
She tightened her lips. The defiance in her eyes was like the fizz in a fuse. “I will always be a nun. And we’ll carry on with our worship and our work just as before. Only now there will be no—how do you call it?—man in the middle. No intermediary. We’ll report directly to God. And God alone.”
“Well,” said Switters, searching for words of comfort or support, “maybe that’s the way it was always meant to be. In the Koran, Mohammed says that direct, personal, one-on-one contact is the
He was on the verge of bringing up Maestra’s missing-link theory and maybe a word or two about Today Is Tomorrow when it occurred to him that he’d gone tangential, which was accepted, even expected, at a C.R.A.F.T. Club donnybrook but generally unappreciated in ordinary company. He smiled sympathetically and shut his mouth.
