Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

from establishing electronic and telecommunicative links with those it wished to influence, assist, save, or solicit for funds. Because of his experience in the CIA, he might also be helpful in dealing with Middle Eastern political situations and the never-ending whirlpool of Vatican intrigue. He would become their communications expert, office manager, and security chief. He’d put the thorn on their rose and the skin on their drum.

Quite aside from that was his gender. The nine Eves had judged that it might be a good idea, after all, to admit an Adam to their little Eden. No longer bound, except by choice, to their vows, some among them had suggested that it was not merely elitist but cowardly to shun all masculine contact. What were they afraid of? Did they lack confidence in their choices? They were feminists of a sort, but well aware that reviling half the human race was a component neither of true feminism nor the Christian faith. Wasn’t Jesus a man? (They weren’t so sure about God.) Hadn’t men (St. Pachomius, their fathers) begat them, figuratively and literally? They were in general agreement that they could use a dose of healthy male energy in their lives. It had to be said that Domino, for one, was not entirely convinced that Switters was a healthy manifestation of male energy, but that question would resolve itself in time.

Meanwhile, she, personally, was fascinated by his Amazonian escapade, by the so-called curse upon him. She believed that she, through prayer, Christian ritual, and modern psychology could break the spell he believed himself to be under. Jesus was known to have cast out beaucoup demons, and over the centuries quite a few priests had followed his example. She saw no need for Switters to venture back into that dark, damp, teeming jungle—he was at heart a desert person, just like her. She was sure she could help him. It was her duty.

Switters tugged repeatedly at one of the more springy of his barley-colored curls, as if it were a cheap plastic ripcord and he in Mexican freefall. “How long do I have to think it over?”

“Oh, somewhere between twenty-four hours and twenty-four minutes. It depends upon the truck.”

He tugged some more, he furrowed his brow. The small scars on his face seemed to furl into nodes. “Do you suppose I might lubricate my cognitive apparatus with some squeezings from your swell vineyard?”

“But you haven’t eaten your breakfast. It’s not yet eight o’clock in the morning.”

“The wine doesn’t know that. Wine only recognizes two temporal states: fermentation time and party time.”

“Yes, but you must eat your omelet. The sausage in it is from chicken.”

“Fine. I like chicken. Tastes just like parrot.”

Without further protest, she went off to fetch a bottle of red, leaving him to ponder her unexpected proposal and—because his mind, even when unlubricated, was disposed toward extrapolatory zigzag—some advice given him years earlier concerning middle-aged palm trees.

It was in the South Seas, on one of those sweet little coconut isles where the word for vagina has a preposterous number of vowels. (On second thought, maybe the vowels aren’t excessive, considering that vowels do possess a decidedly yonic quality, particularly when contrasted with the testosterone flavor of most consonants.) He was sitting at the end of a dock in the company of an American- born professional diver who, for an annual stipend from Langley, kept an eye on French activities in that part of Polynesia. Switters had come down from Bangkok to pass to him some new cryptography software. The delivery completed, they were sipping rum and gazing out to sea.

“Man,” said Switters, “that’s a nasty-looking crowd of clouds over there, all rough and raggedy-assed and milling about, like a herd of white-trash shoppers just crawled out of shacks and sheds and trailer homes for the end-of-winter sale at Wal-Mart.”

“Storm’s coming,” the diver predicted. “A big ‘un.”

“Not a typhoon, I hope,” said Switters, glancing over his shoulder at the small, casually built wood-frame houses that dotted the unprotected shore. “I don’t think I’d want to be frolicking about this paradisiacal poker chip if a real typhoon bore down on it.”

“Nothing quite like that today,” the diver assured him. “But do you know what to do if you’re ever caught on a beach like this during a typhoon or a hurricane? The company not teach you that? Well, you tie yourself halfway up the trunk of a middle-aged palm tree.”

“Why so, pal?”

“Elementary. An older palm tree will be dry inside and stiff and brittle. In a big gust, it’ll snap right off and drop you in the raging flood with a couple hundred pounds of tree trunk strapped to your back. A youngish tree may be graceful and slim and easy to climb, but ultimately it’s too springy, too lithe, too pliable: it’ll bend nearly double in the gale and dip you underwater and drown you dead. Your middle-aged palm, though, is just right. Solid, but still has enough sap in it to be somewhat limber. Neither break nor flop. It’ll give you the strong, flexible support you need to keep from being carried off or blown away.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Switters promised, and sliced another lime for their drinks. In truth, he gave it no further thought whatsoever until that morning in the Syrian desert, far from any ocean, awaiting his hostess’s return from the convent wine pantry; and then he was only partially serious when he asked himself if a woman such as Domino might not be the human equivalent of the middle-aged palm, the personified tree to which the tempest- tossed might emotionally attach themselves without fear of being undone by, say, naive Suzylike whimsicality or crotchety Maestralike recalcitrance. Not that he viewed himself as any orphan of the storm, exactly, but he was at rather loose ends until his planned return to Peru in the autumn, and barring another assignment from Poe, Domino’s offer was perhaps his most interesting prospect and certainly the most substantial.

In any case, upon her return with the bottle, Domino did nothing to discredit the arboreal comparison, so, for better or worse, he might as well entertain it. At the very least, he was learning that for some Western women— even pious ones—middle age needn’t necessarily mean dowdiness, torpor, or capitulation.

“Now,” said Switters, after swirling the first big gulp of wine around in his mouth and swallowing it with satisfaction, “don’t get the idea I’m a boozer. Setting out deliberately to get drunk is pathological. I like to drink just enough to change the temperature in the brain room. I’ll turn to less mainstream substances if I want to rearrange the furniture.”

Since there was a finite amount of wine on the premises and the nearest liquor store was days away, Domino wasn’t particularly worried about his drinking habits. She had other concerns.

“Should you decide to remain with us,” she said, “you may become very homesick for America.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Haven’t spent much time there in the past ten years.” He drew in a long, hard breath of wine. “America,” he mused. “America’s pretty violent and repressive these days. But as my pal Skeeter Washington might put it, it’s a ‘bouncy’ violence, a ‘bouncy’ repression, often ribboned with exuberance and cheer. Believe it or not, America’s a very insecure country. It’s been scared into a kind of self-imposed subjugation first by the imagined threat of Communism and then by the imagined threat of drugs. Maestra calls us an ‘abusive democracy,’ one in which everybody wants to control everybody else. Lately, even tolerance, itself, has been usurped by the sanctimonious and the opportunistic, and turned into an instrument for intimidation, bullying, and extortion. Yet the U. S. continues to pound its sternum and boast that it’s the home of the brave and the land of the free. If that’s brazen chutzpah rather than blind naivete, then I guess I can’t help but admire it.”

The wine had wasted no time greasing the pistons of his tongue, and he probably would have gone on to expound upon his observation that in the late 1960s, everything in America—art, sports, cinema, journalism, politics, religion, education, the justice system, law enforcement, health care, clothing, food, romance, even nature: everything—had devolved into forms of entertainment, and how, by the nineties, most of those forms of entertainment had become almost exclusively about merchandising. However, Domino aborted his rant by stating, with just a flicker of accusation, “You worked for perhaps the most notorious fearmongering institution in your fearful America.”

“Mmm. That’s right, I did. It’s called ‘riding the dragon.’ “

“It can also be called ‘seeking sensation.’ I think you have a need to be always stimulated, to be the action man. How do they call it now? A player. Yes?”

“Only an errand boy,” he protested, refilling his glass with wine as dark as a monster’s gore. “Only an errand boy.”

“Describe it however you wish, I still think you crave to work close to the bull. Or the dragon, if you prefer. But in Spain they say that the matador in time becomes the bull. Is not he who rides the dragon part of the dragon?”

“Not if he’s fully conscious.”