“No. I doubt if you could meet my standards. You haven’t found maturity yet, and you haven’t found peace.”
He wanted to say, “If you’re referring to that pre-senile stagnation that passes for maturity these days and that hypocritical obsequiousness that passes for peace, I’d rather have shingles than the one and scurvy than the other.” What emerged from his mouth, however, was, “Damn! You sure know how to break a guy’s heart.”
“Nonsense. Even though you told me you loved me the moment you laid eyes on me . . .”
“I did?!” He came within half a hue of blushing again. (While he had lain in helpless delirium, his evil elf must have had a field day.)
“. . . we both know you do not. It was just your usual line of—how do you call it?”
“Flapdoodle?” he suggested helpfully, regaining some control.
“Besides,” she went on, “the pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit. In the Order of St. Pachomius, we have always worked to build strong spirits. Spirits that can never be broken. Not even by the things that are to come.”
“What things?”
Domino stood. She was light on her feet, yet firmly planted. (Like a palm tree of a certain vintage?) “Your own spirit, for all of its—flapdoodie?—is very stout, I think, and would not be so badly out of place here. Perhaps it’s even needed. But you mustn’t feel pressured. We’ll get along without you. Even Fannie will. And cursed and misguided and lost to Christ as you are, you may actually need us more than we need you. So, you decide. I’ll go away now and let you mull it over. Just remember that the supply truck could arrive at any hour.”
“Wait.” He caught her wrist. It felt as if he’d grabbed the neck of a swan.
“Yes?”
“The truck. From Deir ez-Zur won’t it go back to Damascus?”
“Eventually, but along a different route. It returns to Damascus by way of Palmyra, the oasis town about a hundred kilometers to the south of us.”
Somewhat reluctantly he released her arm. Sister Domino’s flesh was as pure, and as forbidden, to him as Suzy’s always was, and thus had the capacity to make him dizzy. “Hmm. Well. Ah. What’s the date today? Around the first of June, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what. Let’s cut a deal. In the fall, I’ve got to bop down to Peru to see a man about a taboo. But I’ll stay until then. How’s that? I’ll stay through September, providing my grandmother is healthy, and for those—what is it?—four months, I’ll give you my absolute best, although I’m making no promises regarding Fannie. I’ll stay—but there are a couple of conditions.”
Eyes narrowing, she stiffened, turning her cheeks into something resembling toy igloos for Eskimo action figures. She was thinking that Switters was going to insist on being shown Cardinal Thiry’s secret document. He knew she was thinking precisely that, and it made him smile. If that dusty old paper really was the Serpent in their Eden, it undoubtedly would reveal itself to him in time. And if not, he didn’t give a good goddamn. He had other wants.
“First, I want to meet Masked Beauty.”
“
“And I want Sister Pippi to build another pair of stilts for me. A shorter pair. A pair whose footrests—this is essential, so listen up—a pair whose footrests are exactly two inches above the ground.”
Bobby Case thought it was hilarious. Hilarious. Switters, the scourge of Iraq, the brave-hearted bane of the pickle factory, the poetry-spouting libertine who raised eyebrows at the C.R.A.F.T. Club, even; Switters, operative’s operative and erstwhile stalwart defender of the erotic rights of the young, now a flunky at a convent, performing mundane clerical services for a gaggle of over-the-hill nuns! Hilarious.
When Bobby learned that the nuns had been recently defrocked, were holed up in a private oasis in the Syrian desert, and answered to an abbess who, in 1943, had been the model for the Matisse nude that graced Maestra’s living room wall, he had to admit that the situation had a novel flavor, a certain cachet. But it was still pretty funny. Bobby had to laugh, despite the fact that Switters could not now accept the assignment in Kosovo that was about to be offered by Audubon Poe. And he undoubtedly would have laughed all the harder had he, like the cuckoos in the willow trees, had a bird’s-eye view of Switters clomping and hopping around the convent grounds on a pair of undersize stilts.
The new stilts hadn’t been long in coming, and, as requested, hadn’t been long in length. The soles of his feet—as smooth and pink as a babe’s—were held off the ground at the barely perceptible height of two inches and not a centimeter less or more, and from that modest elevation he scanned the terrestrial and the astral, inspected the commonplace and the rare, as though he were revolving apace with the axle that turned the Wheel of Things. What cosmic insight was afforded by the two-inch perspective? The only advantage as far as he could tell—perhaps because he cloddishly clumped rather than mystically levitated—was that everything seemed a bit less serious when observed from an ambulatory loge. Of course, that might have been the master’s point. And Today Is Tomorrow’s, as well. A similar thought had even occurred to him in his Invacare 9000. At any rate, he certainly didn’t look like an enlightened being as, ungainly and stiff-legged, he negotiated the oasis’s shady paths. He walked the way furniture might have walked. Or a stick beetle on its journey along a twig.
It wasn’t that he was slow. After a week or ten days of practice, Switters, on stilts, could have beaten any of the nuns in a footrace. Moreover, his movements were entirely devoid of the strain, deliberation, and self-pitying sloth that one sometimes noticed in the physically impaired. On the contrary, he stilted with a reckless ebullience, so glad was he to be free of the wheelchair and its sickly associations. Still, there was something comical about him, like a crow blundering across a pavement grate or a boy in his mother’s high heels (Domino, in fact, wondered why he didn’t simply wear clogs, to which he explained that his survival depended upon there being space, air— oxygen, nitrogen, argon, plus traces of helium, hydrogen, ozone, krypton, xenon, neon, carbon monoxide, and methane—between his feet and the earth), and the sisters never reached a point where they could watch him without some amusement. Bobby, for better or worse, was deprived of the spectacle, but as has been noted, he found the whole business in Syria quite funny, including, once he was let in on it, the business of Sister Fannie. His mirth didn’t prevent him, however, from offering Switters sincere and well-reasoned advice. His e-mail read thusly:
> Whether or not you’re man enough to admit it,
> podner, you’re attracted to innocence like mildew to
> strawberries. But just because that little Irish rosary
> wrangler is a technical virgin, that don’t mean she’s
> pure. From what you tell me, Fannie’s less innocent
> than your average Patpong skivvy girl, intact cherry
> and a million damn Hail Marys notwithstanding. That
> don’t mean squat lessen you want it to, but I’d be
> remiss if I failed to point it out.
> It strikes me that the one you really want is the older
> one (not that Fannie ain’t Methuselah’s eldest
> daughter by your and my usual standards), and I have
> to say I find that both touching and troublesome, like
