Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

squirm, and hasten on their separate ways before the headless chicken—the totem bird of discomposure—could find hemorrhage space in their cheeks. Inevitably, one or the other would steal a backward glance. Switters, having been trained as a sneak, was more adept at this than she.

Their lone conversation during this period concerned the round, mud tower that rose above the compound like a silo for a Scud of manna, a missile with a warhead of milk and honey. He’d been stilting past the decrepit wooden door in the tower’s base when Domino and ZuZu exited through it, carrying pails, brooms, and mops. “Oh, hi,” said Domino, straining to sound casual. “Uh, now that we’ve finally given the tower room a cleaning, you might want to spend some time up there.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Your feet are forbidden to touch the ground.”

“That’s the story.”

“And that would include the ground floor of a building.”

“The way I interpret it.”

“Yes, but what about the floors above ground level? The third floor or the twenty-third? Wouldn’t they be safe? The same as the floor of the car or of the airplane flying above the earth.”

He tugged at his hair, which, having been trimmed by Mustang Sally that very afternoon was, for the first time in weeks, shorter in length than her own. “Good question. I’ve asked it myself on countless occasions. The answer’s in the fine print. But I can’t read the fine print, because . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Because,” she said, “there isn’t any fine print. There isn’t any large print, either.”

“It’s an unusual contract in that respect. However, I plan on renegotiating it in the very near future.”

At this reference to his impending departure, there was a slight but perceptible shift in Domino’s body language. Apparently caught somewhere between relief and regret, and wishing to display neither, she excused herself. As she marched off with her mop, she gestured at the tower top, tilting her head toward it in such a manner as to suggest without words that he at least ought to have a look up there.

Oh, yeah? Climb stairs on stilts? That would certainly promote my blood into active circulation. In the process of mentally rejecting her suggestion, he peered inside, where, as he soon noticed, there didn’t happen to be any stairs. Rather, there was a ladder: wooden, old (much too old to have been built by Pippi), barely angled, and probably thirty feet in height. Despite the fact that it looked like something devised by prehistoric pueblo daredevils, it seemed sturdy enough, and, moreover, he felt confident he could plant his feet on its rungs with impunity as far as the taboo was concerned. Nevertheless, Switters did not climb the ladder. Not that day.

Through the dry biblical whisper of the groves—past twiggy branches adangle with seed-stuffed pomegranates and under the toad-tongued leaves of almond trees—he clumped back to the office at a pace that precluded any prolonged enjoyment of arboreal shade. He was bent on reading one more time the e-mail he’d received from his grandmother that morning, the note that informed him that Suzy, having “gotten into a speck of trouble” in Sacramento, had been sent to live with Maestra for a year and would be attending the Helen Bush School in Seattle. What perplexed Switters about the note, what prompted him to keep rereading it, was that he couldn’t ascertain from its ambiguous flavor whether Maestra was encouraging him to be sure to stop by on his way to Peru or warning him to stay away from her door at all costs.

“So,” said masked Beauty. “You will be leaving us in a fortnight.”

“More or less,” Switters concurred. “The exact day depends on when the supply truck shows up.” He had the feeling that sometime during the eighteen hours since he’d happened upon Domino at the tower, the niece and her aunt had discussed the fact that his stay among them was drawing to a close.

Masked Beauty was pouring tea, the ritual with which their morning routine began. He’d already booted up and was stealing a quick glance at Maestra’s e-mail, as if overnight it might have undergone a syntagmatic rearrangement, or he, after a night’s rest, might find in it a nugget of information that had escaped his earlier scrutiny. She bent by his chair, smelling, as always, of incense and rough soap; her skin scoured, her chador as crisp as if it were a habit. She was laundered, she was regal, she was immortalized by Matisse, of whom she would seldom speak, and bewarted by God, of whom she spoke frequently, though often in a tone of bewilderment.

“Yes, the supply truck.” She sighed. “If Almighty God is not blessing soon our treasury, that truck won’t be bringing us much more petrol.” She shrugged then and smiled, and it would have been considered a smile worth admiring had it been situated at a greater distance from the mutated mushroom cap on her nose. “Ah, but dear St. Pachomius got along just fine without a generator, did he not?” It was a rhetorical question, and the abbess, in that unmodulated, childish voice of hers that was at such odds with both her brittle majesty and her brazen defect, went on to say, “In any case, Mr. Switters, I do hope your sojourn here has been in some tiny measure agreeable.”

His mood was languid, tongue still slack from the wordless joy of awakening to cuckoo calls in a sunlit cubicle far from any confines that conceivably might be labeled home, so the approval rating that she seemed to be seeking—the testimony to adequacy if not the rave review—failed to gush forth from him. Later that evening, when he had taken on as much wine as he could quietly accommodate, he would become downright gassy in his tribute, but at that lackadaisical moment, with his ears adjusting to her French, he yawned, stretched, and said only, “Beats Club Med all to hell.”

Having finished tea, they got down to business, the first order of which was the posting of e-mail to several United Nations agencies on the subject of birth control. “Now that I’ve been excommunicated, my protests lack the authority they once had,” she said. “On the other hand, I am at liberty to show less restraint.” She debated whether it was worthwhile to also e-mail Western heads of state. “The greater the population grows and the more threatening the social and environmental problems that that growth causes, it seems the more reluctant our leaders are to address the issue. Crazy, no?”

“Ever wonder,” Switters asked, “why people get so worked up over whale hunts, yet object very little to the killing of cattle? It’s because whales are rare and intelligent and untamed, whereas cows are commonplace and stupid and domesticated.” Presumably he was referring to the manner in which the powers that be, with the greedy compliance of the media and the eager assistance of evangelicals, were busily bovinizing humanity, seeking to produce a vast herd of homogenized consumers, individually expendable, docile, and, beyond basic job skills, not too smart; two-legged cows that could be easily milked and, when necessary, guiltlessly slaughtered. If that was his meaning, however, he did not belabor her with it.

“You failed to mention beautiful,” said the abbess.

“Pardon?”

“Beautiful. You, such a champion of beauty: I imagined you would claim that the whale is more revered than the cow because the whale is the more beautiful.”

“That’s, indeed, the case,” he said. “But if they weren’t so damned ubiquitous, cows also might be considered beautiful.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt?”

“Breeding breeds contempt. Beyond a certain point. The dignity of any species diminishes in direct ratio to its compulsion to teem, or to the extent that it allows teeming to be foisted upon it.”

Masked Beauty sighed another of her curtain-rustling French sighs and suggested that they commence their clicking and browsing. Obediently, he brought up Islam, then clicked on esoteric. “This morning,” she declared, “I wish to see what they have to say about the pyramids.”

“Pyramids?”

“Yes.”

“In connection to Islam? I mean, I’m sure there’s a Web site for pyramids, but . . .”

“In connection to Islam,” she insisted.

“Yeah, but I don’t believe there is a connection.” (Isn’t everything connected, Switters?)

“The pyramids are in Egypt. Egypt is an Islamic country.”

He chuckled, a bit patronizingly. “The pyramids were constructed—when?—around twenty-seven hundred B.C. Mohammed didn’t stick his nose through the fence until three thousand years later. I don’t believe—”

“Click it,” she ordered. He clicked it. And was as astonished to find himself scrolling up Islamic references to pyramids as he had been, days earlier, to discover that esoteric Islam, in opposition to the adamantly patriarchal