mainstream, was decidedly feminine in character and foundation.
Islamic accounts, it turned out, gave credit for the building of the pyramids to a Levantine king called Hermanos, a name, Switters immediately reasoned, that must be a corrupted spelling of “Hermes,” the tricky Greek god of travel, speed, and esoteric adventure; the Speedy Gonzales of the ancient world, whose function was to journey beyond boundaries and frontiers, both physical and psychological; to explore the unknown and bring back to the sedentary, material and spiritual wealth. In the latter regard, Hermes was the prototype of the shaman, the precursor of Today Is Tomorrow. He was also, this inveterate voyager and con artist, a bit of a sex symbol, and crude phallic images of him were often erected at borders and crossroads. (Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?)
In any case, King Hermanos was said to have had the original two pyramids built as mystic vaults to house the revelations and secrets of the ancient sages, a place to shelter their mysterious sciences, as well as their bodies after death. The principal treasure hidden in the underground galleries consisted of fourteen gold tablets, on seven of which were inscribed invocations to the planets, whereas on the other seven there was written a love story, a telling of the star-crossed romance between the king’s son, Salaman, and a teenage girl many years Salaman’s junior. The love story may have been symbolic, the data suggested; a kind of spiritual allegory, but it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that this material suddenly had Switters’s full attention.
Masked Beauty, on the other hand, was puzzled by their findings, disappointed, and even a bit annoyed. Switters could detect her face darkening (the wart set against it like Mars against a thick winter sky) as he read to her from the monitor how Plato had learned of the gold tablets, the Hermetic Writings so-called, and had made a pilgrimage to study them, but was prevented by the prevailing Egyptian ruler from entering the pyramids. Plato then bequeathed to his pupil, Aristotle, the task of gaining access to the secret teachings, and years later, Aristotle took advantage of Alexander the Great’s Egyptian campaign to visit a pyramid and slip inside it, using maps and codes passed on to him by Plato, but he succeeded in bringing out only one of the tablets (one on which a segment of the love story was inscribed) before “the doors were closed to him.” Masked Beauty fumed. “Ooh-la-la,” she said. “Now, I suppose I’ll have to read that damned Aristotle. Oh, I know St. Thomas Aquinas ranked him second only to Christ, but those pagan know-it-alls only give me an ache in the head.”
At any rate, by the time the abbess had copied down in her kitty-whisker script all that cyberspace had coughed up regarding pyramids and esoteric Islam, she was overdue for a nap. As she gathered her notebooks and pencils, her tea things, and her veil, she announced that dinner that evening would be served a half hour later than usual. “We are first holding a special vespers,” she said. “To commemorate the birthday of Sister Domino. You are welcome to attend.”
Swiveling from the computer, where he was about to take yet another peek at the e-mail from Maestra (Suzy in “a speck of trouble”? What kind of trouble?), Switters blurted, “Today’s her birthday? September fifteenth? I wish somebody had told me. Will there be a party?”
“No, no,” Masked Beauty assured him. “Only the prayer service. Around here, a natal anniversary is an opportunity to give thanks for the gift of life, not an excuse to indulge in frivolous pleasures.”
Since, out there in the wilds, he could conceive of nothing else to give her, Switters spent the afternoon trying to compose a poem for Domino. After numerous false starts, he finally finished one, folded it, and concealed it in his breast pocket, thinking it highly improbable that he would actually present it to her. The poetic effort, in fact, so outwitted him that when it was over he felt compelled to flee the compound, slipping through the mammoth gate to stilt precariously for more than an hour over stone and sand in the ancient, clean, open desert, where the air was wavy and the sun rays strong, where everything smelled of infinity, star-ash, and ozone, and occasional gusts of scorpion-breath almost blew him off his stilts.
As he stiffly negotiated the ruined sodiums and hardened salts, he managed to step back mentally (he prided himself on periodic full consciousness) and watch himself negotiate; watch himself frankenstein along, one rigid step at a time, in the mineral heat; watch himself fret over a silly sonnet written to a nun for whom he had feelings that might not bear examination; watch himself try to interpret the Maestra-Suzy alliance and its potential implications (if any); watch himself speculate on how he was going to get out of Syria and into the Amazon so that he might petition a pointy-headed witchman to lift a taboo—and as he watched he said to himself, “Switters, methinks you may have successfully realized at least one of your childhood ambitions.” That ambition, he recalled with a dry-throated chuckle, was to avoid in every way possible an ordained and narrow life. Were he as given to self-analysis as he was to self-observation, he might have seen fit to ask if he hadn’t overshot the mark in that regard, but since, despite everything, he was feeling pretty good about being alive, the question of excess was never addressed.
Broiled pink and abraded still pinker, as if lightly chewed by the invisible teeth of eternity, he returned, panting, leg muscles aching, to the oasis, quaffed a whole pitcher of water, enjoyed a sponge bath (a washing that transcended maintenance), and then a snooze. When, refreshed and cologne splashed, he set off at last through the violet tingle—the smokeless smoke—of Syrian dusk, he was bound for supper but primed for party.
The sisters were already at table. He could hear Maria Deux’s dour voice saying grace as he approached the dining hall door. He passed the hall without entering, going instead around back to the kitchen, where in a small attached shed, a kind of pantry annex, he knew the order’s wine to be stored. The pantry door was padlocked, causing him to wonder if it had always been secured in that fashion or if special precautions had been taken as a result of his residency at the oasis.
Had he patience, a simple tool or two (a hairpin or nail file would have sufficed), and a lower ebb of spirit, he surely could have picked the lock, for, despite his imperfect dexterity, he had successfully completed the burglary course at Langley. In his present mood, however, he summarily rejected that option, returning, instead, to his room to wrest the Beretta from its crocodile-hide cocoon. Back at the pantry, he aimed the weapon at the padlock, and with a little grunt of enthusiasm (a truncated wahoo, one might reasonably categorize it), he squeezed off the rounds necessary to blow apart the lock, adding one or two more for good measure. For a split second, tiny burrs and shards of steel whizzed angrily in all directions, like metallic bees in a bug riot.
Alas, the pantry proved to contain but six bottles of wine. It was his own fault, the increased frequency of festivities from monthly Italian nights to weekly blues nights having depleted the stock. “One must make do,” he muttered philosophically, and after jamming the pistol in his waistband, he gathered up the sextet of dusty green bottles and with difficulty, due to the manner in which a burden of almost any size could create an imbalance for a stiltwalker, tottered off to the dining hall.
The sisters had left the table and were bunched in the doorway, Domino out in front like the leader of the pack. He realized then that the gunshots had frightened them: they probably imagined themselves under another terrorist attack. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to give you a scare. Firearms are to Americans what fine food and drink are to the French: can’t hold a proper celebration without them.” He treated the women to his sweetest, most luminous grin. “And we do, I understand, have something to celebrate this evening.” He swung the grin like a searchlight, narrowing its beam on Domino. “Pippi, please relieve me of this libationary freight—and uncork it, if you would, so that it might inhale, to salubrious effect, nature’s precious oxygens.” Nearly toppling over in the process, he thrust the bottles upon the redhead and then clomped off to fetch his computer cum disk player. “Don’t lament,” he called. “Our separation will be most endurably brief.”
True to his word, he was back in minutes, though he did not sit with them until he had unleashed Frank Zappa’s atonal, polyphonic rendition of “Happy Birthday” upon the gathering. Deliberately shunning Domino’s table (she shared it, as usual, with Bob, Pippi, and ZuZu), he took a seat (his feet planted carefully upon a chair rung) with those four diners—a relatively older group—presided over by Masked Beauty. To appease him, perhaps, there was an open bottle of wine on each table. The other bottles had disappeared. “One must make do,” he mumbled, dividing his table’s wine into four glasses (Maria Deux declined on the grounds of a troubled liver), and persuading, with forceful gestures, the other table to follow suit.
Gazing at Domino along a line of sight that bisected the wad of bubblegum that God, not wishing to defile his golden throne, had deposited on Masked Beauty’s compliant proboscis, Switters raised his glass. All present held
