the proximity of Domino’s exposed fundament—as dreadfully inviting as the entrance to an unexplored Egyptian tomb—was reminding him both of the jitter-fingered monkey’s electrifying probe and the request he’d squeamishly denied that uninhibited young woman down in Lima?
Dissatisfied with their exchange of e-mail, Bobby Case finally took the risk of calling Switters on the satellite phone. The date was November 22, 1998, which, incidentally, happened to be the thirty-fifth anniversary of the death of Aldous Huxley. It was also the thirty-fifth anniversary of what, in a more perfect world, would have been the secondary and less newsworthy of the two events, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In truth, the call probably wasn’t all that risky. The CIA liked to keep tabs on its former employees, particularly those disemployed in an uncordial atmosphere, and even more particularly those it suspected of continued unfavorable attitudes and activities (if for no other reason, Switters’s association with Audubon Poe qualified him as a person of interest), but as it scrambled to establish a new identity, scrambled, indeed, to justify its existence in a so-called post-Cold-War world, the agency would have assigned Switters an insultingly low priority. Still, like every intelligence organization, the CIA was fueled by paranoia, and one never knew when a cowboy might sprout a wild hair.
Bobby weighed those things, for his own sake as well as his friend’s. Then, he made the call. Langley would have pinpointed the Swit’s location months ago, he reasoned, and, besides, this conversation was to be of a decidedly personal nature. Wasn’t it?
As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as personal as Bobby might have liked. So evasive was Switters about his reasons for postponing his return to the Amazon that Capt. Case began to imagine all sorts of goings-on—political, mystical, and sexual—at the Syrian oasis. He began to wonder if he hadn’t ought to be at the convent himself, joining in the fun. In the end, however, he began to conclude, from things said and unsaid, that Switters might actually have lost his head over one of the molting French penguins or “some unhappy shit like that.”
So Bobby, who was well trained in the art of firing rockets, let one fly. He mentioned that he’d contacted Maestra recently from Hawaii, where he’d gone for a few days of R and R, just to see if she had any insight into why her damn fool grandson wasn’t tending to business (i.e., getting his legs back, in order that he might walk the Switters walk as well as talk the Switters talk). Suzy had answered the phone. “Yep, son, I knew the instant she said ‘hello’ it was your Suzy. Her voice was so hot and sweet I damn near had to open a window and send out for insulin.” Bobby paused, and in the silence he could picture Switters pinkening around the edges of what he styled his “dueling scars,” could virtually hear, all the way from Okinawa, the clenching of those teeth that Norman Rockwell might have loved (in an eight-year-old boy; in a man Switters’s age, they would have scared the corny illustrator half out of his smock).
After an effective interval, Bobby continued. “We had us a nice little chat. She told me she’d been upset and confused for a spell but that she was older now—she’s turned seventeen, you know: where does the time go?—and she’d got a better handle on things. ‘I miss him a lot,’ she said, and I could hear it in her voice like an upholsterer who’s swallowed one too many tacks. She says she dreams about you—there’s folks that’d consider that a bona fide nightmare—and worries about you, you being off unsafe somewhere in a damn wheelchair.
“Of course, I informed her that you’d soon be doing what was necessary to get up on your hind legs again like a man. And that then you’d surely come and take her for a stroll downtown. She was so pleased she near about squealed like a monkey. Say, do you remember that time in Burma when—”
“Forget it, Bobby!”
“Listen, I put in for leave last month so I could go down to Peru with you to fix things with your witch doctor, and then had to cancel it. I’m putting in for another one, and I aim to take it. Thirty days is too long to spend in Texas now that the golfers have got ahold of the place, so iffen I’m not gonna be cruising the Amazon with you, guess I’ll have to fall by Seattle, see what I can do for Maestra and Suzy in your unexplained absence.”
Switters knew he was being manipulated, but he didn’t hesitate. “Right after Christmas,” he said firmly. “Ere the needles have browned upon the tree. Ere the reindeer dung has rolled off the roof. Ere the egg has gone rancid in the last of the nog. Ere Baby Jesus has been crammed back in the box.”
“I’m banking on it, podner,” said Capt. Case.
But that afternoon, even as he fondled the old rag of a training bra for the first time in nearly a year, Switters had an eerie sensation that he’d made a pledge that couldn’t be kept.
Damascus is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.
It was on the road to Damascus (then already six thousand years old) that the apostle Paul (formerly Saul) suffered an epileptic seizure. Pounded to his knees by the relentless strobe of the sun, an egg-white mousse of spittle sudsing from his baked lips, Paul imagined he heard the big boom-boom voice of God (formerly Yahweh) admonishing him to scorn sensuality, snub women, and subdue nature, instructions that he subsequently incorporated into the foundation of the early Church (what came to be called “Christianity” was really Paulinism).
It was on the road to Damascus, now a paved highway lined with pizza parlors, car lots, and ice cream stands, that Switters, too, experienced a painful pulsation of lights behind his eyes, knocked sideways by his first migraine in eight months. Switters did not hear God’s basso profundo. Above the horns, shouts, canned Arabic music, amplified prayers, and ubiquitous unmuffled motors—the cacophony thickened dramatically as they neared the city—he registered not a whisper of heavenly guidance, although at that point he might have welcomed some succor if not some actual advice.
If Switters’s head ached twice as badly as usual, it may have been because he was of two minds.
Having rejected Deir ez-Zur as being too close to the Turkish border troubles, and Palmyra as being too far from anyplace useful, he had elected to ride the supply truck cum desert taxi all the way to Damascus. From there, he would have to negotiate a stealthy entry into Lebanon. (Maybe he’d drop in on Sol Glissant, take a dip in one of his pools, have one last gander at Matisse’s
Thus, as through the intermingling smokes of falafel fires and lunatic traffic he entered the city where the alphabet was born and zero invented, Switters was of two minds. Each of them was agleam. Both of them were hurting.
To report that he was of two minds is not to imply, exactly, that he was torn by dilemma. Though hardly a stranger to contrariety, Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life, as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or. (To say that he took
Nevertheless, Switters could be said to be of two minds for the simple reason that, on the outskirts of Damascus, his synaptic electric bill was being split, fifty-fifty, by the process of anticipation and the process of memory, the former yanking his thoughts onward, the latter drawing them back.
In the end, the migraine proved no match for those two processes. As vicious as the headache was, it barely blunted his vague but exciting mental foretaste of South America via Seattle, while his memory of Christmas in Domino’s tower was too acute to be overridden at all.
On Christmas Eve, Switters had attended vespers. He went expecting to be bored in a nostalgic and not altogether displeasing way. Those expectations were met. Afterward, roast lemon chicken with garlic sausage stuffing was served in the dining hall. There were walnut cookies and hot date tarts. The last remaining bottle of old wine—the sole survivor from the Domino birthday bash—was uncorked, and he led the sisters in a toast to the rebirth of the Divine in the world.
