“Have you noticed,” he asked in a faint, sweet voice just before he began to snore, “that nobody talks about the sandman anymore?”
Our hero must have received a heavy dusting of the sandman’s sedative grit because when he finally awoke, the sky was full of blue and the bed empty of Domino. The secret envelope and the telltale Vaseline were gone as well, though the English translation of the third prophecy could be seen protruding from his left tennis shoe. It was eight according to his watch, which meant it would have been eleven, Christmas Eve, in Seattle. He’d intended to ring his grandmother at an earlier hour, but even though it was now past her bedtime, he decided to call her. He held his breath as he punched in the numbers, fearful that Suzy might answer the phone, discouraged that she probably would not.
“This had better be good,” a sleepy voice grumbled.
“It’s a holiday greeting, full of love, warmth, and good cheer,” piped Switters.
“You!” Maestra growled. “I might have known. You think an old woman doesn’t need her rest just because it’s Santa Claus’s birthday? Next thing I know you’ll be calling me up at midnight on the Fourth of July to pledge allegiance to what’s left of the flag.” Then she softened and inquired as to his health and whereabouts—”Not that you’d be truthful about it”—and complained that he was off in some flea-bitten land somewhere, ignoring her, risking his hide and lying about it, when it was no longer of any necessity. “You can take the boy out of the CIA but you can’t take the CIA out of—”
“Merry X-mas, Maestra.”
“Heh! Merry X-mas, you no-good scamp. I miss you. Little Suzy misses you, too, for some unfathomable reason. It was you who put dirty ideas in the poor child’s head and led her astray. She’s gone to Sacramento for the holidays. What time is it, for God’s sake? That cute Captain Case checks up on us every now and then.
“No. I’m not. I’m on stilts.”
There was prolonged silence on the other end of the line, although he could tell from her breathing that she definitely hadn’t dozed off.
Maestra’s silence must have been contagious, for the oasis was unusually quiet that morning. He was soon to learn from a note pinned to the door of his room that Masked Beauty, rather abruptly, had decreed it a day of private devotion, during which the sisterhood would neither eat nor speak.
But was it folderol? Rilke, the poet whose verses had helped him get out of bed mornings in Berkeley, wrote, “The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” And Today Is Tomorrow, with his vision root, had offered the Swit an actual glimpse of the interpenetration of realities and chronologies. He could not with conviction deny that prophecy was theoretically possible. It was just that so much of it reeked of hysteria, esoterica, naivete, and humbug—and Fatima’s forewarnings were hardly free of that shrill cloy. Nevertheless . . .
The part that Switters found encouraging (though he would never admit to a need for encouragement), and the part that seemed to hurt Domino deep in her heart, was the business about a happy transformation of humanity (or, rather, a portion of humanity, an elite, perhaps) that would be cued not from the Church or the Kremlin but from pyramid territory. Domino believed this a foretelling of the triumph of the Islamic point of view, a victory of Mohammed’s metaphysical system over the institutions and metaphysics of Jesus Christ. Switters was not so sure. He kept harkening back to the material he’d pulled off the Net for Masked Beauty, the stuff about King Hermanos constructing the pyramids as vaults in which to shelter the revelations and secrets of the ancient sages. He’d wager neither his Beretta nor his Broadway show tunes on it, but he had an inkling that it was in those mystical, astrological, and alchemical texts known as the Hermetic Writings, rather than in the teachings of the Koran (and the dogma into which those teachings had been subsequently corrupted), that modern survivors would locate their cue as to how to attain and sustain a wise and joyful existence. After all, the Hermetic Writings were from the pyramids, were, in effect,
Thus it was that on Christmas Day, Switters had sat in the shade of a lemon tree and, while nibbling on leftover falafel that he’d stolen from Maria Une’s deserted kitchen, sump-pumped into his frontal lobe everything that he could remember about the Hermetic tradition.
Chickpea in his mouth, dry heat in his nostrils, papery leaf rustle and narcotic hen cluck in his ears, grainy wind on his skin, distant shimmer (like a flutter of god beards, a pulse of muslin-wrapped phosphorus) in his eyes, thirst never far from his throat: it was, in terms of the senses, a perfect situation in which to try to summon his faint knowledge of that series of writings (like the Bible, it was a disjointed, fragmented collection rather than a unified canon) known as the
Hermetic teachings, as best as he could recall, did not constitute a theology, but, rather, were designed as a practical guide to a sane and peaceful life of natural science, contemplation, and self-refinement. They did, however, in their effort to define and celebrate humanity’s place in the grand scheme of things, analyze at great length our relationship to the cosmos, before and after death. Their purpose, though, was to educate and improve; to enlarge the soul rather than to save it.
Well and good, Switters supposed. There was much to admire about a belief system that refused to proselytize or to water itself down to attract converts, that was nature friendly, body friendly (references abounded in the writings to various forms of sex magic), tolerant, respectful, and innocent of any recorded act of repression or bloodshed. A belief system that didn’t insist on belief? That did more good than harm? He’d award it six stars out of five and tell it to keep the change—bearing in mind all the while that a committee of dullards (who but the dull had time or patience to serve on committees?), a small infusion of earnest missing links, could pull it down to their squeaky level and enfeeble it almost overnight.
Still, the Hermetic tradition had deeper roots than any of our religions (though not as deep as shamanism), and was rumored to be preserved to this day by adepts who honored it without banging any pots and pans. On the other hand, those adepts (sometimes called the Invisible College) were few in number, weak in influence. Even in its heyday, Hermeticism had never—so far as anybody knew—turned a single tide of history. Was there any sound reason to reckon that there would occur a resurgence of Hermetic interest in the near next century (the millennial page was so close to flipping one could feel its latent breeze), and that it would thus inspire or instruct a significant minority of the corporate-molded populace to tune its cells to a higher frequency? No, there was something about such a scenario that just didn’t pitch. Granted, he wasn’t much of a consumer, but if this was what Fatima was selling, he was keeping Mr. Plastic in his wallet, at least until he kicked a few more tires and drove around the block.
Using one of the stilts, he swatted a winter lemon loose from a bough, catching it as it fell, a feat that filled him with immense pleasure. He reamed the fruit with a stiff finger, and for some perverse reason, thought of Domino and the intimacies of the previous night. Then, squeezing lemon juice onto a patty of cold falafel, smelling its citric aliveness, rolling its fresh solar acids—yellow, dynamic, and changeless—along the bronco spine of his tongue, he turned back to the curious prophecy.
What possible impetus could there be for a Hermetic renaissance? An unearthing, perhaps, of the fourteen golden tablets? He tried to imagine a team of Egyptologists brushing the sands of centuries from the plates, scanning their magnifying glasses along the columns of glyphs, suggesting, months or years later, during an announcement on CNN, that if beleaguered viewers were only to heed the oblique instructions so quaintly encoded in those ancient alchemical symbols, they might develop techniques and practices for overcoming their human limitations, and, in the process, a way to understand—and function smoothly within—an immutable cosmic order. But try as he might, he couldn’t envision the impact of such information lasting much beyond the cheeseburger and minivan commercials that would follow it. Hermeticism had its merits, certainly, but it lacked immediacy. It seemed so stereotypically occult as to be fusty and inane, like the wizard hat that Mickey Mouse wore when he played the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In his gut (where the ball of white light was spritzing the acerbic droplets of lemon juice), he
