Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  Should he not have stayed with them indefinitely, devoting his skills and energies to preserving their way of life? The khan, after all, had offered him one of his daughters. “Take your pick among the five,” the khan had said, ever the perfect host, and Switters could sense them blushing behind their thin white veils, while the gold coins they wore strung around their heads jingled slightly, as if vibrated by hidden shudders of nuptial anticipation. Their chins were tattooed up to the base of their noses, and at mealtime each would squirt milk from a ewe’s teat directly into her teacup. He tried to imagine marriage to such a girl. His hypothetical adulthood-prevention serum would be superfluous, for they already had been inoculated with an ancient genetic Euro-Asian plasma that kept them soft and fiery and curious and frisky to the grave. Imagine romping with a two-legged patchouli-oiled bear cub every moonlit evening on the carpets she would have woven for his own black tent! How primal, how lurid, how timeless and funky and mysterious and frank!

  Yet . . .

  She would never serve anything but yogurt for breakfast, beer and biscuits and red-eye gravy stricken from his diet forever.

  She would never discuss Finnegans Wake with him, not even on Bloomsday eve.

  And neither she nor her kin would get his jokes: for the rest of his life, every bon mot, every wisecrack, destined to fall on disregarding ears.

  They wouldn’t get his jokes even if he told them in Arabic. The Bedouins weren’t stiff and somber by any means. They smiled when pleased, which was fairly often, and they laughed as well, but it was a kind of harmlessly mocking laughter, almost invariably directed at an act or an object—his undershorts with the cartoon pandas, for example—that they considered ridiculous. Unintentional slapstick might delight them, but a deliberate witticism was as alien to their sensibility as a fixed-rate mortgage. Comedy, as such, was not an aspect of Bedouin consciousness, nor of the consciousness of many other archaically traditioned, non-Western peoples.

  Begrudgingly, Switters was starting to think that Today Is Tomorrow might be on to something. That goddamned pyramid-headed, grub-eating, drug-drinking, curse-leveling savage from the Amazon bush could have been right on the money when he concluded that it was Western man’s comedic sense—his penchant to jibe and quip and pun and satirize and play humorous games with words and images in order to provoke laughter—that was his greatest strength, his defining talent, his unique contribution to the composite soul of the planet.

  Conversely, civilized man’s great weakness, his flaw, his undoing, perhaps, was his technologically and/or religiously sponsored disconnection to nature and to that disputed dimension of reality sometimes referred to as the “spirit world,” both of which were areas to which the Bedouin, the Kandakandero, and their ilk related with ease and understanding, a kind of innate genius, and harmonious grace. Today Is Tomorrow had suggested that if civilized man’s humor (and the imagination and individualism that spawned it) could somehow be wed to primitive man’s organic wisdom and extradimensional pipeline, the union would result in something truly wondrous and supremely real, the finally consummated marriage of darkness and light.

  An interesting idea, the shaman’s proposal, but probably even less likely to be achieved than the happy marriage of a Berkeley-educated former CIA agent to a tattooed, teat-squeezing daughter of the khan.

  Those were the things Switters was thinking as the nomad band moved deeper and deeper into the distant, slowly rising hills, and he, in the opposite direction, moved closer and closer to the mud walls of the small oasis.

  Three of the khan’s daughters—yes, he was still thinking of them—had blue eyes, betraying their ancestral origins on Asia’s northern steppes. Theirs was not the Sol Glissant swimming-pool blue of Suzy’s eyes, however, but a sapphire blue, almost an anthracite blue, as if hardened into being by millions of pounds of chthonian thrust. Their hair was so black that it, too, was nearly blue, and in a dozen other ways they were antithetical to Suzy. Yet, the oldest of them was no more than seventeen, so . . . so what? Seriously. So what? He had certainly not hooked up with the nomads because of young girls, and if they played any part in his impulse to leave, it was due neither to fear nor guilt (emotions quite irrelevant in that milieu) but rather because he had detected something in the girlish laughter wafting from the oasis during the downpour that had seemed glutinous, pulpy, and quilted, as if textured with layers the fleecy Bedouin titters lacked.

  However, to what extent those stratified peals had influenced his sudden urge to explore the place, he couldn’t honestly say. As mentioned, he was quietly crackling with an emboldened abandon in the aftermath of the Iraqi caper, there was wahoo in his tank, and that was quite likely a more accurate explanation for his whim than the curiosity aroused by distant laughter. In any case, the oasis was decidedly silent now.

  It sat there, almost loomed there, like a mud ship becalmed in a rusty bay. Its contours, its lines, were simple but sensuous, organic but intrusive, utilitarian to a fundamental degree yet somehow oddly fanciful, like a collaboration between Antoni Gaudí and a termite colony. The walls, which enclosed an area of about seven or eight acres, were rounded on top, and the single tower that rose above the flat roofs of the two principal buildings inside was also round and bulbous, creating the effect that the whole compound, architecturally at least, had been formed in a gelatin mold. All that was lacking was a dollop of gritty whipped cream. The air around it was so awiggle with heat that one could almost hear a soft shimmering, but not the smallest sound escaped the compound itself. It seemed, in fact, deserted.

  The gate—and there was only one—was arched, wooden, and solid. High on the gate was an area of latticed grillwork, but even when standing on his wheelchair, Switters was unable to quite peer through it. From the outside, the compound was as blank as it was hushed. Hanging from a wooden post beside the gate was an iron bell about the size of a football, and beside the bellrope a sign hand-lettered in Arabic and French. It read: TRADESMEN, RING THREE TIMES/ THOSE IN NEED, RING TWICE/THE GODLESS SHOULD NOT RING AT ALL.

  Switters considered those options for quite a long while before giving the bell exactly one resounding gong.

  After several minutes, having received no response, he next gave the bellrope four strong yanks. He waited. The sun was barbecuing the back of his neck, and his canteen was running on empty. What if he was not admitted? Left out in the heat and desolation? Those responsible for the laughter couldn’t have vanished in so short a time. Were they deliberately ignoring him? Hiding from him? Trained, perhaps, to respond only to three rings or two, might his unauthorized signals have bewildered them or blown some pre-electrical circuit inside? Switters was always nettled when expected to choose between two modes of behavior, two political, social, or theological systems, two objects or two (allegedly) mutually exclusive delights; between hot and cold, tart and sweet, funny and serious, sacred and profane, Apollonian and Dionysian, apples and oranges, paper and plastic, smoking and nonsmoking, right and wrong. Why only a pair of choices? And why not choose both? Who was the legislator of these dichotomies? Yahweh, who insisted the angels choose between him and his partner, Lucifer? And are tradesmen, as implied here, never in need? Did the bell instructions infer that any visitor who believed in God would, per se, either be needy or have something to sell?

  His skull-pot, fairly boiling inside his crumpled Panama hat, was not cooled by this cogitating. He was on the verge of swinging from the bellrope like a spastic Tarzan when he heard a scraping noise, like dog shit being scuffed from a jogging shoe, and looked up to see that the grill had slid open and was framing a human face.

  As near as he could tell, the face was female. It was also European, homely, and either middle-aged or elderly, as it was lightly wrinkled and sprigs of graying hair intruded upon its margins. The owner of the face was either standing on a box, or Switters had stumbled upon a nest of Amazons about which University of California basketball recruiters ought to be apprised, for she was staring down at him fr
om a height of more than seven feet.

  “Bonjour, monsieur. Qu’est-ce que vous cherchez?”

  “What am I looking for? The International House of Pancakes. I must have taken the wrong exit.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ran out of gas out past the old Johnson place, and I’m gonna be late for my Tupperware party. Can I use your phone to call Ross Perot?”

  “Mais, monsieur . . .”

  “I’m looking for this very establishment,” he said, switching to his best French, which had grown as moldy as Roquefort from lack of use. “What else would I be looking for in this. . . .” He paused to search for the French equivalent of neck of the woods, though even in English the expression was irrelevant here, there being no woods within hundreds of miles, indeed, not a single tree in any direction except those embosomed by the compound walls. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by. May I please come in?”

  The hospitality so prodigious in that arid corner of the world was not immediately forthcoming. After a time, the woman said, “I must consult with . . .” At first she said something that seemed to translate as “Masked Beauty,” but she quickly corrected herself and uttered, “the abbess.” Then she withdrew, leaving him wondering if this desert outpost to which he had been drawn was not some kind of convent.

  His suspicion would prove to be well founded, although the kind of convent it was, exactly, was not something he ever could have guessed.

  A quarter hour passed before the slot in the gate reopened. The face in the grill reported (in French) that the abbess wished to know more specifically the nature of his business. “I don’t have any business,” Switters replied. It was dawning on him that he might have made a dumb mistake in coming here. “I’m a simple wayfarer seeking temporary refuge from a stern climate.”

  “I see.” The woman removed her face from the grill and relayed his words to party or parties unseen. Behind the gate there was a low murmur of voices in what seemed both French and English. Then the face returned to inquire if he was not an American. He confessed. “I see,” said the woman, and again withdrew.

  A different face, noticeably younger, rosy as a ham hock, and congenial of smile appeared in the aperture. “Good day, sir,” this one said in lilting English. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m dreadfully afraid we can’t let you enter at the moment.” Her accent seemed to be Irish. “I’m the only one here now who speaks English, and I haven’t got any bleeding authority, if you’ll please excuse my coarse speech, so Masked Beauty or rather the mother superior’s sent word that your request can’t be properly considered until Sister Domino comes back. I’m sorry, sir. You’re not from the Church, are you, sir? That would be a different matter, naturally, but you’re not from the Church, now are you?”

  Switters hesitated a moment before responding, in imitation of R. Potney Smithe, “Bloody well not my end of the field.” He was encouraged when the new face seemed to suppress a giggle. “I’m Switters, free-lance errand boy and all-around acquired taste, prepared to exchange hard currency for a night’s lodging. And what’s your name, little darling?”

  The new face blushed. Its owner turned away, engaged in brief discussion with the unseen voices, then reappeared. “Sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait for herself.”

  “Wait how long?”

  “Oh, not more than a day or two, sir. She’ll be coming back from Damascus.”

  A day or two! “Wait where?”

  “Why, there’s a wee shade over there, sir.” She rolled her eyes toward a spot along the wall where an overhang of thickly leaved boughs cast a purplish shadow on the sand. “Bloody unaccommodating, ain’t it? I can talk like this because only you and God can understand me, and I don’t believe either you or God gives a pip. I’d like to hear how you got here in that bloody chair, but they’re pulling at my skirts. Good-bye, sir, and God bless.”

  “Water!” Switters called, as the grill slid shut. “L’eau, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Un moment,” a voice called back, and in about ten minutes the gate creaked open a few inches. In the crack there stood not the Irishwoman but the Frenchwoman to whom he’d spoken first. She shoved a pitcher of water and a plate of dried figs at him and quickly shut the gate.

  “Oh, well,” he sighed. He trundled the twenty feet or so to the shaded place, where he spread his blanket and lay down, his heels propped on the chair’s footrest, two inches above the ground. The water in the pitcher was cool. The figs had a faint taste of slida. He fell asleep and dreamed of woolly things.

  When he awoke it was night. Above him, all around him, the sky was a bolt of black velvet awaiting the portrait of Jesus or Elvis. Stars, like grains of opium, dusted it from edge to edge. In one far corner, the moon was rising. It looked like the head of an idol, a golden calf fattened on foxfire.

  Why was the air so torrid? It was his experience that the desert cooled quickly after dark. And summer was yet a month away. Not that it mattered, any more than it mattered that his muscles seemed loosened from his bones or that his bones were swimming in gasoline. He felt like the Sleeping Gypsy in Rousseau’s great painting, asleep with his eyes half open in a night alive with mystery and fever.

  Fever? It gradually occurred to him that it was he who was hot, not the air. The sweat drops on his brow were like tadpoles. They migrated down his neck as if in search of a pond. Still, he didn’t care. A night such as this was worth anything! His aching only gave pitch to its beauty.

  The stars hopped about like chigger bugs. The moon edged toward him. Once, he had the sensation that it was licking him with a great wounded tongue. He smelled orange blossoms. He was nauseated. He heard himself moan.

  His brain, lit as it now was by an unearthly radiance, accepted the fact that the fever that sickened him also protected him. It spun a cocoon around him. I am the larva of the New Man, he thought. But then he added, Much as the paperclip is the larva of the coathanger. He cackled wildly and wished that Bobby Case were there.

  Moonlight enveloped him like a clown suit—voluminous, chalky, theatrical—into which he was buttoned with fuzzy red pompons of fever. Inside it, his blood sang torch songs, sang them throughout the night, as he drifted in and out of dream and delirium, unable to distinguish the one from the other. When he vomited, it was a fizzy mixture of bile and dölyolu.

  At some point, he realized that the sun was beating him between the eyes like a stick. He covered his face with his hat and grieved for the enchantments of evening. Another time, he was sure he heard female voices, cautious but caring, and sensed that figures were gathered around him like the ghosts of dead Girl Scouts around a spectral weenie roast. I’m hot enough to toast marshmallows. He chuckled, pleased with himself for no good reason. The voices faded, but he became aware of a fresh pitcher of water beside him and a silk pillow under his head.

  Then, it was night again. He uncovered his face in time to see the moon spin into view like a salt-encrusted pinwheel. Although he couldn’t explain why, the night sky made him want to meow. He tried meowing once or twice, but it hurt his gums, which were swollen, and his throat, which felt like a scabbard two sizes too small for its sword. Oddly enough, it never occurred to him that he might be dying. For his composure he could probably thank fever, which nature had programmed to weave illusions of invincibility, and End of Time, whose yopo had dissolved boundaries between life and its extreme alternative (lesser alternatives being conformity, boredom, sobriety, consumerism, dogmatism, puritanism, legalism, and things of that sorry ilk). He realized, nonetheless, that he was in a kind of trouble for which he had not bargained.

  It was on the second afternoon—or, perhaps, the third—that he emerged from deep torpor to find his forehead being sponged by a vivacious, round-cheeked nun. He studied her face only seconds before blurting out, weakly but passionately, “I love you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she replied in American English with a faint French accent. “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind.”
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br />   That’s true, he thought, and shut his eyes, though he took her smile with him into stupor. The next time he awoke, he was inside the oasis.

  Whether an Amazonian germ colony had been insidiously incubating in his mucous recesses since Boquichicos, or whether he’d taken aboard a more overt yet equally malevolent family of microorganisms while in the company of the Bedouins or Kurds, he would never know. His nurse, the vivacious nun, had no name for his sickness, either in English or French, but she had a cure: sponge baths, sulfa drugs, and pots of herbal tea. Or else it simply ran its course. In any event, after a week of pain, fever, nausea, coma, and phantasmagorical rapture, his lids sprang open one morning like mousetraps in reverse, and he found himself, feeble yet curiously refreshed, upon a low cot in the tiny, blue-walled room that served the convent/oasis as a rudimentary infirmary. Sister Domino sat, as she had almost continually, on a stool at his side.

  She wore now a typically Syrian long cotton gown instead of the habit in which he’d first seen her. In truth, he had little or no recollection of their first meeting, and when informed later of his impromptu declaration of love for her, he was understandably embarrassed, although disinclined to deny he’d made such an avowal.

  Domino had opened the louvered door and thrown back the curtains on the glassless window, and in the strong sunlight, he saw that she was older than her voice and mannerisms had led him to believe. Older, but no less sparkling of eye. And her pert little nose would have been an apt protrusion from the most popular face at any teen queen dairy bar. As for her mouth (what the hell was he doing evaluating her mouth?), it was one of those perpetually rubicund embossments that resembled a plum squashed half out of its jacket and seemed always on the verge of a pout or a pucker—but only on the verge, for it was a strong mouth, there was a firmness and resolve in it, even when it almost pursed, even when it modestly smiled. She could smile from six o’clock to doomsday, and nobody would ever see her gums. She exuded warmth and tenderness, but on her own terms.