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

by Tom Robbins

  What was apparent was that the cardinal had decided the Virgin’s words, as upsetting as they may have been, needed to be preserved. He did not want them in his possession, however, preferring that they be held outside of Europe altogether. Thus, he sealed the sheet of papal stationery inside a heavy manila envelope and placed it in the care of his Jordan-bound, headstrong but trustworthy, disturbingly pretty (“Get thee behind me, Satan!”), young niece. For twenty-one years, Croetine hid the envelope, unaware of its contents. Upon her uncle’s death in 1981, she thought she ought to have a peek.

  Quite probably, Croetine was stunned—she never described her initial reaction—but a couple of years later, under fire from Rome and having changed her name to Masked Beauty, she called her renegade sisters, one by one, into her quarters, read to them the cardinal’s account of how he came to obtain Mary’s prophecy, and then let each nun read the message for herself. Now their shared and sacred secret, they bore it like a cross and protected it like a covenant, to what end they didn’t really know. What they did recognize was that it pasted them, all nine of them, inseparably one to another, a miraculous Marian mucilage—until Fannie had pried herself loose.

  “You were never completely taken with our Fannie,” Domino asserted. Naked, she lay sprawled on her side like a shipwrecked cello. As far as he could tell, there was neither accusation nor rivalry in her remark.

  “Not especially. Cute, but . . .”

  “She was chaste, but she wasn’t pure?” Domino thought she was starting to figure him out.

  “She was strange, but she wasn’t inexplicable.”

  “Oh? Du vrai? So, then you can explain why she ran away.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Then Fannie is inexplicable.”

  He shook his head. “There’s an explanation for her exodus. We just aren’t privy to it. Ignorance of the facts is no more synonymous with inexplicability than technical chastity is synonymous with purity.”

  “Ooh-la-la. Does this mean you’re going to write me another ticket?”

  “No, my subjective semantic opinions are not to be confused with the uniform rules impartially enforced by the brave men and women of the Grammar Police.” He stroked her smooth, voluptuous rump. “By the way, have I ever told you about the time Captain Case and I were strip-searched at a roadblock inside Burma? Rubber gloves were unavailable there, you see, and the militiamen, understandably not wishing to foul their fingers in our . . . what you French sometimes call l’entrée de artistes, had a pet monkey they’d trained to do the job for them. He was a smart little fellow with tiny paws as red as valentine candy, and—”

  “Switters! Why are you telling me this thing?”

  Good question. He was damned if he knew. Was it because that day in Burma he’d been harboring a secret document (though hardly a prophetic one) in his entrée de artistes? Or was it because 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) a
dmonishing 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 Blue Nude 1943.) From Lebanon, he figured it ought to be easy enough to scoot into Turkey. So—ahead of him, somewhere down the line, there was Redhook ale and red-eye gravy; there was air-conditioning and beaches, there were libraries and galleries and forests and skylines, there were Maestra and Bobby and Today Is Tomorrow and the thing that had always seduced him and pulled him forward: the promise of new adventure. There might even have been—dare he consider it?—Suzy. Those things and more waited at the farthest end of the Damascus road, and they put the wahoo in him. But back at the other end, behind him, receding quickly now, there was a compact little Eden, where the almonds were toasting and the cuckoos were crooning. Back there was the infamous last prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima. Back there was a magic wart and a magic hymen. Back there was Domino Thiry.

  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 both a both/and and an either/or approach may be overstating the extent of his yin/yanginess.) Wasn’t he friend to both God and the Devil? Moreover, there had never been any question about whether or not he would leave the Pachomian convent: his eventual departure was written in every little star that ever burped its hydrogen and farted its helium in the void above the roofless roof of the Rapunzel Suite. In fact, something had been revealed (suggested may be the more accurate word) at the convent that had propelled him from the place as unstoppably as if he, himself, were a belch of sidereal gas.

  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.

  “And to the kings and wise men who arrived from the East,” he said in French. In English he added, “Bearing gifts of frank incest and mirth.”

  Masked Beauty, who hadn’t comprehended the English, asked earnestly if Egypt was by any chance east of Bethlehem. Domino, who’d caught the pun, asked him to please refrain from sacrilege. She wagged a scolding-mother finger at him, with an expression that seemed to say, “Just wait until I get you home, young man!”

  He didn’t have long to wait. Following a brief songfest in front of the rather goofy Christmas tree that he had fashioned from date palm fronds and snowed with puffs of shaving cream, a caroling during which everybody sang “Silent Night” in French, English, and the original German, and Switters performed solo a paraphrase of “Jingle Bells” in a tootered-up chipmunk voice (“Jingle bells / Batman smells / Robin laid an egg”), the gathering broke up. He and Domino retired to the tower.

  In one corner she had made a smaller version of his dining-hall tree, substituting satin ribbons for the aerosol foam. Beneath it, on a brass tray, she’d placed three items:

  A bottle of arrack.

  A jar of petroleum jelly.

  A manila envelope with rumpled edges and an aura around it.

  Before the silent night, holy night was through, they’d investigate all three.

  The wine that Switters had helped press in October (from grapes that, on stilts, he’d helped to pick) was too young to be agreeably consumed. Domino had ordered the potent date liquor from Damascus as a holiday treat. He thanked her for her thoughtfulness, but, concerned that she might still be under the impression that he was a man who required alcohol’s flame to light the fuse of his zest, he attempted to assure her that arrack was a nonessential perk.

  “Alcohol,” he said, “is like one of those beasts that devours its own young.” He told her that strong drink, early on, gave birth to whole litters of insights and ideas and joyful japes. But if you didn’t round up those bright and witty cubs and whisk them away from her, if you allowed them to remain in her lair as the postpartum depression set in (if you kept drinking, in other words, beyond a certain point), she’d whirl on them and chew them up or swallow them alive, and in her dark maw she’d turn them to shit. He held out his cup. “I’ll have just one,” he said, secretly wishing she had bought him hashish, instead. (Wasn’t it ever thus with Christmas gifts?)

  Of course, he had more than one. More than two. But he didn’t overdo it, at least not by C.R.A.F.T. Club standards. Anyway, it turned out that the arrack was primarily for her own benefit. It prepared her for the other items on the tray. Starting with the petroleum jelly.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. Following an extended barrage of arrack-scented kisses, during which each of her sumptuous bulges had been lovingly measured and stroked; during which his lingam had been symbolically peeled and repeeled as if it were the principal effigy of a bacchantic banana cult, she had presented herself for lubrication.

  “Why not? If I am to live like a desert woman, I should love like a desert woman.” But she wasn’t sure. Wasn’t this one of the sins that had brought down Sodom?

  (The squish of the jelly. The socket that formed around his finger. The suction of the mouth that never eats. The flutter of the lashless eye. A pink noise that traveled up the spine like the whistle of a toy train. A troll burrow commandeered for a royal wedding. The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. The groom, in purple helmet, yet to arrive.)

  “Et tu?” she asked breathily. “And you? Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure I want every youness of you,” he answered, adding somewhat cryptically, “Ah, that road I’ve never traveled, where the oyster meets the fig!”

  But he wasn’t sure, either. Feeling that remote part of her anatomy commence to dilate, to grow, as it were, hospitable, it occurred to him—ominously, perhaps—that he knew the word for it in only four or five languages.

  (The bridegroom muscling through the cellar door. The rattle
of the plumbing. The furnace’s roar. Ceiling plaster cracking. Cans falling off the shelves. Basement flooding. Cat escaping up the chimney with a banshee yowl and its tail on fire. ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, everything was stirring and God save the mouse.)

  Afterward, they lay quietly in each other’s arms, exhausted, awed, a little stunned; bonded the way people are who have shared an experience about which others can never be told, and which, they intuit, will be forever remembered yet rarely referred to between themselves.

  Nearly an hour passed before Domino got up, lit several extra candles, poured them each another half-cup of arrack, and returned to their carpets, envelope in hand.

  “Every girl who enters a convent,” she began, by way of a preamble, “does so for two reasons, only one of which is religious. The secondary reasons vary from the girl to the girl, though you are correct when you are thinking—I know how the Switters mind works—that the reasons frequently involve some aspect of sexual fear, sexual guilt, or compensation for rejection by the opposite sex. It is true that there are few physically attractive nuns. But then there is the case of Masked Beauty, who became a nun for the same reason she generated that escargot on her nose: she was sick and tired of always being stared at by men.”

  Switters gulped the arrack. He was not a sipper. Domino didn’t notice. Her eyes were fixed on the envelope.

  “Some novices hear the call to serve humanity, to teach or to nurse. Those who enter closed convents, cloisters, choose to serve by being rather than by doing. That was what I chose. For my God, I would be instead of do, believing that the penance and reparations of the few can effect the salvation of the many. But I had, I must confess, other, less admirable motives. I wanted, you see, to belong to a special group, to be a member of a secret society that stood apart from the world, that operated closer to the bone, closer to the truth, closer to God’s mysteries than the rest of humankind. Perhaps it was due to the way I was spurned by the girls in my American school, the ones who kept me out of their clubs and called me ‘French whore’ and so forth. It doesn’t matter why, I still was guilty of elitist aspirations.”