Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  Not every childless woman was so accompanied—it may have been only those who at least partially, on some level, wanted the girls and boys that they, for whatever reason, chose not to conceive—but when Switters looked hard at Domino, as he did now, he saw her saturated with other lives. He wondered if she was aware of her phantom brood, but he wasn’t about to ask. If he broached that subject, his imp might start messing with his coconut, and the next thing he knew, he could be inquiring about what she thought of his potential as a father. He liked children and children liked him, better than most adults liked him, but men such as Switters didn’t breed in captivity. Oh, no. What he was going to ask, and not for the first time, was why she and Masked Beauty, having slowly, steadily moved away from much of the old patriarchal doctrine, still desired to be a part of the traditional Church. The reasons she gave were never very clear, though he surmised that they were not dissimilar to the emotions that caused him to sometimes muse wistfully about the CIA.

  Before he could raise the question, however, they were distracted by a noise. It came from close to the compound, there where the bud-weighted boughs of an orange tree overhung the wall. The sound was that species of muffled hack related to an inverse yap, as if someone were trying to suppress a cough. Switters exposed Mr. Beretta to the light of the moon. In a whisper he asked Domino to push his chair toward the noise, and she complied, tensely but calmly.

  As they drew nearer, a form stirred in the shadows. Grasping the pistol with both hands, Switters yelled something in Arabic, wondering as he did so why he hadn’t chosen Italian. Instantly two figures darted from the wall. Two short figures. Two small figures. Two doglike figures. Loping off into the dunes, they unraveled a ribbon of musk behind them.

  Domino smiled with relief. “I—I don’t know the English,” she said.

  “Jackals,” Switters informed her. “Rare to see one these days. We’ve had ourselves a lucky little nature ramble.”

  His nose was turned up at the jackal smell. Her nose was turned up at his pistol. She stood scowling at its beautiful ugliness. She shook her head, and moonbeams exposed the underlying red in her hair. “When you were a secret agent,” she asked, “did you have a double-oh seven? License to kill?”

  “Me? Double-oh seven?” He laughed. “Negative, darling. I had a double-oh oh. License to wahoo.”

  She knew that by wahoo he was referring to a cry of exhilaration, an exclamation of nonsensical joy, and she knew, also, that it had a basis in Scripture—”Make a joyful noise unto the Lord”—but she was not so sure she could distinguish between that kind of defiant exuberance and mere childish bravado. She continued to fix him with a half-frown of affectionate disapproval.

  Meanwhile, Switters’s attention was focused long and hard in the direction of the fleeing jackals. After a while, Domino said, “I didn’t know you were so interested in wildlife.” He might have rejoined that wildlife was the only life that did interest him, but he just kept looking and listening, saying nothing. Those jackals concerned him. They gave him an evil feeling. He was aware that while few people kept jackals as pets because of their odor, the animals were easily tamed. Conceivably, some party could have trained the jackals to skulk around outside the compound walls. A bug could have been concealed in the fur of one or both of them, a listening device that would record any voice within fifty yards spoken above a whisper. Vatican security might neither possess equipment that sophisticated nor a mentality that ingenious or perverse, but the black-bag tekkies at the pickle factory were capable of that and more. Much more.

  If Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald had been interested enough in him to have him tailed in Seattle, he quite likely had had his name put on satellite. That meant that anytime anyone typed the name Switters into an on-line computer or spoke the name Switters into a telephone—anywhere in the world—it would be recorded and pinpointed geographically and chronologically, by one of the covert satellites that the company had had put in orbit around the planet.

  As he considered that possibility, sitting there beneath a granary of stars that were not all stars, he was struck by the thought that the giant bulbs, the shiny black and copper pods that he’d seen circling the globe when his consciousness was massively enlarged by yopo and ayahuasca; the bulbs that called themselves our overlords and boasted that they ran the show; the pods that the shaman dismissed as a bunch of big blowhards . . . well, what if the master bulbs were just a more evolved generation of intelligence satellites? The fact that Amazonian Indians had apparently been familiar with them for decades, if not centuries, meant little in a realm where the past was today and today was tomorrow: the connectedness of electronic technology and primal mythology seemed not only plausible but inevitable when one accepted the scientific theory and mystical principle of the interpenetration of realities. Wasn’t advanced cybernetics a hell of a lot closer to meditative and psychedelic states than to the meat-and-potatoes commerce of everyday life?

  “Hey! Where have you gone?” Domino shook him, though rather timidly, for he still clasped the weapon that she now called his “hisser.”

  Switters cleared his thoughts. He decided not to share his concerns about the jackals. It was probably silly, anyway. So far, there had been no inkling that the company was involved in or even interested in this dispute over the Fatima prophecy. Sure, the Vatican and the CIA sometimes cooperated—after all, they both believed they had a huge stake in controlling human behavior and maintaining the status quo—but, more than likely, the Church would prefer to keep the Fatima fracas under its own steeple. He reminded himself that it was easy to grow paranoid in the desert. The absence of shadows caused the mind to invent them. History had proven this a hundred times over in a landscape where one man’s mirage was another man’s divine revelation.

  No, he couldn’t permit himself to start hallucinating company spooks with obedience-school jackals. One thing he knew for certain, however, was that Scanlani and his bosses were going to be infuriated when the Pachomians refused their offer. That meant he wasn’t going to be leaving Syria anytime soon. And in the skeleton-dry wind, he could hear the rift widening between him and three of the four human beings he cared about most.

  When, in the fortnight following Christmas, he had failed to show up in Seattle, Maestra had e-mailed him and Bobby had phoned. Their frustration with him was almost explosive. Then, about a week later, an e-mail had arrived from Suzy. The first two communiqués had been anticipated, but Suzy’s caught him off guard, and while its tone was very different, it was no less affecting.

  When you were just a sprout, wrote his grandmother, I advised you never to trust anybody who didn’t have secrets. Even though it’s sound advice, I could kick myself for impressing it so firmly on your soft little brain. I’ve created a damn monster. Maestra wanted him home, wanted him out of that wheelchair or off of “those crazy damn sticks,” and if her requests weren’t promptly honored, she wanted a detailed explanation of why they were not. His clandestine ways had become intolerable. She intimated that she was on her last breath and if he was to see her alive, he’d better not tarry. He was fairly sure the deathbed bit was an act, and he wrote back to remind her that she’d also taught him that guilt was a useless emotion. It didn’t prevent him from worrying, however, especially when, undoubtedly piqued by his flip attitude and lack of candor, she’d not written back.

  As for Bobby, he’d practically shouted into the phone. “Where the hell are you, podner?! Are you still there?”

  “You mean here? I’m afraid so.”

  “With her?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What, then?”

  After a pause, Switters had answered, “Not your need to know.” There was a modicum of sweet revenge in that reply, but any pleasure he took from it was short-lived. Well aware that Switters was working neither for the company nor Audubon Poe, Case was not, as he put it, “buying one Texas ounce of that ‘need-to-know’ horseshit.”

  Dehydrating Okinawan rice paddie
s with the heat of his frustration, Bobby said that he’d always considered Switters a cut above the other loose cannons, jumping beans, jackrabbits, flakes, wild cards, and hot potatoes with whom, due to his own shortcomings as a responsible citizen, he’d been doomed to associate, but he, Switters, had turned out to be the worst of the lot. “It come upon me one night in Bangkok, actually, that if you didn’t back offen that fucking James Joyce, it was one day gonna drive you over the lip—and now it’s went and done it.”

  Bobby said he had leave coming up and he was going to use it to take matters in his own hands. He threatened to blow into Syria like a twister out of Hondo. Switters had half believed him. But Bobby hadn’t appeared. Neither had he e-mailed or called.

  The letter from his stepsister arrived later in January, arrived soundlessly, spectrally, no wood fibers to give it substance, no ink to ferry its essence to the eyes the way blood ferries oxygen to the brain; arrived as a standardized arrangement of backlit glyphs upon a cold glass panel; unscented with Suzy’s perfume, unlicked by her wet tongue, devoid not merely of tearstains but of pizza or lipstick traces; an aseptic transmission whose ephemerality was all the more pronounced due to the fact that his computer was programmed to trash-can after six hours any and all messages for reasons of security (that contemptible word!). With a quaint old low-tech pencil, Switters had copied it onto the flyleaf of Finnegans Wake (talk about your stained paper: wine, beer, cigar ash, soy sauce, fish sauce, gravy, blood, unspeakable and indefinable vegetable-animal-and-mineral deposits, the kind of splotches that might enliven the bedsheets of a Third World beach motel). He reread it once a week. No more, no less.

  Hi,

  Guess you weren’t expecting to hear from me after so long a time, huh? There’s a whole lot I’ve been wanting to talk to you about and I’d been saving it until I saw you again. Everyone was so disappointed when you didn’t come home at New Years. This really isn’t your home though is it? And I know you have a good reason for doing whatever it is you’re doing now. And Switters I also understand that you must have had good reasons for behaving how you did in Sacramento. I’m very very sorry I tripped out that night. I should of trusted you more instead of thinking you were a big liar or had gone crazy or something. I guess I was just confused. I was such a baby back then, such a child. I think about what a spank girl I was back then and it’s like I want to hurl my breakfast or something. I can’t believe it was only a little over a year ago! I’m 17 now, as you ought to know, and a lot has changed with me. Time is a funny thing isn’t it? A planet made out of rock and water takes a few turns in space or whatever and suddenly you’re a different person than you were before. It’s a weird system if you ask me. Anyway I’m here in Seattle now and enjoying the rain. Ha ha. There’s some pretty cool kids at my new school but Maestra won’t let me hang with them much. She’s really great though, and when I get bummed she plays me old blues records and stuff. Reads to me out of Shakespeare who I totally love! I don’t want to bore you with my life but this socked-in morning finds me in a whirl of questions bubbling up from the unseen below or from somewhere over the rainbow maybe. You’re way far the wisest man I’ve ever known and you could always make anything in life seem not just okay but funny and grand. You did hit on me a lot but I know it came from a place of passion and love and I know you’re a person with deep feelings that you hide behind your crazy antics and I also know that you’d protect me with your life from anything or anybody that ever tried to hurt me. Now that I’m older and more “experienced” you would find me a horse of a different color as they say. Please forgive me for being such a clueless brat in the past. And please keep a little bit of me in your heart. There’s a piece of you in mine and it grows as I grow.

  I miss you,

  Suzy

  On at least one occasion when he read over her letter, Switters had unlocked the hidden compartment in his famous crocodile valise, retrieved a particular nylon and cotton vesture (stained almost as colorfully as the flyleaf of Finnegans), and dangled it in the candlelight, its twin cups, though as empty as potholes, mirroring the atmospheres as well as the hemispheres of his brain. Perhaps not surprisingly, Switters, as an erstwhile cyberneticist, had some theories about the bicameral brain, its fractile reflection of a universe steeped in paradox: how, simultaneously and inseparably, it functioned both as a computer running programs and as a program being run, how its mastery of preemphasis often failed to protect it against random signals, viruses, or the meddling of “imps.” That sort of thing. Of course, when it’s taken into account that Switters was a fellow who liked to pretend that his corporeal being was energized and regulated by a ball of mystic white light—a kind of luminous coconut—it’s understandable that reservations might arise regarding the trustworthiness of his views.

  In any case, when he went on-line to compose a reply to Suzy’s letter, he resisted any impulse to refer to the brain’s tendencies—dramatically pronounced in schizophrenics, virtually nonexistent in many “missing links”—toward ambivalent or contradictory states. The example of her bra notwithstanding, such theorizing would have come across as esoteric if not entirely irrelevant, and, worse, might have veered dangerously close to self-analysis.

  Neither could he consider writing to Suzy in the roguish manner he’d favored in the past, telling her, for example, that between her honey thighs she was “as tight as a plastic doll, as squeaky as a Styrofoam sandwich, as soft and sweet and salty as periwinkle pie.” No, as accurate as such comparisons still might be, he no longer felt impelled or entitled to make them.

  Instead, after deleting about a dozen different approaches, he limited his response to a simple declaration of affectionate appreciation. He was grateful for her words, he said, and would not forget them or take them lightly. “ ‘The men don’t know,’ “ he concluded, quoting a line from Willie Dixon, a bluesman he was sure was in Maestra’s record collection, “ ‘but the little girls understand.’ “

  Of all of mankind’s inventions, the helicopter was the most totalitarian. Barbarically invasive, it used its vertical maneuverability—its capacity to climb, descend, hover, and whirl—as a means of raucously raiding life’s tender corners, scattering to the rats and dogs the last sweet crumbs of human privacy. Peasants in their paddies, Humboldt hippies in their pot patches, happy revelers at inner-city block parties, drivers on freeways, sunbathers lazing nude on deserted beaches, all were prey, sitting ducks for those angry gunships with their authoritarian voices and prying eyes. The sound of the rotary blades—cop cop cop cop cop!!—was entirely appropriate for a craft that had come to symbolize police-state potentiality and to mechanically embody every libertarian’s nightmare.

  Any winged aircraft, from the smallest Cessna prop puppy to the biggest Boeing behemoth, was a romantic artifact, a swoozy sculpture, a sailing thing of irresistible appeal; but a helicopter . . . a helicopter was like a funky old shoetree that a witch had caused to levitate. Chunky and uncouth, it was as if some weird kid had planted a homemade whirligig in the fat of a turd.

  Switters hated helicopters. Even though twice—once in Burma, once on the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border—they had John Wayned down to lift him out of dire situations, he never saw one without fantasizing about shooting it out of the air (the fact that they sometimes could be used for good, and thus win the approval of the naive masses, served only to make their evil more insidious). When, on March 20, a whirlybird (cute nickname for such a hellish machine) dropped from the new spring upon the oasis, its needling motor sewing stitches in the sky, its blades chopping ozone into bluish kindling, whipping the first blossoms off the orange trees, stirring up dust and chicken feathers, turning leaves inside out like pocketknives, coughing smoke in the faces of frantic cuckoos, Switters barely could restrain himself from trying to make his fantasy a reality.

  The helicopter hadn’t landed. Neither had it fired upon them. It buzzed the compound, low and loud, a half-dozen times and then whump-whumped off in the direction of Damascus. However,
its intrusion, coming less than seventy-two hours after Domino had e-mailed Scanlani to reject the Church’s offer, left little doubt in Switters’s mind about the mood in Rome. Domino wasn’t as convinced as he of the connection, but he’d warned her all along that the Vatican wouldn’t suffer her rejection with mercy or charity.

  Switters was especially concerned because this helicopter, unlike the ones that had flown over them back in January, did not bear the insignia of Syrian military. It bore, in fact, no insignia at all, an omission with uncomfortable implications. Once again he had to wonder if Langley might not be involved in this religious rumpus, an eerie feeling that intensified when, on two more occasions, he discovered jackals lurking beneath the walls of the paper-snaked Eden. Domino scoffed at the notion of eavesdropping jackals until he told her about the several hundred espionage dolphins that regularly plied the world’s bays and harbors for their handlers in the CIA. His former colleagues were hardly uningenious.

  “It’s likely to get ugly from now on, sister love. I don’t want to alarm anybody, but I smell smoke in the cabin, and the exits are not clearly marked.”

  As stubborn as Domino was, he eventually convinced her to call an emergency meeting to formulate a defense strategy. The helicopter, which had torn down her clothesline and mussed her hair, provided a bit of an impetus.

  That evening in the conference room, Switters was the last to arrive. He entered wearing a shabby suit (a year of crude laundry had taken its toll) and a sheepish grin. His laptop, it seemed, had just received an e-mail from Rome in which, much to his astonishment, the Church had backed down, agreeing, in exchange for the Fatima prophecy, to refrock the Pachomians without any undue restrictions on their rights of free speech.