by Tom Robbins
If Switters thought that that was the end of it, that he could quit the convent now with an easy mind and swivel his attentions to the furtherance of his personal agenda, the fleshing out of the film script of his life, including a scene in which he, with the hard rubber charm of Bogart, would persuade a picturesque Amazonian medicine man to lift a quaint taboo, well, if that’s what he thought, he was mistaken. Because the very next day, Domino contacted Scanlani and brazenly upped the ante.
Although it was completely against his best interest—and probably hers as well—Switters couldn’t help but be delighted by her rash action.
Dawn’s last cock-a-doodle was still aquiver in the red rooster’s craw when she knocked at his door. Unfazed by the nakedness obvious beneath his thin muslin sheet, she plopped her plumping bottom (time’s dung beetle was rolling her buttocks into lush round balls) onto his bedside stool and shared her intentions. If the Vatican fathers wanted the Fatima document, she told him, they were going to have to meet yet another demand. To wit: they would have to agree to disclose to the public the full text of the third prophecy within six months of its receipt, to disseminate its contents and make them widely known.
“A stipulation guaranteed to ferment patriarchal peevishness, I would venture,” said Switters.
She shrugged. She smiled. She said, “C’est la vie.”
“But what about Masked Beauty? I’ve been under the impression that she’s always insisted on keeping the prophecy secret because of the doubt and pessimism it could generate among earth’s happy Christians.”
“Precisely. That’s why I’ve come to you. My aunt has never really heard your interpretation of the Virgin’s pyramid reference. She still suspects it’s an admission of the superior truth of Islam. I need you to explain, to convince her otherwise.” She paused. Her eyes seemed to stop and savor a particular bulge in the bedclothes. “Peut-être convince me, as well,” she mumbled.
They agreed to meet in Masked Beauty’s quarters in an hour. Domino appeared reluctant to leave his company, and when she did, he had the distinct feeling that she was going to her room to indulge in the covert delicious shame that dogged not merely Fannie but most in her vocation.
Aroused by the image, Switters considered a similar, perhaps synchronous indulgence but decided instead to review the prophecies, about which he maintained, not altogether uncharacteristically, ambivalent feelings. Obviously, the predictions, whether Marian or Lucian in origin, had correctly called some shots. (Was it mere coincidence? Did it matter?) Moreover, certain aspects of them about which he’d held reservations had, over time, been elucidated by Domino to his general satisfaction. For example, regarding the first prophecy, where the Virgin was alleged to have warned that “a night illuminated by an unknown light” would be the sign that God was ready to punish his misbehaving lookalikes with war and famine, Domino had contended that that was an accurate foretelling of a unique (she used the word with trepidation, worrying that she should have said “unusual” instead) meteorological event. On January 25, 1938, much of the Northern Hemisphere was dazzled and panicked by what has been described as the most dramatic and bizarre display of the aurora borealis in recorded history. Undulating bands of vivid color, wide, violent, and continuous throughout the night, were accompanied by snapping and crackling sounds, causing thousands to believe that the world was ablaze and doomsday was on the front burner. Less than ninety days after that awesome atmospheric laser circus, Hitler marched into Austria, and the great war that Fatima had predicted was off and running. Switters searched “northern lights” on the Internet and soon found that Domino’s facts were accurate.
In the second prophecy, he’d been put off by all that “consecration of Russia” business. As near as he could figure, Fatima’s command was, at best, Red-baiting and, at worst, a modern example of misguided evangelical zeal being used to justify Roman Catholic imperialism. It hadn’t worked in this case, but it conjured up images of black-robed priests walking arm in arm with genocidal conquistadors, administering absolutions while the loot—and the bodies—piled up. True, Fatima hadn’t advocated a forced conversion of Russia, and to consecrate, i.e., to declare or make sacred, was in and of itself a noble gesture. Yet, it smacked somehow of self-serving expansionism or, at least, condescension.
Not so, argued Domino. She pointed out that the Virgin had spoken of “the error of Russia,” and Switters had to concur that no honest, intelligent person could claim any longer that Communism, however well-intentioned, was anything less than a wretched economic and psychological mistake. However, that was not quite the point, according to Domino. While it had been popular in reactionary circles to paint the Fatima Virgin as a sort of cold warrior, prodding the holy armies of capitalism to subdue the godless Commies, Our Lady was actually saying something quite different. She was, in fact, promoting a revitalization of the Christian faith, a return to the original teachings of Jesus, the rebel rabbi who so vigorously scorned the kind of worldly pursuits that had come, a few centuries after his death, to preoccupy a corrupt and power-mad Church. If the Vatican fathers were proud and foolish and materialistic, and though it pained her to admit it, Domino believed they were; if Rome was spiritually broken beyond repair, and this, too, she’d come to believe; then where could the spiritual center go to fix itself, to reestablish itself on those principles of Jesus that mankind had generally found just too damn difficult to follow?
“To the individual heart,” replied Switters. “The only church that ever was.”
His answer startled Domino, caught her by such surprise that after jerking upright, she slowly drooped forward in her chair, like a sunflower that could no longer bear the weight of its crown; and for thirty seconds or so, she was so lost in thought that her orbs were kind of an inky smear. He squeezed her knee (one of those familiarities in which he rarely anymore indulged) and the eyes winked back on, like modem lights after a power surge. “I meant geographically,” she said. “Where could Christ’s renewed Church recenter itself in the physical world?”
Switters thought: Wall Street? Disneyland? Devil’s Island? To him, the location of Catholic world headquarters was so irrelevant to anything remotely significant that he didn’t bother to venture a serious guess.
“There was nowhere in Western Europe that was any improvement over Rome, and the United States of America was not Jesus’s style.”
“Too bouncy,” agreed Switters.
“Christ always shunned the high and mighty; so we are told. He preferred to mingle with the whores and publicans and sinners, he directed his message to the wayward and downtrodden. Is this not so? Well, in Russia there was a vast population of materially and spiritually impoverished souls, lost and longing for change. It would have been a clean slate, a fertile field. What better way to deal with an unholy land than to thrust upon it the mantle of holiness? Yes? Oui? To replace a bad king with an honest peasant, to replace our imperious pope with a converted Bolshevik, wouldn’t this be an action true to the stark spirit of Jesus? Perhaps equally as important, shifting the cornerstone of Christianity to Russia would have served to heal the tragic schism between the Western and Eastern Orthodox faiths and to reunite their rites. So much suffering on so many levels might have been avoided if the Church had had the grace to heed its Mother’s words. In the stillness of her Immaculate Heart, the hurly-burly antics of Stalin would have seemed like some cruel slapstick, comic and stupid, and few would have supported him. That was in 1917, remember, when there was time.”
Reviewing Domino’s words on that spring morning, he repeated the phrase to himself: “when there was time.” Did the fact—and it certainly appeared to be a fact—that history was accelerating mean that there was less time? Or more? Were there fewer beans in the jar, or were the beans simply pouring in at such a furious pace that they were creating a vortex? He knew that at the center of every cyclone there was a calm circle, a space into which time’s tentacles did not seem to reach. Was that tondo of stillness what was m
eant, then, by the odd phrase, “my Immaculate Heart”?
Intrigued, he sat zazen on his cot for thirty minutes—thirty minutes as measured by those dials and digits that seemed to have so little to do with that void into which meditative stillness always transported him. (He supposed Immaculate Heart was as good a label for it as any other.)
Centered now, he felt he was properly prepared to hypothesize about Today Is Tomorrow. However, on the way to Masked Beauty’s chambers, he stilted by the pantry shed and picked up a bottle of wine. Maria Une protested that it was still too young to drink, but he responded that in the Immaculate Heart, terms such as “too young” were relative if not inapplicable. The old cook was uncertain how to take that reference, and while she studied him for signs of sacrilege, he pushed aside the thoughts of Suzy that the remark had unintentionally engendered.
Then, as he was badgering Maria Une for a corkscrew, he believed he heard the jackals again, yapping just beyond the wall in broad daylight. It took him a minute to realize that it was only Bob and Mustang Sally chortling over some private joke down by the onion beds. Was he becoming paranoid? No, at least not when compared to Skeeter Washington, who, admiring the stars one evening on the deck of Poe’s boat, was heard to say, “If the universe be expanding, they gotta be something chasing it.”
There was a faint lilac smudge where the wart used to stand. A visual whisper had replaced the visual cackle, the seeable caw. When candlelight struck it, it seemed a dot of bluish fog, a nail scar from an ancient crucifixion, a pinpoint of shadow cast by a migratory moth. Three months after separation from her divine wad of tissue, Masked Beauty continued to mark its absence by compulsively rubbing and pulling at her nose, like one of those compassionate zoo apes that openly toys with its genitals in order to relieve the guilt of visiting schoolchildren.
Caressing her snout, Masked Beauty glanced from the wine bottle to Domino and back again. Pushing her hair from her face, Domino glanced from the wine bottle to Masked Beauty and back again. Switters smiled weakly. “All those sponges in the ocean,” he said, “it’s a wonder there’s any water left.” Ah, the power of the non sequitur! Not knowing how to respond, the two women put away the tea things and wiped the dust from a set of wineglasses. Domino was a bit nervous about how her aunt would react to Switters’s interpretation of the pyramid prediction, Masked Beauty was clearly uncomfortable without a veil—or rather, she was uncomfortable without a mask to mask—but once they grew accustomed to the idea, they both welcomed a glass of early morning wine. The women sipped, and Switters, as was his practice, gulped. They were mostly silent; he, with each swallow, became more verbose.
Testing limits of credibility, he told the abbess everything he knew about the Kandakandero shaman with the pyramid-shaped head: his origins, his potions and powders, his fatalistic despair over the white man’s invasion of his forest, his discovery of humor and his attempts to appropriate its magic, his theory that laughter was a physical force that could be used both as a shield and as a spirit canoe in which the wisest and bravest—the Real People—could navigate the river that separated and connected the Two Worlds.
“Which two worlds? Why, Heaven and earth, if you please. Life and death. Nature and technology. Yin and yang.”
“You mean the female and the male?” asked the abbess.
“In a sense. More precisely, more fundamentally, it’s light and darkness. Light and darkness without any moral implications. Good and evil exist only in the biomolecular realm. In the atomic realm, such notions become useless, and in the electronic realm, they disappear altogether.”
Switters talked briefly about particle physics and the search for ever smaller elementary particles. “Recently physicists have started to conclude that in the entire universe there may be only two particles. Not two kinds of particles, mind you, but two particles, period. One with a positive charge, one with a negative. And listen to this: the two particles can exchange charges, the negative can trade off to become positive and vice versa. So, in a sense, there’s only one particle in the universe, it being a pair whose attributes are interchangeable.”
“What makes them decide to trade places?” asked Domino.
“Excellent question, sister love.” Switters took a swig of wine. It was, indeed, very young, but it possessed a toddler’s bashful bravado. “Maybe they get bored. I don’t know. Figure that out and you can go eat lunch with God. Twice a week. Make him wash the dishes.”
Domino made an expression somewhere between a wince and a smile. Masked Beauty’s was closer to the wince. The abbess ran a finger along the length of her nose. Her nose resembled an inflated map of the Yucatán Peninsula, the bluish spot indicating the lost capital of the Mayas.
“It gets better,” said Switters. “This is only theory, there’s no empirical evidence, but the belief now is that when they crack the final nut, split the most minute particle—and we’re talking about something smaller than a neutrino—what they’ll find inside, at the absolute fundamental level of the universe, is an electrified vacuum, an energy field in which light and darkness intermingle. The dark is as black as a bogman’s toejam, and the light is brighter than God’s front teeth; and they spiral together, entwined like a couple of snakes. They coil around each other, the light and the darkness, and they absorb each other continuously, yet they never cancel each other out. You get the picture. Except there isn’t any picture. It’s more on the order of music. Except the ear can’t hear it. So it’s like feeling, emotion, some absolutely pristine feeling. It’s like, uh, it’s like . . . love.”
He paused to drink, and Masked Beauty studied him. “Are you versed in matters of love, Mr. Switters?”
Switters shot Domino an embarrassed look. The look he got back had as much insolence as shyness in it. “I love myself,” he said. “But it’s unrequited.”
Both women laughed at this. Then Domino said, “Mr. Switters is experienced in love, auntie, but not in pure love.”
(Switters didn’t argue, but had Bobby Case been present, the spy pilot would have objected, “Why, hell, ladies, pure love’s the only kind of love this silly hombre knows at all.”)
Rising to light another stick of incense, the abbess commented that while their discussion of advanced physics was certainly interesting, she failed to detect its bearing on the subject at hand.
“Well,” said Switters, “this pyramid-headed curandero from deep in the Amazonian jungle seems to have concluded that light and darkness can merge in a similar fashion on the biomolecular plane, the social plane. He says it occurs during laughter. That a people who could move in the primal realm of laughter could live free of all of life’s dualities. They would be the first since the original men, the ancestors of the Real People, to live in harmony with the fundamental essence of the universe. The essence our quantum physicists are talking about. Today Is Tomorrow says the civilized man can’t perpetuate that state because he lacks the Kandakandero knowledge of the different levels of reality, he’s become emotionally invested in one narrow, absurdly simplistic view of the nature of existence; and the Indians can’t do it because they lack the buoyancy of the civilized man’s humor. But the people strong and nimble enough to combine unlimited intellectual flexibility with the mysterious energy of the laugh, well, they would become . . .”
“Enlightened?” ventured the abbess.
“Enlightened and endarkened,” Switters corrected her. “Enlightened and endarkened. The ultimate.”
Masked Beauty wasn’t convinced. “A sense of humor is a fine thing,” she agreed, “but it is not a way of life, and it certainly is not a means of serving our Lord. This strange savage of yours does not even know our Lord.”
“Why does that matter? Fatima said that in the next century—which pops out of the box in about nine months, by the way—the message that will bring unexpected joy and wisdom to a segment of humanity isn’t going to be coming from the Church of your Lord. Am I right? She said it will come from the direction of a pyramid. Well,
Today Is Tomorrow qualifies as a pyramid, as near as I can tell, and he’s got a much fresher message than Islam, including esoteric Islam, with which, if you factor in the Hermetic tradition, it has a little bit in common.” He gulped. “Mmm. This vintage possesses a rather touching innocence, don’t you think?”
“Yes, and it is almost gone,” the abbess noted. She’d never seen anyone drain a bottle of wine so wholeheartedly. “Perhaps I am just a stupid old woman, but I fail to understand how your shaman’s ideas are at all practical or applicable. How can a mere sense of humor—”
“And a flexible, expansive definition of reality,” Switters reminded her.
“Okay, that as well. But in a troubled world such as ours, one cannot walk around laughing at everything like a mindless magpie. Where is the hope in that?”
He didn’t seem to have a ready response. Tugging at a curl, as if the pressure on his scalp might activate cerebration, he cleared his throat but said nothing. He was entertaining notions about how a radical and active sense of humor could puncture the sterile bubble of bourgeois respectability, how it could destroy smug illusions and in so doing, strengthen the soul; how if the essence could somehow be extracted from laughter, that essence might prove less like sound than like flavor, the flavor of the soul tasting itself at the raw bar of the absolute. Yet, he was neither informed enough (he hadn’t previously given it much thought) or drunk enough to put such notions into words. What the hell? Since when was he the shaman’s mouthpiece?
Observing his hesitation, Domino spoke up. “I don’t believe Mr. Switters is advocating mindless laughter, auntie. I don’t believe he is advocating anything. He’s simply trying to solve the riddle of the third prophecy. And I must say, I find it an attractive alternative to our own interpretation.”