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

  “We’ve been here ever since. Nine of us in all. Nine mavericks. Once we were settled, my aunt informed us that she was henceforth to be called ‘Masked Beauty’ and that each of us was also to be renamed. She asked us each to remember the name that as a child we would have preferred to the one our parents had given us. Most children have such a wish name, do you know? Well, we got five Marias and three Theresas—and Masked Beauty shouted, ‘No no no! Not the name of your heroine, the woman you were taught to most admire, but your dream name, your whisper name, the one you called yourself when you pretended alone in your room to be somebody else.’ Okay, we tried again, and we still got a couple of Marias. So, we have Maria Une, who first spoke to you at the gate, and Maria Deux. We have also Pippi, ZuZu, Mustang Sally, Fannie, and Bob.”

  “Bob?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “What about Domino?”

  “I was lazy and just remembered my nickname from high school in Philadelphia.”

  “Domino Thiry. I get it, though I wish I didn’t. That phrase was used to hoodwink the American public into supporting our criminal war against Vietnam, and it was popularized if not coined by the pus-brained pluto, John Foster Dulles.” Hesitant, he held the pellet of spittle against his gum for several seconds before at last discharging it as daintily as possible toward a target area beneath the cot. His restraint notwithstanding, the act caused Sister Domino to look at him askance.

  Once they had assumed, in ceremony, their new names, Masked Beauty showed her sisters the document she had been hiding for her uncle, the late Pierre Cardinal Thiry. He’d never retrieved it, perhaps preferring that it be lost. But just as certain cloisters are built around a relic—the middle finger bone of a saint, for example, or the charred trouser cuff of a martyr—the Pachomians allowed their tiny community to coalesce around the document. This, even though the document’s text had relevance neither to St. Pachomius nor to any particular canon to which the sisterhood adhered, except maybe a tenuous connection to the desert lands, and the nature of that connection was not for Switters to know. Yet, the Pachomians were the document’s guardians and protectors; they made it both their charge and mortar, their onus and distinction, a symbolic yet tangible secret fulcrum at the center of their turning and toiling for humanity and Christ.

  “Caravans used to travel by here,” said Domino. “Camel caravans as well as motor convoys, but in the past ten years or so, we see only the rare band of nomads, such as the one that left you on our doorstep, and a truck that passes every few weeks carrying passengers, freight, and mail between Damascus and Deir ez-Zur. There’s no road, of course, only what nature has left of the old caravan trail.”

  Because of their isolation and the meagerness of their ecclesiastical stipend, the Pachomian sisters had had to make their oasis as self-supporting as possible. For at least a decade, the compound had been used as a training center and command post for officers of the Druse militia, and its agricultural aspects had been neglected. It took the nuns several years of hard labor to restore productivity. They cleaned, cleared, tilled, planted, pruned, and husbanded, and in between, transformed the Druse mosque into their chapel. During that period, neither the Church nor society heard any noise from them, and they were largely forgotten.

  Toward the end of the eighties, however, letters, essays, and articles bearing the signature or byline of Masked Beauty began to appear in publications both religious and secular, and while they sometimes ranged far and wide, the core of these writings was an unabashed appeal for papal sanction of birth control. In addition to the misery that unlimited procreation caused women and children, Masked Beauty argued that much of the poverty, violence, addiction, ignorance, mental illness, pollution, and climate changes plaguing humankind in general had major roots in careless or coerced reproduction. It would not be mega-weapons, asteroids, earthquakes, or extraterrestrials that destroyed the earth, she wrote, but excessive population. The prophetic “fire next time” referred to loin heat that, if not properly banked, could only lead eventually to cataclysmic global warming.

  “A foregone conclusion,” said Switters, “what with six billion gobbling gullets and an equal number of squirting anuses. But religious fundamentalists—and New Age fluffheads, I should add—can barely wait for the earth to be destroyed. Doomsday is the jackpot on their golden slot machine, the day they’ll be allowed to dig their quivering fork into all that pie in the sky. And have you considered, Sister D., that the afterworld is likely to be even more crowded than our little ball of clay because if every Christian who ever lived is camping there . . . well, that’s a lot of pie-gobbling, although I can’t imagine there’d be squirting anuses in Heaven. Can you? Wouldn’t God have some alternative system?”

  For an answer, Domino shot him a look of pity, scorn, and revulsion. It was deserved, he thought. He’d spat on her floor and made crude remarks; she must think him an absolute lout. How could she understand the exorcisement explicit in the expectoration ritual or know that he used a phrase such as “squirting anuses” only in the abstract? Were he actually to picture one such opening—let alone billions—performing that base function, he’d be more revolted than she. After all, she was a woman who could ferry the chamber pots of the sick, whereas he thought of the rectum, on those very rare occasions when he thought of it at all, as a receptacle for white light, the intake valve through which that mystic energy that Bobby Case’s wise ol’ boys called kundalini entered the body to slither up the spinal column in radiant coils, like the Serpent bringing divine knowledge to the unsuspecting bumpkins of Eden. Enlightenment or excrement: O anus, what doth thy truest purpose be?

  “I’m sorry about the scatological undertones,” he said. It was the third time he had apologized to her in as many days, and sensing that he was a man unaccustomed to apology, she was moved to forgive him. “Overtones,” she corrected him, with a tolerant smile, and then concluded her story.

  The Vatican eventually figured out that Masked Beauty was Abbess Croetine. It ordered her to cease and desist. She refused. Other Pachomians, including Domino, began to publish letters as well. The sisters agitated. The Church complained. And threatened. It was a battle that raged slowly for years. Then, a fortnight ago, it had come to a head. Masked Beauty was summoned to Damascus to face charges at an ecclesiastical hearing presided over by a trio of bishops dispatched from Rome. Citing poor health, the abbess sent Domino in her stead. The tribunal proved immune to the sisterhood’s arguments and Domino’s charms. It officially dissolved the Order of St. Pachomius and commanded its members back to Europe for discipline and reassignment. On behalf of Pachomius, father of all nuns, on behalf of overbooked wombs around the world, Domino told the bishops to go fly a cotton-picking kite.

  “They couldn’t evict us. They don’t own this property. We took a vote and decided to stay on. Only Fannie was of a mind to flee, but she relented. Afraid, perhaps, of Asmodeus, her incubus. Then, yesterday after lunch, while you were resting, a courier arrived here from Damascus. He brought the news that we most feared, that we never thought would really happen. We had been excommunicated. Every single one of us. Thrown out of the Church. Forever.”

  “So you’re not a nun anymore,” Switters said, hoping he didn’t sound too pleased about it.

  She tightened her lips. The defiance in her eyes was like the fizz in a fuse. “I will always be a nun. And we’ll carry on with our worship and our work just as before. Only now there will be no—how do you call it?—man in the middle. No intermediary. We’ll report directly to God. And God alone.”

  “Well,” said Switters, searching for words of comfort or support, “maybe that’s the way it was always meant to be. In the Koran, Mohammed says that direct, personal, one-on-one contact is the only way to Allah, not that the mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs paid him much heed. It’s also written in the Koran that, ‘The gates of paradise open wide for he who can make his companions laugh,’ but in all of Islam only the Sufi seem to have gotten t
he message. Of course, there’re no comedians whatsoever in the Christian scheme of things. If a single giggle ever fluttered the lips of Our Savior, the Gospels neglect to report it. I’m guessing that the gene that disposes people to be true believers may render them immune to wit.”

  He was on the verge of bringing up Maestra’s missing-link theory and maybe a word or two about Today Is Tomorrow when it occurred to him that he’d gone tangential, which was accepted, even expected, at a C.R.A.F.T. Club donnybrook but generally unappreciated in ordinary company. He smiled sympathetically and shut his mouth.

  “And what is your faith, exactly, Mr. Switters? What do you believe in?”

  “Umm. Well. I try not to.”

  “You try not to believe?”

  “That’s right. I’m on the run from the Killer B’s.”

  “Pardon? What have killer bees to do with? . . .”

  “B for Belief. B for Belonging. The B’s that lead to most of the killing in the world. If you don’t Belong among us, then you’re our inferior, or our enemy, or both; and you can’t Belong with us unless you Believe what we Believe. Maybe not even then, but it certainly helps. Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.”

  “But human beings have—”

  “A need to belong somewhere, to believe in something? Yeah, Sister—if I may still call you that—they seem to. It’s virtually genetic. I’m on guard against it, and it still overtakes me. The concern is that we may annihilate ourselves before we can evolve, or mutate, beyond it; but you may rest assured that, even if we survive, as long as we’re driven to Belong and Believe, we’ll never be at peace, and we’ll never be free.”

  “Ooh-la-la! That’s crazy. A human who belongs to no group or believes in nothing? What kind of robot, what lost animal? No longer human at all.”

  “In the sense that a frog is no longer a tadpole, you may be right. And it may never come to pass, or have to. We just might learn enough tolerance, and jettison enough fear and ego, to compensate. The neutral angels could prevail: neutral victory being a particularly intriguing oxymoron. In the meantime, though, Sister—if I may still call you that—can’t you hear them buzzing? Listen to the swarm that Be-lief and Be-longing have Be-got. B-boundaries. B-borderlines. B-blood B-bonds. B-blood B-brothers. B-bloodlust. B-bloodbath. B-bloody B-bloody. B-bang B-bang. B-boom B-boom. B-blast. B-bludgeon. B-batter. B-blow up. B-bomb. B-butcher. B-break. B-blindside. B-bushwack. Be-head. B-blackball. Be-tray. B-bullets. B-blades. B-booby traps. B-bazookas. B-bayonets. B-brute force. B-barbarism. B-babylon. B-babel. Be-elzebub. Be-etlejuice. B-bureaucracy. B-bagpipes. B-beanie B-babies.”

  “Beanie Babies? The kiddie stuffed toys?”

  “Uh, sorry, that just slipped in. And, obviously, there’re good things that begin with B, too. Bee-r, for example. B-biscuits. The Be-atles. B-Broadway. B-beinas.”

  “Bei——?”

  He wasn’t about to explain that beina was the Catalonian for, as Audubon Poe put it, a woman’s treasure. So, he threw in triumphantly, as if he’d been saving it for last, “The B-ible.”

  “So, you do think the Bible a good thing?”

  “Umm. Well. To be-labor my apiarian analogy: the honey that’s dipped from that busy hive can be sweet and nourishing, or it can be hallucinogenic and deadly. All too frequently, the latter is confused with the former. Dip with caution. Reader be-ware.”

  Domino studied him, but he couldn’t tell if it was with appreciation or contempt. To break the silence, and perhaps to win favor, he revealed that less than a year before, he had been considering joining the Catholic Church. He didn’t mention Suzy.

  “What?! Are you mad? How could you possibly be a member of the Church and yet not belong or believe?”

  “Easy. It’s the best way. To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.”

  Understanding him to mean that to practice Christ’s teachings and not believe in them was a finer thing than to fervently believe in them but never put them into practice, she had to nod in tenuous agreement. He was standing hypocrisy on its head. “Is that the way you managed to work for the CIA?”

  “Yeah, probably, now that you mention it. It’s called participation without attachment.”

  “But I don’t . . .”

  “Because the CIA is an extremist organization that has the unusual ability to function outside the compromising channels of normal political and commercial restraint, it has the potential to kick out the blocks here and there and help the world to happen. The original teachings of Jesus and Mohammed et al are also extreme. If a person can participate in those extreme systems without identifying with the humbug they’ve spawned, without becoming attached to, say, patriotism in the case of the CIA, or moralistic zeal, in the case of the Church, then that throbbing nerve that runs from the hypothalamus to the trigger finger might be sedated, minds might be liberated, and—who knows?—the logjam of orthodoxy and certitude might be broken, allowing the—what shall we call it?—river of human affairs to gurgle off freely in new and unexpected directions. Something like that. Cha-cha-cha.”

  “Is that your faith then? Freedom and unpredictability?”

  He finished off his tea. “My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn’t make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?”

  For a moment, she seemed taken aback. Then she snapped, “Comfort.”

  “Heh!” He sounded so much like Maestra he almost gave himself a bracelet.

  “Hope.”

  “I can’t do the math, but wouldn’t x amount of hope cancel out x amount of faith? I mean, if you have faith the sun’s going to rise in the morning, you don’t have to hope it will.”

  “Solace.”

  “Solace? That’s why God made fermented beverages and the blues.”

  “Salvation.”

  “From what? Aren’t you talking about some form of long-term, no-premium, afterworldly fire insurance?”

  Domino didn’t respond, and he worried that he might have gone too far. “Of course,” he said, “I’ve also never seen the point of chicken wings. Either for the chicken, who doesn’t fly, or for the diner, who doesn’t get enough meat to justify all the grease it takes to make them halfway edible.”

  A sudden blink of wistfulness caused her eyes to grow even softer than usual. “Tell me, do they still have the Philly cheese steak?”

  “You bet they do. There are some things a person can count on.”

  She smiled, and it was, he thought, like a cross between the Taj Mahal and a jukebox. “Is there anything right now that is making you feel glad about being alive?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. I’m in a foreign country, illegally, in a mysterious convent, inappropriately, and in conversation with the blue nude’s niece, improbably. What’s not to enjoy?”

  Briefly, very briefly, she closed her palms and fingers around the fists he’d rested on the armrests. “And in a wheelchair, unfortunately.” She stood. “Okay. I must go now and visit my auntie. The excommunication has hit Masked Beauty quite hard. Hit all of us, really. But we will go forward.” She straightened the sweet-smelling sprig behind her ear. She moved away.

  Near the door, she paused. “Now that the patriarchal authorities have found our tiny band of desert nuns unfit to be in their Church, we’re having to redefine our relationship to our religion. In addition to that, we have been trying for some years now to redefine our relationship to Christ, to Mary, to God. God is a fixed point, naturally, God is eternal and absolute, God doesn’t change. But man’s concept of God, man’s interpretation of God, the way we view God has changed many times over history. Sometimes we think of him as more intimate, other times more impersonal and aloof; in some centuries he was seen to be primarily angry and judgmental and vengeful; in others, more loving and accepting. Our image of God evolves. Yes? And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like
if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that? We concentrate on such matters here, and for that reason I very much appreciate my talk with you, for while I may disagree with many of your absurd notions, you show me how it’s possible to think freely, without constraints or limitations or preconceptions. That’s helpful.”

  “We absurdists are always pleased to be of service.”

  “I also appreciate getting to tell you our own story. Because even though you refer to our convent as ‘mysterious,’ you now can see that our ceremony at the bonfire was a logical, pragmatic thing, like all of our activities. We are as simple as a candle, Mr. Switters. There’s no magic here, no mystery.”

  “No, I guess not,” he conceded. “Except, of course, for the document.”

  Domino blanched. “Ah, yes,” she sighed, after a time. “The document. The Serpent in our Eden.”

  Maria Une delivered his lunch, and after it had been absorbed by that ball of mystic white light that he imagined to occupy his lower torso, its nutrients reconverted into photons, the chaff transformed into what he was prone to label “dark matter,” as if bodily waste were the ash from a dead star, he e-mailed Maestra an account of the curious blue nude coincidence. Then, hating it all the while, he exercised for well over an hour, turning his cot into a gym mat, a platform upon which he performed sit-ups, push-ups, crunches, and other forms of self-torture as required by the tyranny of maintenance.