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

  Meanwhile, she, personally, was fascinated by his Amazonian escapade, by the so-called curse upon him. She believed that she, through prayer, Christian ritual, and modern psychology could break the spell he believed himself to be under. Jesus was known to have cast out beaucoup demons, and over the centuries quite a few priests had followed his example. She saw no need for Switters to venture back into that dark, damp, teeming jungle—he was at heart a desert person, just like her. She was sure she could help him. It was her duty.

  Switters tugged repeatedly at one of the more springy of his barley-colored curls, as if it were a cheap plastic ripcord and he in Mexican freefall. “How long do I have to think it over?”

  “Oh, somewhere between twenty-four hours and twenty-four minutes. It depends upon the truck.”

  He tugged some more, he furrowed his brow. The small scars on his face seemed to furl into nodes. “Do you suppose I might lubricate my cognitive apparatus with some squeezings from your swell vineyard?”

  “But you haven’t eaten your breakfast. It’s not yet eight o’clock in the morning.”

  “The wine doesn’t know that. Wine only recognizes two temporal states: fermentation time and party time.”

  “Yes, but you must eat your omelet. The sausage in it is from chicken.”

  “Fine. I like chicken. Tastes just like parrot.”

  Without further protest, she went off to fetch a bottle of red, leaving him to ponder her unexpected proposal and—because his mind, even when unlubricated, was disposed toward extrapolatory zigzag—some advice given him years earlier concerning middle-aged palm trees.

  It was in the South Seas, on one of those sweet little coconut isles where the word for vagina has a preposterous number of vowels. (On second thought, maybe the vowels aren’t excessive, considering that vowels do possess a decidedly yonic quality, particularly when contrasted with the testosterone flavor of most consonants.) He was sitting at the end of a dock in the company of an American-born professional diver who, for an annual stipend from Langley, kept an eye on French activities in that part of Polynesia. Switters had come down from Bangkok to pass to him some new cryptography software. The delivery completed, they were sipping rum and gazing out to sea.

  “Man,” said Switters, “that’s a nasty-looking crowd of clouds over there, all rough and raggedy-assed and milling about, like a herd of white-trash shoppers just crawled out of shacks and sheds and trailer homes for the end-of-winter sale at Wal-Mart.”

  “Storm’s coming,” the diver predicted. “A big ‘un.”

  “Not a typhoon, I hope,” said Switters, glancing over his shoulder at the small, casually built wood-frame houses that dotted the unprotected shore. “I don’t think I’d want to be frolicking about this paradisiacal poker chip if a real typhoon bore down on it.”

  “Nothing quite like that today,” the diver assured him. “But do you know what to do if you’re ever caught on a beach like this during a typhoon or a hurricane? The company not teach you that? Well, you tie yourself halfway up the trunk of a middle-aged palm tree.”

  “Why so, pal?”

  “Elementary. An older palm tree will be dry inside and stiff and brittle. In a big gust, it’ll snap right off and drop you in the raging flood with a couple hundred pounds of tree trunk strapped to your back. A youngish tree may be graceful and slim and easy to climb, but ultimately it’s too springy, too lithe, too pliable: it’ll bend nearly double in the gale and dip you underwater and drown you dead. Your middle-aged palm, though, is just right. Solid, but still has enough sap in it to be somewhat limber. Neither break nor flop. It’ll give you the strong, flexible support you need to keep from being carried off or blown away.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Switters promised, and sliced another lime for their drinks. In truth, he gave it no further thought whatsoever until that morning in the Syrian desert, far from any ocean, awaiting his hostess’s return from the convent wine pantry; and then he was only partially serious when he asked himself if a woman such as Domino might not be the human equivalent of the middle-aged palm, the personified tree to which the tempest-tossed might emotionally attach themselves without fear of being undone by, say, naive Suzylike whimsicality or crotchety Maestralike recalcitrance. Not that he viewed himself as any orphan of the storm, exactly, but he was at rather loose ends until his planned return to Peru in the autumn, and barring another assignment from Poe, Domino’s offer was perhaps his most interesting prospect and certainly the most substantial.

  In any case, upon her return with the bottle, Domino did nothing to discredit the arboreal comparison, so, for better or worse, he might as well entertain it. At the very least, he was learning that for some Western women—even pious ones—middle age needn’t necessarily mean dowdiness, torpor, or capitulation.

  “Now,” said Switters, after swirling the first big gulp of wine around in his mouth and swallowing it with satisfaction, “don’t get the idea I’m a boozer. Setting out deliberately to get drunk is pathological. I like to drink just enough to change the temperature in the brain room. I’ll turn to less mainstream substances if I want to rearrange the furniture.”

  Since there was a finite amount of wine on the premises and the nearest liquor store was days away, Domino wasn’t particularly worried about his drinking habits. She had other concerns.

  “Should you decide to remain with us,” she said, “you may become very homesick for America.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Haven’t spent much time there in the past ten years.” He drew in a long, hard breath of wine. “America,” he mused. “America’s pretty violent and repressive these days. But as my pal Skeeter Washington might put it, it’s a ‘bouncy’ violence, a ‘bouncy’ repression, often ribboned with exuberance and cheer. Believe it or not, America’s a very insecure country. It’s been scared into a kind of self-imposed subjugation first by the imagined threat of Communism and then by the imagined threat of drugs. Maestra calls us an ‘abusive democracy,’ one in which everybody wants to control everybody else. Lately, even tolerance, itself, has been usurped by the sanctimonious and the opportunistic, and turned into an instrument for intimidation, bullying, and extortion. Yet the U. S. continues to pound its sternum and boast that it’s the home of the brave and the land of the free. If that’s brazen chutzpah rather than blind naiveté, then I guess I can’t help but admire it.”

  The wine had wasted no time greasing the pistons of his tongue, and he probably would have gone on to expound upon his observation that in the late 1960s, everything in America—art, sports, cinema, journalism, politics, religion, education, the justice system, law enforcement, health care, clothing, food, romance, even nature: everything—had devolved into forms of entertainment, and how, by the nineties, most of those forms of entertainment had become almost exclusively about merchandising. However, Domino aborted his rant by stating, with just a flicker of accusation, “You worked for perhaps the most notorious fearmongering institution in your fearful America.”

  “Mmm. That’s right, I did. It’s called ‘riding the dragon.’ “

  “It can also be called ‘seeking sensation.’ I think you have a need to be always stimulated, to be the action man. How do they call it now? A player. Yes?”

  “Only an errand boy,” he protested, refilling his glass with wine as dark as a monster’s gore. “Only an errand boy.”

  “Describe it however you wish, I still think you crave to work close to the bull. Or the dragon, if you prefer. But in Spain they say that the matador in time becomes the bull. Is not he who rides the dragon part of the dragon?”

  “Not if he’s fully conscious.”

  “Perhaps not. But I believe there is much to be said for active withdrawal. Not apathy, you understand, not acquiescence or inertia. Ah! My English vocabulary is coming back like the swallows to Cappuccino. No, what I am speaking of is a refusal to participate. A choice to live in a kind of voluntary exile. To observe the dragon from a distance, to study its stre
ngths and weaknesses but to reject it, resist it, by refusing to engage it and give it energy. For example, we Pachomians, after our excommunication, debated going off, one by one, to Third World villages, where we would try to convince a few native women of the wisdom and urgency of limiting procreation. Our successes probably would have been small, our psychic expenditures great. Instead, we decided to stay here in the wilderness, secluded in holy shadow, shooting sometimes our tiny arrows from concealment but mainly working on the growth of our souls, and guarding . . . that which is ours to guard. So, Mr. Switters, what do you think of active withdrawal? Is it selfish? Is it cowardly? Irresponsible?”

  “Nope,” he said between sips. “Not if you’re fully conscious.”

  From the way in which she tilted her head, leaning toward him ever so slightly while the flabby razor of incomprehension carved a little crease in her brow, it was obvious Domino was unsure what he meant exactly by “fully conscious.” He ought to have been able to explain, to inform her that full consciousness referred not so much to a state in which a person always behaved in a manner he or she knew to be just, regardless of public opinion, though that was important; nor even to an awareness so keen that the person never allowed fear, ego, desire, or convenience to delude him or her into believing their behavior was more just than it actually was, though that was nearer the point; but rather, to the clear and persistent realization that at bottom, all human activity was cosmic theater: a grand and goofy and epic and ephemeral show, in which an individual’s behavior, good or bad, was simply the acting out of a role, the crucial thing being to stand back and observe one’s performance even as one was immersed in it. Switters ought to have been able to elucidate for the simple reason that this definition of “fully conscious” closely resembled the unwritten, unspoken creed of the CIA angels. However, Bobby Case had warned him that it was always a mistake to attempt to define terms such as full consciousness. “Even iffen you do a good job of it,” Bobby said, “you’ll end up sounding like a checkbook mystic or some New Age mynah bird, and most folks won’t get it anyhow.” According to Bobby, a person got it—bingo!—or they didn’t; no amount of spelling it out or scholarly discourse was going to peel the peach. And, come to think of it, had Sailor Boy, after issuing his concise counsel, ever felt the need to add anything more? Not once. That settled it. Switters lowered his lids, blanking out Domino’s not quite comprehending gaze. He smacked his lips. “Mmm. A most accommodating vintage. Makes my palate feel like the jewel in the lotus, like a taxfree investment, like a pocket street-map of Hollywood, like Lincoln’s doctor’s dog, like—”

  “A mediocre wine and you know it,” she corrected him, though a certain glint in her eye indicated that she, influenced now, might be incubating a thirst of her own. “Well,” she said, “even if you don’t object philosophically to active withdrawal, that doesn’t mean you are personally suited for it. For example, we are very orderly here.”

  “So? Nothing wrong with that—as long as you don’t deceive yourself into believing your order is superior to somebody else’s disorder.”

  “But, disorder is—”

  “Often just the price that’s charged for freedom. Order, so-called, has claimed more victims historically than disorder, so-called; and besides, if properly employed, language can provide all of the order a person might ever need in life. Language—”

  “You’re throwing me off track. Save language for later.” She nodded at the wine. “All right. I’ll have one sip.” Accepting the glass from him (there was only the one), she went on. “What I’m trying to say is, I worry—all of the sisters worry—that should you accept our invitation, you will find the necessary routines of the Pachomian oasis to be boring and dull.” Rather abruptly, she raised the glass to her mouth and drained it.

  A ruby droplet, at once as authentic as blood and as artificial as a bauble of carnival paste, glistened on her upper lip like an Aphrodite love boil, and Switters felt a bewildering urge to expunge it with his tongue. Easy, big fella. “A legitimate concern,” he agreed, “although I’ve generally managed to find a modicum of what we childish Americans call ‘fun’ and you more refined Europeans term ‘pleasure’ any place the bus has dropped me off.”

  “That is a talent,” she said, sighing. “Unless you can count Italian nights at the dining hall or romping in rainwater in Vatican bikinis—which is what the sisters were doing at the moment you passed by with your nomads and heard them laughing—we nuns have never placed much emphasis on pleasure. Joy, perhaps, but certainly not fun. So, that is something else you could do for us here: teach us how one might remain sensitive and compassionate, yet still enjoy oneself in such a defiled, destructive age.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. . . .”

  “But, you see, we must not be thinking only of ourselves, we must not be unfair. You, Mr. Switters, must find pleasure at our Eden, as well, or else you will be dissatisfied here. So. That is where Fannie comes in.” She poured the last of the wine into the glass and passed it back to him.

  He frowned. “Fannie?”

  “Why, yes. Fannie.” And at that point, the middle-aged palm tree, without so much as swaying, dropped a coconut onto his skull. “Fannie wants to fuck your brains out,” she said.

  He jounced a spatter of vin rouge onto the knee of his last clean trousers. And if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, he blushed. He knew he blushed because he could feel himself blushing, which caused him to blush all the pinker. Blushing did not suit a man such as Switters any more than sheep’s lingerie suited a wolf. Domino was surprised by his shock but was also more than a trifle amused.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked coyly. “Have I made another passé remark? Doesn’t anyone say ‘fuck your brains out’ anymore? Has it followed ‘cotton-picking’ into the vernacular dustbin?”

  “Caught me off guard, that’s all,” Switters muttered. “Didn’t expect—”

  “And well you shouldn’t expect such talk from me. I don’t even like to think about these matters. So let’s get it over with quickly.” She took the glass from him and wiped it with a handkerchief before drinking. “It is not unusual for a novice in a nunnery to indulge in what the Church terms the ‘self-abuse.’ You know what I mean. It is discouraged, even punished, but to a certain extent expected and tolerated. Fannie, however, was incorrigible. She played with herself in chapel, at Holy Communion; she diddled in the confessional even as she was asking forgiveness for diddling. It’s reported she masturbated with one hand while counting her rosary prayers with the other. In every additional respect, she was the model novice, hard-working and devout, so the mother superior believed Fannie to be in the grips of an Asmodeus, a demon that is said to possess young nuns to make them lustful. Every exorcist priest in Ireland had a go at her, and when exorcism failed, the Irish shipped her off to a convent in France, where her behavior might be better understood. Why do so many people believe that the French are the sex race, the world leaders in eroticism? Why?”

  “Because they’ve never been to Thailand.”

  “Really? The Thai are better at sex than us?” Switters thought he detected a soupçon of wounded national pride. “In any case, Fannie ended up with the Pachomians, and now she’s released from vows and is hot to trot: another obsolete expression, I suppose. She likes you. She’s still young and attractive. I find it degrading to pimp like this, but as it may be the only way to assure that both of you are content to remain at the oasis. . . .”

  “Well, you can stop it right now. As far as I’m concerned, Fannie can stick with her finger.”

  “Why? Don’t you find her appealing?”

  “She’s not so bad.” He was about to add, “For a woman of her age,” when it occurred to him that such a sentiment could be both undiplomatic and self-incriminating. What he said instead, however, was worse. He didn’t intend to say it, wasn’t sure he meant it. It contradicted, in fact, the very comment he had so prudently suppressed, a remark that for all of its insensitivity had a
t least been truthful. He felt ventriloquized, as if the imp in him, for reasons that it alone understood, was throwing its voice. “I guess I thought maybe you and I might . . .”

  “Ooh-la-la! No, no, no. You and I? That is ridiculous.”

  “Why? Don’t you find me appealing?”

  “You’re not so bad,” she said, giving it right back to him (or to the trouble-making bugger who had hijacked his larynx). “For a man of your age.” Had she read his mind? Her tone became more serious. “I lost my virginity when I was sixteen.” (An image of Suzy went zinging through his brain like a hot pink bullet.) “It took me years to get it back. If I ever lose it again, which is rather unlikely, it will be to a man with whom I’m united in Christ. That wouldn’t be you, would it, Mr. Switters?”

  “Offhand, I’d say the odds are against it. But stranger things have happened.” (Shut up, you little bastard!)

  “No. I doubt if you could meet my standards. You haven’t found maturity yet, and you haven’t found peace.”

  He wanted to say, “If you’re referring to that pre-senile stagnation that passes for maturity these days and that hypocritical obsequiousness that passes for peace, I’d rather have shingles than the one and scurvy than the other.” What emerged from his mouth, however, was, “Damn! You sure know how to break a guy’s heart.”

  “Nonsense. Even though you told me you loved me the moment you laid eyes on me . . .”

  “I did?!” He came within half a hue of blushing again. (While he had lain in helpless delirium, his evil elf must have had a field day.)