Ignoring his sarcasm, she said, “Fatima was also the name of Mohammed’s daughter.”
“Yeah, you’re right. The Prophet’s favored offspring. That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“So, the question is: are they connected? These two Fatimas?”
“Everything is connected. But the links can sometimes be hard to uncover.” He took a gulp of tea. She took a sip. Outside, a rooster crowed. It sounded like a spastic adolescent trying to imitate Tarzan. “Too bad roosters aren’t more like parrots,” he said. “We could train them to crow inspiring things like, ‘People of the world, relax!’ instead of kicking off our day with a lot of cock-a-doodle-do.”
Domino smiled in spite of herself. “Oh, you Switters. I don’t know whether you are a virtue or a vice.”
“Neither do I, but why does it have to be one or the other? Why, for that matter, can’t we be simultaneously monotheistic and polytheistic?”
“Ugh! Polytheism? Ooh-la-la! All that noisy jumble of gods hiding in tree trunks and chimney hearths, with necklaces of skulls and more arms than a granddaddy spider. Abominable!”
“They tend to teem, all right, but overlooking the fact that some of them are too damn vivid, couldn’t we just accept them as various aspects of the one God, who’s an eternal, absolute mystery and can never be pinned down or accurately described, anyway?” He gulped the last of the tea. “If a person is truly devout, why couldn’t they be both a Christian and a Moslem? And a Jew? Don’t look at me like I’m a naive ninny. They all rolled out of the same pasture. Ol’ Abraham and his peevish herdsmen buddies—cowboys, now that I think of it—inventing the one-god-our-god-and-he-be-a-bruiser concept as a response to and a rebellion against the sexual superiority of women.”
“I might have known you’d bring sex into it sooner or later.”
“If you have a problem with the sexual complexion of the universe, take it up with Mother Nature. I’m just one of her baby boys.”
The rooster sang an encore. Then, another. But so far no single photon of dawnlight had squirmed through the curtain threads. “If women had played an active role in shaping our relationship to God, everything might be different,” she said. “There might not be a conflict between the Church and Islam.”
“There might not be any Church and Islam,” he interjected. “Women wouldn’t have seen the need for them.”
“As it is. . . .” She sighed and shrugged. After a pause, she said, “Despite what I know and you do not, I’m unwilling to concede defeat—or switch sides.” She rose and smoothed out her dress. Evidently she’d pulled it on in a hurry when the disturbance had awakened her: he could tell she was bereft of underwear. Her nipples pushed against the cotton like urchins pressing their noses against a candy store window. In the candleshine, her pubis was faintly outlined, like a map of a phantom peninsula. He considered it wise that she leave, but since the conversation had taken the turn that it had, he felt he simply had to ask:
“Have you never heard of the neutral angels?”
Suppose the neutral angels were able to talk Yahweh and Lucifer—God and Satan, to use their popular titles—into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their earthly kingdom?
Would God be satisfied to take loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while allowing Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York steaks, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all-night, no-holds-barred, nasty “can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell fucks?
Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo; Satan, stud poker? Satan get LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan, Oscar Wilde?
Can anyone see Satan taking pirate radio stations and God being happy with the likes of CBS? God getting twin beds; Satan, waterbeds; God, Minnie Mouse, John Wayne, and Shirley Temple; Satan, Betty Boop, Peter Lorre, and Mae West; God, Billy Graham; Satan, the Dalai Lama? Would Satan get Harley motorcycles; God, Honda golf carts? Satan get blue jeans and fish-net stockings; God, polyester suits and pantyhose? Satan get electric guitars; God, pipe organs; Satan get Andy Warhol and James Joyce; God, Andrew Wyeth and James Michener; God, the 700 Club; Satan, the C.R.A.F.T. Club; Satan, oriental rugs; God, shag carpeting? Would God settle for cash and let Satan leave town with Mr. Plastic? Would Satan mambo and God waltz?
Would Almighty God be that dorky? Or would he see rather quickly that Satan was making off with most of the really interesting stuff? More than likely he would. More than likely, God would holler, “Whoa! Wait just a minute here, Lucifer. I’ll take the pool halls and juke joints, you take the church basements and Boy Scout jamborees. You handle content for a change, pal. I’m going to take—style!”
Because Bobby Case had convinced him that any neutral angel worthy of the name would have recognized that Yahweh and Lucifer could no more be truly separated than the two sides of a coin (they needed each other for balance, for completion, for their identity, for their survival—which may have been why the more reflective of the angels had elected to remain neutral in the first place), Switters reserved speculative rants such as the preceding for his private entertainment (except, of course, when circumstance and/or magnitude of substance abuse dictated otherwise). Therefore, he treated Domino to a factual, relatively straightforward presentation of the neutral angel information as it had survived in Levantine folklore and biblical allusion (often the same thing) for four thousand years. Domino was incredulous, but rather than dismissing the story out of hand, agreed to ponder it and to investigate it with what resources she had at her disposal. “That’s funny,” she said, and she smiled that special smile of hers that was such a perfect blend of unintentional cynicism and warmest charity. “Not long ago, I would have said that I would pray over it.” She paused. She wrinkled her brow in a way that caused a third of it to disappear. “Switters, are you ever, on your own, inclined toward prayer?”
He barely hesitated. “When I feel I’m in need of shark repellent, I try to pray. When I feel I’m in need of smelling salts, I try to meditate. I’m not saying that one’s necessarily superior to the other—both are capable of being reduced to a kind of metaphysical panhandling—but if more people smelled the salts and woke the hell up, they’d find they wouldn’t need to be fretting about sharks all the time.”
“And what about Serpents?”
He grinned. “You mean the Snake in the garden? The Snake is good, Domino. The Snake is smelling salts on a rope.”
Before either of them could prepare for it, she stepped to his wheelchair, bent over—loose breasts bobbing like turtles on a buckboard, hair swinging around to eclipse her moonish cheeks—and kissed him quite emphatically on the bridge of his nose.
“I like you in a way that is too unusual,” she whispered.
“The feeling is mutual,” he said.
Then the rooster crowed her out the door. As he listened to her footsteps disappearing, crunchily, down the sandy path, he thought he overheard the slick voice of Satan. And Satan, in this aural hallucination, was saying, “Okay, Yahweh, here’s a proposition for you: why don’t you take the world’s bargirls under your wing and let me have a turn with the nuns?”
In the annals of Switters lore, the diurnal interval following the aborted terrorist attack would be forever known as the Day of the Hiccuping Jackass.
It may or may not have been an omen, but the day began with Switters awakening late to discover that he had the wrong pair of stilts by his cot. Domino had placed the poles across his lap prior to wheeling him back to his room, and at the time neither he nor she had noticed (the moon had set, and they were both a bit groggy) that it was Pippi’s original, tall pair she’d retrieved and not the customized, two-inches-above-the-ground stilts, the ones he’d designed to provide an ambulatory state of ersatz
enlightenment. Oh, well, he thought, these might be fun for a change, so he stork-walked to the office on stilts that put his unbreakfasted mouth at fig level, higher than the ripe lemons that dangled from their branches like bare lightbulbs in a nineteenth-century shoe factory.
Masked Beauty had slept late, as well, and she arrived at the office only moments before Switters. She greeted him with fresh tea and fresh compliments on his handling of the previous night’s situation. Then she announced that she had had quite enough Marian material for the time being and she wanted him to begin searching the Net for information about Islam. It wasn’t mainstream Islam in which she was interested, she was well versed in that, but the more esoteric doctrines.
Switters studied her, fighting to keep his focus off the wart. “Expecting more trouble?” he asked.
“No, no. The nearest village is in the hills, thirty kilometers away over rough terrain. Men do not come here easily. The Syrians in general are sympathetic people, nice people. It is only the Muslim Brotherhood that makes the problem for Christians, but, then, fundamentalists are the same everywhere, are they not?”
“Yeah. Their desperate craving for simplicity sure can create complications. And their pitiful longing for certainty sure can make things unsteady.”
“I imagine that word somehow has spread about our excommunication, and that has inflamed those who are already disposed toward fanatical piety.”
“Maybe, but I saw on the Net that the U.S. military recently retaliated against terrorist operations in Sudan and Afghanistan, and you can bet that’s put a bee up many a djellabah. Good thing our visitors mistook me for a Frenchman.”
“A mistake no Frenchman would ever make,” she said, referring both to his accent and his grammar. “Now, what I wish to investigate is—”
The abbess was interrupted by a knock, and they glanced up to see Bob standing in the open doorway, wearing an expression that was almost as fritzed as her hair. Generally, Bob appeared as if she’d been sired by one of the Marx Brothers—perhaps all four—and now she was alternating between looks of sheepish contrition, like Harpo after striking a sour note on his instrument of choice; popeyed incredulity, like Chico watching the diva disgorge the aria in A Night at the Opera; waggy disgust, like Groucho learning that his best jokes had once again been eviscerated by network censors; and peevish indignation, like Zeppo sensing that it was his fate to be perpetually upstaged by his three siblings.
Bob apologized profusely for the interruption, but, mon Dieu, she hadn’t asked to be put in charge of livestock, she wasn’t a farmgirl, if only Fannie had fared better at the hands of some she could name; but Fannie had fled, and what was she, Bob, supposed to do in such a crisis, et cetera, et cetera. Masked Beauty calmed her with reassuring clucks and waves of her veil, and eventually they drew from Bob the source of her fluster. It seemed that the donkey had hiccups. Had had them for forty-eight hours, give or take an hour. Bob kept thinking they’d go away, as her own hiccuping always had, but they’d persisted, maybe even worsened, and the poor dumb creature couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, was becoming unsteady and weak, and if something wasn’t done, surely it would hiccup itself to death.
As Bob appealed to Masked Beauty, Masked Beauty appealed to Switters, and Switters, without stopping to consider how it might come across in French, said, “People of the world, relax. I’ll give it a shot.”
First, he stilted over to the little stableyard, where the donkey was tethered. Sure enough, the beast was racked with spasms. They were occurring about every other second, and each time its diaphragm contracted, its skinny sides would inflate and deflate, as if it had strayed into the product inspection line at a whoopee cushion factory, forcing from its epiglottis a jerky sound somewhere between a cough, a sneeze, a fairy choking on fairy dust, and a socially prominent dowager trying to stifle a belch. Repeatedly the donkey’s donkey larynx was issuing the first quarter-note of a bray, a hee-haw from which the haw and most of the hee had been scrunched and extinguished.
“Pathological,” muttered Switters, surveying the scene with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Then, gathering his wits, he sent Bob to the kitchen for sugar. “Tell Maria Une I want . . .” He surveyed the animal. “Tell her I’ll need most of a small sack. You know: at least a kilo.” Next, he dispatched Pippi (who’d come over from her shop to see what was the matter) to fetch a pail of water.
When the sisters returned (Bob was followed by Maria Une, who was demanding to know what was to become of her precious sweetener), Switters spilled the sugar into the water bucket and stirred it with a rake handle. He set the solution under the donkey’s convulsive muzzle, but the beast was too distressed to take more than a few laps of it. They waited. The donkey hicced, then lapped again. It obviously liked the taste but simply couldn’t consume the mixture with enough speed or in sufficient quantity for it to be therapeutically effective. “Okay, Bob, you restrain the noble jackass. Pippi, prepare to pour.”
With that, Switters destilted onto the scrawny back, straddling it as though he were Don Quixote about to ride into war. “Bring on the windmills!” he yelled, as he grasped the slobbery muzzle, top and bottom, and pried the greenish-yellow teeth apart. “Whew! I’m a model of dental elegance compared to you, buckaroo. Come on, Pippi, pour. Pour!”
“Assez?”
“No. More. The whole damn bucket. But not so fast, you don’t want to drown the thing.”
The donkey was struggling mightily, causing Switters, atop it, to resemble a rodeo clown, but they eventually succeeded in emptying most of the sugar water down the creature’s gullet. Masked Beauty held the stilts for Switters, and, with considerable difficulty, he transferred onto them. The little ass was braying now, genuinely braying, and retching as if it might spew out every drop with which they’d flooded its tank. In a minute or two, however, it settled down, seeming dimly to notice that its demon had been exorcised. The humans, too, noticed that the hiccuping had ceased, and as the healed patient squeezed its head into the bucket to lick up residual sugar, they applauded.
Joining in the applause was Domino, who had come upon the scene about the time that Switters was mounting his spasmodic steed.
“Incroyable!” she called. “Do your talents have no end?” She was abeam with mock adulation.
Shuffling the poles, he hopped awkwardly around to face her. “Switters,” he growled, as if, with gruff modesty, introducing himself. “Errand boy, acquired taste; roving goodwill ambassador for the Redhook Brewing Company, Seattle, Washington; and”—doffing his hat, he attempted a courtly bow, an exercise not easily performed on stilts—”large-animal veterinarian.”
(Sometime, perhaps that evening at dinner, he would confess that his grandmother had taught him the hiccup remedy. Was it before or after she taught him to cure childhood moodiness with Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, and Big Mama Thornton? He couldn’t remember.)
Whether disposed to savor the passing moment or with a view toward advancing himself further in Domino’s good graces, he swept his hat in an ironic parody of a knightly gesture, as though, with ostentatious ceremony, he was dedicating his triumph to her, his lady. His backside happened to be to the donkey—rather too close to the donkey for the donkey’s liking—and at that exact, fastuous instant, the ungrateful creature lashed out with its hind legs, one of its hooves kicking thin air but the other dealing Switters’s right stilt a blow that sent him flying.
Domino dove forward to catch him. She underestimated his momentum, however, and they both ended up on the ground, he on top of her. She was flat on her back. He lay facedown, his manly jut of a chin resting just above her darling little jut of a nose. In that uneven alignment, their eyes could not meet, so he stared for a few seconds, while recovering his wind, at the rocky soil just beyond the crown of her head. “Are you okay?” he asked, afraid to move a muscle.
“Oui. Yeah. Ooh-la-la!” She laughed nervously. “I was trying to keep your feet from touching the earth.”
And she had. Th
e toes of his sneakers rested upon her shins.
“So!” he said. “You do believe in the curse.”
Still not moving, he could feel her half-face flushing beneath his half-face. He could also feel her body, flattened and yet somehow buoyant, under the weight of his body. She was as soft as a marshmallow bunny, he thought, yet simultaneously as firm as a futon. Most of the words that she stammered about her action being intended only for his peace of mind were lost in the folds of his throat—and in the concerned chatter of those Pachomians who’d clustered around them.
It was at about that point—and no more than ten seconds had passed—that he became aware of his pen of regeneration and of the red ink rushing into its inkwell. It was positioned against her belly, not far from where the concave yolk of her umbilicus simmered in its downy poacher, and an equal distance, more or less, from that vital area and favored masculine destination that is known in the Basque language (Switters could verify this) as the emabide and sometimes as the ematutu. Whatever the proximities, and no matter what it was called in Basque, Switters’s rod of engenderment was growing more rigid, more perpendicular, by the moment; was behaving, in fact, like a hydraulic jack, threatening, he imagined, to lift him right off her, suspending him above her prone body as if he were a plate on a shaft, a bobbin balanced on a spindle.
Domino had round cheeks. She had the kind of nice round cheeks that made a person want to press one of their own cheeks against one of hers, to hold it there, slide it around a bit, the way an affectionate mother might lay a cheek against her baby’s bare bottom, or a boy put his cheek to a cold, ripe cantaloupe, sniffing its lush, musky fruitiness out of the corner of his nostrils. Domino had those kind of cheeks, and Switters admittedly had sometimes had that kind of reaction to them, but, naturally, had never yielded to the temptation, nor, alas, could he really yield to it now, despite this unusual opportunity, for his cheeks had landed a few inches to the north of her cheeks, and cheek-to-cheek congruency could be attained only were he to slide downward, a southerly migration that, to phrase it crudely, would have put the carrot dangerously close to the rabbit hole.