As it was, he was pronged against her lower abdomen in such a spring-loaded fashion that he could feature himself, without use of hands or feet, vaulting over the henhouse. Undoubtedly, she was aware of the protuberance—she was practically run through by it: nun on a stick—and that awareness must account for the fact that she was silent, tense, and seemed to be holding her breath. As his own embarrassment turned gradually to panic, he rejected the notion of trying to collapse the bulb by mentally picturing radically anti-erotic images (his mother with the stomach flu, for example, or a Pomeranian humping a sofa leg) and, instead, dug the heels of his hands into the earth and flipped himself off her, onto his back. His talents had no end?
Gasping slightly from the effort, he lay there beside her with his feet in the air, looking like an advertisement for an aerosol insecticide. (Of course, a dead bug wouldn’t be sporting an erection. Or would it? Hanged men are reputed to be so affected, why not a zapped beetle? Perhaps there was a reason why they were called “cockroaches.” And think of the Spanish fly.)
The sisters assisted Domino to an upright position, whereupon she brusquely brushed off her blue chador (which is what Syrian women called their long cotton gowns), and retreated, muttering that there were important matters that required her immediate attention. The others then attempted to hoist Switters back onto his stilts, but the ex-linebacker’s bulk was too much for them. Bob, understandably grateful, and seemingly oblivious to the accidental subtext of his topple onto Domino, volunteered to go fetch his wheelchair. “Merci, Madame Bob,” he said weakly.
For the nearly ten minutes that it took Bob to return with the chair, he lay there like a yogi in the dead-bug asana, growing slowly flaccid; shielding his eyes from the pulsating radiation of a sun, now directly overhead, that resembled a phoenix egg laid in a campfire and impaled on a laser; and talking to his abnormally elevated feet. “Be patient, ol’ pals,” he whispered to his feet. “Please. Another month, that’s all. Then we’re hot-footing it—that’s just a figure of speech—to South-goddamn-America. And one way or another, feets, I’m gonna set you free.”
For the next couple of weeks, Domino and Switters were shy around each other. In fact, without it being overly obvious, even to themselves, and without going to any great lengths to achieve it, they were in avoidance of each other. Cloistered in the confines of an eight-acre oasis, it was, of course, impossible that their paths wouldn’t cross several times daily, but when such encounters occurred, they’d smile, exchange a polite nod or two, fidget, squirm, and hasten on their separate ways before the headless chicken—the totem bird of discomposure—could find hemorrhage space in their cheeks. Inevitably, one or the other would steal a backward glance. Switters, having been trained as a sneak, was more adept at this than she.
Their lone conversation during this period concerned the round, mud tower that rose above the compound like a silo for a Scud of manna, a missile with a warhead of milk and honey. He’d been stilting past the decrepit wooden door in the tower’s base when Domino and ZuZu exited through it, carrying pails, brooms, and mops. “Oh, hi,” said Domino, straining to sound casual. “Uh, now that we’ve finally given the tower room a cleaning, you might want to spend some time up there.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Your feet are forbidden to touch the ground.”
“That’s the story.”
“And that would include the ground floor of a building.”
“The way I interpret it.”
“Yes, but what about the floors above ground level? The third floor or the twenty-third? Wouldn’t they be safe? The same as the floor of the car or of the airplane flying above the earth.”
He tugged at his hair, which, having been trimmed by Mustang Sally that very afternoon was, for the first time in weeks, shorter in length than her own. “Good question. I’ve asked it myself on countless occasions. The answer’s in the fine print. But I can’t read the fine print, because . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Because,” she said, “there isn’t any fine print. There isn’t any large print, either.”
“It’s an unusual contract in that respect. However, I plan on renegotiating it in the very near future.”
At this reference to his impending departure, there was a slight but perceptible shift in Domino’s body language. Apparently caught somewhere between relief and regret, and wishing to display neither, she excused herself. As she marched off with her mop, she gestured at the tower top, tilting her head toward it in such a manner as to suggest without words that he at least ought to have a look up there.
Oh, yeah? Climb stairs on stilts? That would certainly promote my blood into active circulation. In the process of mentally rejecting her suggestion, he peered inside, where, as he soon noticed, there didn’t happen to be any stairs. Rather, there was a ladder: wooden, old (much too old to have been built by Pippi), barely angled, and probably thirty feet in height. Despite the fact that it looked like something devised by prehistoric pueblo daredevils, it seemed sturdy enough, and, moreover, he felt confident he could plant his feet on its rungs with impunity as far as the taboo was concerned. Nevertheless, Switters did not climb the ladder. Not that day.
Through the dry biblical whisper of the groves—past twiggy branches adangle with seed-stuffed pomegranates and under the toad-tongued leaves of almond trees—he clumped back to the office at a pace that precluded any prolonged enjoyment of arboreal shade. He was bent on reading one more time the e-mail he’d received from his grandmother that morning, the note that informed him that Suzy, having “gotten into a speck of trouble” in Sacramento, had been sent to live with Maestra for a year and would be attending the Helen Bush School in Seattle. What perplexed Switters about the note, what prompted him to keep rereading it, was that he couldn’t ascertain from its ambiguous flavor whether Maestra was encouraging him to be sure to stop by on his way to Peru or warning him to stay away from her door at all costs.
“So,” said masked Beauty. “You will be leaving us in a fortnight.”
“More or less,” Switters concurred. “The exact day depends on when the supply truck shows up.” He had the feeling that sometime during the eighteen hours since he’d happened upon Domino at the tower, the niece and her aunt had discussed the fact that his stay among them was drawing to a close.
Masked Beauty was pouring tea, the ritual with which their morning routine began. He’d already booted up and was stealing a quick glance at Maestra’s e-mail, as if overnight it might have undergone a syntagmatic rearrangement, or he, after a night’s rest, might find in it a nugget of information that had escaped his earlier scrutiny. She bent by his chair, smelling, as always, of incense and rough soap; her skin scoured, her chador as crisp as if it were a habit. She was laundered, she was regal, she was immortalized by Matisse, of whom she would seldom speak, and bewarted by God, of whom she spoke frequently, though often in a tone of bewilderment.
“Yes, the supply truck.” She sighed. “If Almighty God is not blessing soon our treasury, that truck won’t be bringing us much more petrol.” She shrugged then and smiled, and it would have been considered a smile worth admiring had it been situated at a greater distance from the mutated mushroom cap on her nose. “Ah, but dear St. Pachomius got along just fine without a generator, did he not?” It was a rhetorical question, and the abbess, in that unmodulated, childish voice of hers that was at such odds with both her brittle majesty and her brazen defect, went on to say, “In any case, Mr. Switters, I do hope your sojourn here has been in some tiny measure agreeable.”
His mood was languid, tongue still slack from the wordless joy of awakening to cuckoo calls in a sunlit cubicle far from any confines that conceivably might be labeled home, so the approval rating that she seemed to be seeking—the testimony to adequacy if not the rave review—failed to gush forth from him. Later that evening, when he had taken on as much wine as he could quietly accommodate, he would become downright gassy in his tribute, but at that lack
adaisical moment, with his ears adjusting to her French, he yawned, stretched, and said only, “Beats Club Med all to hell.”
Having finished tea, they got down to business, the first order of which was the posting of e-mail to several United Nations agencies on the subject of birth control. “Now that I’ve been excommunicated, my protests lack the authority they once had,” she said. “On the other hand, I am at liberty to show less restraint.” She debated whether it was worthwhile to also e-mail Western heads of state. “The greater the population grows and the more threatening the social and environmental problems that that growth causes, it seems the more reluctant our leaders are to address the issue. Crazy, no?”
“Ever wonder,” Switters asked, “why people get so worked up over whale hunts, yet object very little to the killing of cattle? It’s because whales are rare and intelligent and untamed, whereas cows are commonplace and stupid and domesticated.” Presumably he was referring to the manner in which the powers that be, with the greedy compliance of the media and the eager assistance of evangelicals, were busily bovinizing humanity, seeking to produce a vast herd of homogenized consumers, individually expendable, docile, and, beyond basic job skills, not too smart; two-legged cows that could be easily milked and, when necessary, guiltlessly slaughtered. If that was his meaning, however, he did not belabor her with it.
“You failed to mention beautiful,” said the abbess.
“Pardon?”
“Beautiful. You, such a champion of beauty: I imagined you would claim that the whale is more revered than the cow because the whale is the more beautiful.”
“That’s, indeed, the case,” he said. “But if they weren’t so damned ubiquitous, cows also might be considered beautiful.”
“Familiarity breeds contempt?”
“Breeding breeds contempt. Beyond a certain point. The dignity of any species diminishes in direct ratio to its compulsion to teem, or to the extent that it allows teeming to be foisted upon it.”
Masked Beauty sighed another of her curtain-rustling French sighs and suggested that they commence their clicking and browsing. Obediently, he brought up Islam, then clicked on esoteric. “This morning,” she declared, “I wish to see what they have to say about the pyramids.”
“Pyramids?”
“Yes.”
“In connection to Islam? I mean, I’m sure there’s a Web site for pyramids, but . . .”
“In connection to Islam,” she insisted.
“Yeah, but I don’t believe there is a connection.” (Isn’t everything connected, Switters?)
“The pyramids are in Egypt. Egypt is an Islamic country.”
He chuckled, a bit patronizingly. “The pyramids were constructed—when?—around twenty-seven hundred B.C. Mohammed didn’t stick his nose through the fence until three thousand years later. I don’t believe—”
“Click it,” she ordered. He clicked it. And was as astonished to find himself scrolling up Islamic references to pyramids as he had been, days earlier, to discover that esoteric Islam, in opposition to the adamantly patriarchal mainstream, was decidedly feminine in character and foundation.
Islamic accounts, it turned out, gave credit for the building of the pyramids to a Levantine king called Hermanos, a name, Switters immediately reasoned, that must be a corrupted spelling of “Hermes,” the tricky Greek god of travel, speed, and esoteric adventure; the Speedy Gonzales of the ancient world, whose function was to journey beyond boundaries and frontiers, both physical and psychological; to explore the unknown and bring back to the sedentary, material and spiritual wealth. In the latter regard, Hermes was the prototype of the shaman, the precursor of Today Is Tomorrow. He was also, this inveterate voyager and con artist, a bit of a sex symbol, and crude phallic images of him were often erected at borders and crossroads. (Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?)
In any case, King Hermanos was said to have had the original two pyramids built as mystic vaults to house the revelations and secrets of the ancient sages, a place to shelter their mysterious sciences, as well as their bodies after death. The principal treasure hidden in the underground galleries consisted of fourteen gold tablets, on seven of which were inscribed invocations to the planets, whereas on the other seven there was written a love story, a telling of the star-crossed romance between the king’s son, Salàmàn, and a teenage girl many years Salàmàn’s junior. The love story may have been symbolic, the data suggested; a kind of spiritual allegory, but it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that this material suddenly had Switters’s full attention.
Masked Beauty, on the other hand, was puzzled by their findings, disappointed, and even a bit annoyed. Switters could detect her face darkening (the wart set against it like Mars against a thick winter sky) as he read to her from the monitor how Plato had learned of the gold tablets, the Hermetic Writings so-called, and had made a pilgrimage to study them, but was prevented by the prevailing Egyptian ruler from entering the pyramids. Plato then bequeathed to his pupil, Aristotle, the task of gaining access to the secret teachings, and years later, Aristotle took advantage of Alexander the Great’s Egyptian campaign to visit a pyramid and slip inside it, using maps and codes passed on to him by Plato, but he succeeded in bringing out only one of the tablets (one on which a segment of the love story was inscribed) before “the doors were closed to him.” Masked Beauty fumed. “Ooh-la-la,” she said. “Now, I suppose I’ll have to read that damned Aristotle. Oh, I know St. Thomas Aquinas ranked him second only to Christ, but those pagan know-it-alls only give me an ache in the head.”
It’s not Aristotle that’s bugging you, thought Switters. He wondered, and not for the first time, whether she had once been enamored of old Matisse. Perhaps she didn’t relish May–December love stories barging into her theological research, uncorking memories. And/or, it could be that she was expecting more definitive results from that research.
At any rate, by the time the abbess had copied down in her kitty-whisker script all that cyberspace had coughed up regarding pyramids and esoteric Islam, she was overdue for a nap. As she gathered her notebooks and pencils, her tea things, and her veil, she announced that dinner that evening would be served a half hour later than usual. “We are first holding a special vespers,” she said. “To commemorate the birthday of Sister Domino. You are welcome to attend.”
Swiveling from the computer, where he was about to take yet another peek at the e-mail from Maestra (Suzy in “a speck of trouble”? What kind of trouble?), Switters blurted, “Today’s her birthday? September fifteenth? I wish somebody had told me. Will there be a party?”
“No, no,” Masked Beauty assured him. “Only the prayer service. Around here, a natal anniversary is an opportunity to give thanks for the gift of life, not an excuse to indulge in frivolous pleasures.”
A prohibition against birthday parties, mused Switters, who was growing a trifle weary of prohibitions. Well, well. A little something may have to be done about that.
Since, out there in the wilds, he could conceive of nothing else to give her, Switters spent the afternoon trying to compose a poem for Domino. After numerous false starts, he finally finished one, folded it, and concealed it in his breast pocket, thinking it highly improbable that he would actually present it to her. The poetic effort, in fact, so outwitted him that when it was over he felt compelled to flee the compound, slipping through the mammoth gate to stilt precariously for more than an hour over stone and sand in the ancient, clean, open desert, where the air was wavy and the sun rays strong, where everything smelled of infinity, star-ash, and ozone, and occasional gusts of scorpion-breath almost blew him off his stilts.
As he stiffly negotiated the ruined sodiums and hardened salts, he managed to step back mentally (he prided himself on periodic full consciousness) and watch himself negotiate; watch himself frankenstein along, one rigid step at a time, in the mineral heat; watch himself fret over a silly sonnet written to a nun for whom he had feelings that might not bear examination; watch himself t
ry to interpret the Maestra-Suzy alliance and its potential implications (if any); watch himself speculate on how he was going to get out of Syria and into the Amazon so that he might petition a pointy-headed witchman to lift a taboo—and as he watched he said to himself, “Switters, methinks you may have successfully realized at least one of your childhood ambitions.” That ambition, he recalled with a dry-throated chuckle, was to avoid in every way possible an ordained and narrow life. Were he as given to self-analysis as he was to self-observation, he might have seen fit to ask if he hadn’t overshot the mark in that regard, but since, despite everything, he was feeling pretty good about being alive, the question of excess was never addressed.
Broiled pink and abraded still pinker, as if lightly chewed by the invisible teeth of eternity, he returned, panting, leg muscles aching, to the oasis, quaffed a whole pitcher of water, enjoyed a sponge bath (a washing that transcended maintenance), and then a snooze. When, refreshed and cologne splashed, he set off at last through the violet tingle—the smokeless smoke—of Syrian dusk, he was bound for supper but primed for party.
The sisters were already at table. He could hear Maria Deux’s dour voice saying grace as he approached the dining hall door. He passed the hall without entering, going instead around back to the kitchen, where in a small attached shed, a kind of pantry annex, he knew the order’s wine to be stored. The pantry door was padlocked, causing him to wonder if it had always been secured in that fashion or if special precautions had been taken as a result of his residency at the oasis.