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

  At the check-in desk, the clerk handed Domino a message. It was from Scanlani. He welcomed the Pachomians to Rome. He informed them that their audience with the Holy Father had been moved up to 14:30 hours on Wednesday, the following day. And he advised them that in Italy it was illegal to impersonate a nun, so all of them, most especially their “chief of security,” ought to change into civilian clothes.

  It was a rather stunned flock of penguins that lugged its bags (there were no bellmen at the Hotel Senato) into the dwarfish lift. Only two persons could fit at a time, and Domino and Switters elevated last. “I know you don’t like the sound of this,” she said, fluttering Scanlani’s note, “but it’s going to be okay. I only hope my aunt gets here in time. The prophecy is hers. I don’t feel right about surrendering it without her.”

  After dropping off her bag in the room that she would share with Mustang Sally and Pippi, Domino came to Switters’s room to help him off with his habit. “Hold still, ZuZu,” she said playfully. “Only forty-six more buttons to go.”

  Beneath the heavy habit, he wore his undershorts. The boxer shorts with little snowmen on them and maple trees with buckets attached for collecting maple sap. With a sudden flourish that astonished them both, she yanked them down around his ankles.

  She fondled him until he was as stiff as a tire iron. Then, cupping his testes in the palm of her hand, like a farmgirl weighing guinea eggs, she knelt before his Invacare 9000 and gave him a single lick; a long, slow, wet, pedestal to pinnacle lick. He laid his hands on her head, hoping to guide her into more of the same, but she stood and backed away from the chair. She was shaking.

  “I want you so bad I could scream,” she said. “I want you so bad I could yell and spit and scratch the flowers off this wallpaper. I want you so bad I could kick the furniture and pray to God and piss in my panties and weep.”

  “But?” he asked, as she took another step backward. It was only one word, but his mouth was so dry he could barely utter it. As a matter of fact, it came out in Baby Bear’s voice. He was stiffer than before, if that was physiologically possible, and a fever had descended upon him like a satyric malaria.

  “But I’ve made a vow to Mary and to myself and to that part of myself that is Mary and vice versa. Not until I am married.”

  “We cou-cou-could marry tomorrow,” he stammered. “Hell, the pope could marry us.” The imp had hold of him for certain.

  Domino smiled. It was a smile that could have overturned three or four Vespas in the piazza beneath their window. “Silly goose,” she said. “It would never work out between us. I’m too old and you’re too . . . Anyway, you will make fun of this, but when I enter St. Peter’s tomorrow, it is important to me to enter as a virgin. I may not have on my habit, but between my legs as in my heart, I will be a nun.”

  “The maidenhead Lazarus,” he muttered, hoping that he didn’t sound too sardonic. He did, after all, admire the sheer obstinacy of her commitment to the patriarchs’ bogus notion of innocence. “The hymen that rose from the dead.”

  She frowned. But then she smiled again. “Yes,” she said with an air of pride that was only partially feigned. “And it’s the only one on the planet. It’s unique.”

  “So far as we know.” He was still so aroused his eyeballs were hard.

  “Yes,” she agreed, as she backed out of the room. “So far as we know.”

  The next day they lunched just off the piazza at the gastronomically glorious Da Fortunato al Pantheon, although only Switters and Mr. Plastic had much of an appetite. Thrilled to be out of the chickpea zone at last, Switters gobbled both grilled sea bass and spaghetti alle vongole veraci, washed down with a carafe of frascati. It was Italian asparagus season, and he ordered the aspàrgi bianchi in three different preparations, pausing between each to improvise asparagus poetry: “Erect as the white knight’s lance, a flameless candle that lights the country ditch, pithy pen with a ruffled nib for writing love letters to his cousin, the lily; O asparagus! lean lord of spring” etc. etc., on and on, in Italian, French, and English, until the waiters joined Domino and Sally in rolling their eyes.

  After dessert and grappa, they stopped back by the hotel to see if Masked Beauty had arrived. She had not, alas, so they split up and took two minicabs to Vatican City. Switters rode with Pippi, who was practically gnawing the freckles off her fingers with nervous excitement. Pippi was wild to see the Holy Father, of course, but she felt somehow that the timing was wrong. “This is supposed to be happening tomorrow,” she whined.

  “Today is tomorrow,” said Switters. He took her hand and held it tightly until they reached the half-hidden service entrance off Via di Porta Angelica, where, as instructed, they were to meet Scanlani. Indeed, the Swiss Guardsman who answered Domino’s ring ushered them inside immediately, and there Scanlani waited, expressionless, smartly dressed, looking as if the Exxon Valdez had run aground in his hair. He showed no surprise at seeing Switters.

  The party was invited onto a minibus, not much more than an oversize golfcart, which, having no provision for the disabled, caused Switters a bit of difficulty. Apparently, Scanlani found this amusing, although it was almost impossible to tell. Switters wanted to hold on to the rear of the vehicle and be towed, but his host objected that it would attract attention. Pippi and a Swiss Guardsman tipped him over and more or less dumped him into the cart. His chair was folded and plopped awkwardly and heavily in his lap. He patted the contraption. “It’s guaranteed fireproof,” he said, and grinned at Scanlani.

  Traveling the Vatican’s back streets, out of sight of pilgrims and tourists, they passed through two security checkpoints, at the second of which they were taken into separate cubicles and searched so thoroughly that afterward Domino whispered in Switters’s ear that she might as well have lost her virginity to him the night before. The guard captain was highly alarmed by Switters’s pistol, but Scanlani said it was okay, telling the captain that the crippled American “used to be one of us” (a statement to which, under normal circumstances, Switters would have strenuously objected). He was made to give up the weapon, however. They locked it in a vault, assuring him that he could retrieve it on his way out. Without the gun in his waistband, he had to tighten his belt. “How to eat a huge lunch and still lose weight,” he mumbled.

  “I warned you not to bring that thing in the first place,” said Domino.

  The captain and three other Swiss Guards now accompanied them to the large building that stood at the northwest of Piazzo San Pietro, the ugly old gray castle in which the pope had his apartments. They entered through a side door and in a wood-paneled vestibule were greeted with practiced courtesy by a cardinal—robe, red beanie, and all. He was the prelate in charge of investigating miracles. “Do you do warts and hymens?” asked Switters. Neither the cardinal nor Domino acknowledged his remark, but there was a throb of unspoken menace in the almost imperceptible curl of Scanlani’s upper lip.

  With an air of aloof benevolence, such as one might find in a kindergarten teacher whose interest in children was strictly professional, the cardinal led the group down a long, dim hallway to a door that opened onto a garden of unexpectedly large dimensions. Spring flowers and spring-green shrubs were everywhere, and there were pines and chestnut trees and scattered broken hunks of ancient columns that, relieved of their burden of porticoes, lay about in decorative retirement. Birds were singing, though with no more or no less religiosity than if they’d been at a New Jersey landfill, while the afternoon sun fuzzed everything in a lazy chartreuse haze. Gas of asparagus.

  At the far end of the garden, perhaps fifty yards’ distant, there was an ivy-covered pavilion, a raised gazebo of sorts, made of ivory-painted latticed wood, and it was down a graveled path to that gazebo that the cardinal led them, single file, after first briefing them on the protocols of a papal reception.

  Approximately five yards from the gazebo, the cardinal stopped them. When Switters, who’d been propelling himself, didn’t brake quickly enough, his wheelchair was
jerked to a halt from behind. He glanced over his shoulder to see the captain hovering there. “I thought the Swiss Guard were all young bucks,” Switters said. “You look old enough to remember John Foster Dulles.” His subsequent expectoration was subdued, even delicate, but the Guardsman shook his chair forcefully and laid a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “The Holy Kielbasa witnessed not one speck of my secular sputum,” Switters protested. He was correct. There was a throne inside the shadowy gazebo, but as best he could tell, peering through the ivy vines, it was presently unoccupied.

  “You’ve been drinking alcohol, sir,” the captain said.

  “Merely boosting the ol’ immune system,” explained Switters.

  The party had spread out a bit in front of the gazebo, and the ex-nuns were staring hard, straining to glimpse the patriarch whom they might resist but whom they could not help but revere: their conditioning would allow no other response. Not one papal blip had appeared on their radar screens, however. Switters could make out two figures in business suits to either side of the empty throne, but neither of them cast a popish shadow. Scanlani entered the gazebo then and joined them. The trio conversed briefly, then called to the cardinal. In turn, the cardinal beckoned to Domino. “You have the paper of interest? Good. Please come.” He took her by the elbow and steered her up the four short steps that led into the gazebo. Mustang Sally and Pippi fell in behind her, bursting to genuflect, but a Guardsman blocked each of their paths, and even though Switters hadn’t moved, he felt the captain tighten his grip on the wheelchair.

  A pair of songbirds flew over, making songbird noises.

  Domino paused at the top of the steps. Although her back was to Switters, he could tell she was riveted on the pavilion’s rear entrance, searching for some sign of a little white monkey with china blue eyes and an aura of milky authority. She searched in vain, proceeding no farther, clutching the dog-eared Fatima envelope to her bosom. Gently the cardinal tried to nudge her inside, but she wouldn’t budge. At that point, however, Scanlani and his two companions began, in a friendly, if deliberate, fashion to edge toward her.

  As they inched out of the deeper shadows, into the confusing pattern of ivy leaf and sunlight, one of the men proved to be good Dr. Goncalves, Fatima scholar and author of a biography of Salazar, in which he portrayed the Portuguese dictator as a latter-day apostle. There was something familiar about the second man as well. In a few clicks of his biocomputer, Switters identified him as a company spook, a shrewd, rat-eyed cowboy by the name of Seward, who was run by Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald and who apparently possessed some interest and expertise in religious affairs, having at one point petitioned Mayflower to allow him to smack the Dalai Lama, whose inner circle Seward had managed to penetrate. “The little sheet-wrapped bastard’s promoting a destabilizing brand of happiness,” Seward was said to have complained. Mayflower countered, “His emphasis on happiness is precisely why nobody takes him seriously.”

  Switters was taking Seward seriously. It would be a major understatement to say he did not like the looks of this, the sound of it, the smell of it.

  Those in the gazebo were conversing now. Even in the sweet green hush of the garden, he could hear nothing of the men’s side of things, but every now and then, he caught a word or two of Domino’s. He heard her say “no” a lot. He heard her say, “This isn’t right.” He heard her say, “I can’t do that.” He heard her say, “I will have to consult the abbess.” From the way her back muscles rippled under her best chador, he knew she was squeezing the prophecy to her breast, like the child she’d never borne. He glanced at Pippi. Her freckles were winking out like dying stars. He glanced at Mustang Sally. Plastered by sweat to her forehead, her spit curl formed an ominous question mark. “No,” he heard Domino say. Her voice was as firm as cheddar. Then, “How will I know that it’s . . .”

  With one of those effortless, swift moves of his, Scanlani glided toward her. Something was clamped in his fist. Something about the length of a small flashlight. Something as shiny black as a licorice popsicle. Something obviously made from nonmetallic materials, perhaps in order that it might pass unnoticed through airport metal detectors. Like Switters’s Beretta. The Beretta that was locked now in a Vatican vault, as though it were one of the Holy See’s legendary treasures.

  His arm extended, Scanlani leveled the sinister object at Domino’s head, intending—there was no doubt—to shoot her point-blank, right between the eyes.

  Switters screamed. “Stop, motherfucker! You!”

  The captain attempted to restrain him, but the way Switters snapped the man’s wrist in half, it might as well have been the wrist of a Barbie doll.

  It is tempting to report that that whole past year with Sister Domino was unfolding now before him in a speed-parade of images—odd and endearing and frustrating; a hurricane of blurry memories that blew past his inner eye as if it were tied halfway up a middle-aged palm tree. In actual fact, there was nothing at all in his brain but a clear, clean hum: the cultivated signal that, in men of his background, transformed the primal siren of wah-wah panic into an articulated call to action.

  Switters leapt from the chair.

  His left foot hit the ground first. The instant it touched, it was as if an angry viper had sunk its fangs into the instep. A severe jolt shot through his body. There was a deafening pop, and a ball of white light—decidedly not a mystic coconut—exploded behind his eyes.

  He staggered sideways.

  He pitched forward onto his face.

  Switters had once read somewhere that according to data accumulated from the black-box flight recorders of crashed aircraft, the last words spoken by pilots, upon realization that they were doomed, was most often, “Oh, shit!”

  What did it say about human frailty, about the transparent peel of civilization, about the state of evolution, about the dominion of body over mind, when, at the moment of their imminent death, modern, educated, affluent men were moved to an evocation of excrement? That as the ax abruptly fell on their mortal lives, technologically sophisticated commanders of multimillion-dollar flying machines usually uttered no proclamation of sacred, familial, or romantic love; no patriotic sentiment, no cry for forgiveness, no expression of gratitude or regret, but rather, a scatological oath?

  Quite likely, it said very little. Almost certainly, the word shit was issued without the slightest conscious regard for its literal meaning. On an unconscious level, the oath might be significant, but one would have to be a fairly fanatical Freudian to propose that it indicated the persistent domination of an infantile fixation on feces.

  In any event, though he might imagine Bobby Case uttering something of the sort (Bobby was a Texan, after all), Switters, mildly appalled by the information, vowed that no such phrase would mark his final exit. “Oh, shit” lacked grace, lacked class, lacked charm, lacked imagination, lacked any indication of full consciousness. It was simply vulgar, simply crude, and while Switters appreciated profanity’s occasional value as verbal punctuation, as a highly effective vehicle for emphasis, he was scornful when louts swore as a substitute for vocabulary, youths as a substitute for rebellion, stand-up comics as a substitute for wit.

  When his end came, Switters had always trusted that he would improvise something original if not profound; something appropriate to the specific situation, which was to say, something dramatically correct. If nothing else, should time be short and inspiration shorter, he would, he had vowed, bellow wahoo!—one final, culminating, roller-coaster-rider whoop of defiant exhilaration.

  A noble ambition, perhaps. Yet when the earth viper bit, when the internal fireball exploded, when he lost contact with the world and went spiraling off into an electrified darkness, he hadn’t cried wahoo or anything remotely resembling a famous last word. And had there been a black box in the cockpit of his Invacare starship, it would have recorded his last words before he was sent spiraling into that electrified darkness as, “Stop, motherfucker.” How very déclassé, how very embarras
sing.

  Electrified darkness because it wasn’t passive. And it wasn’t really dark. Or rather, it was dark and it wasn’t dark. It was a darkness that behaved like light. Or, maybe, it was light that behaved like darkness. How was he supposed to know? Spiraling into it, out of control, he was in no position to judge. The condition seemed, in a sense, neutral—yet, as stated, it was far from static. Had he time to analyze it (which he did not, being embedded in a trans-temporal state, where the linear pencil of analysis had an eraser at both ends), he might have described it as an interface. As an interface between darkness and light. As an imperceptibly thin crack between yin and yang. A reality between that which is and this which is. A number between one and zero. Spiraling.

  Switters realized then that he had passed that way before. The Hallways of Always. Except now there were no botanical tryptamine alkaloids churning in his belly. And so far, no pod things boasting that they owned the business. There was, however, a faint glow in what might be called the distance, a sort of end-of-the-tunnel luminosity, and it was pulling him toward it. “No! I absolutely refuse to have some trendy near-death experience,” he heard himself exclaim. “Serve me the real enchilada or let me—”

  “Heh!”

  “Maestra? Is that you? Are you . . . okay?”

  There was no reply. He spiraled on through the tunnel. Or, the tunnel spiraled on through him. Was he a toy boat in the gutter, or was he the gutter—and where were the Art Girls? He drew closer to the glow. Or, it drew closer to him. It was proving to be not a light as such, but something more on the order of a pulsating membrane, feathery and multicolored, with lots of greens and reds. The membrane had no alter image, no counterpart, and he began to wonder if in that dichotomous void, there wasn’t a singularity after all. Might this be the aura of the Ultimate? The medulla of the mandala? The Immaculate Heart made visible? A hyperspatial hymen? He became aware, then, of sound: not the music of the spheres, by any means, but a low, crusty, constricted noise, scrumbling harshly out of the membrane, almost as though it were clearing its throat.