Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (47 page)

“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 strengths 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?”