Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (51 page)

Nevertheless, they each made a
certain peace with its imposition. He refused to allow the wart to unsettle
him, she refused to brood over whether he might possibly be unsettled. Thus,
they proceeded with their objectives.

“This little bastard operates on
solar batteries, the likes of which are unknown to the civilian population.
When you get your conventional desktop PC—and I wish we had one now because it’d
be a lot easier to teach you on—you’ll either have to run your generator during
daylight hours or else, if you choose to go DC, charge its batteries almost
every night. Burn more fossil fuel, in any case, I’m afraid. The dinosaurs died
so that chat rooms might flourish.”

Masked Beauty nodded. She didn’t
exactly take to cyberspace like a duck to orange sauce. Switters attributed
this to her background rather than to her age. Look at Maestra, after all. As
the weeks dragged dryly by, the abbess learned little more than how to boot up
and shut down. One problem was that she could barely type. When there was a
lengthy e-mail to transmit, Switters functioned as a stenographer, taking her
dictation directly on the keyboard. A couple of things prevented him from
becoming so bored that he unleashed his imp: one, the realization that it was
Matisse’s blue nude for whom he was clerking; and two, the delight he took in
imagining the look on Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s steely face every time
Langley intercepted another missive from Switters’s address clamoring for papal
reforms and advocating global birth control. And, ha-ha, what about those
exorcism instructions?

Soon, however, it seemed that less
and less of their time was devoted to e-mail and more and more to searching the
Internet. The subject of their search was Mary aka Miriam aka Maria aka Marian
aka the Blessed Holy Virgin Mother of God, the legendary Jewess whose
maidenhead was alleged to have remained unpopped, sound as a dollar, even after
she gave birth to a seven-pound baby boy.

In one of their earliest
conversations, Domino had disclosed to Switters that the Pachomians were busily
redefining their relationship to their religion: to Jesus, to Mary, and to God.
Working now with Masked Beauty, it was clear to him that, for the present,
their central focus was on Mary. Since Mary was mentioned in the Bible no more
than a dozen times, and then mostly in passing, and since she was paid little
or no attention in the first four hundred years of the Church’s existence, any
material upon which one might base a reevaluation of her was comparatively
recent. That didn’t mean that such material was scarce. Oh, no. Enough had been
written about her—an astonishingly huge amount in the late twentieth century—to
fill every boxcar on the Bethlehem, Golgotha & Santa Fe Railroad. If one
aspect of the material interested the abbess more than any other, she did not
let on.

It was slow going. For reasons of
both portability and government security, the sophisticated little computer
lacked a printer. Switters read aloud the data off the screen—often struggling
to translate as he read, for the majority of it was in English or Italian—and
Masked Beauty wrote it down in French and by hand. Following their afternoon
siestas, she and Domino would go over the longhand “printouts,” and several
evenings a week, the entire sisterhood would gather for group discussions
centered around the gleaned information. Switters would have liked to have been
included in those discussions, if for no other reason than to blow the gunk out
of his intellectual carburetor and to keep his discursive spark plugs clean. It
was a long, long way from the C.R.A.F.T. Club, but, hey, a fully conscious man
was an adaptable man.

When the Mary material concerned, as it
increasingly did, one or more of the Virgin’s alleged modern apparitions, he
was especially keen on joining the conversations. For better or worse, he’d
trod the electronic road to Fatima before, and he very well might have
something to contribute. (Remembering that Suzy had not even sent him a copy of
her paper, a thin sheen of hurt lacquered his so-called fierce, hypnotic green
eyes, only to instantly evaporate in the arid air. He couldn’t blame her.
Suzy’s generation was unforgiving of dishonesty, and rightly so. Alas, it
remained rather blissfully unaware that it was being lied to by corporate
America—through the movies, TV shows, and magazines it so adored—a hundred
times a day, but that’s another story.) Alas, again, no invitation to
participate in the dialogues appeared forthcoming. Whether out of their
exclusiveness or consideration for his own privacy, the doors to their meetings
were closed to him.

Then, late one night at the burnt end
of August, as the happy ghosts of long-deceased Bedouins rode the gritty desert
winds (because they in life possessed the wisdom of physical nonattachment,
nomads enjoyed an unusually smooth transition into death and made the world’s
most contented ghosts), he discovered himself in unexpected and unusual
discourse, the consequences of which were to be considerable.

It was well past midnight when he
heard the bell. The bell ding-donged him out of a dream in which red-eye gravy
played a prominent role. (Could it be that he’d munched one too many cucumbers,
chewed a few too many chickpeas?) After the first four or five rings, he was
alert; after the next four or five, he was on his stilts. He stood at the door,
which had been left ajar to facilitate a nighttime stirring of day-parched air.
There was more ringing, followed by male voices from outside the compound,
followed by female voices from within. The male voices sounded angry, the
female voices alarmed. Switters unzipped the crocodile valise.
Mr. Beretta!
Rise and shine!

Before he could pull on his trousers,
there was a burst of automatic gunfire. In a flash, he was through the door,
stilt-sprinting along a moonlit path in his boxer shorts. The ones with the
baby ducks on them.

Something brighter than blood sang in
his arteries. It climbed up his spine like the high notes of an anthem,
clarifying his lungs, teasing his muscles and making them brisk. It wasn’t a
syrup of wahoo, really: it wasn’t pure enough for that. Mostly, it was good old
retro primal adrenaline, concocted in the fight-or-flight kitchen, the reptile
house of the brain. But there were drops of wahoo in it. Had he said otherwise,
he would have been untruthful.

He hadn’t gotten far before he met
Domino. She’d been running to his room to get him. “For the gate,” she gasped.
“They are demanding it open.”

“Yeah, I can hear that. Although
their French really sucks.” He resumed his sprint. “And I have to say your
English isn’t much better.”

“Switters! . . .” She was trying to
keep up with him.

“It’s okay, darling. It’s just
because you’re excited.”

Domino looked at him as if he were
completely demented. “This is serious!” she cried.

“Ah, yes,” he agreed. She could have
sworn his tone was sarcastic, or at least facetious.

By then, they had reached the gate.
All of the sisters, with the exception of Masked Beauty, were gathered there. A
couple of them had their hands clasped, apparently in prayer, but they were
amazingly calm and composed. On the other side of the thick mud wall, men were
shouting in broken French. They were saying that the oasis was a holy garden of
Allah that had been desecrated by handmaidens of the great Western Satan. “Ah,
yes,” muttered Switters again. This time, his voice had overtones of boredom
and weariness. “Infidels!” the men screamed repeatedly. There was another
savage spurt of gunfire. Switters yelled to the women to take cover, although
he realized that the bullets, for the moment, were being sprayed in the air.

“They’re drunk,” whispered Domino,
who was crouched at his side.

“Yeah, but not on arrack. Help me
onto these stilts.” He was transferring to the taller pair that Pippi kept at
the gate.

“Killer-B stuff?” she suggested,
steadying the poles.

He grinned at her approvingly and
nodded. “That’s some toxic honey. Blind a man and make him crazy.”

“Do be careful.”

Leaning the stilts and his body
against the gate so that his hands would be free, he slid open the grate and
stared down on the men, who raised their rifles and stepped back a few feet to
stare up at him. There were only three of them. They had sounded like more.
Dressed in cheap civilian khakis and those red-and-white checkered headdresses
that always looked as if they’d been yanked off tabletops in a suburban
spaghetti parlor (“They’ve copped our Italian night!” he wanted to yell to
Pippi), the men had arrived in a dented old Peugeot sedan.

He greeted them in polite Arabic, and
it would have been difficult to determine which had surprised them more, his
language (it was an extended greeting and as flowery as the finest Arabic often
can be) or his sex. The fact that the moon was illuminating—and the grate
framing—a grin spiked with strife-torn teeth, a pair of gleaming f.h.g. eyes,
and the barrel of a most capable-looking handgun, must also have contributed to
their astonishment.

After a period of rather stunned
silence, the men all began to clamor at the same time. Speaking Arabic now, one
asked what kind of man would live in a nest of unclean women, another demanded
to know what a foreigner was doing speaking in the tongue of great Allah, and
the third inquired if Switters was prepared for death.

To the first question, he replied, “A
lucky
man”; to the second, “It’s as stupidly ethnocentric to think God’s
language is Arabic as it is to believe Jesus spoke King James English”; and to
the last, “Everybody on earth, unfortunately, is prepared for death, but very
damn few are prepared for life.” The eloquence of his Arabic surprised even
him: he must have chipped the rust off when traveling with the Kurds and
Bedouins. While the attackers were quietly jabbering among themselves about his
replies, he interrupted to ask if they might tell him a joke.

His request bewildered them—and
rekindled their hostility. “Tell you a joke? Do you think this is a funny
matter?”

“Hey, it’s written in the Koran that
the gates of Paradise open wide for he who can make his companions laugh.” He
quoted the chapter and verse, challenging them to look it up. “I was wondering
if you boys might be among those favored by Heaven.”

That threw them into a state of
consternation. For a good three or four minutes, they conferred with one
another, occasionally scratching their kaffiyehs with their rifles, as if
trying to remember a punch line. Finally, the eldest of the trio (all under
thirty) stepped forward and announced, “It is irrelevant to Heaven whether or
not we can make you laugh because you are not our companion.”

Well, that was reasonable enough, and
he told them so. “You fellows aren’t as dumb as I originally believed.” At
this, they seemed oddly pleased. Then, again listing chapter and verse, he
brought up Mohammed’s prohibition against priests, asking them why, since the
Koran clearly stated that each individual must approach God singularly and
alone, had modern Islam spawned such an authoritarian hierarchy of ayatollahs,
imams, and mullahs.

This time, their consultation was
more brief. “These exalted authorities to whom you refer,” the spokesman said,
“are not priests but scholars.” He stepped back rather smugly, confident that
he’d had the final word, unaware that he was dealing with Switters.

Though Switters didn’t know the
Arabic for
semantics
, he, nevertheless, got his point across. “They can
call themselves ‘scholars’ until the camels come home,” he said, “but the truth
is, they function as priests and bishops and cardinals, and you know they do.
They intercede between a man and Allah.”

All four of them bantered about that
for a while, making a lot of fuss but getting nowhere, until Switters
eventually said, “Show me, if you can, where it says in the Koran that a devout
Muslim has the duty or the right to kill those who don’t believe as he does.
Show me where Mohammed sanctions the murder of those of another faith—or no
faith at all—and I’ll unbolt this gate and let you in to bravely slaughter
these unarmed women.” When there was no immediate response, he added, “It is
not the Prophet who advocates violent behavior but ambitious ayatollahs, and
the politicians who share their vested interests.”

Of course, the men could not refute
him with scripture, as the Koran was on Switters’s side, but they argued with
him, bringing up such things as the Israeli displacement of Palestinians and
the murderous legacy of the Christian Crusaders, neither of which he was wont
to defend in the slightest. In fact, he seconded everything they said about the
Crusades, plainly exhibiting his own disgust and revulsion, yet refusing to
accept any residual guilt, claiming that it had nothing to do with him
or
them. He understood, however, that Arabic peoples had a different sense of
time, of history, than a Westerner such as himself; had, like the Kandakandero,
a different relationship with the past and their ancestors.

After that, the discussion cooled
down. The night was cooling down as well, and on the ground behind him, the
ex-nuns were beginning to shiver in their thin cotton gowns. The talk
continued, though, for at least another two hours, during which many
cross-cultural theological issues were fairly evenly debated. In the end, the
attackers, drained and a trifle flabbergasted by the encounter, made as if to
depart. Just to make sure, to cap the melting sundae with a tangy cherry,
Switters announced that the compound was under the personal aegis of President
Hafez al-Assad, Audubon Poe, and Pee-wee Herman, and if any harm came to its
occupants, heads would roll all the way to Mecca. “Take it up with those worthy
gentlemen if you have any doubts. Tell them Switters sent you.”