Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (54 page)

“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 lackadaisical 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 try 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.