Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (41 page)

His brain, lit as it now was by an
unearthly radiance, accepted the fact that the fever that sickened him also
protected him. It spun a cocoon around him.
I am the larva of the New Man,
he thought. But then he added,
Much as the paperclip is the larva of the
coathanger.
He cackled wildly and wished that Bobby Case were there.

Moonlight enveloped him like a clown
suit—voluminous, chalky, theatrical—into which he was buttoned with fuzzy red
pompons of fever. Inside it, his blood sang torch songs, sang them throughout
the night, as he drifted in and out of dream and delirium, unable to
distinguish the one from the other. When he vomited, it was a fizzy mixture of
bile and
dölyolu
.

At some point, he realized that the
sun was beating him between the eyes like a stick. He covered his face with his
hat and grieved for the enchantments of evening. Another time, he was sure he
heard female voices, cautious but caring, and sensed that figures were gathered
around him like the ghosts of dead Girl Scouts around a spectral weenie roast.
I’m
hot enough to toast marshmallows.
He chuckled, pleased with himself for no
good reason. The voices faded, but he became aware of a fresh pitcher of water
beside him and a silk pillow under his head.

Then, it was night again. He uncovered
his face in time to see the moon spin into view like a salt-encrusted pinwheel.
Although he couldn’t explain why, the night sky made him want to meow. He tried
meowing once or twice, but it hurt his gums, which were swollen, and his
throat, which felt like a scabbard two sizes too small for its sword. Oddly
enough, it never occurred to him that he might be dying. For his composure he
could probably thank fever, which nature had programmed to weave illusions of
invincibility, and End of Time, whose yopo had dissolved boundaries between
life and its extreme alternative (lesser alternatives being conformity,
boredom, sobriety, consumerism, dogmatism, puritanism, legalism, and things of
that sorry ilk). He realized, nonetheless, that he was in a kind of trouble for
which he had not bargained.

It was on the second afternoon—or,
perhaps, the third—that he emerged from deep torpor to find his forehead being
sponged by a vivacious, round-cheeked nun. He studied her face only seconds
before blurting out, weakly but passionately, “I love you.”

“Oh, yeah?” she replied in American
English with a faint French accent. “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind.”

That’s true,
he thought, and
shut his eyes, though he took her smile with him into stupor. The next time he
awoke, he was inside the oasis.

Whether an Amazonian germ colony had
been insidiously incubating in his mucous recesses since Boquichicos, or
whether he’d taken aboard a more overt yet equally malevolent family of
microorganisms while in the company of the Bedouins or Kurds, he would never
know. His nurse, the vivacious nun, had no name for his sickness, either in
English or French, but she had a cure: sponge baths, sulfa drugs, and pots of
herbal tea. Or else it simply ran its course. In any event, after a week of
pain, fever, nausea, coma, and phantasmagorical rapture, his lids sprang open
one morning like mousetraps in reverse, and he found himself, feeble yet
curiously refreshed, upon a low cot in the tiny, blue-walled room that served
the convent/oasis as a rudimentary infirmary. Sister Domino sat, as she had
almost continually, on a stool at his side.

She wore now a typically Syrian long
cotton gown instead of the habit in which he’d first seen her. In truth, he had
little or no recollection of their first meeting, and when informed later of
his impromptu declaration of love for her, he was understandably embarrassed,
although disinclined to deny he’d made such an avowal.

Domino had opened the louvered door
and thrown back the curtains on the glassless window, and in the strong
sunlight, he saw that she was older than her voice and mannerisms had led him
to believe. Older, but no less sparkling of eye. And her pert little nose would
have been an apt protrusion from the most popular face at any teen queen dairy
bar. As for her mouth (what the hell was he doing evaluating her mouth?), it
was one of those perpetually rubicund embossments that resembled a plum
squashed half out of its jacket and seemed always on the verge of a pout or a
pucker—but only on the verge, for it was a strong mouth, there was a firmness
and resolve in it, even when it almost pursed, even when it modestly smiled.
She could smile from six o’clock to doomsday, and nobody would ever see her
gums. She exuded warmth and tenderness, but on her own terms.

Her complexion was Mediterranean of
hue and thus seemed incongruous with her more northerly nose. Around her eyes
the skin looked as if it had been trampled by sparrows, a tracing that caused
him to put her age at forty. She was forty-six. Or would be in September.

In shadow, Domino’s hair was dark
brown; in sunlight, reddish tints shone through in streaks, like claw marks on
fine maple furniture. She wore it straight, at medium length, and it had a
tendency to swing free and half cover one or the other of her rotund cheeks.
The cheeks were not fat, exactly, but each might have concealed a bishop’s
golfball—with a couple of Communion wafers thrown in for good measure. Her
breasts and buttocks were also quite round, but Switters didn’t notice that. He
would have sworn under oath that he didn’t notice. Why would he have noticed?
She was a middle-aged nun.

“Well, hello,” she said cheerfully.
“You appear to be on the mend.”

“Thanks to you, I’m sure.”

“You must thank God, not me.”

“All right. I may do that. But I
sincerely doubt that any Divine Almighty worthy of the name is going to beam if
I gush or grumble if I don’t.”

Much to his astonishment, she nodded
in agreement. “I suspect you’re right,” she said.

“Don’t you find it a bit batty that
people believe God—the absolute epitome of perfection and enlightenment—could
be so puffed with petty human vanity that he’d expect us to sing his praises at
every opportunity and twice on Sunday?”

She smiled. “Have you traveled by
wheelchair to the middle of the Syrian desert in order to debate theology,
Mr.—?”

“Switters,” he answered, without the
addition of the usual malarkey. “And no, I have not. I decidedly have not.”

She laid a hand gently but authoritatively
on his brow. “Naturally, we need to learn why—and how—you did travel here, but
I don’t wish to interrogate you until you’re stronger, so . . .”

“Oh, thank you! Please, no
interrogation. I’m only insured for fire and theft.”

If she detected a facetious note, she
elected to ignore it. “We must get you strong so we can send you on your way.
Your fever has broken”—she removed her hand, somewhat to his
disappointment—”but you look
la tête comme une pastèque
, as we say in
France.”

“Aren’t you American?”

“No, no. I’m French. Alsatian French,
by heritage, which is why I’ve been denied the grand Gallic nose.”

“But—”

“When I was four, we moved to
Philadelphia so that my father could oversee a famous collection of French art
in a private museum there. I lived in the U.S. for the next twelve years and
became very Americanized, as children will, and although I haven’t been back
since, I’ve worked hard to keep my English pure, so that I don’t sound like
Jacques Cousteau describing zuh most ’andsome craytures zaire are in zuh sea.”

She laughed, and though it jiggled
his sore gut, Switters found himself chuckling with her. “So, you’re a Philly
fille
.
What’s your name?”

There was a pause. A long pause. For
some reason, she was pondering the question, as if she lacked a ready or
definite answer. “Around here, I’m called Domino,” she said at last. “More
formally,
Sister
Domino—but I’m not so certain I can be called that any
longer.” A troubled look dimmed the lights in her eyes. “Before Sister Domino,
I was Sister somebody else, and before that I had my christened name, and in
the not so far future I may have a different name yet.” She paused and
deliberated some more. “I think it’s okay if you just call me Sister.”

“I’d be honored to call you Sister,
Sister.” Then, thinking of Suzy, he added, “Fate has sought to compensate for
the shortcomings of my parents in the sister production department by supplying
me with the sweetest, loveliest sororal surrogates.”

“Kind of you to say that, Mr. Switters,
but I hope you don’t think you can butter me off and get me to extend your stay
here. You really must leave just as soon as you’re healthy enough to travel.”

Switters ran his hand over his face.
A week’s growth of stubble rasped his fingers.
I must look like a werewolf’s
bedroom slipper,
he thought. “I find it difficult to believe that someone
who spent her formative years in the City of Brotherly Love could be so
callously chomping at the bit in her desire to kick me out into the cruel
wastes.”

“Yes, but you mustn’t take it
personally. Or doubt our Christian charity. You see . . . well, no, you
couldn’t see because you haven’t looked around, but the Pachomian Order has
itself a regular little Eden here. But it’s an Eden for Eves only. We cannot allow
even one Adam to intrude, I’m afraid.” She stood up to leave.

“Hmm? An Adamless Eden? I’ll have to
mull that over.” Turning to face her, he heard the ponderosa music his whiskers
made as they scratched the silk pillow. “What about a Serpent?”

“A Serpent?” She laughed. “No, no
Serpent here, either.”

“Oh? But there has to be.
Every
Paradise has a Serpent. It goes with the territory.”

“Not this one,” she said, but there
was something about her denial that was patently unconvincing.

All day Switters lay on the cot,
listening to the sounds of activity in the compound. There was work going on.
He heard the spray of sprinklers, the clang of garden tools, the
whisk-whisk
of brooms, the rattle of buckets and pots, the
ech-zee ech-zee
of
pruning saws, and the simple grunts of labor (so different in their coloration
from the loaded grunts of love). A couple of times he stood on the cot to peer
out the window at the adobe buildings, the orchards, and the vegetable plots,
but he grew quickly dizzy and lowered himself to a prone position. Laments
(there had been an unusually long, coolish winter, and the orange trees had
bloomed so late that there was danger the fruit would cook on the boughs),
complaints (evidently there was some kind of dispute between the convent and
the Mother Church), and snatches of French songs (no hymn among them) drifted
into the little room, where they were tossed in an auditory salad with the work
noises and the cackle and bray of beast and fowl.

Every hour or so, Sister Domino would
stick her head in to check on him. He’d wave to her helplessly, and it wasn’t
entirely an act. Midday, she brought him a warm vegetable broth but departed
when satisfied that he was capable of spooning it himself between his
fever-cracked lips. Midafternoon, she stopped by, to his supreme embarrassment,
to empty his chamber pot.

Toward dusk, as she delivered a fresh
kettle of tea, he apologized for being a burden to her. “I’m interfering with
your duties,” he said sincerely, “and it’s making me feel guilty, an emotion my
grandmother warned me against.”

“Well,” she sighed, “you must be
carefully attended to for a few more days, and nobody else here has good
English. Except for Fannie, our Irish lass, and I wouldn’t trust her alone with
you.”

“Is that a fact? And which one of us
wouldn’t you trust?”

She looked him over. He was
physically disabled, he was recuperating from fever, and yet . . . “Neither,”
she said. “Frankly.”

“But what do you think might go on?
If we were left alone together?”

Domino headed for the door. “I don’t
sully my mind with such details.”

“Good,” he congratulated her. “But,
please, one more question before you go.”

“Yes?”

“Who undressed me?” He nodded at his
clothing, which—suit, T-shirt, cartoon shorts, and all—hung from a peg on the
wall.

She turned as red as a blister and
sailed out of the room. And it was the older nun who’d first answered his ring
at the gate who showed up with his supper tray, removed it a half hour later,
and tucked him in for the night.

“Faites de beaux rêves, monsieur,”
she called as she put out the light.

Switters had always loved that
expression, “Make fine dreams.” In contrast to the English, “Have sweet
dreams,” the French implied that the sleeper was not a passive spectator, a
captive audience, but had some control over and must accept some responsibility
for his or her dreaming. Moreover, a “fine” dream had much wider connotations
than a “sweet” one.

In any event, his dreams that night
were neither fine nor sweet, for he was made fitful by the notion that toward
Sister Domino, with the intention of being playful, he may have behaved like an
insensitive boor.

How oddly delighted he was (though
he tried to conceal it) when she turned up the next morning with his breakfast!
It was a fine breakfast, too: scrambled eggs, grilled eggplant, chèvre, and
toast. Before he dove into it, however, he found himself apologizing once more.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. It’s just that I come from a country where
there are prudes on the left, prigs on the right, and hypocrites down the
middle, so I sometimes feel obligated to push in the other direction just to
keep things honest.”