Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (44 page)

“Pachomians don’t look for ulterior
motives. That’s too cynical. We petition for free will and common sense and
compassion, and avoid casting blame on the guardians of the doctrine. After
all, they were divinely commanded to ‘go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.’ “

“You mean their tribal antecedents
were so commanded. Four thousand years ago. Before a person had to stand in
line for an hour and a half just to get a whiff of fresh air. It’s tough to say
who’s a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a
crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.”

In the ensuing exchange, Domino made
it clear that while she might be estranged from the Church, she would no more
brook criticism of its mediators than Skeeter Washington, in exile from New
York, would accept insult to the Yankees. In the absence of an urgent ax to
grind, Switters was happy to shut up and let her get on with her chronicle.

The Vatican fathers did not
officially abolish the Order of St. Pachomius—an act that might have engendered
bad publicity—but in the hope of drying it up, they quietly reduced its budget
by two-thirds. A necessary economic move, they said. Then, they sold the
Pachomian compound to the Jordanian military. If the sisterhood was to survive,
it would have to arrange private subsidy. Amazingly enough, it did, although by
the time Croetine found the Lebanese businessman who offered her a small oasis
in neighboring Syria (he’d scored it as part of a real estate deal but could
make scant use of it himself, the oasis being quite out of the way and he being
quite Jewish), most of her sisters had moved on to other places, other orders.
Undaunted, she returned to Europe, recruited a handful of new members,
including her niece, Simone Thiry, and led them to the Syrian desert in 1983.

“We’ve been here ever since. Nine of
us in all. Nine mavericks. Once we were settled, my aunt informed us that she
was henceforth to be called ‘Masked Beauty’ and that each of us was also to be
renamed. She asked us each to remember the name that as a child we would have
preferred to the one our parents had given us. Most children have such a wish
name, do you know? Well, we got five Marias and three Theresas—and Masked
Beauty shouted, ‘No no no! Not the name of your heroine, the woman you were
taught to most admire, but your dream name, your whisper name, the one you
called yourself when you pretended alone in your room to be somebody else.’
Okay, we tried again, and we still got a couple of Marias. So, we have Maria
Une, who first spoke to you at the gate, and Maria Deux. We have also Pippi,
ZuZu, Mustang Sally, Fannie, and Bob.”

“Bob?”

“You’ll have to ask her.”

“What about Domino?”

“I was lazy and just remembered my
nickname from high school in Philadelphia.”

“Domino Thiry. I get it, though I
wish I didn’t. That phrase was used to hoodwink the American public into
supporting our criminal war against Vietnam, and it was popularized if not
coined by the pus-brained pluto, John Foster Dulles.” Hesitant, he held the
pellet of spittle against his gum for several seconds before at last
discharging it as daintily as possible toward a target area beneath the cot.
His restraint notwithstanding, the act caused Sister Domino to look at him
askance.

Once they had assumed, in ceremony,
their new names, Masked Beauty showed her sisters the document she had been
hiding for her uncle, the late Pierre Cardinal Thiry. He’d never retrieved it,
perhaps preferring that it be lost. But just as certain cloisters are built
around a relic—the middle finger bone of a saint, for example, or the charred
trouser cuff of a martyr—the Pachomians allowed their tiny community to
coalesce around the document. This, even though the document’s text had
relevance neither to St. Pachomius nor to any particular canon to which the
sisterhood adhered, except maybe a tenuous connection to the desert lands, and
the nature of that connection was not for Switters to know. Yet, the Pachomians
were the document’s guardians and protectors; they made it both their charge
and mortar, their onus and distinction, a symbolic yet tangible secret fulcrum
at the center of their turning and toiling for humanity and Christ.

“Caravans used to travel by here,”
said Domino. “Camel caravans as well as motor convoys, but in the past ten
years or so, we see only the rare band of nomads, such as the one that left you
on our doorstep, and a truck that passes every few weeks carrying passengers,
freight, and mail between Damascus and Deir ez-Zur. There’s no road, of course,
only what nature has left of the old caravan trail.”

Because of their isolation and the
meagerness of their ecclesiastical stipend, the Pachomian sisters had had to
make their oasis as self-supporting as possible. For at least a decade, the
compound had been used as a training center and command post for officers of
the Druse militia, and its agricultural aspects had been neglected. It took the
nuns several years of hard labor to restore productivity. They cleaned,
cleared, tilled, planted, pruned, and husbanded, and in between, transformed
the Druse mosque into their chapel. During that period, neither the Church nor
society heard any noise from them, and they were largely forgotten.

Toward the end of the eighties,
however, letters, essays, and articles bearing the signature or byline of
Masked Beauty began to appear in publications both religious and secular, and
while they sometimes ranged far and wide, the core of these writings was an
unabashed appeal for papal sanction of birth control. In addition to the misery
that unlimited procreation caused women and children, Masked Beauty argued that
much of the poverty, violence, addiction, ignorance, mental illness, pollution,
and climate changes plaguing humankind in general had major roots in careless
or coerced reproduction. It would not be mega-weapons, asteroids, earthquakes,
or extraterrestrials that destroyed the earth, she wrote, but excessive
population. The prophetic “fire next time” referred to loin heat that, if not
properly banked, could only lead eventually to cataclysmic global warming.

“A foregone conclusion,” said
Switters, “what with six billion gobbling gullets and an equal number of
squirting anuses. But religious fundamentalists—and New Age fluffheads, I
should add—can barely
wait
for the earth to be destroyed. Doomsday is
the jackpot on their golden slot machine, the day they’ll be allowed to dig
their quivering fork into all that pie in the sky. And have you considered,
Sister D., that the afterworld is likely to be even more crowded than our
little ball of clay because if every Christian who ever lived is camping there
. . . well, that’s a lot of pie-gobbling, although I can’t imagine there’d be
squirting anuses in Heaven. Can you? Wouldn’t God have some alternative
system?”

For an answer, Domino shot him a look
of pity, scorn, and revulsion. It was deserved, he thought. He’d spat on her
floor and made crude remarks; she must think him an absolute lout. How could
she understand the exorcisement explicit in the expectoration ritual or know
that he used a phrase such as “squirting anuses” only in the abstract? Were he
actually to picture one such opening—let alone billions—performing that base
function, he’d be more revolted than she. After all, she was a woman who could
ferry the chamber pots of the sick, whereas he thought of the rectum, on those
very rare occasions when he thought of it at all, as a receptacle for white
light, the intake valve through which that mystic energy that Bobby Case’s wise
ol’ boys called kundalini entered the body to slither up the spinal column in
radiant coils, like the Serpent bringing divine knowledge to the unsuspecting
bumpkins of Eden. Enlightenment or excrement: O anus, what doth thy truest
purpose be?

“I’m sorry about the scatological
undertones,” he said. It was the third time he had apologized to her in as many
days, and sensing that he was a man unaccustomed to apology, she was moved to
forgive him. “Overtones,” she corrected him, with a tolerant smile, and then
concluded her story.

The Vatican eventually figured out
that Masked Beauty was Abbess Croetine. It ordered her to cease and desist. She
refused. Other Pachomians, including Domino, began to publish letters as well. The
sisters agitated. The Church complained. And threatened. It was a battle that
raged slowly for years. Then, a fortnight ago, it had come to a head. Masked
Beauty was summoned to Damascus to face charges at an ecclesiastical hearing
presided over by a trio of bishops dispatched from Rome. Citing poor health,
the abbess sent Domino in her stead. The tribunal proved immune to the
sisterhood’s arguments and Domino’s charms. It officially dissolved the Order
of St. Pachomius and commanded its members back to Europe for discipline and
reassignment. On behalf of Pachomius, father of all nuns, on behalf of
overbooked wombs around the world, Domino told the bishops to go fly a
cotton-picking kite.

“They couldn’t evict us. They don’t
own this property. We took a vote and decided to stay on. Only Fannie was of a
mind to flee, but she relented. Afraid, perhaps, of Asmodeus, her incubus.
Then, yesterday after lunch, while you were resting, a courier arrived here
from Damascus. He brought the news that we most feared, that we never thought
would really happen. We had been excommunicated. Every single one of us. Thrown
out of the Church. Forever.”

“So you’re not a nun anymore,”
Switters said, hoping he didn’t sound too pleased about it.

She tightened her lips. The defiance
in her eyes was like the fizz in a fuse. “I will always be a nun. And we’ll
carry on with our worship and our work just as before. Only now there will be
no—how do you call it?—man in the middle. No intermediary. We’ll report
directly to God. And God alone.”

“Well,” said Switters, searching for
words of comfort or support, “maybe that’s the way it was always meant to be.
In the Koran, Mohammed says that direct, personal, one-on-one contact is the
only
way to Allah, not that the mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs paid him much heed.
It’s also written in the Koran that, ‘The gates of paradise open wide for he
who can make his companions laugh,’ but in all of Islam only the Sufi seem to
have gotten the message. Of course, there’re no comedians whatsoever in the
Christian scheme of things. If a single giggle ever fluttered the lips of Our
Savior, the Gospels neglect to report it. I’m guessing that the gene that
disposes people to be true believers may render them immune to wit.”

He was on the verge of bringing up
Maestra’s missing-link theory and maybe a word or two about Today Is Tomorrow
when it occurred to him that he’d gone tangential, which was accepted, even
expected, at a C.R.A.F.T. Club donnybrook but generally unappreciated in
ordinary company. He smiled sympathetically and shut his mouth.

“And what is
your
faith,
exactly, Mr. Switters? What do
you
believe in?”

“Umm. Well. I try not to.”

“You try not to believe?”

“That’s right. I’m on the run from
the Killer B’s.”

“Pardon? What have killer bees to do
with? . . .”

“B for Belief. B for Belonging. The
B’s that lead to most of the killing in the world. If you don’t Belong among
us, then you’re our inferior, or our enemy, or both; and you can’t Belong with
us unless you Believe what we Believe. Maybe not even then, but it certainly
helps. Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our
nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.”

“But human beings have—”

“A need to belong somewhere, to
believe in something? Yeah, Sister—if I may still call you that—they seem to.
It’s virtually genetic. I’m on guard against it, and it still overtakes me. The
concern is that we may annihilate ourselves before we can evolve, or mutate,
beyond it; but you may rest assured that, even if we survive, as long as we’re
driven to Belong and Believe, we’ll never be at peace, and we’ll never be
free.”

“Ooh-la-la! That’s crazy. A human who
belongs to no group or believes in nothing? What kind of robot, what lost
animal? No longer human at all.”

“In the sense that a frog is no
longer a tadpole, you may be right. And it may never come to pass, or have to.
We just might learn enough tolerance, and jettison enough fear and ego, to
compensate. The neutral angels could prevail:
neutral victory
being a
particularly intriguing oxymoron. In the meantime, though, Sister—if I may
still call you that—can’t you hear them buzzing? Listen to the swarm that
Be-lief and Belonging have Be-got. B-boundaries. B-borderlines. B-blood
B-bonds. B-blood B-brothers. B-bloodlust. B-bloodbath. B-bloody B-bloody.
B-bang B-bang. B-boom B-boom. B-blast. B-bludgeon. B-batter. B-blow up. B-bomb.
B-butcher. B-break. B-blindside. B-bushwack. Be-head. B-blackball. Be-tray.
B-bullets. B-blades. B-booby traps. B-bazookas. B-bayonets. B-brute force.
B-barbarism. B-babylon. B-babel. Be-elzebub. Be-etlejuice. B-bureaucracy.
B-bagpipes. B-beanie B-babies.”

“Beanie Babies? The kiddie stuffed
toys?”

“Uh, sorry, that just slipped in.
And, obviously, there’re good things that begin with B, too. Bee-r, for
example. B-biscuits. The Be-atles. B-Broadway.
B-beinas.
”

“Bei——?”

He wasn’t about to explain that
beina
was the Catalonian for, as Audubon Poe put it, a woman’s treasure. So, he threw
in triumphantly, as if he’d been saving it for last, “The B-ible.”