Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (61 page)

Since he had read them largely in
bits and pieces or paraphrase, while assisting Suzy and Masked Beauty with their
individual research projects, and since Domino was of the opinion that the trio
of predictions was ultimately inseparable, Switters decided to refamiliarize
himself with One and Two before tackling the pièce de résistance.

the first prophecy

You have seen Hell, where the
souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world
devotion to My Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will
be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end soon, but if people do
not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the reign of Pius
XI. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the
great sign given to you by God that He is about to punish the World for its
crimes, by means of war, famine and persecutions of the Church and the Holy
Father.

Okay, then. And next—

the second prophecy

To prevent World punishment, I
have come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart and the
Communion of Reparation on the first Saturdays (of each month). If my requests
are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace; if not, she will
spread her errors throughout the World, causing wars and persecutions of the
Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer,
and various nations will be annihilated.

Already sedated by dinner, arrack,
and the act of love most naughty, Switters could barely read those
prognostications without yawning. They struck him as vague, bland, generalized,
incongruous, and overly concerned with the fate of the Church, its dogma, and
its leader. Had he heard them related by a starry-eyed ten-year-old Portuguese
peasant girl in 1917, they might possibly have spun the propeller on his
intellectual beanie, but now he just stretched and sighed like a hockey coach
at a tea dance before proceeding to the ballyhooed main event: that legendary
ultrasecret time-release pope onion,

the third prophecy of fatima

Before this century draws to a
close, there are to be unimaginable advances in all sciences. These
achievements will bring about a great physical ease but little intelligence or
happiness. Everywhere, communication and education will flourish, yet men,
deprived of My Immaculate Heart, will sink ever further into stupidity. Anguish
and violence will increase apace with material wealth, and many will be lost to
fiery death and sickness of spirit. In the century after this one, however, a
certain unexpected wisdom and joy will come upon a segment of the population
that has survived the earlier sorrows, but, alas, the Word that brings about
this healing will be delivered to mankind neither from Rome’s basilica nor from
a converted Russia, but from the direction of a pyramid. Whether it is by
design of God or the Evil One, even I do not know, yet the World must not fail
to pay it close attention, for Heaven and Hell hang in the balance.

That was how it went. Switters
read both the English and French versions, and as far as his sleepy mind could
tell, they were in perfect agreement. In the next to last sentence, the French
mot
had been translated as “word” when he supposed it could have been rendered, as
it often was in French, as “cue” (something said or signed in order to elicit a
particular action onstage), but the meaning here was virtually the same, and he
was scarcely in a mood to quibble. In fact, he yawned like a pigeonhole before
conceding that “This little augury is more intriguing than the first two.
Definitely more intriguing. But I honestly can’t see what all the furor is
about, why you’d find it so horrifying or ol’ John the Twenty-third would go
through a ream and a half of Kleenex.”

“You don’t see why?”

“No, sister love, I don’t. I mean,
it’s hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the
latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were
standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham. Or that an
abundance of information can exacerbate ignorance, if the information is of
poor quality. Or that people can be lavishly entertained right around the clock
and still feel empty and disconnected. Fatima slam-dunked the crystal ball in
that regard, I have to give her credit, whoever she was. All that stuff is on
us like a bad suit, and she called it in 1917. But, hey, there’s a flip side to
it, ways to profit from it, ways to get around it, and—”

“Yes, yes,” Domino broke in
impatiently. “The remedy is Her Immaculate Heart. But what about the rest of
the prophecy?”

“You mean the nice part about unexpected
joy and wisdom heading our way in the next century? Sounds bloody jolly to me,
to quote the late Potney Smithe, Esquire. Bloody jolly. Assuming that you and I
will be among the survivors.”

“Yes, but this so-called wisdom and
joy, this healing, will not be brought about by the Church.”

“So? Who gives a damn whether the
Church brings it about as long as it’s brought about?”

She frowned so hard her cheeks nearly
doubled. “Don’t you see? The enlightening doctrine is to come from the
direction of the pyramids. From the Middle East. That means Islam. Mary’s
inference is that Islam will succeed where Christianity has failed. Who gives a
damn? Everyone in the Western world
ought
to give a damn! The
implications are almost too disturbing to be contemplated.”

“Well now, this wouldn’t happen to be
the whining of a poor loser, would it?” A herd of sarcastic remarks was set to
stampede out of his voice box, but he bit his tongue and turned them back. He
didn’t want to hurt her, and he was too drowsy to covet prolonged conversation.
“Listen,” he said, “these prophecies leave a lot of room for interpretation,
and there’s a possibility you may have missed—”

“Don’t you think we haven’t—”

“Yeah, I know you and Masked Beauty
have been kicking this gong around for years, but you still may have
misinterpreted some point or other. Isn’t that why you wanted me to cast my
unflinching bloodshot beam on it? I, who have left speechless entire roomfuls
of itinerant journalists and shadowy international entrepreneurs with my
unprecedented unravelings of certain passages of
Finnegans Wake
? Just
let me sleep on it, sister love. Do please let me sleep on it.”

With that, he blew out the closest
candle, kissed the disappointed nun, and snuggled down between the rugs. “Have
you noticed,” he asked in a faint, sweet voice just before he began to snore,
“that nobody talks about the sandman anymore?”

Our hero must have received a heavy
dusting of the sandman’s sedative grit because when he finally awoke, the sky
was full of blue and the bed empty of Domino. The secret envelope and the
telltale Vaseline were gone as well, though the English translation of the
third prophecy could be seen protruding from his left tennis shoe. It was eight
according to his watch, which meant it would have been eleven, Christmas Eve,
in Seattle. He’d intended to ring his grandmother at an earlier hour, but even
though it was now past her bedtime, he decided to call her. He held his breath
as he punched in the numbers, fearful that Suzy might answer the phone,
discouraged that she probably would not.

“This had better be good,” a sleepy
voice grumbled.

“It’s a holiday greeting, full of
love, warmth, and good cheer,” piped Switters.

“You!” Maestra growled. “I might have
known. You think an old woman doesn’t need her rest just because it’s Santa
Claus’s birthday? Next thing I know you’ll be calling me up at midnight on the
Fourth of July to pledge allegiance to what’s left of the flag.” Then she
softened and inquired as to his health and whereabouts—”Not that you’d be
truthful about it”—and complained that he was off in some flea-bitten land
somewhere, ignoring her, risking his hide and lying about it, when it was no
longer of any necessity. “You can take the boy out of the CIA but you can’t
take the CIA out of—”

“Merry X-mas, Maestra.”

“Heh! Merry X-mas, you no-good scamp.
I miss you. Little Suzy misses you, too, for some unfathomable reason. It was
you who put dirty ideas in the poor child’s head and led her astray. She’s gone
to Sacramento for the holidays. What time is it, for God’s sake? That cute
Captain Case checks up on us every now and then.
He
doesn’t wait until
the middle of the night on Christmas. Okay, there’s just one thing I have to
know. Are you still scooting yourself around in that pathetic dodge-’em chair?”

“No. I’m not. I’m on stilts.”

There was prolonged silence on the
other end of the line, although he could tell from her breathing that she
definitely hadn’t dozed off.

Maestra’s silence must have been
contagious, for the oasis was unusually quiet that morning. He was soon to
learn from a note pinned to the door of his room that Masked Beauty, rather
abruptly, had decreed it a day of private devotion, during which the sisterhood
would neither eat nor speak.
That’s fine,
Switters reasoned.
It’ll
create an atmosphere conducive to my contemplation of the Fatima folderol.

But was it folderol? Rilke, the poet
whose verses had helped him get out of bed mornings in Berkeley, wrote, “The
future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it
happens.” And Today Is Tomorrow, with his vision root, had offered the Swit an
actual glimpse of the interpenetration of realities and chronologies. He could
not with conviction deny that prophecy was theoretically possible. It was just
that so much of it reeked of hysteria, esoterica, naiveté, and humbug—and
Fatima’s forewarnings were hardly free of that shrill cloy. Nevertheless . . .

Nevertheless,
a fair amount of
what she (be she Divine Mother or schizophrenic pasture girl) had predicted in
her three-pronged prognosis had indisputedly come to pass. It wasn’t much,
really, but it was enough to merit serious consideration of the remainder of
her declarations.

The part that Switters found
encouraging (though he would never admit to a need for encouragement), and the
part that seemed to hurt Domino deep in her heart, was the business about a
happy transformation of humanity (or, rather, a portion of humanity, an elite,
perhaps) that would be cued not from the Church or the Kremlin but from pyramid
territory. Domino believed this a foretelling of the triumph of the Islamic
point of view, a victory of Mohammed’s metaphysical system over the
institutions and metaphysics of Jesus Christ. Switters was not so sure. He kept
harkening back to the material he’d pulled off the Net for Masked Beauty, the
stuff about King Hermanos constructing the pyramids as vaults in which to
shelter the revelations and secrets of the ancient sages. He’d wager neither
his Beretta nor his Broadway show tunes on it, but he had an inkling that it
was in those mystical, astrological, and alchemical texts known as the Hermetic
Writings, rather than in the teachings of the Koran (and the dogma into which
those teachings had been subsequently corrupted), that modern survivors would
locate their cue as to how to attain and sustain a wise and joyful existence.
After all, the Hermetic Writings were from the pyramids, were, in effect,
responsible
for the pyramids, whereas any connection between pyramids and Islam was of the
most tenuous and after-the-fact geographical nature.

Thus it was that on Christmas Day,
Switters had sat in the shade of a lemon tree and, while nibbling on leftover
falafel that he’d stolen from Maria Une’s deserted kitchen, sump-pumped into
his frontal lobe everything that he could remember about the Hermetic
tradition.

Chickpea in his mouth, dry heat in
his nostrils, papery leaf rustle and narcotic hen cluck in his ears, grainy
wind on his skin, distant shimmer (like a flutter of god beards, a pulse of
muslin-wrapped phosphorus) in his eyes, thirst never far from his throat: it
was, in terms of the senses, a perfect situation in which to try to summon his
faint knowledge of that series of writings (like the Bible, it was a
disjointed, fragmented collection rather than a unified canon) known as the
Corpus
Hermeticum
. The tradition, while popularized in ancient Greece, had
originated in still older Egypt, in places probably not wildly different from
this one.

Hermetic teachings, as best as he
could recall, did not constitute a theology, but, rather, were designed as a
practical guide to a sane and peaceful life of natural science, contemplation,
and self-refinement. They did, however, in their effort to define and celebrate
humanity’s place in the grand scheme of things, analyze at great length our
relationship to the cosmos, before and after death. Their purpose, though, was
to educate and improve; to enlarge the soul rather than to save it.

Well and good, Switters supposed.
There was much to admire about a belief system that refused to proselytize or
to water itself down to attract converts, that was nature friendly, body
friendly (references abounded in the writings to various forms of sex magic),
tolerant, respectful, and innocent of any recorded act of repression or
bloodshed. A belief system that didn’t insist on belief? That did more good
than harm? He’d award it six stars out of five and tell it to keep the
change—bearing in mind all the while that a committee of dullards (who but the
dull had time or patience to serve on committees?), a small infusion of earnest
missing links, could pull it down to their squeaky level and enfeeble it almost
overnight.