Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (70 page)

Both women laughed at this. Then
Domino said, “Mr. Switters is experienced in love, auntie, but not in pure
love.”

(Switters didn’t argue, but had Bobby
Case been present, the spy pilot would have objected, “Why, hell, ladies, pure
love’s the only kind of love this silly hombre knows at all.”)

Rising to light another stick of
incense, the abbess commented that while their discussion of advanced physics
was certainly interesting, she failed to detect its bearing on the subject at
hand.

“Well,” said Switters, “this
pyramid-headed
curandero
from deep in the Amazonian jungle seems to have
concluded that light and darkness can merge in a similar fashion on the
biomolecular plane, the social plane. He says it occurs during laughter. That a
people who could move in the primal realm of laughter could live free of all of
life’s dualities. They would be the first since the original men, the ancestors
of the Real People, to live in harmony with the fundamental essence of the
universe. The essence our quantum physicists are talking about. Today Is
Tomorrow says the civilized man can’t perpetuate that state because he lacks
the Kandakandero knowledge of the different levels of reality, he’s become
emotionally invested in one narrow, absurdly simplistic view of the nature of
existence; and the Indians can’t do it because they lack the buoyancy of the
civilized man’s humor. But the people strong and nimble enough to combine
unlimited intellectual flexibility with the mysterious energy of the laugh,
well, they would become . . .”

“Enlightened?” ventured the abbess.

“Enlightened and endarkened,”
Switters corrected her. “Enlightened
and
endarkened. The ultimate.”

Masked Beauty wasn’t convinced. “A
sense of humor is a fine thing,” she agreed, “but it is not a way of life, and
it certainly is not a means of serving our Lord. This strange savage of yours
does not even
know
our Lord.”

“Why does that matter? Fatima said
that in the next century—which pops out of the box in about nine months, by the
way—the message that will bring unexpected joy and wisdom to a segment of
humanity isn’t going to be coming from the Church of your Lord. Am I right? She
said it will come from the direction of a pyramid. Well, Today Is Tomorrow
qualifies as a pyramid, as near as I can tell, and he’s got a much fresher
message than Islam, including esoteric Islam, with which, if you factor in the
Hermetic tradition, it has a little bit in common.” He gulped. “Mmm. This
vintage possesses a rather touching innocence, don’t you think?”

“Yes, and it is almost gone,” the
abbess noted. She’d never seen anyone drain a bottle of wine so wholeheartedly.
“Perhaps I am just a stupid old woman, but I fail to understand how your
shaman’s ideas are at all practical or applicable. How can a mere sense of
humor—”

“And a flexible, expansive definition
of reality,” Switters reminded her.

“Okay, that as well. But in a
troubled world such as ours, one cannot walk around laughing at everything like
a mindless magpie. Where is the hope in that?”

He didn’t seem to have a ready
response. Tugging at a curl, as if the pressure on his scalp might activate
cerebration, he cleared his throat but said nothing. He was entertaining
notions about how a radical and active sense of humor could puncture the
sterile bubble of bourgeois respectability, how it could destroy smug illusions
and in so doing, strengthen the soul; how if the essence could somehow be
extracted from laughter, that essence might prove less like sound than like
flavor, the flavor of the soul tasting itself at the raw bar of the absolute.
Yet, he was neither informed enough (he hadn’t previously given it much
thought) or drunk enough to put such notions into words. What the hell? Since
when was he the shaman’s mouthpiece?

Observing his hesitation, Domino
spoke up. “I don’t believe Mr. Switters is advocating mindless laughter,
auntie. I don’t believe he is advocating anything. He’s simply trying to solve
the riddle of the third prophecy. And I must say, I find it an attractive
alternative to our own interpretation.”

“What? Laughing one’s way into
Heaven?”

“I think what is at issue here,”
Domino went on, “is a kind of mindful playfulness. I have observed it in Mr.
Switters, and I suspect it could be extricated from Today Is Tomorrow’s
philosophy—a philosophy, by the way, that seems almost to have resulted from combining
aspects of an archaic shamanic tradition with a kind of Zen nonattachment and
an irreverent modern wit. Mr. Switters defeats melancholy by refusing to take
things, including himself, too seriously.”

“But many things
are
—”

“Are they? What I’ve learned from Mr.
Switters is that no matter how valid, how vital, one’s belief system might be,
one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and
dogmatic in one’s adherence to it.”

Masked Beauty rubbed her scar as
though trying to erase it. Or to stimulate new growth. “I realize that
happiness is relative and often dependent upon or at least affected by external
circumstances, whereas cheerfulness can be learned and consciously practiced.
Both you and Mr. Switters seem to have a knack for practicing cheerfulness—oh,
but I can see that our discussing Mr. Switters in this way is making him
uncomfortable. Let us return to the ideas of his pyramid man. Assuming that a
deliberate comic cheerfulness can evolve into a sustainable joy, where does the
wisdom come from?”

Domino deferred to him, but he nodded
for her to answer. “I would guess,” she said, “that what might be extrapolated
from Today Is Tomorrow’s epiphany is that joy itself is a form of wisdom.
Beyond that is the suggestion that if people are nimble enough to move freely
between different perceptions of reality and if they maintain a relaxed,
playful attitude well-seasoned with laughter, then they would live in harmony
with the universe; they would connect with all matter, organic and inorganic,
at its purest, most basic level. Could not that be our Lord’s plan for us, his
goal for his children? Now, auntie, don’t make a face. Perhaps . . . perhaps
that’s even where God resides, there in that—how did Switters call it?—that
energized void at the base of creation. It makes more sense than on some
poof-poof Riviera among gold-plated clouds.”

Pausing to let that sink in—to sink
into her own consciousness as well as her aunt’s—Domino took a Switters-sized
swallow of wine. “Perhaps, too,” she resumed, “Today Is Tomorrow’s ideal is
precisely what is needed to rescue the human race from its tragic flaw:
prideful narcissism. Isn’t that where all this ‘seriousness’ comes from? A
dilated ego?”

Switters regarded her with amazement.
He saw her in a whole new light. On the grease rack of his esteem, he jacked
her up a few more notches.
What a stand-up girl!
he thought.
She gets
it. Better than I get it, maybe.
He felt a spreading warmth toward her. He
also felt a spreading need to urinate. The degree to which the wine had
contributed to both of those sensations is not worth examining. It is enough to
say that he reached for his stilts, blew kisses, presented the women as a
parting gift his favorite word in all of earth’s languages—an ancient Aztec utterance
that meant
parrot
,
poet
,
interlocutor,
and
guide to the
underworld
; all that stuffed into a single word; and a word, he assured
them, that could not be properly pronounced unless one had had one’s tongue
surgically altered, preferably with an obsidian blade. He presented them with a
spitty approximation of that word, and then, before anyone could say, “What? It
doesn’t mean
vagina
?”, he weaved off to the nearest privy, leaving
Domino to convince Masked Beauty that the third prophecy of Fatima referred not
to a triumph of Islam but to the views of a capitate freak from the Amazonian
forest; and to persuade her, further, that the prophecy, bizarre implications
and all, should be made public by the institution most at risk from it.

Evidently, she did a pretty good job,
for shortly after noon, she sought him out and had him e-mail Scanlani with the
Pachomian demand for full disclosure.

If Domino could imagine that God
occupied the fundamental subatomic particle, where did she think Satan lived?
In the fundamental anti-particle? In a quarklette of dark matter? Wouldn’t the
presumed interweaving of light and darkness in that minutest of maws give her a
clue that God and Satan might be codependent if not indivisible? The real
question was where did the neutral angels reside, the ones who refused to take
sides? There would be, of course, plenty of elbow room of a sort in that
elementary space. Because the light waves therein would have been transformed into
photons had they struck any matter, indications were that the space was
infinitely empty. Which also would suggest that God and the Devil were energies
in which, outflanking Einstein, mass dropped out of the equation.

By the time Domino arrived to have him
e-mail Scanlani, the effects of the grape had worn off, and Switters was no
longer bruising his brain with such thoughts. He felt bruised enough by the
wine itself, its infantile character having left him with the kind of headache
with which newborn babies leave sleepless dads. Any impulse he might have had
to wonder aloud to her how it was that the microcosmic could not merely reflect
but
contain
the macrocosmic, any desire to suggest that levity might
actually be the hallmark of the sacred, had evaporated, and he was not unhappy
to be thusly unburdened. He wished to concentrate on convincing Domino that her
tactics with the Vatican would likely provoke strong reaction. He wanted the
oasis to steel itself.

Once again, however, he was mistaken.
Not three days had passed before word arrived from Rome that the Pachomian
demand would gladly be met. According to Scanlani, the Holy Father had been
planning all along to make public the third prophecy as soon as he was
convinced of its authenticity.

Noticing Switters’s frown, Domino
asked if he smelled a rat. “Worse,” he said. “I smell a jackal.”

It did have a stink about it. It
seemed much too easy, passing beyond the smooth into the slick. What worried
him even more than Rome’s newfound spirit of accommodation was the last line of
Scanlani’s communiqué, the line that advised that within the week,
representatives of the Holy See would be arriving at the Syrian oasis to
collect the Fatima transcript.

“You cannot allow that,” Switters
insisted.

“Why not?”

He then outlined several grisly
scenarios, one in which all occupants of the compound were shot dead and the
massacre blamed on religious fanatics (or, if Damascus was cooperating, on the
troublesome Bedouins); another in which insidious chemicals were employed to
make it look as if a deadly virus had swept through the order. They might paint
the Pachomians as a suicide cult. They might even slaughter the sisters and
blame it on him. “We’re out here in the middle of nowhere, vulnerable,
unprotected, naught but the wind and the cuckoos to witness our fate.”

Domino scoffed. She proposed that his
service in the CIA had lowered his reality orientations. “There would be no
cause to murder us, nothing to gain. Suppose they renege on their promise and
don’t make public the prophecy, or else they edit it to their advantage; and
suppose then that we protest and release our own version of the prophecy,
Cardinal Thiry’s version? How many will believe us? How many will care? In the
end, we are no more to them than the nuisance fly.”

“People swat flies,” he said, but he
knew that she was right. Governments—and the armed agencies that served
them—loathed intellectuals and artists and freethinkers of every stripe, but
they didn’t particularly fear them. Not anymore. They didn’t fear them because
in the modern corporate state, artists, intellectuals, and freethinkers wielded
no political or economic power; had no real hold on the hearts and minds of the
masses. Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but
nowadays corporations are telling man’s stories for him. And the message, no
matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you
must conform; to be happy, you must consume. But though Switters was well aware
of those conditions, he was also aware that they could be and ought to be
subverted. Moreover, he was aware that cowboys periodically caught Hollywood
fever, instigating ludicrous, horrendous capers out of sheer ennui, a
smoldering appetite for thrill and domination. So he badgered Domino
relentlessly until she at last gave in.

The Pachomians, she e-mailed
Scanlani, would surrender the Fatima prophecy only to the Holy Father himself.
It would be directly delivered to the pope and none other. “Do not waste your
time traveling to Syria,” she told him, at Switters’s insistence. “We shall
travel to Rome.”

This time, the reaction was more
typical, if not more reassuring. Hostility seethed from every glyph. Scanlani
chided Domino for her presumptuousness, her audacity and insubordination in
thinking she could order the Holy Father about, thinking she could force a
papal audience. He reminded her that her superiors had gone out of their way to
be accommodating, and for her ingratitude and impertinence he berated and
belittled her as only a practiced lawyer could. His attack brought her close to
tears. Contrite, she was ready to back off, but Switters wouldn’t permit it.
“The grand mackerels have given in before, and they may again. Stick to
your—pardon the expression—guns.”