“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.”
Reluctantly she did. And a wicked war of words ensued, a dispute that raged for weeks. No Vatican representative came to Syria, but overheated electrons zinged eastward across the Mediterranean on a regular basis, and hard-boiled electrons often passed them, heading west. Several times Domino seemed to lose her stomach for the fight, but Switters, operating on not much more than a hunch, propped her up, girded her loins (though he might have preferred to ungird them), and pushed her back into the fray.
Toward the end of April, she prevailed.
She didn’t know if she had simply worn them down or if they were getting nervous as June and the “New Catholic Women” conference approached, but quite abruptly one day in the weeks following Easter, the Church fathers relented, going so far as to issue a thoroughly polite formal invitation to meet with the Holy Father in a fortnight’s time.
Hugging Switters, almost sobbing with relief, she said she was overjoyed that it was done and that, in the end, winning an audience with the pope was worth all the Sturm und Drang.
“Personally, I’d rather meet Pee-wee Herman,” he said, “but if you’re happy, I’m happy. And if you’re safe and happy, I’m happier yet.”
She suggested that he must be happy on his own account as well. He could leave now, leave at once, and start attending to his considerable personal agenda. “Not so fast,” he said. “You may have won the compulsories, but you still have to skate the freestyles, and there ain’t no way your coach is abandoning you until the last damn twirl is twirled. Oh, no! Not with this set of judges. Some way, somehow, I’ve got to escort you to Rome.”
She told him he was out of his cotton-picking mind. She told him he was crazy and brave and sweet. He told her he was just curious.
The May moon looked like a bottlecap. More specifically, entering its last phase, the moon looked like a bottlecap that a fidgety beer-drinker had squashed double between macho thumb and forefinger. The moon was making Switters thirsty, and he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver wasn’t listening.
“I want to love America,” Toufic lamented, “but America requires me to hate it.”
Toufic had come to drive the Pachomian delegation to the airport at Damascus. He arrived on a Monday evening so that they might get a very early start on Tuesday morning. He arrived with a crumb of hashish for Switters, and they sat by the car now, smoking it in the faintly moon-painted desert. He also arrived with American offenses on his mind. Offenses in Iraq. Offenses in Yugoslavia. Those offenses made Toufic angry, but mostly they made him sad. His large brown eyes seemed saturated with a kind of molten chocolate grief.
“What is wrong with your great country?” Toufic lamented. “Why must it do these terrible things?”
Switters held a cloud of candied smoke in his lungs. “Because the cowboys wiped out the buffalo,” Switters said.
“Everywhere a buffalo fell,” said Switters, “a monster sprang up in its place.”
Switters was going to list some of the monsters, but his mouth was dry, and he feared he couldn’t expectorate.
“There’s a direct link between the buffalo hunts and Vietnam,” said Switters.
Straining to comprehend, Toufic sighed with his eyes.
“When Lee surrendered at Appomattox,” said Switters, “it sealed once and for all Wall Street’s power over the American people.”
Switters said, “There’s a direct link between Appomattox and genuine imitation leather.”
“But,” Toufic lamented, “your country has so much.”
“Well,” said Switters, “it has bounce. It has snap. It has flux.”
“Americans are generous and funny, the ones I have met,” Toufic lamented, “but I am compelled to oppose them.”
“It’s only natural,” said Switters. “American foreign policy invites opposition. It invites terrorism.”
Switters said, “Terrorism is the only imaginable logical response to America’s foreign policy, just as street crime is the only imaginable logical response to America’s drug policy.”
Toufic wanted to pursue this in greater detail, but the hashish was kicking in, and Switters was rapidly losing whatever interest he had in politics. “Politics is where people pay somebody large sums of money to impose his or her will on them. Politics is sadomasochism. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Switters said, between pursed lips, for he was holding in the last of the oily smoke, “Let’s talk about . . . let’s talk about . . . Little Red Riding Hood.”
Switters told Toufic the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Toufic was puzzled but enthralled. He listened attentively, as if weighing every word. Then, Switters told Toufic the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He did the voices. Switters did the big gruff bass Daddy Bear voice, he did the medium-sized nurturing domestic Mama Bear voice, and he did the little high-pitched squealy Baby Bear voice. Toufic was absolutely spellbound.
Toufic wanted more. So, next, Switters tried to describe Finnegans Wake to him. It was not a complete success. Obviously baffled, Toufic became disinterested, even slightly irritated; but Switters persisted in his “titley hi ti ti” talk and his “where, O where is me lickle dig done” talk, just as if he were back at the C.R.A.F.T. Club in Bangkok.
But Switters wasn’t in Bangkok, he was in the Syrian desert, and the May moon, entering its last phase, appeared folded over on itself like a thin yellow omelet. It was making him hungry, and he said as much to Toufic, but the truck driver was no longer listening.
Six of them crowded into the Audi sedan long before dawn. Toufic, of course, was at the wheel, and there were Masked Beauty, Domino, Pippi, Mustang Sally—and Switters, dragged out in nun’s habit, traveling (he hoped) on ZuZu’s passport. As they lined up in the dark to pack themselves into the car, Masked Beauty turned and faced them. “We are going to Italy,” she announced solemnly, perhaps unnecessarily. “You will find that it in no way resembles Italian nights in our dining hall.”
“Italian nights? What are those?” asked Mustang Sally, referring sarcastically to the fact that the sisters had not enjoyed an Italian night since Switters had cleaned out their wine cellar back in September.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” crowed Switters, trusting that he’d turned the tables and awakened the rooster.
The drive was hot and hard. For fifteen or so miles around midmorning, they were shadowed by a helicopter. This particularly angered Pippi, who badly needed a pit stop. Watching her squirm to hold her water, Switters was given yet another reason to despise choppers.
They arrived at the Damascus airport at half past one, believing themselves unfashionably early for a 5 P.M. flight. Such, alas, was not the case.
Switters had purchased their tickets over the Internet, courtesy of Mr. Plastic, and they picked these up at the Alitalia counter without a hitch. (When Domino inquired how he intended to pay for them, he said that was not an issue, since he’d charged them to his grandmother’s attorney, whose credit information he’d had the foresight to hijack after the woman cheated him out of his cabin in the mountains.) Up to a point, clearing customs likewise had gone
smoothly. Switters, wheelchaired and bewimpled, pushed by Pippi and fussed over by Mustang Sally (as though he were the most unfierce of invalids), was accepted as Sister Francine Boulod (ZuZu’s real name) without question. Whenever an official looked him over, Switters would commence to drool, inspiring the douanier to shift his attentions elsewhere. The trouble came when the women were advised that while they were free to leave the country, or free to stay, once they left they could not return: the Syrian government would not be renewing their visas.
Lengthy protests and convoluted discussions followed. When the Frenchwomen objected that they could not possibly depart Syria under those circumstances, the customs agent-in-charge shrugged and said, in essence, “Fine. Don’t go.” Switters wasn’t liking the implications of this at all, but he dared not open his lightly rouged, drool-bedewed mouth.
Having eventually exhausted her arguments with officials at the airport, none of whom could supply her with a reason for the visa restrictions, Masked Beauty began making frantic phone calls. Nobody appeared to be in that day at the Syrian Foreign Office. Every living soul at the French embassy seemed to be in a meeting. The abbess made call after call, to no avail. And now, Flight 023 was boarding.
At the last minute, just before the gate was closed, it was decided that Masked Beauty would remain in Damascus to attempt to resolve the visa problem. The rest of the party would proceed to Rome, where with any luck, the abbess would catch up with them in time for their papal audience on Thursday. They left her stewing, rubbing her nose as if it were a lamp whose genie had gone on coffee break. They barely made the flight.
The three former nuns and one quasi-nun (here’s a way to avoid the “earrings”) had reserved rooms, on Switters’s recommendation, at the Hotel Senato. A smallish albèrgo, the Senato sat, modest cheek to pagan jowl, next door to the Pantheon in the Piazza della Rotonda, the loudest, most colorful, most, for that matter, Italian corner of Rome, and a favorite of Switters’s, although he sometimes complained that the area bordered on being too damn vivid.