Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

But no. He couldn’t sell it to his conscience. The bedroom was not a classroom. There were some skills (if skill was the right word) that a person needed to develop, through trial and error, on their own. To “teach” Suzy about sex, from his well-burnished lectern, would be to deprive her of the follies and fumbles of teen romance: the embarrassment and awkwardness, worry and wonder, telltale stains and tangled-up limbs—all the gawky ecstasies and sticky surprises that jack out of the box of neophyte lust. What right did he have to streamline that process? What right to teach her anything?

He asked that question again late in the afternoon, when, after completing an outline of the Fatima story at the family computer, he found himself adding to it the following provocation:

The Virgin Mary, in her Lady of the Rosary guise, appeared to the kids at Fatima six times in 1917. Way back in 1531, she chose Guadalupe, Mexico, for the first stop on her tardy comeback tour, imprinting her image, so it’s said, on a poor Indian’s poncho and instructing him to have a church built outside of Mexico City. Next stop, Paris, three hundred years later (God’s time is not our time), where a novice spied her twice in a chapel. This time, she wanted a medal to be cast with her image and regular devotions said to her. She was back in a relative flash in 1858, appearing no less than eighteen times in a grotto down the road at Lourdes and referring to herself as the Immaculate Conception. She must have liked the neighborhood because she turned up next before four children in Pontmain, France, and succeeded in getting another church constructed in her honor. In 1879 she hovered above a village chapel in Ireland; in the 1930s she did Belgium big time, appearing to various youngsters no fewer than forty-one times in several locations, referring to herself at Beauraing as the Virgin of the Golden Heart, and at Banneux as the Virgin of the Poor. It was in Amsterdam between 1945 and 1959 that she took off the velvet gloves, calling herself the Lady of All Nations and demanding that her contact petition the pope to grant her the titles Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate. Starting in 1981, she touched down in two of the most screwed-up places on earth, Rwanda and Bosnia, wanting to be known as Mother of the World, no less, and Queen of Peace. And speaking of bad locations, her image affixed itself to the side of a finance company office in Florida a couple of years ago, though she didn’t apply for a loan.

So, my steamy little kumquat, I’m forced to ask: where has Jesus been during all this? Mary makes multiple appearances, demands increasing recognition, assumes ever more grandiose titles, and insists on equal billing as the Co-Redeemer. Yet over those five centuries, and the fifteen that preceded them, not a peek of Jesus or a peep from him. What’s going on here? In his time on earth, he didn’t seem all that shy. Notice how Mary never mentions him in any of her pronouncements? God, yes, but not Jesus. She herself is hardly mentioned in the Gospels, and on those few occasions when she does make the scene, Jesus is less than enthusiastic about her, going so far, in Matthew, I believe, as to snub her, asking, “Who is my mother?” and answering that anyone who does God’s bidding qualifies as his mother. Could there be a revenge motif here? Could Jesus be under house arrest, chained up in his mother’s basement? Does she have something on him, is he being blackmailed? I suppose we could perceive all this Mary activity as a natural resurfacing of the feminine principle in society, a welcome reemergence of the goddess as the dominant religious figure. But might it also signal a palace coup of the sort that cost the brilliant upstart Lucifer his No. 2 position in Heaven—or else a public airing of a nasty little family feud?

As Switters read, then read again, the preceding two paragraphs, his forefinger hovered over the delete key like the meatless digit of the Reaper pausing above his black eraser. What right did he have to provoke her sweet mind, to litter with funky horse blossoms of doubt the aseptic, uncracked sidewalks of her street of bliss?

“Every right in the world,” he heard a voice within him say. “Not only a right but a duty.”

Around sunset, as a geranium and satsuma luminescence turned the adjacent golf course into the playboard of a pinball machine, an onslaught of nervousness sent Switters to the garage refrigerator where Dwayne maintained a supply of beer. He drained a can of Budweiser, popped open a second, stuck a couple extras in the wheelchair saddlebag. Then he propelled himself about the house some more, grimacing at the hurricane lamps and clunky tin candlesnuffers. At one point he announced loudly, as if to a straggling duffer out on the seventeenth hole, “This home has bad feng shui. I can sense it.”

He’d had a similar feeling once about his apartment in Langley, and, as he was later to e-mail Bobby Case (with apparent embellishment), “I went to call some feng shui geomancers to take care of the problem, but I dialed Sinn Fein by mistake, and a bunch of Irishmen showed up with automatic weapons.” To which Bobby responded, “You’re just lucky you didn’t dial Sean Penn.”

As the daylight vanished, his agitation increased. He pictured banks of halogens winking on at the parochial school stadium, the zit-bejeweled gladiators (he was one once) lining up for kickoff; the high, thin squeals from the students in the bleachers, the coldness and hardness of the narrow boards beneath their buttocks, the shrill whistle of referees and cheesy deep-fried echo of the P.A. system; the spilled cola and missquirted mustard, puffs of dust and puffs of quicklime, the pumped-up adolescent wonder of it all. And then the first quarter drawing to an end . . . the sophomore cutie stealing away. . . .

Switters had been Siamese-twinning it most of his life, but for the dichotomy that bedeviled him now he was not quite prepared. For the spider bite of guilt, yes, but not the ice hook of doubt. One moment he craved to give her a bath in his semen, to rub it, warm and pearly, into her navel, her lips, the nipples that in his mind evoked the candy-coated lug nuts on Cupid’s pink Corvette. The next, he wished simply to kiss her toes. No, no, not the toes: much too erogenous! To kiss her heel or, better yet, her left elbow. In its cotton sleeve. To kiss once, lightly, the top of her sweet head—and then to shield her, with every means at his disposal, from the slings and eros of adult rage and fortune; to deflect the poison bullets of the “real world,” which is to say, the marketplace, so that not one would ever blast a hole in the magic tutu of her childhood.

Damn! Switters had always been a shade contradictory, but he’d never been neurotic. Like many robust people, in fact, he held neurosis in contempt. Yet, here he was, a fever flaming in his veins, a thunder in his pulses; his lungs ballooning, then deflating, his thoughts all over the map like a fast-food chain. And the alcohol, as was its evil genius, was only egotizing and adrenalizing matters, making them worse. Better the silly genius of hemp.

He proceeded to his room, where he raised a window for ventilation and then lit a joint. Following a husky toke or two, a semblance of calm was restored. He toked further, nodding, closing his eyes. Ahhh. His vision of the football game took on a softer focus now. Rather than a ritual parody of the primate territorial imperative, complete with nonlethal but often painful violence, colored at its margins with decidedly sexual overtones, and fouled in recent years by the stink of commerce, it became . . . well, no, it was still all that, but there was an innocent oomph about it, too, a playful, high-spirited, savage zest, and he envied Suzy being there and, moreover, wished he could have been on the field, performing for her, flattening running backs and cracking wide receivers nearly in half.

Seconds later, he giggled at the dumbness of that fantasy, and, slumping low in the wheelchair, soon forgot about the game altogether. Other, seemingly more profound, thoughts took over his brain, thoughts such as, To what extent would a given quantity of catnip have affected quantum mechanics in Schrödinger’s theoretical catbox? and, Why was C selected to symbolize the speed of light when Z is obviously the fastest letter in the alphabet?

The chiming of two of Eunice’s three ridiculously oversize, depressingly ugly grandfather clocks interrupted his reverie. He thought he counted eight bongs, and his wristwatch confirmed it. Hell’s bells! The first quarter would have ended long ago. Suzy wasn’t coming. She warned that she might not. She had her own set of fears, including her kind concern that a physical assertion of their love might compromise his “delicate condition.”

She wasn’t coming after all. So be it. It was for the best. He lit another joint and partway through it, realized he was famished. A classic case of the cannabic munchies. (If manufacturers of chocolate and peanut butter were half smart, they’d lobby relentlessly for decriminalization.) He was so hungry he reached under the bed and retrieved the plates of brownies and cookies he’d hidden there so as not to hurt her feelings. They were by this time entering the early stages of fossilization—crusty, dry, and stale—but he devoured them as though they were bootleg ambrosia.

Sucrose sugars from the baked goods linked arms, singing, with dextrose sugars from the beer, to form a near-riotous rabble in his bloodstream, a chemical mob whose march on his cerebral ramparts was mollified but not diverted by the more gentle, introspective (though hardly staid) tetrahydro-cannabinols from the marijuana. Provoked by these energies, he found himself rummaging in the secret compartment of his crocodile valise for his disk of Broadway hits, and when, moments later, the sailors’ chorus from South Pacific began to belt out “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” he was moved to dance.

He rolled to the bed and vaulted up on it. Dancing on a bed has intrinsic limitations, and his preliminary steps quickly evolved, or devolved, into ungainly bounces. Rather than fighting it, he went with it, and by the time “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” from Oklahoma blared on (he’d cranked the amps to full volume), he was bounding like a rambunctious kid on a bedtime trampoline, the fritter-colored curls at the dome of his skull almost brushing the ceiling. The exertion provided a much-needed release. His wahoo was rapidly rising.

Midair, during one of the higher bounces, he thought he heard a voice in the hall exclaim, “Good God! What is that sucky music?”

He landed. Springs depressed, then recoiled, and without breaking his rhythm, he catapulted ceilingward again, and as he elevated he saw her. Standing now in the doorway. She’d rouged her mouth, a bit too thickish, and shadowed her eyes, a shade too bluely, and she was wearing one of Eunice’s party dresses, a slinky charcoal sheath that he recognized from his recent inspection of his mother’s wardrobe. It was a sophisticated little number, but although she and Eunice were approximately the same height now, it hung loosely on her, its effect anything but chic. It was Suzy’s objective, apparently, to look womanly and seductive. In actuality, she looked like a child playing dress-up in her stepmother’s clothing (which, to some extent, she was), an impression reinforced by the fact that she was barefoot. To the extent that the effect was comical, it was also overwhelmingly erotic.

Switters stiffened his legs and dropped his arms to bring the bouncing to a halt, but the springs continued to contract and expand in a gradually diminishing action that sent him stumbling and staggering about on the bed, largely out of control.

Suzy’s mouth was agape, the expression on her face one of shock, disbelief, and horror. Abruptly she turned and fled.

“This was a joke!” he yelled after her. “I’ve got other music! I’ve got . . . Frank Zappa!” Shit! She’s probably never heard of Zappa. “I’ve got . . . I’ve got Big Mama Thornton!” Sixteen, living in suburban Sacramento, would she even know Big Mama? “The Mekons! There we go! Mekons? Suzy!”

Then, perched on the edge of the bed like a stone cherub urinating into a fish pond, it occurred to him that music wasn’t the issue.

Switters came within a muscle contraction of jumping down and running after her. He was a survivalist to the marrow, however, and instinct tempered his panic long enough for him to transfer his body into the wheelchair before setting off in pursuit.

Through the closed door of her room, he could hear her weeping.

Again and again, his mouth formed her name, but the sound stuck in his throat like a fake Santa in a crooked chimney.

For a full five minutes, he sat there, listening to her sob. Then he trundled slowly back to his room, packed his things, and left the house. At Executive Field he spent the night sitting up in the Invacare 9000, occasionally dozing, mostly not. For a fee of thirty-five dollars, Southwest Airlines allowed him to reschedule his departure date from Sunday to Saturday, and he boarded an early morning flight to Seattle.

When, three days later, Switters arrived back on the East Coast, a migraine arrived with him. A headache likewise had ambushed him between Sacramento and Seattle, sending him to bed for forty-eight hours and minimalizing his contact with Maestra. It wasn’t until he was leaving her house that he thought to give her the bracelet of linked silver camellias he’d bought for her at the Sacramento airport. Maestra had been preoccupied, herself, attempting to break into the computer files of an art appraiser whom she suspected of deliberately undervaluing her Matisse. Intuitively, she’d steered clear of the topic of Suzy.

The cross-country migraine was neither milder nor more severe than the short-distance one. In both cases, there was the sense that in the space behind his eyes a porcupine and a lobster were fighting to the death in front of a strobe light.

At some juncture on the train ride from New York to Washington, one or the other of the prickly creatures prevailed and a neuro-optic gaffer switched off the strobe. Switters was feeling reasonably normal when the skyline of the nation’s capital came into view. At the sight of the Washington Monument, wahooish bubbles formed in his spinal fluid. The excitement, needless to say, owed nothing to the monument itself, it having even less of a connection to him than to the dead statesman it was meant to honor. Aside from the fact that it was tall and white, what did the structure evoke of George Washington, the soldier, President, or man? On the other hand, since Jefferson described his colleague’s mind as “being little aided by invention or imagination,” perhaps the blandness of the monument was entirely fitting—and besides, what symbol would a designer have erected in its place: a surveyor’s transit, a hatchet, a set of clacking dentures?

To Switters, the monument signaled that he was back on the job, and that was the reason for his tingling. Back on what job was another matter. He knew only that, armed with privileged credentials, he had reentered the maw of the beast, the power-puckered omphalos upon which all angelic mischief must sooner or later come to bear, the city where winning was absolutely everything.

And only the winners were lost?

That night he slept in his own bed. Such a cozy, comforting phrase: “in his own bed.” Like many such sentiments, however, it was fallacious. True, he owned the bed and, under mortgage, the apartment in which it was situated, but in the two years since he’d acquired those things, he’d slept in them fewer than forty times.

Because he was born on the cusp between Cancer and Leo—which is to say, drawn on one side to the hermit’s cave, on the other to centerstage—he both craved the familiarity of a private, personal, domestic space and loathed the idea of being fettered by permanence or possession. At least, astrologers would attribute the ambivalence to his natal location. Someone else might point out that it was simply an acute microcosmic reflection of the fundamental nature of the universe.

The apartment was sparsely furnished. Except for some of the suits and T-shirts, the few articles in it (including refrigerated food items in states of degeneration that brought to mind the special effects in Mexican horror films) had been purchased at least two years prior.

The more advertising he saw, the less he wanted to buy?

Depending upon their level of . . . what?—fear? alienation? vested interest? humanity?—people looked at the new headquarters building of the Central Intelligence Agency from varying psychological perspectives. Switters’s perspective was fairly neutral. He was, by Bobby Case’s definition, a “neutral angel.”

Switters was even neutral about angels. Biblical angels, that is. On the rare occasion when he considered the subject, he was inclined to compare angels to bats. He could scarcely think of one without the other. It seemed perfectly obvious. They were two sides of the same coin, were they not? One winged anthropomorph the alter image of the other.

White and radiant, the heavenly angel represented goodness. Dark and cunning, the nocturnal bat was associated with evil. Yet, was it really that simplistic?

Bats, in actuality, were sweet tempered, harmless (less than 1 percent rabid) little mammals who aided humankind by devouring immense amounts of insects and pollinating more plants and trees in the rain forest than bees and birds together. Angels, conversely, often appeared as wrathful avengers, delivering stern messages, wrestling with prophets, evicting tenants, brandishing flaming swords. Their “pollination” was restricted to begetting children on astonished mortal women. Which would you rather meet in a midnight alley?

Angels had their worth, however. Creatures of wonder, they bore the ancient marvelous into the modern mundane. Skeptics who howled at the very mention of ghosts, space aliens, or crop circles (not to mention greenhouse gases) were not so quick to scoff at angels. According to a Gallup poll, more than half of all Americans believed in angels. Thus did the supernatural still influence the rational world.

Women tended to be afraid of bats. Even Maestra. As near as could be determined, it was not a subconscious fear of pollination, some sowing of bad seed. Women, rather, were afraid that bats might become entangled in their hair. Ah, but St. Paul had decreed that women’s heads be covered in church “because of the angels.” In Paul’s era, words for angel and demon were interchangeable, and there was a species of angel/demon that was said to be attracted to women’s hair. Angels in hair. Bats in hair. Once again, distinctions were not as crisp as they might have superficially appeared. At some point, then, angels and bats must converge. There, as in mathematical space, the coin would have only one side. But what point was that? Where or when was it that light and darkness combined? End of Time—or, rather, Today Is Tomorrow—might have answered: “In laughter.”

Within the CIA, the opposite of the neutral angel was the cowboy. Cowboys believed themselves on the side of light (which they identified exclusively with goodness), but because they insisted on light’s absolute dominion over darkness—and would stop at no dark deed to insure that domination—they ended up transforming light into darkness. It was strictly a transformation, though, not a merger. Laughter never entered the equation.

Thus, when critics looked at the CIA headquarters and saw evil, they were not entirely mistaken. What they failed to see, however, was what Switters (now climbing clumsily out of a taxi in front of the building) almost always saw: a factory unexcelled at manufacturing the very monkey wrenches that might be tossed into its own machinery.

After being cleared through a series of checkpoints, Switters eventually arrived at the offices of Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald, assistant deputy director of operations. It was 10 A.M. Joolie, Fitzgerald’s redheaded secretary, with whom Switters had enjoyed an ongoing flirtation of some years’ standing, frowned speculatively at the wheelchair but did not inquire about it. One does not prosper at Langley by being nosy.

As for Fitzgerald himself, he pretended at first not even to notice. Mayflower, as he signed his memos and preferred to be addressed, never showed surprise at anything. A display of surprise would have been a breach of sophistication, a violation of ingrained principles.

“You’re right on time,” said Mayflower, when he’d shut the door behind them.

“That’s only natural,” said Switters, who had blown Joolie a kiss as he disappeared into the inner office. “I’m an operative, not a lawyer, a Hollywood agent, or a self-important bureaucrat.”

If Mayflower took offense, his face did not reveal it. Perhaps he was accustomed to Switters, expected him by now to deport himself with cool effectiveness under certain field conditions, but at other times to wax florid, audacious, rascally. In any event, he stared silently, inexpressively, at his subordinate for quite a few seconds, stared through steel-rimmed spectacles whose assiduously polished lenses gleamed as brightly as his bald spot. Actually, it was a bit more than a spot. At fifty-five, Mayflower had just about enough left of his iron-gray hair to bewig a small doll. Chemotherapy Barbie. Steel glasses, iron hair, granite jaw, golden voice, and a mind like weapons-grade plutonium. To Switters, the deputy director seemed less animal than mineral.

It was Switters who finally broke the silence. “Errand boy,” he said, “not operative. Sorry if I overstated my position.”

Mayflower’s thin lips twitched but stopped short of a smile. “Is the wheelchair a prop to dramatize some point?” he asked.

“Minor mishap in South America.”

“Really? Nothing to do with our fellow Sumac, I hope?”

“Nein. To do with End of Time. Or, rather, Today Is Tomorrow.”

Mayflower stared at him some more. Switters stared at the wall behind the desk. In many government offices, an official of Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s rank might have displayed a Groton pennant and framed diplomas from Princeton and Yale (all part of Mayflower’s background), but at CIA, relics of personal history were discouraged. Not so much as a photograph of wife, child, or dog graced the desk. There was, however, on one wall, a signed eight-by-ten glossy of Barbara Bush. The former first lady wore a turquoise dress in the photo, and Switters compared her image unfavorably—and, no doubt, unfairly—to Matisse’s big blue nude.

“Have you ever wondered, Switters, why I’ve run you personally, rather than put you under the direction of, say, Brewster or Saltonstall?”

“Because Saltonstall’s a dickhead and Brewster’s a tiddlypoop. Either would have cramped my style.”

“I’m flattered that you think I don’t. You’re aware, of course, that I officially disapprove of your sans gêne approach to both the company’s affairs and your own. At the same time, however, you fascinate me. There are things about you I admittedly find intriguing. For example, there’s a rumor you can refer to a woman’s genitals in fifty languages.”

“Seventy-one, actually.”

“Mmm? And are there some words for . . . for that organ that you favor above others?”

“Oh, I like most all of them, even the Dutch. There’s a Somali term, though, that only females are allowed to utter. It reeks of mystery and secret beauty.”

“And that word is? . . .”

“Sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not your need to know.”

Although Mayflower smiled bleakly and maintained an air of metallic cordiality, he buzzed Joolie and told her not to bother with bringing in coffee. He cleared his throat quietly, with formality. “I wanted to outline a possible next assignment, but first we’d better discuss your . . . your, ah, condition.” He gestured at the wheelchair. “What’s the story?”

And Switters told him.

Switters told him. An abbreviated version, not a third as long as the one Bobby Case received, but a truthful account, nonetheless. And Mayflower’s reaction? Incredulity, primarily. But also anxiety, barely concealed anger, and a flicker of disgust. When he spoke, his golden tones burned with frost. “Unless you can assure me that this is some silly prank—even if it isn’t—I’m placing you on suspension. The committee will decide whether or not it’s with pay.”

“I’m short on funds.”

“Not my department.”

“But I’m able to work. What’s the assignment? I can handle it. Better than any of your gung-ho cowpokes.” Switters rose and stood on the footplate. Then he hopped backward onto the seat, much as he had for Bobby, although he refrained from running in place. “I’m sure this looks crazy, but . . .”

“Yes, doesn’t it?”

“Come on, Mayflower. You know my record.”

“Yes, don’t I?”

“I’m available for duty.”

“Physically, maybe. There are other concerns. Would you please sit down.”

“I could have lied.”

“Pardon?”

“I could have lied about the witchman, the taboo, the whole jar of jam. I didn’t have to spill a bean. I could have fed you a perfectly plausible, ordinary explanation. . . .”

“No. You would have had to be medically cleared before returning to duty. And when Walter Reed found nothing physically wrong. . . . But why didn’t you—I’m curious—give me a more believable alibi? If you honestly want to remain with the company . . .”

“I want very damn much to remain with the company!” Switters paused, took a deep breath, and lowered his intensity. “I guess that in itself could be considered a sign of mental illness—but we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we?”

Mayflower didn’t hesitate. “No!” he snapped through clenched teeth. “Not in the same boat at all.”

In the silence that followed, Switters remained standing in the wheelchair. What’s happening to me now? he wondered.

Seemingly, what was happening was that he was losing his job, and it staggered him to realize how much his identity had become dependent on that job. He’d meditated enough to realize that his true self—his selfless self, if you will, his essence—didn’t know or care that he worked for the CIA; didn’t, for that matter, know or care that his name was Switters. And by no means was he wedded to his title (“operative”: what the fuck was that?), his desk (didn’t have one), his duties (only occasionally exciting), or his paycheck (the more advertising he saw the less he wanted to buy). Moreover, he enjoyed a variety of outside interests.

What gripped him, nourished him, enlarged and thrilled him, and molded the contours of his ego was in actuality the job within the job: the ill-defined, self-directed business of angelhood, with all of the romantic elitism with which that exercise in quixotic, but sometimes effective, subversion was colored. It was so special and furtive, so nutty yet seemingly noble, so poetic, even, that he had gradually permitted it to define him to himself, although he was keenly aware that much of the time he was working closer to the bullshit than the bull.

So: if he was no longer an angel, so-called, who would he be? Perhaps it was time to find out. Perhaps it didn’t matter. The one thing he now knew was that he couldn’t lie to Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald—not after he had lied to Suzy.

“You can lie to God but not to the Devil.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Slowly Switters returned to a sitting position. Good question. What was it supposed to mean? “Lies may disappoint God or exasperate him, but ultimately his compassion dissolves them, cancels them out. The Devil, though, he grows fat on our lies; the more you lie to him, the better he likes it. It’s an investment in his firm, it increases the value of his stock by fostering the practice of lying. Only truth can hurt the Devil. That’s why honesty has been banished from almost every existing institution: corporate, religious, and governmental. Truth can be dangerously liberating. Did I mention that the Devil’s other name is El Controlador? He who controls.”

“That’s news to me.” Mayflower was looking at his desk clock. “But then I lack your background in theology.” He parted his pale lips just enough to indicate he spoke facetiously.

“Oh, yes. And his other name is El Manipulador. He who—”

“I know what it means. And I suspect I know what you’re getting at. If I felt it necessary to defend the company, and the national interests it serves, against your implied criticism—and I emphatically do not—I would point out that both manipulation and control are sometimes requisite in order to secure and insure stability. If that smacks to you of the satanic, then I suggest you think of it as us using the Devil to further the aims of God.” He cleared his throat again in that self-consciously dignified way of his. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to—”

“Stability the handiwork of God? You’ve got to be kidding! If God’s aim is stability, then he’s a monumental, incompetent failure, the biggest loser of all time. This universe he’s credited with creating is dynamic, in almost constant flux. Any stability we might perceive in it on any level is as temporary as it is aberrant. Symbiosis, maybe; even a kind of harmonious interaction, but not stability. The Tao is a shaky balancing act between unstable yin and unstable yang. The fact is . . .”

“I must call an end to—”

“. . . neither God nor the Devil is the least concerned with stability. Human artifices such as fixity and certainty are a big bore to the immortals. Which is why it’s so corny of us to try to paint God as absolute good and Satan as absolute evil. Of course, I resorted to that convenient, conventional symbology myself in my previous analogy, so you’re right, Mayflower, I was blathering like a theologian, and a half-baked one at that. Maybe it’s okay, after all, to lie to the Devil. But for reasons of my own, I refuse to lie to you or yours.”

(Where was this coming from? Usually, he only went on like this when he was bent or stoned, and that morning he’d had but one beer with breakfast.)

“Happy to hear it,” said Mayflower, pressing the intercom buzzer. “Joolie, would you show Mr. Switters out. I hate to terminate this fascinating discussion, but. . . .” Clenching and unclenching his hard, perfect teeth, he stood. “Perhaps we can resume it at some future date. During a round of golf or . . . no, I suppose you’ll not be golfing, will you? Excuse me. I’m sorry.”

“No problem, pal. Most American men secretly hate women and love golf. I love women and hate golf.”

“Yes, you are a man apart, aren’t you? Well then. The committee meets Friday. Check in with me on, uh, Monday, and you’ll be advised of your status. Should we decide on suspension or dismissal, you obviously have the right to appeal. I should caution you, however, that the Civil Service Commission is quite reluctant to interfere in internal matters of the CIA.”

Doing his best to pop a wheelie, though only half succeeding, Switters spun and followed Joolie out. Before the door closed behind him, he called over his shoulder: “I’ll give your regards to Audubon Poe.” He could have sworn he heard Mayflower sputter.

“Joolie, would it be considered sexual harassment if I—”

“Don’t even think about it,” warned Joolie. But like a miser making a night deposit at an inner city bank, she leaned over with a kind of fearful glee and planted a peck perilously close to his pucker.

Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?

That night he hit the bars in D.C.’s hotel district, wishing he were in Patpong as he zigzagged from one to another, slicing through knots of pedestrians like Alexander’s sword, turning away at the door when he found a lounge to have a pianist in residence, for fear that, provoked by booze, he might erupt in song at the first tinkling rendition of a Broadway standard. Years earlier, he’d contemplated having a device surgically implanted in his throat to prevent any such musical indiscretion under the quickening of drink, and had gone so far as to contact a certain Hungarian clinic, only to have its administrator suggest he see a psychiatrist instead.

Bar patrons were swift to move aside for him, showing him the guilty, condescending respect reserved for the disabled. At Spin Doctor’s, he was invited to wheel his chair up to a table occupied by five government workers: two male, three female, under thirty, reasonably attractive. After a round or two, he was entertaining them with an abridged, shaman-free account of taking his grandmother’s parrot to the Amazon to reunite it with its origins. They seemed enthralled, but midway through his narration one of the men interrupted him to describe the difficulties he was experiencing trying to housebreak his new puppy, and soon all of them were telling their favorite dumb, boring pet stories. Raising his voice above the rest, Switters announced solemnly, “This morning, I received proof positive that my tabby cat is the reincarnation of a Las Vegas crime lord.” The table fell silent, and once more all ears were his. He merely looked them over, however, removed his hand from the baby fat of the feminine knee to his right (a hard-won concession), finished off his tequila jackhammer, then sped recklessly to the door. Jesus, he thought as he rolled out onto the street, I might just as well have sung “Memories.”

The next day he slept late, not surprisingly, and upon rising began quite mindlessly to pack. It was almost as if he were being directed by his welled unconscious, a wholly intuitive impulse that he did not think to challenge until he had cleaned out his closets. It was evening before he received confirmation that his intuition had been on the money. E-mail arrived from Bobby Case claiming that the angel grapevine was abuzz with rumors that Switters was about to be sacked.

Bobby offered assistance, hinting that he had enough embarrassing dirt on company activities to make Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald a reluctant ally for life. Switters replied that he would think it over. Bobby e-mailed back, “Okay, think, but don’t forget to sit.”

So, over the weekend he sat. And he got stoned. And he thought some. And when on Monday morning Joolie telephoned to inform him he was in trouble—Mayflower wanted him in on Tuesday for a daylong debriefing session—he could actually sound nonchalant, though some of it was faked. Impressed, Joolie confessed in a tremulous whisper (fully aware that she was being recorded) that she wished she could have known him better.

“Yes,” agreed Switters, “I can picture the two of us sharing a gypsy cave above a deserted beach with nothing on but the shortwave radio, a shaft of sunlight visually activating the coppery coils around your . . .” Joolie, a true redhead, hung up for fear she might swoon.

Switters then called a real estate agency and put his condo on the market. He had very little equity in the property, but any amount he might realize would help. He wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, but the fact that he was about to disobey orders by refusing to be debriefed would end up costing him his severance pay.

Too antsy to wait for a train, he took that very night a red-eye flight (sans gravy) to Seattle by way of Los Angeles, greatly annoying the D.C. taxi driver when, after announcing Dulles as his destination, he spat on the floor of the cab.

Undoubtedly, there are those who would be inclined to sneer at Switters, judging him in word and deed to have proven himself immature, frivolous, or even zany (to employ that stale adjective—from the Italian, zanni, a would-be or untalented clown—that the leaden are so fond of applying to characters less stodgy and predictable than they or their friends). The psychoanalytically disposed, on the other hand, might detect in his behavior, particularly as described in recent pages, a classic, arguably heroic, example of despair refusing to take itself seriously. Well, maybe.

Sigmund Freud once wrote that “Wit is the denial of suffering,” meaning not that the witty, the playful among us, deny that suffering exists—in varying degrees, everyone suffers—but rather that they deny suffering power over their lives, deny it prominence, use jocularity to keep it in its place. Freud may have been right. Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control (and fleece) its members by insisting they take its symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.

It’s entirely possible, however, that Switters was merely exhibiting the tics that can show up in a spirited intelligence when it can no longer count on, as an outlet, periodic meetings of the C.R.A.F.T. Club.

Switters was raised in Northern California, Colorado, and Texas, but whenever his mother’s domestic life went topsy-turvy, as it seemed intermittently to do, he’d been sent for months at a time to Seattle, and it was in Seattle that he once again took refuge. It could not be said that during his youthful asylums under Maestra’s roof she had ever mothered him, tending always to treat him as friend and equal, and she definitely wasn’t going to mother him now. In fact, once he broke down and informed her of his predicament and the queer Amazonian incidents (he omitted the part about eating her Sailor Boy) that had rather directly occasioned it, it became plain that he could not remain in her house.

Accepting no blame for having set events in play—guilt, in her opinion, being one of the most useless human emotions—Maestra chided him repeatedly for what she termed his “disappointing display of ignorance and superstition.”

Whacking her cane on floor and furniture until she set up an ominous rhythmic resonance evocative of the timpani in Greek tragedy, she accused him of a reaction worthy of primitive cave-bear worshipers or, worse (because they ought to know better), evangelical Christians. “You go down there and encourage Suzy to accept as fact the tall tales of dogma-crazed underage ignorant Portuguese hillbillies. . . .”

“I only encouraged her to fully investigate that thing that she found most compelling in life. Isn’t that—”

“I was appalled when I heard you were aiding and abetting her dabblings in such harmful nonsense. Appalled. What I didn’t know was that you yourself were in the dimwitted thrall of something even more ridiculous, more destructive. In all of my eighty-plus years I’ve never. . . . As far as I’m concerned, this millennium business is wholly bogus, but there must be something in the air that would cause you, of all people, to surrender your spirit, to wreck your career, to turn yourself into a craven invalid. . . .”

“Fierce invalid,” he corrected her.

“I guess I thought you were one of the last of the torchbearers, but as it’s turned out, sad to say, you couldn’t strike a match in an elevator.”

Stung, he asked, “Do you want me to stand, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Knowing what you know about Smithe, the anthropologist, what happened to him, do you want me to get up and walk? Because I’ll do it. Right now. Right this second. Just say the word.” He was already half out of the chair.

Maestra couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She stalked off, only to return ten minutes later to chide him for passively accepting his dismissal from the CIA without even requesting a hearing. “At the very least, you could have gotten a mental disability pension. As screwy as you’ve turned out, they still owe you something. Many times you gambled your life for them.”

“Never.”

“You did!”

“No. I may have gambled my life, but it wasn’t for them. It was for—something else.”

“What? Precisely.”

“Precision doesn’t enter into it.”

“Heh!”

He wasn’t kidding, though, nor being unnecessarily evasive. Switters had conducted his professional life in much the same way as he made love to a woman: wholeheartedly, romantically, poetically, in a frenzy of longing for the unattainable, the unknown; ladling onto himself—and his partner or his mission—that mysteriously generated concentrate of exhilaration that he sometimes referred to as his syrup of wahoo, a kind of emotional extract produced by the simultaneous boiling down of beauty, risk, wildness, and mirth. Delusional or not, it was hardly a matter of precision.

When Switters took a room in an old building adjacent to the Pike Place Market (he’d considered moving into the Snoqualmie cabin, but there was already heavy snowfall in the mountains), both Maestra and Bobby Case quizzed him about what he would do there. “For the time being, my aim is to keep the oxygen from leaking out of my life,” he replied, an answer neither they nor he found satisfactory. So, he hinted that he might be embarking upon a scholastic bender.

Assisting Suzy with her term paper had dusted and oiled creaky academic reflexes just enough to convince him that the dissertation that stood between him and a Ph.D. degree—he’d long ago completed the course work—would not be all that painfully difficult to write. “How would you feel about calling me Dr. Switters?” he asked. “Hell, I’d probably get mixed up and call you Dr. Seuss,” said Bobby. “You’re just lucky I don’t call you Baby Dumpling,” said Maestra.

Joining them briefly at Thanksgiving, Bobby listened politely to Switters rant about the future of the word in cyberculture. “From the time of the invention of the alphabet, if not before, all technologies have originated in language, but in cyberspace, we don’t see or hear information so much as we feel it. Technology may at last be outstripping language, not merely leaving the nest but killing the mother, if you will. You know, we don’t really see darkness, or even light, we feel neurologically their effect on surrounding surfaces. The binary digital system—Brother One and Sister Zero—that makes computers possible is a kind of light/dark relationship to begin with, and when you start to factor in the electron rather than the word as the primary information link between the brain and the external world . . .”

And so on and so forth. Bobby got the idea that Switters didn’t believe that language was doomed per se but, rather, was about to be transformed, much as it had been by the invention of the Phoenician alphabet; liberated, as it had been by the invention of the Greek alphabet; and then celebrated, as it had been by the advent of the Roman; yet suspected that he, nevertheless, felt protective of words, the stranger, more archaic the better, perceiving them as keys to some lost treasure. All very interesting, basically, but Switters, once he got going, was inclined to scoot off on tangents, to drive in the ditch. For example: “Why, our cosmology is a binary system, as well. God equals one, Satan, zero. Or is it the other way around? Whichever, we use that pair of digits only—eschewing numbers two through nine and the endless combinations thereof—to compute the meaning of life and our ultimate destiny. Ah, but in the beginning was the word. Before the division, before—”

“Yep, podner, you’ll churn yourself a damn fine thesis outta that butterfat, I’m sure, but what ought to be sizzling on your front burner is a strategy for getting yourself back on your feet, and I don’t necessarily mean financially. Pass the peas.”

“Amen to that!” chimed in Maestra. “Have a drop more gravy, Captain Case. Sorry it isn’t red-eye, but the caterer’s led a sheltered life and didn’t have a clue.”

After dessert, as the two men smoked cigars in the living room, watched over by the Matisse nude, herself as blue as smoke, Bobby broached the subject of Suzy. “Forget cyberspace for a minute. You’ve been quieter than a Stealth potato about what went on in Sacramento. Come on. Did you deflower the ‘wholesome little animal,’ or did I manage to talk you out of it?”

“Talked myself out of it, I’m afraid. With my forked tongue.”

“Lordy, Lord. And who said talk is cheap?”

“Some inarticulate man of action, I imagine; the strong, silent type who other males admire but who women secretly find a dupe or a dope.” He expelled a dancing doughnut of smoke. Like every smoke ring ever blown—like smoke, in general—it bounced in the air like the bastard baby of chemistry and cartooning. “I’m unsure how or if it applies in this particular situation, but the poet, Andrei Codrescu, once wrote that ‘Physical intimacy is only a device for opening the floodgates of what really matters: words.’ “

Bobby looked skeptical. “Sounds like sublimation to me. Anyhow, I thought the verbiage was supposed to start the ball rolling. In the fucking beginning was the fucking word.”

“So the Good Book informs us. What it neglects to tell us, and for which omission I can never forgive it, is which came first, the word for chicken or the word for egg.”

Bobby couldn’t make it down for Christmas—his little clandestine U2 unit was on some kind of alert—but he telephoned Maestra’s manse on Christmas Eve, and once he’d stuffed the old woman’s goose with flattery, got on the line with Switters, surmising from their conversation that the latter had cooled a bit toward the prospect of writing a dissertation, although he could and would, if given a chance, still get wound up over its thematic potentialities.

“The role of the computer in literature is limited to grunt work and janitorial services. Makes research easier and editing faster without making either of them any better. Where the computer does appear to foster genuine innovation and advancement is in graphics: photographic reproduction, design, animation, et cetera. Amazing development in those fields. But to what end?”

“More interesting TV commercials.”

“Exactement! Marketing. Merchandising. Increasingly sophisticated, increasingly seductive. And sure, it’s just a flashy modern version of the age-old bread-and-circuses brand of bondage—except that today the bakery’s a multinational and the circus follows us home. Well, culture has always been driven to some degree by the marketplace. Always. It’s just that nowadays the marketplace, having invaded every nook and cranny of our private lives, is completely supplanting culture; the marketplace has become our culture. Nevertheless—”

“Yeah,” put in Bobby, “and wild ol’ boys like you and me may turn out to be one of the last lines of defense against corporate totalitarianism and unhappy shit like that. That’s why it’s important that you . . . I know for a fact that the company would reinstate you if you’d—”

“Did I tell you Mayflower sent a pair of grim-faced pickle-packers out to debrief me? Right after Thanksgiving. Cornered me in my room, six o’clock in the morning; damned unsporting of them, me being groggy from the toils and impairments of the evening prior. Still, they had rather a thick time of it before I allowed them to take back some of their toys. I managed to keep my laptop, my Beretta, and my faithful crocodile, although the pistol remains an issue, and there’s reason to believe they’ve put a Joe on my tail.”

“That could be fun.”

“Perhaps. But all that’s irrelevant. What I was getting at a minute ago is that the real show, as usual, is taking place behind the tent, and neither the hawkers nor the ringmasters are hip to it. Forget the graphic-art gymnastics. What’s really happening in cyberculture is that language isn’t contracting, it’s expanding. Expanding. Moving outside of the body. Beyond the tongue and the larynx, beyond the occipital lobe and the hippocampus, beyond the pen and the page, beyond the screen and the printer, even. Out into the universe. Bonding with, saturating, or even usurping physical reality. Let me explain.”

“Ut! Swit? Whoa. Give me a rain check on that if you don’t mind. All this brainstorming of yours is costing me MCI’s holiday rates—and costing you what’s left of your marbles, I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, if you’re not planning to write your damn thesis, why? . . . The main thing is, you’re still in that feeble-foot Ferrari, son, and it’s been seven or eight weeks now. Jesus! You got to deal with this problem, bring it to an end, whatever it takes. If that involves tripping back down to the Amazon, so be it. You, me, either or both of us. Will you please just lock in on that target? Direct your fire toward getting well, getting free? Jesus!”

There was no immediate response, and in the absence of dialogue, the men could hear MCI’s holiday meter running. Eventually Switters said, “Remember the story that monk told us?”

“Which monk? The one who hid us from the Burmese border patrol?”

“No, not him. The one we had tea with in Saigon. The—”

“You still won’t call it Ho Chi Minh City.”

“I refuse. Although I certainly mean no disrespect to the brave and honorable Uncle Ho. . . .”

“Betrayed, slandered, pushed into a corner . . .”

“By that ice-hearted, lizard-brained, sanctimonious Christian bully boy . . .

“John Foster Dulles!” the two men snarled in contemptuous harmony. Then, also in unison, they spat into the mouthpieces of their respective phones.

“I heard that!” cried Maestra, who, to the best of Switters’s knowledge, had been engrossed in e-gab in a hackers chat room, a kind of on-line cybercryptic Christmas party. “Disgusting lout! Clean it off. Now.”

Separately they each obeyed, chuckling softly as they wiped, the one with coat sleeve, the other with bandanna; and then Switters returned to the Saigon monk. “Remember? He told us about a great spiritual master who was asked what it was like being enlightened all the time. And the master answered, ‘Oh, it’s just like ordinary, everyday life. Except that you’re two inches above the ground.’ “

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “I remember that.”

“Well, it occurred to me a week or so ago that that’s where I’m at. In this wheelchair, my feet are almost exactly two inches off the ground.”

“Aw, come on. It ain’t nowhere near the same thing.”

“No, but maybe it could be. Maybe that was even ol’ Pyramid Head’s point. So to speak. He was oblivious to wheelchairs, presumably, but, still, maybe . . . In any event, I’m being forced to survey the world from a new perspective—you’d be astonished the difference two inches can make—and I’m loath to relinquish the vantage point quite yet. There may be other angles, other takes, whole phyllo pastries of existence I’ve yet to explore from this sacred height. So, patience, pal. Let me play it out for a while. Let me discover what it is that I’ve become: synthetic cripple or synthetic bodhisattva.” He paused. “Merry Christmas, Bobby.”

From the Alaskan end of the connection, there floated a huge sigh. “Merry Christmas, Swit. Here’s wishing you a sleighload of eggnogged virgins in mistletoe underwear.”

Switters did, indeed, maintain his vantage point. Throughout the long, wet winter he maintained it, his “starship in hover mode,” as he put it, orbiting the earth from a height of two inches.

For several weeks in November and December, he had, every morning, propelled his chair eastward on Pike Street and south on Fourth Avenue to the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library, where he sought to supplement his on-line research toward a dissertation that was to be entitled, “Speaking in Things, Thinking With Light,” but near Christmas those academic forays dwindled, and by the first of the year he had abandoned both wood pulp and electron for a different kind of research.

Like some beggar or street performer, he would dock the wheelchair beneath the aged arcades of the labyrinthine Pike Place Market, and there, in the grotto light, protected from the rains that pounded the cobblestones and hissed beneath the tires of delivery trucks, he’d turn a keen eye on whiskered parsnip and hairless apple, and bathe himself in the multitudes.

The old market, worn half away by dampness and fingerprints, sweat drops and shoe heels, pigeon claws and vegetable crates; soiled by butcher seepage, sequined with salmon scales, smelling of roses, raw prawns, and urine; blessedly freed for the winter from the demanding entertain-me-for-nothing! gawkings of out-of-town tourists, the market bustled now with fishmongers and Vietnamese farmers, florists and fruit vendors, famous chefs and food-smart housewives, gourmets and runaways, flunkies and junkies, coffee brewers and balloon benders, office workers and shopgirls and winos of all races; with pensioners, predators, panhandlers, and prostitutes, and (to complete the p’s) political polemists, punks, potters, puppeteers, poets, and policemen; with musicians, jugglers, fire-eaters (dry days only), tyro magicians, and lingering loafers such as he seemed to be.

Or did he? None of the market regulars, legitimate or illegitimate, were quite able to label him or find a reason for his daily presence among them. Just as shoppers would take one look at his stationary wheelchair and glance around automatically for a tin cup and accordion or the equivalents thereof, so denizens searched at greater length though equally in vain for some clue to his raison d’être. Occasionally, he tapped away at a laptop computer, but mostly, day after day, week after week, he merely sat there, observing the surrounding cavalcade or gazing into the rain. Rumors spread that he was an undercover cop, but when there was no increase in arrests, when it was noticed that he was periodically harassed by market security guards (usually for stationing himself in one spot for too many hours or days in a row), and when he took to carving tiny boats out of busted crate scraps, rigging them with lettuce leaf sails and launching them in rainswept gutters, that particular suspicion gradually faded.

Still, nobody was prepared to write him off as another lingering loafer: his presence was too strong, his demeanor too cool. While he never flashed wads of currency or sported gold jewelry, he dressed in well-cut suits over fine T-shirts and was wont to drape a black cashmere topcoat theatrically, rather like an opera cape, about his broad shoulders. He kept a cell phone in his saddlebag but spoke on it infrequently (Maestra preferred e-mail, the Sacramento contingent was incommunicado, and by February Bobby Case had been transferred to Okinawa), giving no indication when he did converse that any sort of business was being conducted. Reticent though hardly bashful, Switters had affixed to the back of his chair a neatly lettered sign that read I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT JESUS OR DISEASES, this being necessitated by the countless well-meaning busybodies who were convinced that their New Age herbalist or their Sunday School Savior could provide succor if not remedy to whatever misfortune had denied his powers of perambulation. Preservation of wahoo demanded that they be discouraged.

There were those, chiefly women, who did talk to him, however. They couldn’t seem to resist. Never in his life had Switters been quite so handsome. He’d let his hair grow long so that it framed his face, with its storybook of scars, in a manner that made it all the more intriguing. Enhanced by the moist climate, a predominantly vegetarian diet, and the liberty to do with his hours what he pleased, his complexion had the rich glow of a Renaissance oil, and his eyes were like jets of green energy. When he spoke, it was in grand syllables, moderated and warmed by a loose hint of drawl. He projected the air, falsely or not, of both a learned man and a rogue, innately exhibitionist yet deeply secretive, a powerful figure who habitually thumbed his nose at power—and thus might lead one, were one to fall under his spell, off in directions opposite those that one had been conditioned to recognize as prudent, profitable, or holy. To all but a missing link, then, he was an attraction.

Margaret, with the fresh baked piroshki she was fetching back to her desk at the law firm; Melissa, the Microsoft widow, with a basket of Gorgonzola and winter pears bound for suburbia; Dev, whose breasts in her cheap, fuzzy sweater were as heavy as the cabbages she sold in her stall; they and others, different and similar, would kneel hesitantly beside his chair, kneeling so they would be at eye level with him and so they would not be overheard, and say, with varying degrees of embarrassment, “I see you here a lot.”

“Yes,” he’d reply. “I’ve been watching you, too,” and though that was not always the truth, the little lie didn’t trouble his conscience, not even when he sensed a vibration travel down a spine to settle with an almost audible pang in a clitoris.

“What are you? No, I mean who are you? What do you do?”

“I’m Switters, friend of both God and the Devil.” Then, getting an uncertain reception, “Taker of the stepless step.” Then, “Two-inch astronaut.”

That usually stopped them. Lightly dumbfounded, the woman would give him a long, perplexed though hardly rankled look, and as shyly and sweetly as she had knelt, she’d rise, muttering “Have a nice day” or “Stay dry” or some other genial inanity, and walk away, seldom without a wistful glance over her shoulder as she paused at the cobblestones to unfurl her umbrella. Not infrequently, he’d spot one of them in the market again and exchange with her one of those futilely desirous smiles that are like domestic postage on a letter to a foreign destination. Did they approach him a second time? None save for Dev, who was much too undereducated and overburdened to be fazed by cryptic epigrams and non sequiturs; and who eventually followed him to his room, where, against his better judgment, she gladdened him unmercifully. Evidently he gladdened her, too, for afterward she claimed she needed a wheelchair more than he.

And she returned. Twice or thrice a week. Usually early in the morning, while her brothers were stocking the produce stand she would operate until dusk. When she unhooked her bra, it was like a farmer unloading a cart, and when she pulled down her panties, Switters thought he was back up the Amazon. Dev had meaty lips, chapped red cheeks, and walnut-shell eyelids beneath a prominent dark brow, and was as wide of hip as she was thin of guile. A strapping Eastern Orthodox milkmaid of Slavic descent, pretty in a coarse, uncultivated way, she was uncomplicated and honest in mind and emotion, complex and pungent in bodily aroma. She was always out of his room by five forty-five, but her musks hung around all day. Before long he was putting her on with his clothing, tasting her in his bread and cigars.

Wallpaper curled and stayed curled, windowpanes fogged and stayed fogged from Dev’s humidity. Dev’s cries spooked ledge pigeons into flight, and these were urbanized birds accustomed to every manner of human commotion. Dev’s pubic mound was like the hut of a shaman. Fruit flies picnicked on her thighs.

They had virtually nothing in common, nothing whatever to talk about, but she seemed without agenda beyond the erotic, and, at twenty-nine (the oldest woman with whom he’d ever lain), fatalistic and juggy, there was not one thing about her to remind him of Suzy. Sometimes as he shook her—her vapors and her short hairs—out of his sheets, his eyes almost teared with gratitude. He did come to see, in time, that she perceived him as a dramatic figure of mystery and was as magnetized by that aspect (real or fallacious) of his image as, say, Margaret or Melissa, but Dev was content to rub up against the mystery, wisely feeling no compulsion to probe or dispel it, which the others surely would have done. When he recognized that about her, his appreciation deepened into affection, and he took to awakening before five in cheery anticipation of her rapping—a coded knock he’d taught her so as to know it was her soft self knocking rather than one of Mayflower Fitzgerald’s bothersome cowboys.

O Dev, unreflective Dev, you are the one who is the mystery. Despite the numerous clues, largely olfactory in nature, you scatter in your wake.

If Dev was an O-ring that sealed wahoo in his body, a gasket against the leaking of that emotional oxygen now in shortened supply as a result of his sacking, his break with Suzy, and the Kandakandero curse that precipitated those two events, so then were the Art Girls. No Art Girls, either individually or collectively, ever visited his room, and, in fact, not all of the Art Girls were girls, but their presence in the Pike Place Market and in his acquaintanceship helped him to sail through that strange season—literally as well as figuratively.

From his two-inch elevation, he’d watched them filter into the market almost daily from the art school down on Elliott Avenue, walking mostly in pairs, sometimes singularly or in threesomes, but never en masse, although they were classmates and dressed as if siblings or even clones: black berets, black turtleneck sweaters, pea coats on which were pinned buttons bearing messages of rude social protest (one alluded to CIA malfeasance and paid tribute to Audubon Poe), rings in earlobe, lip, and nose. They carried sketchbooks, mainly, but also paintboxes, cameras, occasionally an easel; and each according to her or his favored medium—pencil, ink, crayon, watercolor, or film—would set about to depict her or his favored feature of the market: people, produce, or architecture. They strove to be disconnected and cool, but their vitality and curiosity were difficult to suppress. Try as they might, the nearest they could come to the cynicism and ennui with which somewhat older artists advertised their genius was to strike the odd hostile pose or suck defiantly on cigarettes. Finding them charming, Switters flirted openly with the Art Girls, even when they turned out to be boys, and though they were too self-consciously hip to ever kneel by his chair, as did the Margarets and the Melissas, they demonstrated through knowing expressions and inclusive gestures their unpremeditated approval of him.

Approval was tested, shaken, and finally cemented one January afternoon when a couple of them, representing at least two genders, presented him with a photograph that the anatomically female of the pair had snapped of him without, so she believed, his knowledge. After briefly examining and complimenting the picture, Switters proceeded to give the astonished young woman the date and time of day it had been taken, as well as prevailing weather conditions before, during, and after the exposure, and a detailed description of the candy bar her friend had been eating while she aimed the telephoto lens—all routine for a company operative. Could she really think some callow amateur, let alone one as cute as she, could photograph him from any distance without being systematically registered and remembered?

To regain her composure, the girl informed him that her faculty adviser had complained that the sign on the wheelchair—prominent in the photo—might give offense to the religious and the afflicted, prompting Switters to respond that he was certain the student photographer had rejected that moralistic nudging toward self-censorship since no artist worthy of the name gave a flying fuck whether or not any special interest group—minuscule or multitudinous, benign or malicious—took offense at their heartfelt creations. “Humanity is generally offensive,” he told her happily. “Life’s an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can’t tolerate offense ought to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense ought to have it ended for them.”

If he had overstated his position a tad for the sake of shock value, it had worked: they retreated as though from a fiery chili they’d assumed to be merely exotic pimiento. Indeed, but a philter can blister the gums, and the most effective aphrodisiacs are often foul at first taste. In a matter of days, the pair and its cohorts were friendlier than ever, having debated his pronouncement vigorously and at length in classroom, studio, and coffeehouse (few among them were yet of tavern age), concluding that it made up in bravery and brio what it lacked in sensitivity, and that it had been issued, moreover, in defense of their own aesthetic rights. Besides, he had a gorgeous smile.

Where Switters and the Art Girls truly connected, though, was in the gutter.

For weeks they’d watched with ill-concealed fascination whenever he’d push one of his minute boats into a current of streetside rainwater, often wielding a wilted dahlia stalk as a wand to guide it past obstacles as it commenced its voyage into the unknown. Day by day, berets cocked, the girls edged closer to the launchings. Once, one of them returned a boat to him that she’d retrieved from the place it had finally run aground. “It made it all the way to Virginia Street,” she said, dimples enlarging in both diameter and depth. It was only a matter of time before they started to make toy boats of their own.

From the start, their boats were lovelier than his. His, in fact, were pathetically engineered. How inept was Switters with tools? Had he been assigned to build crosses in Jerusalem, Jesus would have died of old age. The Art Girls, conversely, made lovely little vessels; clean, sleek, and well-proportioned, while his were decidedly otherwise. Yet, when they began to race them (human nature being what it is, racing was inevitable), his—lopsided, clumsy, cracked, splintery, wobbly of mast (often no more than a carrot stick)—always won. Always.

Challenged, the Art Girls fashioned increasingly finer craft. Forsaking those scraps of broken citrus crates that had provided shipwright fodder in the beginning, and that were now in short supply and deemed inferior into the bargain, they turned to the art school for materials, appropriating for hull and deck pieces of wood originally intended for stretcher bars, frames, maquettes, and the like, while making off with costly rice paper, parchment, and strips of Belgian linen canvas that could be cut into little sails. Rather quickly, spurred as much by artistic temperament and the human love of difficulty as by Switters’s unexplained and undeserved success, they progressed from catboat to sloop to ketch to yawl to schooner. They spoke of jibs and mizzensails, added bilge boards, keels, and rudders. And being artists, they painted their vessels in brilliant blues, whites, and golds, often inscribing a well-chosen name on the bow such as Shakti, Athena, Mermaid Lightning, Madame Picasso, or Madame Picasso’s Revenge.

Each and every one of Switters’s boats was christened Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters (scratched on the foredeck with a ballpoint pen), each was of the same primitive design in which he made no improvements beyond substituting a cabbage leaf sail for the customary lettuce leaf whenever the breeze was especially stiff or when he happened to accidentally produce a rat-trap-sized boat rather than the mousetrap size that was his usual limit. It wasn’t that Switters eschewed beauty and grace. No, indeed. He was, in fact, a champion of the beautiful in an age when beauty had been voted out of office by philistines on both the right and the left. His boats remained raw and rudimentary because he was incapable of making them differently, the handyman gene having been recessive for generations in the males of his family (which might well account for their tendency to become “men of mystery,” borrowing Eunice’s droll phrase). And anyway, his dumb dinghies continued to triumph.

“Sorry, darlings,” he’d apologize as, at the finish line, the girls would parade single file past his wheelchair to plant a victory kiss on his victory grin.

“I don’t get it.”

“He must cheat.”

“Is it some kind of, like, trick?”

“Fuck!”

Into the shallow streams of their racecourse—streams that bore mum petals, sprigs of dried statice, seeds, spices, crab shell fragments and tossed latte cups; streams shoaled by squashed apples, rotting lemons, runaway brussels sprouts, and the occasional yeasty horse turd; streams drizzled with cloud water, tea, lemonade, soup, screwtop wine, and drool (avian, equine, and human), in addition to a half-hundred varieties of coffee; streams dredged clean by municipal workers every night only to be collaged the next day with lurid organic detritus shed by activities within the Pike, the belly and heart of Seattle—into those cobble-bottomed streams the girls commenced to shove brigs, brigantines, barks, frigates, and clipper ships: vessels meant not for sport but for cargo or battle. It was as if, having despaired of exceeding his vulgar Virgins in speed and endurance, they sought to overwhelm them with scope, intricacy, and grace.

Indeed, they were works of marvel, those nautical midgets, especially when the clipper ship decks were stacked with lumber, rum barrels, hogsheads, cotton bales, or sacks of grain; when the frigates were outfitted with cannon and beaked figureheads for ramming an enemy. Races were interrupted, delayed, or canceled altogether due to outbreaks of naval warfare. As the fighting raged around it—”Fuck the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”—a lumpish Switters Virgin, flying a crude Jolly Roger, would go careening by in awkward audacity and lurch its way (providing it didn’t run aground on a half-submerged bagel) to the storm drain at the end of the street. Pretending to ignore him, the Art Girls made plans for a reenactment of the Battle of Trafalgar, deciding it might be a more interesting and authentic engagement if the warships were manned.

“Fruit flies,” suggested Luna, one of the more innovative of the girls. “We could rub grape pulp and stuff on the decks and in the rigging, and next thing you know we’ll have a crew.”

“Hello?” countered Brie, who was Luna’s heated rival in the talent department. “Did you happen to notice that it’s winter? There aren’t any fruit flies out.”

“Are, too. There’s always a flock of ’em flitting around that rosy-cheeked brunette who works in the stall over there.”

“Yeah,” agreed Twila. “Even when she walks down the street.”

“You mean Dev?” asked Switters innocently. As one, to a woman, each of the girls swung like a beacon to face him, their eyes narrowed with suspicion, or rather, some psychic knowledge well beyond suspicion, a daunting display of feminine intuition in full efflorescence. He actually blushed.

When they’d had enough of broiling his marrow under their sarcastic smirks, they returned to preparations for Trafalgar. “Are we going to have critters aboard or not?”

“Darlings, please!” pleaded Switters, reclaiming his pallor. “Critters? Rarely has a linguistic corruption stunk so excrementally of willful hayseediness. It’s the sort of ill-bred mispronunciation associated with barnyard sodomites and greeting-card wits, even exceeding in déclassé offensiveness the use of shrooms when mushrooms is the word intended.”

“Life is offensive. Get used to it.” They had him there.

“Bet Dev says shrooms.” There, too.

Being as fundamentally nonviolent as they were artistically restless, the girls soon lost their taste for naval warfare. One day, to everyone’s delight, a lowly garbage scow appeared in place of a windjammer, and the next day somebody launched an ark. These were followed by fishing trawlers, tugboats, barges, rafts, kayaks, houseboats, tankers, and ocean liners. And, as any art historian could have predicted, there eventually bloomed a period of stylistic mannerism, of art for art’s sake. The girls began to bring in boats that bore little or no resemblance to boats: impressionistic boats, expressionistic boats, Cubistic boats, boats more closely resembling swivel chairs, toupees, bowling trophies, or poodle dogs than anything that ever plied the seas; boats that wouldn’t steer correctly and in some cases wouldn’t even float. Anti-boats. Suicides. Sinkers. Bangladesh ferry service. Then, Luna stopped the show with a miniature Christ who walked on water. Everyone was stunned, but two days later, during which time she’d neither eaten nor slept, Brie unveiled a Christ who not only walked on water but also towed skis. Apparently, the end was near.

Their little regattas had been attracting an increasing number of kibitzers, so it was hardly a surprise when a writer for the Post-Intelligencer mentioned them in her column. “Regrettable,” bemoaned Switters. “Any day now we can expect the novelty-greedy snouts of TV cameras to come sniffing at our pleasures.”

A product of their culture, the Art Girls could neither share nor understand his objection. An aversion to media exposure was as incomprehensible to them as would have been in earlier times an aversion to the favors of a king or the blessings of the Church.

There might have developed a quarrel, but (naturally enough, since it was well into April) the rains stopped. The sky went blue on them, the sun bounded on stage like a cut-rate comedian who doubled as his own spotlight, and within a day the market streets and gutters were as dry as rye. And dry they remained. With the dawning of spring, moreover, it dawned on the girls that their school year was drawing to a close, final exams were imminent, portfolios must be readied for grading; and, so, with a chirpy panic, they turned their full attention to the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs that for months they’d been ignoring, to the faculty’s supreme bewilderment, in favor of maritime models and nautical whirligigs.

On their rare forays into the market now, they did, singularly or in pairs, seek out Switters, always with just a trace of dreaminess in their perky hellos and good-byes. “What are you doing with yourself these days?” they’d inquire, implying that his life must be dreary without them.

“The house is on fire,” he’d answer merrily. “I’m looking out the second-story window. In my case, that happens to be two inches above the ground. Perfect!”

Whereas in the past it had been an unspoken rule that no prying was permitted, now they’d ask, “But what are you doing here in the market? What did you do before? You know, like before?”

“Oh, I gave up a proctology practice to go live in the Ural Mountains. Or did I give up a urology practice to go work for Procter and Gamble? Hmm?”

“You can’t remember whether you were a proctologist or a urologist?”

“Alas. All I know is that if you could sit on it, I was interested in it.”

At least half the girls made it clear, largely through body language, that anything they sat on could be his for the asking. Yet, he did not ask. He was, in some oblique fashion, paying off a debt to Suzy, who, he kept reminding himself, was but three or four years their junior, and for whose sake he seemed to feel he owed more than a modicum of retribution. He lusted maniacally for the Art Girls, of course, and, in all frankness, might never have let remorse over Suzy stand in the way of getting to know them more intimately had not his sunrise visits from Dev been so carnally extracting.

It was spring. There was no mistaking it. The air had become like cotton candy, spun not from sugar but the sex glands of meadowlarks and dry white wine. In the Pike Place Market, green sprouts popped up between the cobblestones. When he ventured out of a morning, freshly if resentfully groomed, yet bearing Dev’s funky signature like a laundry mark on a shirt, Switters left his topcoat at home.

Pale sunlight warmed the “starship,” the “second-story window,” the “throne of enlightenment” from whose eminence he kept watch on the world. Because spring brought with it, as it does each year, quiet spasms of longing that may be interpreted as sad, he found himself thinking of the sad-faced little mercado down in Boquichicos, so woefully wanting in goods and goods-buyers compared to the overstuffed market in which he parked his “one-man tilt-a-whirl.” And because in the high stalls (including Dev’s), oranges, onions, potatoes, and so forth were stacked in pyramid piles, he was repeatedly reminded of the shaman of the Kandakandero. Was it around Today Is Tomorrow’s cranial apex that Sailor Boy’s plumage had come to rest? And what of Fer-de-lance? The boy was out of vivid South America, but vivid South America was not quite out of the boy.

Bereft of Art Girl yachting parties, Switters again had lots of time to think, and while he thought often of Suzy and what he might have done to protect their relationship, thought of the CIA and what he might have done to preserve his job, he focused his thinking on his South American affliction, specifically on the question raised by Bobby Case, to wit: What had he been shown by the witchman’s ayahuasca, his yopo, that was so privileged and precious that he’d be expected to pay for it by spending the rest of his life with his feet off the ground?

Was his predicament in any way a distant echo of Adam and Eve’s? Had he, with a chit supplied by a creepy trickster, bought lunch at the Tree of Knowledge Bar & Grill, where only the cosmic elite were supposed to eat? If so, what forbidden information, exactly, had he ingested? That every daisy, sparrow, and minnow on the planet had an identity just as strong as his own? That all flesh was slowed-down light and physical reality a weird dance of electrified nothingness? That at a certain level of consciousness, death ceased to become a relevant issue? As did time? Today is tomorrow? Okay. But hadn’t he known those things all along?

In Genesis 3:22, a peevish voice attributed to Yahweh said of Adam (caught with pip on his lip), “Behold, the man is become as one of us.” Us? More than one god, then? Goddesses, perhaps: a Ms. Yahweh? Was Yah’s collective pronoun meant to include his beaming lieutenant, Lucifer? Or, for that matter, the Serpent? How about the community of angels (an apolitical faction of which might already have been disposed toward neutrality)? Or might God possibly—and this was pretty far-fetched—have been referring to the bulbs? The coppery pods, the shiny, trash-talking siliques who had boasted that they were running the show? Ridiculous, maybe, but what were those damn bulbs? Were they intrinsic to the plants from which ayahuasca and yopo were derived, an example of an abiding botanical intelligence amplified and made comprehensible by an interfacing of vegetative alkaloids with human neurons? Were they, rather, projected manifestations of his own psyche, hallucinated totems from the collective unconscious? Or were they actual independent entities, a life-form residing, say, one physical dimension away from our own, reachable at a kind of supercharged Web site accessed through chemical rather than electronic means?

Well, whatever, he certainly hadn’t become “as one” of them, or “as one” of the witchman’s ilk, either. So, why was he being punished? Instructed? Initiated? Eighty-sixed, at any rate, from the garden of reason? The very terminology to which he was forced to resort in order to consider these issues was suspect, being at once alien and shopworn, the parlance having in recent decades been yanked from its arcane native contexts and incorporated into the vocabularies of popularizers, charlatans, and dilettantes. Ugh! Still, they were real issues, were they not, as challenging to science, which preferred to sweep them under the rug, as to Switters, who, for reasons personal and acute, lacked that timid luxury?

Thrilled by the strange implications of such questions and at the same moment embarrassed by them, he examined them repeatedly but sheepishly, like a forensic scientist sorting a collection of crime-scene lingerie. These private musings occurred mainly in public—on sun-smeared corners, in shadowed archways, or beneath the great cartoonish market clock—where the murmuring of unsuspecting throngs washed over him, and Florida grapefruit and Arizona melons, like the popped orbs of Buick-sized frogs, watched him without blinking.

It was in one of those places, toying with one of those riddles, that he was approached, too abruptly for his liking, by a blue-chinned, dagger-nosed young man with an excess of glower behind his spectacles and an excess of wrinkle in his suit.

If the fellow was Mayflower’s Joe, coming out of the cold, something pretty serious must be up. At second glance, though, Switters would have bet this sulky slubberdegullion couldn’t tail the Statue of Liberty. He was no Joe. The company still had standards. Of course, he might be a master of disguise. Lower lip like that could be a nice touch, provided he didn’t trip over it.

“You Switters?”

“Who wants to know, pal?”

“I’m here to drive you to your grandmother’s.”

“Don’t believe I rang for a car. My chauffeur’s name is Abdulla, he’s been known to patronize a dry cleaner, he calls me Mr. Switters, and unless I have him confused with the gardener, this is not his day off.”

The man bristled, but any thought he might have had to rummage in his repertoire of rude retorts was dispelled by a look from Switters, hypnotic and fierce. Out of a jacket pocket unraveling at its seams, he drew a card that identified him as a paralegal at a downtown law firm that Switters remembered Maestra having mentioned once or twice in connection with her will.

“Guess there’s some bad news,” he said. “I’m parked around the corner on Pine.”

In Maestra’s foyer Switters was greeted by a doctor and a lawyer. Does it get any worse than that? Assuming that no decent person would allow a land developer in their home, only the presence of a cop and a priest was required (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) to complete this roll call of damnation.

The physician was courteous and kind. He explained that Maestra had suffered a mild stroke, particularly mild when one considered her age, from which there were indications she would fully recover. There was no evidence of paralysis, although her speech was noticeably slurred. She was lightly sedated, and a nurse had been engaged to watch over her for the next seventy-two hours. Until she regained normal speech, she wished to see no one. “Switters would try to take advantage of my vocal impediment to win his first argument with me in thirty years.” The doctor quoted her with a chuckle, gave Switters his phone number, and left the house.

It was now the lawyer’s turn. She, too, was polite, though with her it seemed more a matter of professionalism than compassion. Uncommonly tall, she was as black of skin as many of her colleagues were of heart, and there was a trace of tradewind in her accent. “Barbados,” she’d later explain. Her dignity, magnified by her height, might have been daunting to a man less reckless than he. In any case, since Ms. Foxweather had a couple of bombs to drop, her altitude was entirely appropriate.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been apprised of your grandmother’s indictment?” Foxweather inquired, opening the hatch and letting a big one fall. “No, I thought as much. Well, she was charged in January with computer trespass. Intrusion with mischievous intent. And it was mischief, I should stress. There was no evidence of larceny or social activism, per se. Nevertheless, it’s a serious charge at an inopportune time since the government is attempting to clamp down in these cases before they get out of hand. The feds aim to send a message.”

Whether in disbelief (though he shouldn’t have been overly surprised), dismay, or a kind of admiration that was not far from delight, Switters just kept shaking his head. Foxweather couldn’t be faulted for imagining that it was palsy that had landed him in his chair.

“Because of your grandmother’s age, prison was never really a possibility and because, as far as can be proven, she didn’t capitalize financially on her intrusions, there was. . . . Well, intentionally or unintentionally, she did bring down at least one computer network and destroy a fair amount of intellectual property, and while I did my best, the fine was steep. It was levied this morning, and I have to say, I’m convinced the judgment is what caused her stroke.”

The attorney finally took a seat—Switters was getting a crick in his neck—and cut to the nougat. Maestra, even should she completely recover and suffer no further blockages, was going to require care. She threatened to cane-whip the tightwad who might try to move her into an efficiency apartment and gun down like a landfill rat the Nazi who would plant her in a nursing home (Switters and Foxweather exchanged glances that indicated they both knew the old lady wasn’t joking), and home care was not inexpensive. The Magnolia manse was costly to keep up. Taxes were in arrears. There was a six-figure fine to pay. And, of course, legal fees. When all was said and done, Maestra, who’d donated generously over the years to some rather kooky causes, was staring into the hungry eyeholes of the lean white dog of bankruptcy.

“Now, I’ve agreed to accept her old cabin up at Snoqualmie Pass in exchange for my services. So that helps some. Ahem. Aside from this house, however, your granny has only one asset of any great value.”

“The Matisse.”

“Precisely. And it would fetch more than enough at auction to see her through. But she says she’s promised it to you upon her demise and, therefore, doesn’t feel she has the moral right to sell it.”

Switters wheeled himself to the living room door and looked in. There it hung above the mantel, in all of its sprawling, life-affirming effrontery. How could anything so flat be so rotund, anything so still be so antic, anything so meaty be so spiritually contemplative, anything so deliberately misshapen be so gratifying? Upon patterned cushions that might have been honked, zig by zag, out of Ornette Coleman’s horn, the odalisque exposed her flesh to a society that had grown frightened again of flesh. Without fear, inhibition, egotism, monetary motive, or, for that matter, prurience or desire, she loomed, she spread—as if she were both metropolitan skyline and wilderness plain: woman as city, woman as prairie, woman as the whole wide world. And yet, the longer he looked, the more removed she became from womanliness and worldliness, for in essence, she was but a song sung in color, a magnificently useless expanse of liberated paint. Owing nothing to society, expecting nothing, the painting bumped against the brain like a cloud against an oil derrick. It had the innocence and brute force of a dream.

Switters turned to Ms. Foxweather. “Matisse must not have had any damn heat in his studio. Woman went blue on him.”

“Oh, but that’s the way—”

“Sell it!” he snapped. “I never liked it anyhow.”

You can lie to God but not to the Devil?

For at least two reasons, Switters had been planning to move into the mountain cabin as soon as the snow melted. First, he was ready for a sabbatical from the Pike Place Market, which, with the advent of warm weather, was becoming almost South American in its vividity; and second, if Maestra was staring the pale dog in its ciphers, Switters was already under its paws. With his unemployment benefits about to expire and his unsold condo facing foreclosure, he’d been steeling himself to approach Maestra for a loan. Now . . .

A lawyer’s going to be weekending in my sylvan cabin whilst, in the glow of my beloved Matisse, some ruthless corporate raider will be plotting the hostile takeover of a pharmaceutical firm noted for the manufacture of mood-elevating laxatives. Along with appropriate details and his concern about his grandmother, Switters e-mailed the preceding to Bobby Case. When Bobby failed to respond right away, Switters figured he must be off flying a hazardous recon mission over North Korea (for, presumably, that’s what his new assignment entailed) or else up to his knees in Okinawan pussy (Bad Bob was ecstatic to be in Asia again, boy howdy!).

In about twelve hours, however, the e-bell rang. Damn! Why do those yellow-bellied fates always gang up on the elderly? How is she?

In the mind and the body, where it counts, Maestra’s doing remarkably well, Switters answered, although, for the moment, her voice is unsettlingly reminiscent of her dear departed parrot. Financially, Sailor Boy may be the better off of the two. I had no idea. Turns out she’s been donating large sums of cash to organizations whose names and objectives are not well known.

Probably CIA fronts, every one of them, Bobby tapped. But that Matisse, which a drifter like you never deserved in the first place, ought to bring in millions.

Yes, millions. If it doesn’t set off an alarm. Not only is its authenticity likely to be challenged, there’s a possibility it could be stolen property. Maestra’s first husband acquired it under somewhat foggy circumstances. In any event, I’m living by the temporary graces of Mr. Plastic and in dire need of gainful employment. I have to keep Maestra out of the nursing home, should it come to that, keep her in her own house with her wicked computers. Also, I’ve decided to go back and confront Today Is Tomorrow in the autumn. One year should just about suffice for two-inch enlightenment. Wouldn’t want to overdo it. Wear out my welcome in Nirvana.

Now you’re talking, son! I’ll get back to you if I have any bright ideas. Meanwhile, give the old hacker my affection and admiration.

The very next day, Bobby was on-line with an intriguing proposal.

If you’re able and willing to travel, You Know Who has got a speck of work for an ex-operative with your particular experience. April 30. Hotel Gül. Antalya, Turkey. Sit in the lobby and look innocuous—can you manage that?—until you hear somebody say, “Fuck the Dallas Cowboys.” Pay: low. Risk: high. But you won’t turn it down because the thrills are practically unlimited, and I know you’re aching to get back in the game.

Was he? Aching (from the Old High German ach!, an exclamation of pain) to get back in the game (from the Indo-European base gwhemb, “to leap merrily,” as in gambol)? Certainly, he had always looked upon his activities, official and unofficial, in the geo-political arena as a game: a combination of rugby, chess, and liar’s poker, with a little Russian roulette mixed in for good measure. While there were no conclusive victories to be had in that game beyond simple survival, a player scored whenever his acts of subversion thwarted or even delayed the coalescing of power in any single camp. In a sense, one won by making it difficult for others to win or, at least, to grow fat on the fruits of their triumph.

Six months in a wheelchair, however, had altered his overview slightly if significantly. When one was living two inches off the ground, one remained close enough to the earth to experience its tug, share its rhythms, recognize it as home, and not go floating off into some ethereal ozone where one behaved as if one’s physical body was excess baggage and one’s brain a weather balloon. On the other hand, one had just enough loft so that one glided above the frantic strivings and petty discontents that preoccupied the earthbound, circumnavigating those dreary miasmas that threatened to bleach their hearts a single shade of gray. In short, one could be keenly interested in worldly matters yet remain serenely detached from their outcome.

Switters, if the truth be told, was as enthusiastic about geopolitical monkey-wrenching as he’d ever been, but now, two inches removed, was no more attached to the end results than he’d been to the outcome of the rain-gutter boat races against the Art Girls. (Were he inclined—and he decidedly was not—he probably could have drawn several parallels between his passage through life and the careening of his unlikely little boats through the market’s littery channels.) In fact, he’d reached the conclusion that the inertia of the masses and the corruption of their manipulators had become so ingrained, so immense, that nothing short of a literal miracle could effect a happy ending to humanity’s planetary occupancy, let alone the kind of game in which he played upon that slanted field. And yet, it was a game absolutely worth playing. For its own sake. For the wahoo that was in it. For the chance that it would enlarge one’s soul.

So, perhaps he wasn’t exactly aching to resume play, but he mustn’t have been averse to it, for he wasted no time in twisting Mr. Plastic’s arm until the card blubbered like a cornered snitch, surrendering a one-way ticket to Istanbul for Switters and a heavy silver bracelet in a Northwest Indian raven motif for Maestra. In one of the market’s dimmer cul-de-sacs, he enjoyed a furtive farewell straddle from a drawers-down Dev, while yards away at her deserted stall, consumers edged across the narrow line of civilized restraint that separated shopping from looting, cleaning out the first of the season’s Mexican strawberries. Switters reimbursed her from his undernourished wallet in order to keep her brothers from slapping her around. Then, he was off to meet, for the very first time, the archangel—

“Audubon Poe.” The flannel-shirted, Mariners-capped man who spoke the name had been standing on the

Pike Street

curb poring over a bus schedule all the while that Switters was sliding into a taxi, folding his chair, and dragging it in beside him. He was a youngish, nerdy yet nimble Caucasian, not unlike Hector Sumac of Lima, Peru. As the cabbie signaled to pull into traffic, the stranger had suddenly thrust his face in the taxi window, uttered Poe’s name, frowned one of those obligatorily disapproving frowns that is actually a smile with its pants on backward, and shook his head. “You know he’s an arms runner,” he said, making it sound more like a piece of hot gossip than an accusation or a warning. And just as quickly he was gone.

“Airport,” said Switters.

“Where you fly today, sir?” asked the driver.

“Turkey.”

“Ah? Turkey. Long way. Vacation there?”

“Run arms there,” Switters replied matter-of-factly, wondering where that Joe had come from and what the hell Bobby had gotten him into.

Part 3

Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to God and there’s always a chance that a folly will.

—Erasmus

The land spread out before him like a pizza. Its topography was flat, its texture rough, its temperature hot, its hue reddish yellow, studded with pepperoni-colored rocks; and, at the moment, it glistened as if drizzled with olive oil. Water was absorbed slowly, very slowly, by the arid hardpan and tended to trickle toward any depression. Were the ground conscious, it would savor this unexpected rainwater, for it would see not another drop of moisture for a good seven months.

Behind him, where he’d separated from the band of Shammar Bedouins, the baked “cheese” bubbled up in low hills that grew progressively steeper until, farther west, they became a full-fledged mountain range with snowy peaks. Eastward, however, the “pizza” was unrelieved. This was the great Syrian desert that stretched into Iraq and Jordan and Israel and all the way across Arabia, and was the threshing floor upon which the human soul had been flailed free from the chaff of its long ripening, only to be ossified and shriveled by a degeneration into dogma of the very ideas that had nurtured it and winnowed it loose, in the endless granary of the desert, from its dark animal husk. Man’s physical self evolved in the sea, and to the rhythms of the oceans our salty blood and waves of breath still moved, but it was here on the burning sands of the Middle East, where Switters now paused to rest, that the spiritual self emerged. There had been nothing to distract it.

Switters was left almost giddy by the realization that not only was he alone, he was also unseen. By anyone or anything. In the Amazon forest, by way of contrast, one never made an undetected move, for no matter how deeply one penetrated, how far removed one was from one’s fellows and milieu, one was always of great interest to a hundred pairs of eyes: slitty eyes, bulbous eyes, multifaceted eyes, eyes bloodshot, chocolatey, or hollow; eyes that saw without being seen; a blinking, squinting, spying paradise of reincarnated Joes. Here in the desert, though, nothing watched but the gods. Small wonder that religion was born hereabouts or that, for better or worse, hereabouts it had thrived.

The coolness that had come with the rain was only a sweet memory now. Switters sweltered but didn’t sweat: perspiration evaporated before it could pump out of his pores. The air that he gasped, due to the exertion of wheeling his chair over stony, pitted, thorn-bushed terrain, was so light and dry that it made but the weakest impression on his respiratory system and failed to inflate his lungs, although it tingled inside him in a faintly delicious way. For all its unsubstantiality, the air seemed as alive as the earth seemed dead. Massaging his wrists, he squinted through nets of rising heat at the oasis, still more than a mile away, and could not help but think how vastly different these bare, harsh, god-connecting surroundings were from the scene off the coast of Turkey, where he had yachted and sipped Dom Pérignon only three weeks prior.

“Fuck the Dallas Cowboys.”

Switters had been expecting that declaration, had been nervously straining to hear it through a fog of jet lag and migraine and coffee-fueled Turk chatter all afternoon, but he hadn’t expected to hear it issued so abruptly, openly, and emphatically by a denim-clad black man striding toward him across lush oriental carpets and speaking English with a Swedish accent.

“Fuck Notre Dame,” Switters responded hopefully. Bobby hadn’t supplied him with a countersign. “Likewise the Los Angeles Lakers and the New—”

“Steady, man,” cautioned the contact. “You be speaking ill of the New York Yankees, you and me gonna have a problem. Ja, man, ya betcha.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t want that.” With just a hint of fierceness in his grin, Switters had looked the man over. He was trim enough for someone of his age—late forties would be a good guess—but his shoulders were stooped, and his hands, from which long, sensitive fingers dangled like licorice whips, seemed uncallused and spongy. “However . . .”

“Ain’t no however to it. You got luggage upstairs? Good. Tell the bellman to bring it to the yacht basin. And follow me.” He paused. “I’d offer to push your chair, but if you can’t get out of this lobby on your own, you sure as hell not be getting out of where Mr. Poe be sending you.” For the first time, he smiled. “Go Yankees,” he said softly. “Go Knicks. And by the way, man, nice suit.”

The contact was Skeeter Washington, chief lieutenant to the legendary Audubon Poe and, in certain circles, a minor legend, himself. The son of a fairly well-known Harlem jazz couple (mother a singer, father played bass), Louis Mosquito Washington, about to be drafted, had enlisted in the army in 1969 after a recruiting sergeant assured him he’d be assigned to a military band. Instead, he’d been put in the infantry and shipped to Vietnam. He’d been wounded and upon recovery, ordered to return to battle once he’d enjoyed a week’s R and R in Tokyo. At that point he deserted, threw himself upon the mercy of a group of radical Japanese pacifists, and a month or so later turned up in Sweden, where he resided for a quarter century, earning a living and a reputation as a bebop pianist. A couple of years back, still smoldering with resentment over the horrors wrought in Southeast Asia by America’s savage wrong-headedness and his forced participation therein, he’d sought out Audubon Poe and volunteered his services—although neither Skeeter nor anyone else seemed to know exactly what Poe was up to, aside from providing the international news media with a steady source of information damaging to the “defense” industry and the CIA. It would have been unlikely, however, that the services of a jazz piano player would have been refused by a man born and reared in New Orleans.

“Uh, I should inform you,” Switters had said as they waited on the dock for the hotel porter to arrive with his bags, “that the company seems aware of this.”

“This?”

“My coming here. To meet with Poe.”

“Aw, doesn’t matter.”

“But isn’t there a price on his head?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Ol’ Poe, he put out the story himself years ago that he was on a CIA hit list. After that, the government didn’t dare to smack him. Not in no obvious, violent way, nohow. Could always try and slip him a heart attack pill or something, I guess. But Anna, she be sneaking and tasting his food before he eat a bite of it.”

“Who is Anna?”

“His fifteen-year-old daughter.”

Switters’s Adam’s apple flopped in his throat like an eel in a creel. Good God! he thought. Why didn’t Bobby warn me?

Antalya’s marina, one of the most beautiful on the Mediterranean, was built on the site of an ancient Roman harbor next to a restored Ottoman village. From its main dock, in the shadow of crumbling ruins, a motor launch had carried Washington and Switters out to a gleaming white ninety-foot yacht, The Banality of Evil, anchored about a half-mile offshore. The boat, flaring in the distance like a millionaire’s teeth, belonged to Sol Glissant, a Beirut-based French national who had made a chunk of his fortune rebuilding Lebanon’s swimming pools after the war and was known as the Pool Pasha of the Levant. For reasons of his own, Glissant had put The Banality of Evil at the disposal of Audubon Poe, who behaved as if it were his, which for all practical purposes it was.

Switters had been shown to a stateroom, given time to “freshen up” (code for perform maintenance), and then summoned on deck, where he was handed a champagne glass as large as a fishbowl by none other than Poe, himself. Like Washington, Poe was dressed all in denim, but his fine, sharp, birdlike features, his slicked-back silver hair, his effluvium of cologne that made Switters’s Jungle Desire, in comparison, smell as cheap as its name, and the irony in his civil, confident quiver of a smile, produced an air of aristocracy that seemed to transform the egalitarian blue cotton into resort wear designed by a Riviera comte.

“So, you’re Switters,” Poe said, in an accent that managed to be both southern and refined. “The last I heard of you, you were hanging upside down over Baghdad.”

Sloshing his champagne, Switters demurred. “I believe you may have me confused with my friend Case. While I’ve passed many a merry hour in fair Iraq, my peripateticism there has been limited to its terrestrial surfaces.”

Poe regarded him curiously. “I see. Do please forgive my social blunder. But you are, are you not, the gentleman who knows how to refer to a lady’s treasure in seventy-five different languages?”

“Seventy-one.” Good God, he thought, is this to be my only claim to fame? The lone thing by which men remember me? My other achievements—academic, athletic, and political—eclipsed by this frothy exercise in linguistic trivia? They’ll probably engrave it on my tombstone, should I live long enough to get one.

“Myself, I dig the Swedish for it,” put in Skeeter Washington.

“Oh, yes,” said Switters. “Slida. One of my favorites. For its onomatopoeia.”

When Skeeter looked puzzled, Poe had said, “You must excuse Mr. Washington. He’s been a long time away from English. Why, I had to teach him to speak Ebonics, and as you may have noted, he’s not very fluent in it. Says things like ‘Ja, ya betcha, motherfucker.’ “ Laughing, he turned to his associate. “Skeet, onomatopoeia refers to a word that sounds like the thing it represents.”

“Slida,” said Switters, nodding. “And the Japanese for the organ in question is almost as onomatopoeic: chitsu.”

“Yeah, man, that ain’t bad, either.”

“Preferable, certainly, to the Japanese for the male equivalent: chimpo. Makes it sound like a trained monkey in a traveling circus.”

“Don’t know about yours,” said Skeeter, “but my dick behave like a trained monkey in a traveling circus most of the time.”

“Let’s change the subject, shall we, gentlemen?” said Poe. “Anna will be coming on deck momentarily with an hors d’oeuvre or two.”

The men hadn’t gotten down to business right away. In fact, nearly three days passed before Switters was taken belowdecks into the boat’s storeroom and shown the contraband that Poe and Washington were running. In the meantime, they sailed Turkey’s famed Turquoise Coast, slicing gracefully through waters the color of Suzy’s eyes, from whose pellucid depths fairyland rock formations and playful dolphins rose. They sipped Sol Glissant’s champagne, dined on fresh fish poached in grape leaves and served with capered sauces, and gazed at sunsets while Skeeter played on the salon piano, at Switters’s tipsy request, amazing bebop renditions of Broadway show tunes. Occasionally they talked shop, wondering among themselves, for example, at the arrogance and uncharacteristic stupidity of Israel’s Mossad in its recent bungled attempt to smack a revered Hammas leader inside Jordan.

“Goes to show you,” remarked Poe, “that cowboys are cowboys, whether Jewish or—”

“Goyboys,” suggested Switters.

“Cowgoys,” offered Washington.

“More champagne, Daddy?” asked young Anna.

Anna proved to be a slender sylph, with a galactically freckled, waiflike face, brown hair braided in pendulous pigtails, and breasts scarcely larger than her fists. She was innocently flirty, and Switters, when not drinking with the men, divided his time between going to absurd lengths to avoid ever being left alone with her and spying on her voraciously as she sunbathed, topless, on the afterdeck.

Because he was on water, Switters assumed that the prohibitive taboo was not in effect and that he was free to move about the yacht on foot. However, since he didn’t want to have to explain his situation to his hosts, he remained in the wheelchair. To honor the fates, he remained in the wheelchair even when no one was looking. He was heartened, nevertheless, for it occurred to him that should he fail to get the curse lifted, should worse come to worst, he possibly could spend the rest of his life aboard ship, be it a ship on the order of The Banality of Evil or one like Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters. The latter type, he had to admit, was much more feasible, although it provided scant more space for walking about than had his double bed in Seattle.

In any event, in the early afternoon of their third day at sea, Poe had called him to the railing and pointed a manicured nail at a hazy, macaroon-colored horizon. “Hatay,” he said. “On the Syrian border. A dismal, camel-gnawed area whose only distinction aside from it being the site of Alexander’s victory over the Persians is that it was upon its uninviting beach that Jonah was supposed to have been coughed up by the whale. Nothing symbolic is intended, I assure you, but I regret to report that it’s the very spot where we are coughing you up. Tonight.”

“Hatay? Turkey? What’s? . . .”

“How you get from Hatay into northern Iraq is your affair. Frankly, considering your physical liability, I have my doubts that you can manage it at all. People whom I trust, however, assure me you have excellent qualifications: the languages, the experience, the courage, the cunning. They couldn’t vouch, of course, for your desire.”

“Well, I’m plainly uninformed as to the nature of the mission, but I can tell you that I don’t go to dances to sit on the sidelines nibbling fruitcake. I’m here to take the prom queen home. Moreover, I happen to be embarrassingly bereft of hard currency, and Mr. Plastic is pretending he doesn’t know me. This gig has got to be preferable to selling used electrolysis equipment over the phone.”

Again, Poe studied him curiously. Then he said, “All right. Come with me.”

The silver-haired précieux (he could be foppish even in jeans) had unlocked the storeroom, shoved aside cases of champagne, crates of capers, and restaurant-sized jars of olives and pickled artichokes, to reveal a ton or more of . . . well, there were land-mine detectors and various devices for defusing or detonating mines, there were camouflage paints, gas masks, fire extinguishers, transmitters for jamming radio and radar signals, flares, bulletproof shields, water-purification kits, and a refrigerator stocked with serums for inoculation against anthrax, sarin, and other biological and chemical weapons.

“My goodness,” said Switters, looking over the supplies. “You’re a regular little elf.”

Poe winced. “I’ve been called worse. ‘Traitor,’ for example. By the President of the United States and the chairmen of the intelligence committees in both houses of Congress.”

“Not to mention Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald and swarms of racketeering locusts in the pulpits and the press. Congratulations. One man’s treason is another man’s valor. At Berkeley, where I was in grad school at the time your book was published, you were celebrated and revered. As a matter of fact, though I have to admit I only read the reviews and not the tome itself, it was your book that inspired me to sign on with the company.”

If Poe had looked at him with curiosity before, those looks were nothing compared to the one he gave Switters now. “Pardon me? You joined the CIA because of a book that exposed it as an amoral, imperialist, bungling gang of money-wasters operating outside of and above the law?” He was starting to suspect that this man he’d been sent was crippled in mind as well as body.

“Why, yes. You made it irresistible. Because no other room in the burning house promised a more interesting view? Because every stand-up comic longs to play Hamlet? Because a big back has a big front? Because I believed my syrup of wahoo could sweeten its sulfur?” Switters shrugged. “It’s a trifle hard to explain.”

“Evidently.” Poe’s expression betrayed neither satisfaction nor confidence, and he enjoyed a long skeptical moment before shrugging, himself, and returning to the cache of—counteractives. “Those gas masks? There’re approximately two thousand of them. Not fractionally enough, but they’ll help. Your job is to get them to the Kurds near Dahuk.”

“Which Kurds? KDP or PUK?”

“Should such a choice become necessary, I’d favor PUK for the simple reason that the KDP is sponsored by the Iraqi government and therefore is in less danger of being gassed by it. Like all political parties everywhere, however, they’re both consumed with power and self-interest, so my preference is that you try to get the masks into the hands of those unarmed civilians whom both parties claim to represent.”

In a parodying, theatrical gesture, Switters pounded his right fist against his left breast and exclaimed, “So it shall be written, so it shall be done!”

They had an early supper on deck, a leisurely meal in which Switters was restricted to a single glass of champagne. This was due to the fact that he would be needing his wits about him, but also because the last time he’d had his fill of the bubbly, he’d gazed into Anna’s face and told her that her eyes were like a morning mist on the fur of a squirrel. Or something along those lines.

The sun was low but the air was still balmy, and the sea was the shade of blue that black could have been if it hadn’t stepped over the line. After plotting the mission as best they could—it was a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants operation—they entered into a conversation about jazz, cinema, and literature, a dialogue that hit a snag when Switters began expounding upon “the mythological and historical echoes” that resonated in the most overtly skimble-skamble phrases of Finnegans Wake. “Nigh him wigworms and nigh him tittlies and nigh him cheekadeekchimple,” for example.

After that, Audubon Poe talked of his boyhood among the gentry of New Orleans and how, to further his ambition to become a professional chess player, he had taught himself Russian at fourteen, thinking it might give him some advantage if ever pitted against the grand masters, who all seemed to hail from Mother Russia. At seventeen he became the youngest spy in the history of the CIA, which recruited him to dig for Cold War information at international chess tournaments, and although he blew his cover by having a love affair with the wife of one of the Soviet champions, he later became a full-time operations officer. In that capacity he served the company loyally for years, until he found himself gradually disillusioned and sickened by Vietnam, the secret war against Cuba, the gratuitous lying to the American public, the support of brutal dictatorships, the coziness with the Mafia, and, in general, the overly indulgent interpretation of the “such other functions and duties” clause in the agency’s charter. Poe didn’t blame company cowboys as much as he blamed the Presidents who used them, often illegally, as instruments of a foreign policy whose main objective was to enrich the defense industry and get them, the Presidents, reelected. Nevertheless, his exposé had badly dented the agency’s fenders—and forced him into a precarious exile.

“The company’s changed since your divorce,” said Switters.

“I hear they let black men be agents now,” said Washington.

“Black women, too. Only we call them ‘African-Americans’ these days.”

“Ja, ja, that’s right. I can’t keep up with all our name changes, man. Back in Harlem, we was ‘Negroes’ or ‘colored people.’ Then it got to be ‘blacks’ and ‘people of color.’ But ‘Negro’ means ‘black,’ meant ‘black’ all along unless I’m mistaken; and maybe I’m thick, living among the Swedes all this time—I mean, America’s a bouncy country whereas the Swedes ain’t got that much bounce to ’em, you know—but I fail to detect where they be a hell of a lot of difference between the terms ‘colored people’ and ‘people of color.’ Or between ‘Afro-American’ and ‘African-American,’ far as that goes.”

“The distinctions are subtle, all right,” Switters admitted. “Too subtle for the rational mind. Only the political mind can grasp them. I suspect there’s a bid for empowerment behind it all, the power going to whoever seizes the right to coin the names. In a reality made of language, the people who get to name things have psychological ownership of those things. Couples name their pets and children, Madison Avenue names the products that dominate our desires, theologians name the deities that dominate our spirit—’Yahweh’ changed to ‘Jehovah’ changed to plain ol’ generic ‘God’—kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they’ve successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King’s life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we’re like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control. Or maybe not.”

“Verbal wolf urine?” inquired Audubon Poe incredulously. He had tucked a polka-dotted ascot into the throat of his denim work shirt, accentuating the dapperness that seemed to originate from his hair. “Anna, you must promise me you’ll never marry a man who uses phrases that picturesque.”

Anna giggled in a manner that suggested she thought it might be good fun to marry just such a man. Switters averted his eyes, while Poe smiled ruefully and returned the conversation to the CIA. “You say the company has changed. For better, you think, or for worse?”

“It may be too soon to tell. About the company and about the world in general.” Before Switters could say more—if, indeed, he had any intention of continuing—a crewman approached and whispered something in Poe’s ear.

“Blow coming up,” Poe announced when the sailor departed. “Radio reports there could be seven- to eight-foot swells throughout the night. Switters, I’m afraid we’re going to have to dump you earlier than planned. There’re likely to be Turks up and about, though they turn in early in these parts, but we can’t wait until tomorrow night, as we’ve got a drop to make off of Somalia next week that we don’t dare miss. Innocent lives at stake and so forth. If you’ll just get your gear together . . .”

“Happily,” said Switters, and he meant it, although it’s debatable whether he would attribute his glee to the prospect of action or to the fact that he was about to escape without making a fool of himself—or worse—over Anna.

In any case, he had waved good-bye to the girl from a safe distance, shook the manicured hand that had nearly punched the breath out of the Central Intelligence Agency, and allowed the crew to lower him, his luggage, his chair, and the burlap sacks containing two thousand gas masks into a rubber raft. Skeeter Washington manned the oars (a motor might have attracted attention) and manned them well. The wind was already escalating, and between the darkened yacht and the rocky shore there was considerable chop, but Skeeter slid over the crests and attacked the troughs as if mastering a difficult composition by Thelonius Monk. Indeed, he was humming as he rowed.

“What’s that tune, Skeeter?”

“Huh? Oh, that? Just something new I been working on. I thinking about calling it ‘Slida,’ thanks to you, man. Americans won’t know what that mean nohow and the Swedes be broadminded about such matters. If my record company in Stockholm don’t dig the reference, guess I could call it—what was your Japanese word for it?—’Chitsu’? Unless you got a better one.”

The raft pitched to one side and caromed off a rock. Switters had to wipe spray from his eyes. “Well, you likely would want to avoid the Welsh. In Wales, they say, llawes goch.”

“Say what? You jiving me? That be ugly, man. Why, I wouldn’t go near nothing with a name like that.”

“A rose by any name would smell as sweet,” Switters reminded him, then dug his left heel under the tubing to keep from being jolted overboard. They were entering the surf now, and despite Skeeter’s skillful maneuvering, the raft was lurching violently. “Vietnamese is worse. In Vietnam they call it lo torcung am dao or lo torcung am ba, depending on whether a baby is coming out of it or a man is going in.”

“And what about when it’s not in use?”

Switters shrugged. He started to suggest that the Vietnamese term was so long that simply speaking it might constitute foreplay. However, he would have had to yell to make himself heard above the roar of breakers, and as they were then less than thirty yards from the beach, yelling was probably not a wise idea.

“I assume you got the Turkish in you repertoire, ja?” he thought he heard Skeeter say right before they slipped sideways again and a wave broke over them. (Good thing his computer and pistol were in plastic bags.) If he remembered correctly, the Turkish term for the vagina was dölyolu, but with the coast guard or a Jonah cult possibly nearby, he wasn’t about to shout that into the gap-toothed chaw of the rock-biting waves.

The oasis didn’t seem to be getting any closer. For a moment, he seriously considered that it might be a mirage, a faux tableau created by too much heat rising from too much sand into too much sky. True, the nomads had seen it, as well, but to Bedouins a mirage would have its own tangibility. Could it have been a shared hallucination, like the Virgin Mary’s dancing fireball at Fatima? Well, whatever, it was all his now.

He was no longer singing. He still had the urge to sing, he had the wahoo in him—the hint of anxiety only boosted it, and its level had rarely been higher—but the exertion of propelling the chair robbed him of the breath to sing. Surrounded on all sides by an immense silence, the only sound he heard beyond his own shallow gasps was sand crackling beneath his wheels and thorny weeds brushing against the spokes like a tone-deaf witch trying to pluck a banjo.

That a person’s elation seemed to be tightly bound to his or her unencumbrance was a detail generally overlooked by psychologists (not surprisingly, since psychologists tended to skirt the subject of elation altogether, except when describing symptomatic behavior at the manic extreme of bipolar personality disorder), but Switters’s high spirits could be primarily attributed to the fact that he was . . . well, the word footloose did not really apply, not literally, considering his perambulatory injunction, but at large, certainly, at liberty, exempt, burdened neither with possessions nor duties; free in a wild, wide-open land, where he was consciously going against the flow (of reason, not of nature), deliberately choosing the short straw, flaunting the rule of “safety first” (surely one of the most unromantic phrases in the English language). However, it also had not failed to energize his coconut that the operation in Iraq had gone so swimmingly.

The hardest part of the mission had been the landing on Jonah’s riviera. Once Skeeter had succeeded in beaching the rubber raft and helping him into his chair—a tricky, time-consuming task due to the surf, the rocks, and Switters’s inability to disembark on his own or otherwise assist—it had been a piece of cake. They had stowed the gas masks in the ruins of an old stone net shed, where Skeeter rested while Switters got out of his soaked yeast-colored linen suit and into a dry, navy blue, pin-striped, double-breasted number of a sort that was not uncommon in Turkey. They talked briefly, shook hands (Switters imagined he could feel a current of pent-up music in Skeeter’s fingers), and parted, Skeeter to buck the waves back to the yacht, Switters to trundle the four kilometers into the town of Samanda(breve)gi, where, in a compound next to the marketplace, he had come upon a small contingent of Kurds.

Kurds belonged in The Guinness Book of World Records on at least two counts: they were the largest ethnic minority on earth without an independent homeland, and they had been double-crossed and betrayed by more foreign powers than any other people in history. For this last reason alone, Switters had expected it would take days if not weeks to win their confidence. The United States, after all, had been among the nations to use them as pawns. After that one night, however, spent smoking (cheap cigars provided by Switters), drinking (arrack, a date-based liquor furnished by the Kurds), and discussing (poetry and philosophy, in Arabic) around their headman’s hearth, he had felt comfortable enough to confide in them, and they had agreed to participate, to the extent that they could, in his humanitarian escapade.

Because Iraq’s border with Turkey was deeply troubled where Kurds were concerned, and abristle with Turkish troops, Switters thought it best to try to enter from Syria. His new friends agreed. If he would buy the petrol, a couple of their restless young men would drive him and his gas masks (they demanded thirty masks for themselves, though they resided far from the threatened region) across southeastern Turkey in one of their rickety old Mercedes trucks. Somewhere near Nusaybin, they would put him in touch with Syrian Kurds who would help him cross over into Syria. And so it came to pass.

The second Kurdish group, as colorful as carnival cavorters in their billowy trousers, embroidered blouses, and tablecloth-sized head coverings, had taken him along Syria’s northeastern snout on camelback. It was while swaying to and fro atop one of those spitting, whining, kicking, loaf-lipped beasts that he had finally made contact with Maestra. He’d been afraid to e-mail her since, as evidenced by the Joe who’d seen him off in Seattle, the company was picnicking in his computer, and for reasons he hoped were just her characteristic orneriness, she wasn’t answering her phone. As much to take his mind off his uncomfortable ride as to ease his worry about her, he’d punched her Magnolia number into the satellite phone one more time—and was actually startled when the line was picked up and a gruff voice bellowed, “This had better be good!”

“Did anyone ever tell you, Maestra, that you have the disposition of a camel?”

“Damn straight I do, so don’t try to milk me or pile a load on my hump. Where are you, boy?”

“Are you aware that a camel’s hump is naught but a lump of fat?”

“Really? Then it’s the same as a woman’s breast.”

“Oh no, you must be mistaken. A woman’s breast . . . why, a woman’s breast is a miniature moon. It’s made out of moon paste and warm snow and honey.”

“Heh! You romantic ninny. Where are you?”

He dared not be specific, but she got the idea that he was in camel country, and, more important, he got the idea that she’d fully recovered from her stroke. She was, in fact, arranging to fly to New York to be on hand for the auction of the Matisse in late June. “I’m making sure those poufs at Sotheby’s don’t try to stiff me.”

Thus it was with much lightening of heart that he slipped into Iraq, a country where it was as easy to get beheaded as to get a bad meal. Fortunately, he endured the latter and avoided the former. In a ruined mountain town southwest of Dahuk, he had bestowed the masks (minus the hundred he’d given his latest escorts) on a tearfully grateful mayor, whose constituents had been recently decimated with nerve gas dropped on them by the very Baghdad authorities who had promised them self-government in 1970. The mayor hosted a celebration in his honor that evening, with lambs on the spit, hookahs on the rug, and belly dancers on the balcony. Because these Kurds were more strict in their adherence to Mohammed’s commandments than was the isolated group in Samanda(breve)gi, it proved a nonalcoholic affair, a condition that actually suited Switters since his digestive tract found arrack as combustible as pisco and since sobriety could be a useful ally in a hasty getaway.

Knowing full well that Baghdad would have informants in the town (there would have been a minimum of two or three at the party) who’d waste little time in reporting his presence to the nearest military garrison, Switters excused himself early on in the festivities and, instead of visiting the outhouse, as advertised, ducked into the small room he’d been given and retrieved his belongings. He rolled out the rear entrance, rattled across an adjacent courtyard dotted with stones and tethered donkeys (belly dance music drowning out the clatter), and on through a gate onto a dark side street. The neighborhood was as empty as a Transylvanian blood bank, most of its inhabitants being at the party, but outside PUK headquarters a block down the street, he found a battle-hardened old militiaman leaning against the battered hood of a Czech-made version of the Jeep. The guard spoke little Arabic, while Switters’s Turkish vocabulary was pretty much limited to dölyolu. In Kurdish, even the word for that revered orifice was absent—temporarily, he trusted—from the tip of his tongue; yet, somehow the message was conveyed that Switters desired to be driven to the Syrian frontier, a hundred miles away. The request had been stubbornly refused, even after Switters flashed the wad of deutsche marks that Poe had provided to see him through (the rest of his pay, about nine thousand dollars plus airfare, was being wired to his Seattle bank). So, for the first and only time in the operation, he drew his pistol. He cocked it with an ominous click and snuggled its barrel up under the guard’s floating rib. “To the opera!” he called. “And five gold guineas if you catch the king’s carriage.”

The emaciated PUK grenadier wept openly when Switters flung his rifle out of the moving Jeep, and Switters, tears gathering in his own eyes, felt such shame that he had the warrior turn the vehicle around, and they went back and picked it up. “Jesus, pal! Your attachment to your symbolic manhood could get me killed.” The teeth the Kurd showed when he smiled made his abductor’s seem a textbook example of the rewards of dental scrupulosity. They clasped hands in the Islamic manner. And—

Wham, bam, thank you, Saddam! Nigh him wigworms and nigh him cheekadeekchimple! They were out of there.

The distance between Switters and the oasis at last began to shrink. Quite suddenly, in fact, the compound seemed to enlarge, as if, cued by a director and strictly timed (ta da!), it had burst out on stage. It was no mirage. But what was it? It had better be good because all around it, in every direction, as far as his eyes could see, the world was as empty and dry as a mummy’s condom.

He was wondering if he shouldn’t have remained with the Bedouins. They were a marvelous people to whom travel was a gift and hospitality a law. The Kurds had been gracious enough, but he preferred the Bedouins, for they were less religious and thus more lively and free. Kurds were essentially settlers who roamed only when forced from their villages by strife. Bedouins were nomadic to the bone. Whereas Kurds were in a constant state of bitter agitation over their lack of an autonomous homeland, Bedouins had no use for such paralyzing concepts. Their homeland was the circle of light around their campfire, their autonomy was in the raw sparkle of the stars.

In almost every nation in the Middle East, Near East, and Africa, nomads were under strong governmental pressure to plant themselves in established settlements. Whatever the socio-political, economic reasons given, underlying it all was that great pathetic lunatic insecurity that drove men to cling to various illusions of certainty and permanence. The supreme irony, of course, was that they clung to those ideals because they were scared witless by the certainty and permanence of death. To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.

The fires of this particular band of wandering herdsmen had been noticed by Switters only a few kilometers inside Syria, along the isolated, seasonally fertile wadi down which he’d been driven, headlamps off, to avoid both Iraqi and Syrian border patrols. Knowing that they would be honor bound to receive him hospitably, he ordered the commandeered Jeep stopped about three hundred yards from their encampment, gave the driver a fistful of deutsche marks, and sent him back to his Kurds and fray. “Thanks for the lift, pal. Good luck to you and your homeboys. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you ought to switch brands of toothpaste. Give Atomic Flash or Great White Shark a try.”

Initially, he’d planned to make his way back into Turkey, where an American with a properly stamped passport and no gunnysacks of gas masks in his possession would have aroused not the slightest suspicion. He might expect to reach the Istanbul airport within the week. But he was full of himself after his little caper, and soon he was full of the Bedouins, as well.

Despite the fleas that prickled him nightly the way stars prickled the desert sky, he loved sleeping on their musky carpets inside their big black tents. (The universe is organized anarchy, he thought, and I’m lying in the folds of its flag.) He loved their syrupy coffee, earthenware jars, silver ornaments, tilted eyebrows, and the way they danced the dobqi, their bare feet as expressive as a ham actor’s face. Yes, and he loved it that they were as wild as bears and yet impeccably neat and polite. Their good manners would put a Newport socialite to shame. Every country had a soul if one knew where to look for it, but for the stateless Bedouins, their soul was their country. It was vast, and they occupied it fully. It was also portable, and he felt compelled to follow it awhile.

Should he not have stayed with them indefinitely, devoting his skills and energies to preserving their way of life? The khan, after all, had offered him one of his daughters. “Take your pick among the five,” the khan had said, ever the perfect host, and Switters could sense them blushing behind their thin white veils, while the gold coins they wore strung around their heads jingled slightly, as if vibrated by hidden shudders of nuptial anticipation. Their chins were tattooed up to the base of their noses, and at mealtime each would squirt milk from a ewe’s teat directly into her teacup. He tried to imagine marriage to such a girl. His hypothetical adulthood-prevention serum would be superfluous, for they already had been inoculated with an ancient genetic Euro-Asian plasma that kept them soft and fiery and curious and frisky to the grave. Imagine romping with a two-legged patchouli-oiled bear cub every moonlit evening on the carpets she would have woven for his own black tent! How primal, how lurid, how timeless and funky and mysterious and frank!

Yet . . .

She would never serve anything but yogurt for breakfast, beer and biscuits and red-eye gravy stricken from his diet forever.

She would never discuss Finnegans Wake with him, not even on Bloomsday eve.

And neither she nor her kin would get his jokes: for the rest of his life, every bon mot, every wisecrack, destined to fall on disregarding ears.

They wouldn’t get his jokes even if he told them in Arabic. The Bedouins weren’t stiff and somber by any means. They smiled when pleased, which was fairly often, and they laughed as well, but it was a kind of harmlessly mocking laughter, almost invariably directed at an act or an object—his undershorts with the cartoon pandas, for example—that they considered ridiculous. Unintentional slapstick might delight them, but a deliberate witticism was as alien to their sensibility as a fixed-rate mortgage. Comedy, as such, was not an aspect of Bedouin consciousness, nor of the consciousness of many other archaically traditioned, non-Western peoples.

Begrudgingly, Switters was starting to think that Today Is Tomorrow might be on to something. That goddamned pyramid-headed, grub-eating, drug-drinking, curse-leveling savage from the Amazon bush could have been right on the money when he concluded that it was Western man’s comedic sense—his penchant to jibe and quip and pun and satirize and play humorous games with words and images in order to provoke laughter—that was his greatest strength, his defining talent, his unique contribution to the composite soul of the planet.

Conversely, civilized man’s great weakness, his flaw, his undoing, perhaps, was his technologically and/or religiously sponsored disconnection to nature and to that disputed dimension of reality sometimes referred to as the “spirit world,” both of which were areas to which the Bedouin, the Kandakandero, and their ilk related with ease and understanding, a kind of innate genius, and harmonious grace. Today Is Tomorrow had suggested that if civilized man’s humor (and the imagination and individualism that spawned it) could somehow be wed to primitive man’s organic wisdom and extradimensional pipeline, the union would result in something truly wondrous and supremely real, the finally consummated marriage of darkness and light.

An interesting idea, the shaman’s proposal, but probably even less likely to be achieved than the happy marriage of a Berkeley-educated former CIA agent to a tattooed, teat-squeezing daughter of the khan.

Those were the things Switters was thinking as the nomad band moved deeper and deeper into the distant, slowly rising hills, and he, in the opposite direction, moved closer and closer to the mud walls of the small oasis.

Three of the khan’s daughters—yes, he was still thinking of them—had blue eyes, betraying their ancestral origins on Asia’s northern steppes. Theirs was not the Sol Glissant swimming-pool blue of Suzy’s eyes, however, but a sapphire blue, almost an anthracite blue, as if hardened into being by millions of pounds of chthonian thrust. Their hair was so black that it, too, was nearly blue, and in a dozen other ways they were antithetical to Suzy. Yet, the oldest of them was no more than seventeen, so . . . so what? Seriously. So what? He had certainly not hooked up with the nomads because of young girls, and if they played any part in his impulse to leave, it was due neither to fear nor guilt (emotions quite irrelevant in that milieu) but rather because he had detected something in the girlish laughter wafting from the oasis during the downpour that had seemed glutinous, pulpy, and quilted, as if textured with layers the fleecy Bedouin titters lacked.

However, to what extent those stratified peals had influenced his sudden urge to explore the place, he couldn’t honestly say. As mentioned, he was quietly crackling with an emboldened abandon in the aftermath of the Iraqi caper, there was wahoo in his tank, and that was quite likely a more accurate explanation for his whim than the curiosity aroused by distant laughter. In any case, the oasis was decidedly silent now.

It sat there, almost loomed there, like a mud ship becalmed in a rusty bay. Its contours, its lines, were simple but sensuous, organic but intrusive, utilitarian to a fundamental degree yet somehow oddly fanciful, like a collaboration between Antoni Gaudí and a termite colony. The walls, which enclosed an area of about seven or eight acres, were rounded on top, and the single tower that rose above the flat roofs of the two principal buildings inside was also round and bulbous, creating the effect that the whole compound, architecturally at least, had been formed in a gelatin mold. All that was lacking was a dollop of gritty whipped cream. The air around it was so awiggle with heat that one could almost hear a soft shimmering, but not the smallest sound escaped the compound itself. It seemed, in fact, deserted.

The gate—and there was only one—was arched, wooden, and solid. High on the gate was an area of latticed grillwork, but even when standing on his wheelchair, Switters was unable to quite peer through it. From the outside, the compound was as blank as it was hushed. Hanging from a wooden post beside the gate was an iron bell about the size of a football, and beside the bellrope a sign hand-lettered in Arabic and French. It read: TRADESMEN, RING THREE TIMES/ THOSE IN NEED, RING TWICE/THE GODLESS SHOULD NOT RING AT ALL.

Switters considered those options for quite a long while before giving the bell exactly one resounding gong.

After several minutes, having received no response, he next gave the bellrope four strong yanks. He waited. The sun was barbecuing the back of his neck, and his canteen was running on empty. What if he was not admitted? Left out in the heat and desolation? Those responsible for the laughter couldn’t have vanished in so short a time. Were they deliberately ignoring him? Hiding from him? Trained, perhaps, to respond only to three rings or two, might his unauthorized signals have bewildered them or blown some pre-electrical circuit inside? Switters was always nettled when expected to choose between two modes of behavior, two political, social, or theological systems, two objects or two (allegedly) mutually exclusive delights; between hot and cold, tart and sweet, funny and serious, sacred and profane, Apollonian and Dionysian, apples and oranges, paper and plastic, smoking and nonsmoking, right and wrong. Why only a pair of choices? And why not choose both? Who was the legislator of these dichotomies? Yahweh, who insisted the angels choose between him and his partner, Lucifer? And are tradesmen, as implied here, never in need? Did the bell instructions infer that any visitor who believed in God would, per se, either be needy or have something to sell?

His skull-pot, fairly boiling inside his crumpled Panama hat, was not cooled by this cogitating. He was on the verge of swinging from the bellrope like a spastic Tarzan when he heard a scraping noise, like dog shit being scuffed from a jogging shoe, and looked up to see that the grill had slid open and was framing a human face.

As near as he could tell, the face was female. It was also European, homely, and either middle-aged or elderly, as it was lightly wrinkled and sprigs of graying hair intruded upon its margins. The owner of the face was either standing on a box, or Switters had stumbled upon a nest of Amazons about which University of California basketball recruiters ought to be apprised, for she was staring down at him from a height of more than seven feet.

“Bonjour, monsieur. Qu’est-ce que vous cherchez?”

“What am I looking for? The International House of Pancakes. I must have taken the wrong exit.”

“Pardon?”

“Ran out of gas out past the old Johnson place, and I’m gonna be late for my Tupperware party. Can I use your phone to call Ross Perot?”

“Mais, monsieur . . .”

“I’m looking for this very establishment,” he said, switching to his best French, which had grown as moldy as Roquefort from lack of use. “What else would I be looking for in this. . . .” He paused to search for the French equivalent of neck of the woods, though even in English the expression was irrelevant here, there being no woods within hundreds of miles, indeed, not a single tree in any direction except those embosomed by the compound walls. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by. May I please come in?”

The hospitality so prodigious in that arid corner of the world was not immediately forthcoming. After a time, the woman said, “I must consult with . . .” At first she said something that seemed to translate as “Masked Beauty,” but she quickly corrected herself and uttered, “the abbess.” Then she withdrew, leaving him wondering if this desert outpost to which he had been drawn was not some kind of convent.

His suspicion would prove to be well founded, although the kind of convent it was, exactly, was not something he ever could have guessed.

A quarter hour passed before the slot in the gate reopened. The face in the grill reported (in French) that the abbess wished to know more specifically the nature of his business. “I don’t have any business,” Switters replied. It was dawning on him that he might have made a dumb mistake in coming here. “I’m a simple wayfarer seeking temporary refuge from a stern climate.”

“I see.” The woman removed her face from the grill and relayed his words to party or parties unseen. Behind the gate there was a low murmur of voices in what seemed both French and English. Then the face returned to inquire if he was not an American. He confessed. “I see,” said the woman, and again withdrew.

A different face, noticeably younger, rosy as a ham hock, and congenial of smile appeared in the aperture. “Good day, sir,” this one said in lilting English. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m dreadfully afraid we can’t let you enter at the moment.” Her accent seemed to be Irish. “I’m the only one here now who speaks English, and I haven’t got any bleeding authority, if you’ll please excuse my coarse speech, so Masked Beauty or rather the mother superior’s sent word that your request can’t be properly considered until Sister Domino comes back. I’m sorry, sir. You’re not from the Church, are you, sir? That would be a different matter, naturally, but you’re not from the Church, now are you?”

Switters hesitated a moment before responding, in imitation of R. Potney Smithe, “Bloody well not my end of the field.” He was encouraged when the new face seemed to suppress a giggle. “I’m Switters, free-lance errand boy and all-around acquired taste, prepared to exchange hard currency for a night’s lodging. And what’s your name, little darling?”

The new face blushed. Its owner turned away, engaged in brief discussion with the unseen voices, then reappeared. “Sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait for herself.”

“Wait how long?”

“Oh, not more than a day or two, sir. She’ll be coming back from Damascus.”

A day or two! “Wait where?”

“Why, there’s a wee shade over there, sir.” She rolled her eyes toward a spot along the wall where an overhang of thickly leaved boughs cast a purplish shadow on the sand. “Bloody unaccommodating, ain’t it? I can talk like this because only you and God can understand me, and I don’t believe either you or God gives a pip. I’d like to hear how you got here in that bloody chair, but they’re pulling at my skirts. Good-bye, sir, and God bless.”

“Water!” Switters called, as the grill slid shut. “L’eau, s’il vous plaît.”

“Un moment,” a voice called back, and in about ten minutes the gate creaked open a few inches. In the crack there stood not the Irishwoman but the Frenchwoman to whom he’d spoken first. She shoved a pitcher of water and a plate of dried figs at him and quickly shut the gate.

“Oh, well,” he sighed. He trundled the twenty feet or so to the shaded place, where he spread his blanket and lay down, his heels propped on the chair’s footrest, two inches above the ground. The water in the pitcher was cool. The figs had a faint taste of slida. He fell asleep and dreamed of woolly things.

When he awoke it was night. Above him, all around him, the sky was a bolt of black velvet awaiting the portrait of Jesus or Elvis. Stars, like grains of opium, dusted it from edge to edge. In one far corner, the moon was rising. It looked like the head of an idol, a golden calf fattened on foxfire.

Why was the air so torrid? It was his experience that the desert cooled quickly after dark. And summer was yet a month away. Not that it mattered, any more than it mattered that his muscles seemed loosened from his bones or that his bones were swimming in gasoline. He felt like the Sleeping Gypsy in Rousseau’s great painting, asleep with his eyes half open in a night alive with mystery and fever.

Fever? It gradually occurred to him that it was he who was hot, not the air. The sweat drops on his brow were like tadpoles. They migrated down his neck as if in search of a pond. Still, he didn’t care. A night such as this was worth anything! His aching only gave pitch to its beauty.

The stars hopped about like chigger bugs. The moon edged toward him. Once, he had the sensation that it was licking him with a great wounded tongue. He smelled orange blossoms. He was nauseated. He heard himself moan.

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.”

“No problem,” she said. “What you don’t understand is . . . well, there’s a deep undercurrent of sexuality flowing through every cloister. That may be especially true of the Pachomian Order because we are merely a centimeter above a lay sisterhood, no pun intended. In the hierarchy of sisterhoods, we are not especially great, and we have accepted members who a few of the more esteemed orders might reject. Of course, a Pachomian sister must adhere to vows of chastity just like any nun, but prior to taking up the cloth, she need not have been a virgin. So, among us, we have women with some experience, and that makes men and carnality a more tense issue, perhaps, than in certain orthodox convents. But when I get so cotton-picking coincée about it, it is I, myself, who is acting the hypocrite.”

Naturally, Switters had to bite his tongue to keep from asking Domino if she could be counted among those sisters with “some experience.” What he asked, instead, after a lacerating lingual nip, was a question about the role and features of the Pachomian Order.

“Maybe we can discuss that at a later time,” she said. “Right now, before I go to my work, we must talk about you. Who are you? What are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here? So far from the beaten track.”

“May I assume my interrogation is off and running?”

She smiled, and it was a smile, he thought, that could raise roadkill from the dead or turn a lead mine into a Mexican restaurant, yet a smile made more with the eyes than the lips. “You seem to be much improved, Mr. Switters, although you still look like—how do you say it?—a thing that the cat has brought home. I don’t mean to pressure you. If you don’t feel well enough . . .”

“It’s all right,” he assured her, “although should I die in your custody, you’ll have to answer to Amnesty International.” Then, before she could protest, and holding to his vow to stop lying, he jumped right in with the truth, or, at least, an abridged version of it. “Until six months ago, I was a CIA operative. Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Really? I know, of course, about the CIA. It has an unpleasant reputation.”

“And largely deserved, I assure you.” He might have added, “Thanks to corporate-owned politicians and their cowboy dupes,” but he did not.

“Then why were you? . . .”

“Its unpleasantness, as you put it, had a purity, a spice, and anarchy that simply didn’t exist in the academic, military, or corporate sectors, and I hadn’t enough talent for art or poetry. Besides, it offered an unparalleled, world-class opportunity for corrective mischief: subverting subversion, if you will, although I won’t pretend my motives were ever entirely altruistic. But all that’s immaterial now. I had to drop out of the game last November.”

She glanced at his wheelchair, folded in a corner, and he knew what she was assuming. He decided not to correct the assumption. Instead, he told her how he’d recently become involved in a private humanitarian mission inside Iraq, his old stomping grounds, and how, when it was over, he, feeling adventurous and having no particular place to be, joined a band of nomads driving their flocks to summer pasture in the mountains. “We passed by your Garden of Eden here, and for some crackpot reason I felt a magnetic attraction to the place. The rest, as they say, is histrionics.” He shrugged, as if to emphasize the pristine logic of it all.

Whether or not she bought his story he could not tell. She was quiet, thoughtful, her countenance vacillating between serenity and fret. “Finish your breakfast,” she said at last. “I’ll come back for the tray. A supply truck will be arriving in a few days, bringing petrol for our generator. It can take you to Deir ez-Zur, but I can’t see how you will depart Syria without the proper papers.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sister,” he called after her. “Impropriety is what I do for a living.”

Fortified by his first regular meal in more than a week, Switters attempted a few push-ups and sit-ups on the cot. It was a wimpy, pathetic display. After lunch, delivered by a French nun who introduced herself as ZuZu (she was Domino’s age but lacked Domino’s radiance), he tried again, with greater success. Mostly, however, he rested. He meditated, he dozed, he read, he drank in the farmyard sounds and orchard smells of the oasis. Once, a black goat wandered into his room. Almost immediately, ZuZu and another middle-aged nun arrived to shoo it out.

“That Fannie,” ZuZu clucked. “She should pay more mind to her animal.”

“Yes,” said her companion. “Instead of to the animal in her mind.” They laughed and departed. It was probably funnier in French.

In midafternoon, he tried telephoning Maestra. When she didn’t answer, he pulled his computer up onto the cot. Now that Audubon Poe was far away, it shouldn’t matter if the company read or even traced his transmission. Mayflower had little reason to be interested in him, per se, and even if he was, what could the cowboys do to him? Tip off Syrian authorities that he was in their country illegally? Intimate that he was a spy? Get him imprisoned or executed? In the old, crazed Cold War CIA, that might have been a possibility, but these days the company had a different censure and different methods. It had other fish to fry, its own bare asses to cover. Unless it believed he could help it get at Poe, whose whereabouts it doubtless already knew, he would be regarded as no more than a loose cannon with minimum firepower and no direction. He said a prayer to the satellite gods. He e-mailed his grandmother.

In less than an hour, she responded. Maestra was well. There was some unspecified trouble about the Matisse. She was glad he was enjoying his vacation in “Turkey,” and understood that the Turks made fine silver bracelets. Was he finally out of that stupid wheelchair?

It was Domino who brought him his supper. “I’m sorry to be ignoring you,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too.”

She tested his forehead for signs of fever, and in her hand he sensed a current not unlike the throb of pent-up music he’d felt in the fingers of Skeeter Washington, only what was pent up in Sister Domino was of a different order: spiritual, physical, emotional, or a mixture of the three, he wouldn’t venture to suppose.

“Can we talk?” he asked.

“Later tonight, or tomorrow,” she said, glancing out the window at the purpling dusk. “Now we have a special vespers. And, oh, we won’t be turning on the generator for a while, so, I’m sorry, you’ll have to make do with candlelight if you want to read.” She picked up the copy of Finnegans Wake from its place on the bedside stool. “It’s an Irish book, isn’t it? Fannie would be thrilled.”

“Only a dozen souls in Ireland have actually read this tome,” he said, “and I’d bet a crock o’ gold and a barrel o’ Guinness that your Fannie is not one of them.”

About an hour after dark, as he lay digesting his thin goat stew, he heard singing. This time the song was a hymn, and more than a couple of voices were joined in its vocalization. “Vespers,” he said to himself. At almost that same moment, he became aware that an orange glow had commenced to flicker, snap, and waggle against the drawn curtains of his little window. Inquisitive, he stood on the cot, down near its foot, and parted the rough cotton fabric. For the next half hour, he was to gawk at an extraordinary spectacle. The psychedelic porthole aside, no window he’d ever peered through looked out on a more memorable scene.

The convent chapel, identifiable by its stunted steeple and crude stained glass, was located at—and connected to—the far end of the building that apparently served as living quarters for the sisterhood. The chapel was a good seventy yards, maybe more, from the infirmary, which was situated near the compound gate. In front of the chapel, from whose open door the singing floated, there was a small flower garden, and in that flower patch, amidst poppies and jasmine bushes, a bonfire had been built.

As Switters watched, nuns—eight of them in all—filed, still singing, out of the chapel. Each wore her traditional nun habit, rather than the Syrian dresses in which he’d become accustomed to seeing them. Joining hands, they formed a circle around the fire, circumnavigating it several times, both clockwise and counterclockwise. Then they suddenly ceased singing, broke the circle, and began to disrobe.

Initially, a startled Switters jumped to the conclusion that the sisters were practicing witchcraft, that he’d stumbled upon some arcane sect that was combining Catholicism with Wicca. However, as the nuns, one by one—some eagerly, even vehemently, others with obvious reluctance—hurled or gently dropped their habits into the bonfire, he realized that something of a different nature was transpiring here. He couldn’t guess what the ceremony was about, but it was no eye-of-newt sabbat.

As the heavy habits smoked and slowly ignited, the women watched in their underwear. Most wore knee-length bloomers, the sort of ultra-baggy shorts that might have outfitted a low-rent hip-hop ghetto gangster basketball team, and stiff old-fashioned prototype brassieres that could have harnessed pairs of boudoir oxen. One was in modern bra and panties. From that distance, he couldn’t clearly recognize faces, but he thought (or hoped?) she must be Domino. The last of the eight wore bikini underpants and nothing else, and as firelight twinkled on her far naked nipples, he thought, Fannie?

His attention was diverted from Fannie’s (?) breasts by the appearance in the residence hall doorway of yet another figure, a tall woman, whose silhouette had a certain majesty. She was immediately greeted by two sisters, who took her arms and led her, very gingerly, for she appeared to be old, to the fire. Masked Beauty? Switters wondered, although as far as he could tell, she wore no mask.

Two other nuns had gone inside the residence hall and lugged out a kind of wooden settee. A third went inside and fetched cushions. Masked Beauty—it must be her—stood in front of the settee and, assisted by the shapely one he believed to be Domino, undressed. With surprising vigor, she likewise flung her habit into the flames.

After Domino arranged the pillows for her, she reclined upon the settee, propping herself on one elbow, the better to view the conflagration, and the pose she then struck was so strangely familiar to Switters that it gave his spine an electrical shock.

And just then, as Masked Beauty’s doffed habit erupted into full blaze, he, still tingling, saw by its light that the thin shift she wore as an undergarment was an equally strange and familiar shade of strangely familiar—blue.

Silence is a mirror. So faithful, and yet so unexpected, is the reflection it can throw back at men that they will go to almost any length to avoid seeing themselves in it, and if ever its duplicating surface is temporarily wiped clean of modern life’s ubiquitous hubbub, they will hasten to fog it over with such desperate personal noise devices as polite conversation, humming, whistling, imaginary dialogue, schizophrenic babble, or, should it come to that, the clandestine cannonry of their own farting. Only in sleep is silence tolerated, and even there, most dreams have soundtracks. Since meditation is a deliberate descent into deep internal hush, a mute stare into the ultimate looking glass, it is regarded with suspicion by the nattering masses; with hostility by business interests (people sitting in silent serenity are seldom consuming goods); and with spite by a clergy whose windy authority it is seen to undermine and whose bombastic livelihood it is perceived to threaten.

However, when Domino returned to the infirmary to find Switters propped up in bed, his arms folded, palms upward, across the rough sheet, a thick aura of quietude around him, she attributed it to the fact that he was in recovery from illness and would not have guessed that he might be trying to steady himself after witnessing, an hour and a half earlier, Masked Beauty’s startling impersonation of his grandmother’s painting.

As far as that goes, Domino might not have registered her patient’s meditative air at all, so absorbed was she by her own cares. Her eyes resembled a serving of salmon sushi, and while their puffy redness could conceivably have been caused by bonfire smoke, Switters guessed that she had been weeping. She knew he wanted to talk (though she couldn’t have known how badly), but she begged off, claiming fatigue. “À demain,” she promised, and then apologized that exhaustion had made her lapse into French.

“Tomorrow’s fine,” he said.

“It’s Sunday, so I will be free all the day, after chapel.”

“You’ll still have chapel?”

She was momentarily puzzled. “Oh, you mean after? . . . Mais oui, yes, of course we will have chapel.” She paused. “You watched our brazen ceremony, didn’t you? I saw your silhouette at the window.”

“I wasn’t intending to spy.”

“Ah, but you couldn’t help yourself: you’re CIA.” Sensing instantly that she might have yanked a sleeping dog’s tail, she issued a retraction. “No, please, I’m only making a joke. It would have been impossible not to notice our. . . . We should have waited until you had gone away. Tell me, did you find our display to be tasteless?”

“No, on the contrary, it struck me as rather tasty. But, then, I have an appetite for bold gestures and burned bridges.” To himself he added, And blue nudes. “I don’t much savor pain, however, and I detected a sharp hickory of hurt in the fumes from your little barbecue.”

She looked him over slowly, as if seeing him in a new light. “You are not an entirely stupid fellow,” she said, and she smiled.

“Thanks, Sister,” he replied. “Your own mental prowess has also proven to be significantly superior to that of the average pecan. Nevertheless, what I am most taken with are your eyes.”

“Ooh-la-la,” she protested, brushing her fingers across her lids. “Tonight they are ruined. But as a rule, they are my nicest feature.”

How refreshing, he thought. A woman who knows how to accept a compliment. “It’s like they were congealed from nitroglycerin and mother’s milk. I can’t tell if they’re about to nurture me or crack my safe. And your mouth has a sneaky habit of getting them to do most of your smile-work.”

“Yes, I admit it. I have such a round face that my father told me when I make a big grin, I look like a, how do you say, jack-in-the-lantern.”

“Nonsense,” he objected. “I know my pumpkins, and you’re not of their race. If your cheeks are a little full, it’s because they’re packed with secrets and mysteries, like the moon.”

Domino snorted, and her snort sounded surprisingly like Maestra’s Heh!—an exclamation that usually suggested that what he’d just uttered was a load of bunkum, though a not uninteresting load of bunkum as loads of bunkum go. “I warned you, Mr. Switters, don’t be trying to butter me off.” She then left the room so abruptly he wondered if she might actually be peeved.

When she returned the next morning, however, she wore a starched white dress, an affable aspect—and a sprig of orange blossoms behind her ear.

Switters, for his part, was freshly shaved, brushed, and dressed in a yeast-colored linen suit (the one he’d soaked in the landing on Jonah’s beach) over a black T-shirt with the discreet C.R.A.F.T. Club emblem above the left pectoral. The cologne that he liked to call Jungle Desire, but which, in fact, was simply Old Spice, had been splashed recklessly about his face and neck. He sat, for the first time in more than a week, in his starship, and she seated herself on the stool opposite him.

“Mmm. Mr. Switters. You clean up very nice.”

“Don’t be trying to butter me off.”

She didn’t mind that he mocked her but, rather, seemed amused by it, though she put on an insulted face. He liked it that she was amused, and he liked it that she pretended otherwise. There was something of Maestra in her, and something of Suzy, as well, but he didn’t dwell on those similarities. No heart-shaped blip could be said to have formed on his radar screen. Sister Domino was as charming as she was kind, as fresh as she was wise, but she was too old and too religious, and, besides, he’d be gone in two or three days: whenever the supply truck showed up. Meanwhile, he had an industrial-strength curiosity to satisfy.

“This woman you call Masked Beauty—”

“Yes,” Domino interrupted. “We should begin with her, because everything that we are in this place is a result of her. I’m unsure what you know of nuns. . . .”

“Well, nun comes out of Egypt, an old Coptic Christian word meaning pure.”

“There’s much disagreement over that, but I’m pleased and impressed that you’ve connected the nun to the Middle East, to the desert. That’s very important to us here. But let me go on to Masked Beauty, who is our founder and leader, and who, in the secular realm, also happens to be my aunt. Before I can say much about her, however, I must say a little about the famous French painter, Henri Matisse.”

Like the helmeted heads of an itty-bitty army springing from the trenches, goosebumps appeared along the length and breadth of Switters’s epidermis, where they marched in place, as if, intent on pillage, they were preparing to advance on his brain.

Although Domino might have been loath to make such a claim, Switters gathered from her description of Matisse that he owed much of his greatness as an artist and as a man to the fact that he was simultaneously epicurean and pious, hedonistic and devout; that he made little or no distinction between his love of wine, women, and song and his love of God—an attitude that struck Switters as entirely sensible.

At any rate, as Domino’s account went, Matisse, in the early 1940s, had painted several large pictures of his nurse at the time, a Dominican novice named Sister Jacques. Matisse loved to paint the contours of the female body, lush, rhythmic volumes that were shown to their best aesthetic advantage when undisguised by garb. Naturally, Sister Jacques could not pose nude. However, knowing the genius to be honorable, ailing, and elderly (in 1943, Matisse was seventy-four years old), and hoping to persuade him to decorate a chapel (which he did for her in 1948 at Vence), she didn’t mind encouraging another girl to sit for him.

For generations, Domino’s family had been deeply involved in both French art and the Roman Catholic Church, so when Sister Jacques set out to find Matisse a suitable model, the logical first choice was that family’s voluptuous seventeen-year-old Croetine, the girl who would, at Domino’s birth slightly less than a decade later, become her aunt.

Switters whistled. “Well, boil my bunny in carrot oil!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe it.”

“You can’t believe what?”

“That I’d wander into the middle of goddamn nowhere and stumble upon my actual, original, flesh-and-blood blue nude.”

“Matisse painted a variety of blue nudes,” she cautioned, “dating back to 1907. And what do you mean, yours?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine. But she’s the one, all right. You’ve got to let me meet her.”

Domino would agree to nothing until he’d explained, and even after he had, she informed him that Masked Beauty was not receiving visitors. Moreover, while she found the blue nude coincidence remarkable—Domino couldn’t help but be amazed that he’d grown up around that particular painting—she saw no need for Switters to get so carried away. Maybe she was right. More than she might realize. A man immobilized by a pyramid-headed Indian’s curse was not a man who ought to be overreacting to a dollop of synchronicity, even when it involved an object of much sentimental wahoo.

“Okay,” he said. “Forget it. I’ve been ill. Get on with your story. Excuse me. I mean, please get on with your story. S’il vous plaît.” At the same time, however, he was vowing to himself that he would not leave the oasis without having met Masked Beauty, and thinking, also, what a kick it was to be sitting there listening to the blue nude’s niece.

Croetine posed for Matisse for more than two years, at Cimiez and later at Vence, and having fallen in love with the artist’s paintings, photographs, and souvenirs of Morocco, made plans to accompany him there as soon as the war was over. When V-E Day arrived, however, Matisse was not hardy enough to travel, and at the encouragement if not outright insistence of her uncle, a well-known archbishop, Croetine made the decision to enter a convent.

Because of her background as a nude model, Croetine was forced to spend an extraordinarily long time as a novice before being allowed to proceed to final vows. Her physical beauty was so unnerving to the Church fathers that her uncle advised her to find ways to make her face and figure more godly, which, assuming that God is inclined toward plainness, she did, stopping just short of grotesque disfiguration. By the time she was finally permitted to formally “marry” Christ, an ovule of rebellion had been planted deep in the sod of her sanctimony.

The solemn vows were still rippling in her saliva when she began to petition for assignment to Morocco. Not wishing to be too accommodating, they sent her to Algeria, instead. She worked in a mission there and liked everything about it; liked it so much, in fact, that her mother superior feared she was going native, and, citing such disturbing activities as “long solitary walks in the desert,” had her transferred back to France. It was in Paris in the mid- to late fifties that she formulated and promoted her ideas for the Order of St. Pachomius.

“Since I have a snakelike fascination with examples of extreme human behavior,” said Switters, “I really ought to have paid more attention to the lives of the saints. But I confess I’ve never heard of good St. Pachomius.”

“Pachomius was an Egyptian Christian ascetic. Around the year 320, he founded the first religious community for women, the very first convent. He built it out in the desert. So, Pachomius is the father of all nuns, and nuns had their beginnings in the desert. Today, the Middle Eastern desert countries are Islamic, and while there are small Christian minorities in these lands, those are almost exclusively Eastern Orthodox. It was my aunt’s idea, back when she was Sister Croetine, that an order of desert nuns be formed that would both honor St. Pachomius and give the Roman Church at least a token presence in the region. Pretty smart, don’t you agree?”

The Vatican had agreed. Up to a point. Which is to say, it liked the general idea but was sorry that it had come from Croetine, who not only had once posed for naked pictures but who, on at least two occasions, had openly expressed reservations about Rome’s prohibition against birth control. The Church never rejected the Pachomius idea, it simply dragged its velvet slippers when it came to implementing it.

“Then, something happened. I can’t tell you what it was. It was in 1961, and Croetine’s uncle—my great-uncle—had been appointed to a cardinalship and was then stationed at the Vatican. He had come into the possession of an item—a document, let us say—that he wished to conceal in the safest way possible. So, our cardinal used his influence with Pope John the Twenty-third to get the Order of St. Pachomius approved. Quarters were procured for it in Jordan. Croetine was named as its acting abbess, and when she went to the desert, she took the cardinal’s secret document with her to safekeep it there.”

“What kind of document?”

Domino shook her head, causing her cheeks to wobble like puddings on a pushcart.

“Does she still have it? Are you privy to it?”

“You’re pretty cotton-picking nosy, Mr. Agent Man.”

He touched her wrist. “You know, Domino”—it was difficult to call her “Sister” when she was in white lace and orange blossoms—”you know, Domino, I hate to have to tell you this, you trying so hard to be hip American and all, but the euphemistic expression, cotton-picking, left the idiom about the time you left Philadelphia. Or even sooner. Nobody says cotton-picking anymore.”

Domino looked as if a scorpion had stung her, and Switters felt as low and venomous as any one of those arachnids. However, she quickly recovered her composure. “If I say it,” she announced haughtily, “then somebody still says it.”

And as she took a sip of tea before resuming her story, Switters thought, Now here’s a woman who would stick to your ribs.

When it had been proposed that Abbess Croetine be permitted to personally choose the nuns who’d serve with her in Jordan, one prelate objected on the grounds that she might stock the new order with those who shared her radical views. “Of course she will,” said another, “and what better way to get them out of our hair.” The area of Jordan where the convent was to be located was not only remote but also dangerous. Moreover, it was chartered as an enclosed convent, one in which the sisters, fully isolated from the outside world, would be expected to seek their salvation and that of others through a regimen of worship, prayer, and contemplation, rather than providing health care, education, or social services.

For several years, while they adjusted to the enclosure and the climate, the Pachomians stuck to that blueprint, but eventually Croetine and her twenty-two hand-picked sisters began—through epistolary campaigns and journal articles—to take public issue with the Holy See’s inflexible stand against birth control. From the peeling wastes east of Az-Zarq¯a, there came a faint but persistent cry, a cry to dam the flood tides of semen, to leash the sperm packs running wild in the sheets, to zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt, to garrote the gullible glorification of gamete, forsake the foolish fidelity to fecundity, and wrest free from a woman’s shoulders the boa of spermatozoa that the Church had draped there like a weighty shawl and that pulled her ever downward into sickness and servitude, while at her skirts her too-many children went hungry, went bad, or just went.

“Rome tolerated it for quite a while,” said Domino, “but after Croetine’s uncle died in 1981, they finally erupted against her.”

“Naturally,” said Switters. “Isn’t it the sacred duty of the Catholic masses to increase geometrically the number of true believers in the world, just as it’s a secular duty to provide merchandisers with more and more little consumers?”

“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.